So staggering here with exhaustion a little and before I crawl off to bed, if you haven’t got an email already about the completely free gift lessons The Six Keys to Happiness with Your Horse , then click here to go to the new website and register for them – they are a HUGE gift.
I just laughed at myself – this post goes in more categories than any other most I’ve ever written!
Hey folks, I must be going crazy, because I just wrote ANOTHER post about the horse that wouldn’t walk through water, having forgotten that I already wrote about it the other day! Crikey! I think I had better get rid of all the old aluminium cookware! (Just kidding I already have…)
Anyway, this post has a slightly different perspective from the last blog that might have the penny dropping for someone, so here it is anyway…
You see, the thing is, it’s not just a simple little puddle to your horse. Your horse has no depth perception so they cannot tell whether the water is only ½ an inch deep or 50 feet deep. The uncertainty of that, even for an experienced horse can be a bit nerve racking.
And here’s another really big point – fear is cumulative. Every time that we or our horse feels unsafe and either cannot or is not allowed to act on that, it adds to the fear buried last time, making the NEXT fear more intense than it needs to be.
Hmmm… I need my horse MORE confident, not less.
And I personally want me and my horse to be able to look after each other, which we can only do if we listen to our fear and help each other BE safe.
At my age the ground has got harder every year (anybody else noticed that?) so being as safe as I can be out there on my horse is a very big deal to me.
I also want me and my horse to enjoy ourselves and that really only happens when we both FEEL safe as well.
We can undo those old buried fears and make the new fears less intense, with the processes in the 8 lessons on the CD for your MP3 player that is in the back of Zen Connection with Horses.
If you have the book but haven’t done the lessons yet, the feedback that I have been getting is that they are as easy to understand as I meant them to be. You just download the CD onto your MP3 player and take it out to your horse, where I talk you through each step.
As for the water, the next time I rode, I would plan on fixing his fear of my leadership around water, rather than going on the rest of the ride. And I expressed it that way, because my horse is ALWAYS going to be a bit afraid of water when he doesn’t know where his foot is going to meet solid ground.
When you have retreated to where your horse is in their comfort zone again, you could start by visualising how deep the water is – sending your horse a clear picture of the depth of the water.
Then I would approach and retreat from the water, using my feeling of Not Quite Right to know when to retreat. For those who have not developed their feelings of Not Quite Right, the 8 lessons in the back of Zen Connection with Horses helps you develop that as a subtle communication, instead of that “oh shit I’m dead” feeling.
On each retreat to his comfort zone away from the water, you would stop, sit there no matter how long it took and wait for The Chew. He will probably do some processing, which may take a while but that will be the most useful time you spend in the saddle.
At some point, it may be right to sit there at the edge of the water and just wait, instead of retreating.
One really nervy horse in a clinic recently showed his owner how people’s normal way of asking him to do things felt to him like the fast forward on a video. That was a big insight to get! Slow it down… Horses like slow…
So don’t be afraid of taking as long as it takes for your horse to think through and process whatever they have to, in order to be OK with what you are asking them to do.
Every time we help our horse deal with a fear and become not afraid of this particular situation or thing, we become more and more leader like. Until, eventually, just the fact that we say “ït’s OK ” is enough to have them follow our leadership.
But that takes quite a few examples to them first…
Laughing at the doubling up on the same subject - but I hope you enjoyed the difference!
I had a question from a reader the other day about what to do about her horse that wouldn’t walk through a simple little puddle on the ground.
First of all, know that your horse has no depth perception in their eyesight, so they cannot tell whether the water is only 1 cm deep or 10 metres deep. So they have to trust you when you tell them that it is only 1 cm deep.
I am a bit “thingy” about the trust word. Too often, trusting involves not making myself safe and giving my power away to someone else. I am VERY into listening to my fear and making myself safe.
And for my horse, I am VERY into listening to his fear and helping him to be and feel safe. That is the very base of my of having a good relationship with my horse.
