An extra-ordinary clinic with an extra-ordinary focus

 

Kristina & Jenny demonstrating advanced feel for your horse.

What would this kind of one-ness with your horse mean to you?

 

What WOULD it be like to have this kind of togetherness with your horse?  What would it feel like?   Imagine the sheer poetry you could create with your horse with this kind of feel and togetherness?

I’m telling you that anyone can have this kind of advanced feel for their horse.

So… what does it take?

1.  It takes good posture, a pelvis and spine that is alive and available for communication with the horse – there is an emotional AND physical balance in good posture..This is the human version of self carriage for the horse.

2.  The horse has to be in self carriage too.  Self carriage means that the horse is carrying themselves with their back lifted up to carry you with strength – there is an emotional AND physical balance involved in a horse being in good posture.

3.   It takes a willingness to be ridden by you and happy co-operation by the horse.  This willingness is not a big deal when we have eliminated the fear big or small, or stress and tension that gets in the way of that kind of togetherness.

4.   It takes a willingness on OUR behalf too,  to strive for that togetherness.  And that does not mean trying, trying, trying – because apart from the tension that comes from fear, trying too hard gets in the way the most.  It is about understanding how to get rid of what is BEHIND not having that togetherness and systematically eliminating it.

 

If you watched and listened to the recent series about the uniqueness of your own feel, you’ll understand that helping people to develop their unique feel is the primary focus of everything that we do here – the on line programs, the private lessons with me or my wonderful team, or in virtual clinics like the one coming up in late November.

Helping people discover their unique feel is what we are very good at here.

Giving people skills and techniques that they can use with that feel, to achieve a goal or solve a problem – that is another focus.

 

5.   Now here’s the fifth thing that it takes to achieve that kind of togetherness with your feel for your horse.  That is a willingness to look behind the horse’s “problem” or behavior to what is REALLY going on and to take action to help them to fix that.  No blame, no judgement, no “bad” horse – just the heart to want to help them.

We really get it here, that everything happens for a reason.  And in this clinic starting in November, you’ll get to move forwards towards your goals and solve your “problems” with feel and consideration for the bond between you and your horse, producing a bond together that is far better and far stronger than before.

This group of clinics coming up, are intimate clinics, where I am going to match like minded people in similar time zones together in groups of only six people to work on whatever it is that they want to work on.

We start in late November 2015.

As we are working over the internet, we can do what is the equivalent of a two day intensive weekend clinic, much more gently over a week, with our follow up a week after that.

We will be chatting live with various wonderful technical tools that are available these days.  With all the various qualities of internet amongst us, we’ll do our best to work it so that we can see each other while we chat.

 

How the clinic will work:

We’ll meet as a whole group, three times – once at the beginning of the week to establish goals and get to know each other, once towards the end of the week to chat about work in progress and then again a whole week later to follow up and share and celebrate achievements.

For individual sessions, prior to the clinic starting, you would video something that you would like to work on.   I’ll give you instructions about how to do that even if you don’t have anyone else to video you.   AND we’ll have a quiet mind session to help people clear away any anxiety around that.

We will do a personal live feedback session around that first video, you and I sharing computer screens – being able to pause the video say “See that?” or “Feel that?” – to identify and feel EXACTLY the point of change and from the comfort zone of hindsight, figure out what to do with either horse or person for the best result – whether that’s helping a person to release whatever is going on BEHIND what happened for the person or stepping you carefully through what to do for your horse and anchoring the skills to do that.

This is almost better than working live, because we can’t pause, do a re-wind and get you to FEEL what happened and FEEL how to do it differently from the unique-ness of how you experience feel naturally, when we are working live in the moment. This video coaching is a VERY powerful tool in its own right.  I love it.

For those who are not familiar with our work here, the effectiveness of the Release, Re-learn and Re-program techniques that we have come up with for both horse and rider is very powerful.    I still shake my head at what can happen.  For both horse and rider, at all levels of ability, we can clear out old stress and trauma, re-learn a more useful way and re-program that and anchor the new way of doing something into muscle memory for really fast progress.

You get to choose whether you share those sessions with the group or not.  Sharing with like minded people is a seriously lovely experience, even if you’re shy.  You can decide whether to share during the course of the clinic if you need to, as you find a comfort zone and confidence with the other participants.

