Status Updates From Dancing with Your Dark Hors...

The learning path as an ascending spiral

“And perhaps my greatest hidden fear of all was how vulnerable, unworthy, and angry I really felt about my ability to maintain a positive and optimistic attitude in life while living in the shadow of a Creator who has apparently set us up to learn the hardest lesson of all—how to find our balance and inner peace as we strive forward in a world full of paradox.”

“Learning to recognize and expose our lies is the final step we must take before we truly earn the right to tell our horses that we are their leaders…If we need to see clearly, understand accurately, and respond appropriately with our horses (or our children, our students, our staff), we have to first do so with ourselves.”

“Just as we’ve balanced out predator and prey, we now have to look within and discover how to find balance between our outward selves and personalities and our inner selves, our Shadow sides.”

“And if we let them, they will bring us to an awareness of what’s holding us back. They can help us to move forward by isolating and confronting our dysfunctions and our past traumas.”

“The good news is that horses are generous. They’ll forgive mistakes. They’ll help us learn. We can use the feedback they give us to become the kind of people they need us to be—calm, focused, aware, confident, compassionate, and assertive without being threatening.”

“A horse is only concerned about how you behave. With horses, *who* you are is *how* you are. We have learned to devalue those body language signals in favor of words…Our body language is just as honest as that of the horse; we’ve simply learned to disregard it.”

“We simply can’t bring discipline and collection to our mounts if we’re confused in our own minds about our motives, methods, and goals. We must understand all three with crystal clarity, and that understanding is achieved only through a disciplined self-awareness.”

“But I believe that if humans earn the right to lead by giving their horses more of what they need from us than they can provide for themselves, the relationship becomes closer to partnership than domination. I believe that if humans study what it is that horses need from us, it will force us to come to grips with our own dysfunctions and balance the contradictions in our nature.”

“I found that if I wanted my horse to be confident and clear-minded, I had to approach it with those characteristics in myself. If I wanted consistency, I had to give consistency. Anything I wanted to create in the horse, I first had to do to myself.”