Throughout these posts I’ve been referring to the centrality of awareness to the development of a connection with our horses. So, it seems appropriate now to say a little more about what is involved in this relational state of being and why it is crucial to the process of learning feel.
Continue reading Living in-relation with horses: awareness‘I can’t teach you anything. I can only help you learn.’ (Tom Dorrance, True Unity, 1987, P 49
Deep learning involves discovering an intuitive feel for a discipline or field, whatever it might be – maths, Italian, cricket, playing the piano, working with horses. Like all good teachers, Tom Dorrance was insistent that feel could not be acquired through instruction, the transfer of the teacher’s knowledge to the student – ‘it is not something that can be handed to someone – it has to be learned’ (Dorrance 6). While people might get something at a cognitive level, real learning only happens through full-bodied experience – ‘It’s experience, I guess’ was one of Tom’s constant refrains. Learning feel, then, is an organic process in which each student learns in their own way, at their own particular pace (6, 12, 18, 30). And, a good teacher will set aside any outcomes they might desire for a student in order to allow this learning to happen.
Continue reading Living in-relation with horses: The impossibility of teaching
In the previous post I described the stillness of a supportive holding space. Here, I want to talk about the significance of boundaries in the creation of that space and the role they play in building a horse’s confidence in our reliability.
Continue reading Living in-relation with horses: boundariesIn this post I want to talk about the significance of ‘stillness’ to leadership. To reiterate briefly, leadership in our relations with horses involves the provision of a trustworthy, safe space. This requires the relational capacity to be present and open, able to listen to our horses and to respond to what is called for, without being reactive or judgemental. In other words, leadership in human-horse relations, is analogous to that in teacher-student, parent-child, carer-cared for relations. In all of these, it is the relation that leads rather than an identifiable individual. A teacher is teacher-and-student, simultaneously teaching-and-learning; a student is a student-teacher, simultaneously learning-teaching. This is the logic implied when horsepeople say that our horses are our teachers. And it calls for humility on our part.
Continue reading Living in-relation with horses: stillness‘Listen to the horse’ (Tom Dorrance, True Unity, 1987, P 21)
Tom Dorrance was insistent that listening was the most important aspect of communication with horses. He said that, while most people start from themselves, from where they are, and try to work back to the horse, he ‘tries to listen to the horse… to feel what the horse is feeling and operate from where the horse is’. Listening, he says, is essential to the capacity to feel the whole horse inside ourselves (pp 12-14, 21), that is, to the capacity to participate in horse-and-human feedback systems (see the previous post).
Continue reading Living in-relation with horses: listening‘It has to be a togetherness’ (Tom Dorrance, True Unity, 1987, P 11)
Tom Dorrance insisted that togetherness, ‘this thing between the horse and the person’ could not be learnt through instruction – ‘do this and you get that’. Rather, it was a matter of ‘feel’, something that could only be acquired through full-bodied experience. Speaking of his own experience, he said ‘I try to feel what the horse is feeling and operate from where the horse is’. To feel ‘the whole horse’, he said, involves feeling ‘inside the horse, right in his innards’. And, most importantly, we feel ‘the inside of the horse… from inside of ourselves’. In short, feel is an experience of entwined being (Pp 12-14). To develop an understanding of this experience, in this post I want to introduce the ecological idea of feedback. Continue reading Living in-relation with horses: feedback
I said that this post would be on feedback, but there’s something more immediate I’d like to talk about here – stroking our horses. Stroking has enormous significance to what Tom Dorrance describes as the ‘foundation’ of horsemanship – horses ‘coming to us for security’ (True Unity, p 12). Without this, he says, nothing will work. Above all else, we want our horses to feel happy and safe with us. This is what leadership is about.
In an excellent article about the significance of connection, Jo Spiller says
So how do you create this partnership? You don’t do anything to create it, because it’s not a matter of doing. It is much more a matter of who you are being. You see, we have language for doing things: we can say ‘Put your heels down’, ‘Sit up straight’… but nobody can tell you how to do ‘being’.
After years of teaching riders and training horses, Spiller says that she suddenly saw what had been there in plain sight. She’d been too busy doing things to see that the basis of good horsemanship was the capacity to develop a connection with horses. And, ‘in order to achieve that connection’, she realized, we ‘must undergo a transformation’, a change in form of being.
Continue reading Living in-relation with horses: imagination
In previous posts I’ve made references to softness – to soft ways of looking, to the softness in states of being calm, present and focussed, to the softness in a connection between human-and-horse. For example, with reference to the kangaroo experience, I said that Corey softly picked up a feel on the rein, and looked softly at the kangaroo to help Pia soften, relax and become curious. In this post, I want to think more about what is involved in a soft way of being and why this is so important to being-in-relation with horses.
Any activity performed with skill requires good timing. This is true of catching a wave, for example, or hitting a ball or playing a musical instrument or dancing …. Good timing is also essential to skilful horsemanship, both on the ground and in the saddle. Whatever the specific skill might be, acquiring the capacity for good timing takes never-ending practice, and it depends on a particular temporal way of being – being present.
Continue reading Living in-relation with horses: being present