So in this instance of the water, the question is not so much “how do I get my horse across the water”, but “what can I do to help my horse to feel safe when I ask him to cross the water?”
Hmm… that question puts a bit of a different angle on the situation, hey?
I had an email from Pam who has an Arabian mare who is an aggressive horse and beating up the other horse in her pasture. She says the mare “has a bad attitude and is very mean to the other horse who is always being chased around and has bite marks all over him”.
Pam’s question had some great timing to it, because we have just had a second aggressive / dominant horse change his ways here in our herd and stop beating up on the other horses and I had been doing some thinking about what it was that caused him to change.
So here are my thoughts on that. Click here for the rest of this story…
Here is an email from Heidi about Tilly’s dramatic float loading problem, the accident when Tilly was forced on the float with ropes, the terror that Tilly experiences now and the subsequent threat to her life.
We have decided to set up Heidi’s emails and my replies about Tilly’s dramatic float loading problem as an on-going lesson here on the blog, so that others may benefit from the on-going lesson.
I have had very large shift in perspective in the last few weeks that has had a major impact on my life in and out of horses – and I just love the fact that horses are such a catalyst for powerful changes like this!
Click here for the rest of this article that brings a new perspective to problems with our horses.
Do you know, anyone who still thinks of horses as dumb animals in this day and age , should have been out riding with me yesterday. My friend Jane’s horse Shea, systematically worked on me, physically worked on me, loosening up my “bad” knee and the cause of my bad knee, up higher in my pelvis – and last night was the best night’s sleep that I had with this sore knee in weeks.
I was happy to be able to help Shea in return, with a noisy dam water drainage pipe under the road that she had a fear of, by doing that approach and retreat and then just sit there and wait for the Chew exercise that I describe discovering with Bobby in Bobby’s Diaries – Straight from the Horse’s Mouth to You.
For those of you who haven’t read that book, I discovered (Bobby told me!) this brilliant method of dealing with things that my horse is afraid of when I am out riding
Wouldn’t it be great if there was actually a golden thread that you could follow, knowing that it was leading you exactly on the path that you needed to take with you and your horse and that you would be “led” to each and every person, place and event that was absolutely perfect for the both of you together?
Well, guess what? There IS a golden thread. It is called “Synchronicity”, but Anita Wheeler likes to think of it as “Power Flow”.
Click here to read Anita Wheeler’s article about following the golden thread. It doesn’t make mention of the word “horse” once, but it might have been written just for us and our horses anyway! At the bottom of Anita’s article, I bring this excellent concept back to relate to you and your horse again.
Jazz, our 13 year old chestnut mare, has lived with us for 5 years. During this time we have always trucked her but before she came to us she was floated. Unfortunately when we moved to town I could no longer afford to keep the truck so had to downsize to a float.
All went well the first few times until out of the blue, Jazz went down as I slowly turned in a circle in a paddock preparing to park. She had her tail hanging out the back at the time and wrenched it upwards as she fell. She may have suffered a small fracture which we were unaware of at the time.
The next time we tried to float her she walked in no trouble at all but was scrambling / falling over virtually immediately. She was too scared to back out of the float.
Well, I’ve got to tell you, I am as surprised as anything I have ever been surprised about. For those of you who have read Zen Connection with Horses, you might remember our racehorse, Desert Moon (aka Sunny) as being a horse who fights when she is afraid. (You know, there are horses who run when they are afraid, horses who freeze and horses who fight.) Click here for another article about horses’s who freeze when they are afraid.
Well, it turns out that the fight reflex was not genetic like I thought it was. It was imprinted into her by humans who cornered her – trapped her in a small space when she was young (a foal by the feel of it).
It is such a normal thing for us humans to do, I have done it dozens and dozens of times myself in the old days before I knew a different way. You get the horse in a corner where they can’t get out and catch them when they give up.
Click here to read the rest of this story with its surprise ending.