I’ll also have video footage and lessons prepared on the theme/s that we want to work on as a group.  We’ve got a mountain of video footage now, from Steve and Oliver specially, also from me working with my herd and from others, to support whatever we do in the clinic.

Then you’ll take what you’ve learned back to your horse and do another video as you are working on the change.   We’ll have another live video feedback/working session about that. Then you’ll video again and we’ll use that last video to talk about “where to from here” in the last group session.

The third time we meet as a group, we’ll be talking about what you’ve achieved and more specially, the “where to from here”.

We’ll record sessions where we can, so people can catch up if they have to miss a session.  The technical stuff is much easier than it sounds and we can help people with that.  Videoing is so easy these days and even if you don’t have someone to do it for you, we can talk you through how to do it for yourself.

 

Let’s have a look at the kind of things you could choose to work on:

*   You can work on any sort of “problems” for the  horse like aggressiveness around food or separation anxiety,  like floating, or feet trimming, or trot to canter transitions, or shoulder in not working as well as it could, or tension in the jaw , or not enough elevation in the back when riding or not moving forwards well enough, or moving forwards too freely with anxiety or general tensions in the horse that are getting in the way of everything that you can be together, or maybe you just want to teach new things to your horse.

*   You can work on any kind of rider issues, such as a stronger more stable riding seat, a better sitting trot, more confidence, understanding and clearing away nerves generally, or looking for confidence with specific tasks or movements.

*   You could work on healing kinds of issues for your horse  – aches and pains, back issues, muscular-skeletal issues – understanding what’s behind their health issues and learning how to help them recover.   We could look at learning how a horse can contribute to their own healing – in fact, what prompts a horse to WANT to contribute to their own healing, what is BEHIND the problem and get people and horses well started on the road to well being.   You can ride a horse to soundness in sooo… many circumstances.

 

In all these cases, we’ll be looking at increasing your feel for your horse, understanding the big picture that’s BEHIND whatever is going on,  so that you can clear this up and at the same time increase your bond with your horse.  You’ll get techniques where appropriate and get to understand the RELEASE, RE-LEARN and RE-PROGRAM format that we use here for both horses and riders, that gives us progress so quickly when we get the hang of it.

 

Here is a timely example from this week, about how we could work with someone in this clinic environment.

I had a post from a lady this week talking about how her otherwise lovely horse is aggressive around food and had turned his butt and kicked up at her granddaughter and then charged her.

Here is part of my reply:

I have a strong “all the way to my bones” knowledge that everything happens for a reason.  Some things take a bit more figuring out than others, but this one is pretty easy – from my end anyway!

Food oriented horses are worth their weight in gold and can be sooo… much fun – once we get a handle on it, once we get leadership around food.

And that leads me to a possibility in “everything happens for a reason” – leadership.

I always say that co-operation is more important than leadership – and it is.

HOWEVER, some people’s dreams are big. And some dreams do need you to have leadership with your horse – and around food is THE place where I can easily check out how my leadership is going.

There are so many elements to REAL leadership with a horse – not the dominance variety that some people misunderstand as leadership, but REAL leadership, where a horse willingly follows what you want together because you have the same goals and the same things that you care about and you look after each other in a really special way.

In a clinic situation, we would come at this problem from different angles at the same time. First we would give this lady some techniques to make her and her granddaughter safe while we work through to find the cause BEHIND the behavior.

We’d look at health reasons – because he was charging over running out of hay.

We’d work on two way communication so that he didn’t need to express himself in such an inappropriate way from now on.

And we’d help her to figure out how all this fitted into the big picture of her dreams – WHY did this happen, HOW can we learn to have things smoother and easier from now on.

 

Do you get how exciting it will be, to get a deep understanding of “everything happens for a reason” all the way to your bones? To notice how it all fits together – to see the flow in yourself and others and find a confidence in that for the future? AND solve something that has been in the way of your progress at the same time?

I have a vision, that these groups could continue as a more intimate support for each other into the future, maybe with occasional group lessons to keep the momentum of progress into new areas.

The focus will be on horses and horse stuff in the clinic, but we won’t be shy about noticing the application of our horse stuff to making other parts of our lives happier either.

Because each group is only six people, when you’ve paid the deposit, I’ll confirm whether you got a place in that clinic, schedule others where agreeable and I’ll refund if it’s full.

Later edit… This clinic was back in 2015 and long over. You can get the benefit of similar results working at home with your own horse, in your own time with our on line Training Programs, have a look at the wide range here.