The hidden crisis for humans and horses

Every crisis is an opportunity for a wonderful life.

What if there was one single thing, one root cause, to release your horse’s potential? What if there was one thread that if you could just tease it out, made the whole ball of twisted up knots just fall apart and become happily useful?

Separation anxiety, herd bound horses – call ’em barn sour or barn sweet, call ’em whatever you like – is one such root cause that when you fix it, everything else effortlessly becomes sooo… much easier.

I’m getting a lot more blunt in my older age. I can’t tell you how often I watch otherwise brilliant horsemen and women use all kinds of techniques on a horse to get their attention and all along the problem was really separation anxiety. They were wasting their time flapping flags, chasing them around a round yard, yielding their hindquarters, or any of the many ways people can put pressure on a horse that they consider “wasn’t listening”. In fact, it was worse than wasting their time, they were actually creating a problem with that horse by adding pressure and more fear to a horse who was already afraid.

Even some of the more gentle ways of getting a horse to focus on a rider are just repeating the same thing over and over again without actually solving the root cause of the problem. AND… because each of the different horse personalities deal with fear differently, lots of people don’t even recognize separation anxiety as being a problem until something goes wrong.

I’ve watched video after video after video of someone heart breakingly starting a horse (breaking it in, in the old language) who had so much separation anxiety that they couldn’t think. The whole process was a monumental waste of time and money because at the end of that process the horse went home with monumental separation anxiety baked into every response they gave. Yeah all those “monumentals” give you a clue as to how big a deal I think this is!)

AND it gets in the way of the full glory that’s possible in their relationship with their person.

Think about it.  You bring your horse out of the pasture or the barn and the tension starts rising in them as you take them away from their friend.   That tension doesn’t suddenly leave them when you put your foot in the stirrup – it affects EVERYthing that you do with them adversely. It effects their ability to think, to learn, to relate to you – EVERYthing!

I see it sooo often.  Dressage riders think that they have a piaffe problem or a flying change problem or that they have a horse who finds it hard to concentrate, trail riders think their horse is spooking about stuff on the trail or they’ve got a horse with a back problem, trainers think they’ve got a difficult horse to work with  – but that’s not the root of the problem at all.  The problem is all the way back in stress and the tension of the separation anxiety that started when that horse was first taken away from their friend or family without helping them to cope with that happily. 

That herd bound stress and tension became the foundation of EVERthing else that they do.  That tension is baked into EVERYthing they do from that point on – even causing health problems which I won’t dwell on in this article.

Do you understand what that means?  If separation anxiety isn’t attended to it means a foundation of struggling that simply doesn’t have to be like that. If it’s not attended to, it means people are practicing practicing practicing to be good with their horse, but never quite reaching what they’re yearning for.

Then they think they’re not good enough or some such crap, when all along it was simply because they never attended to the root cause of the horse’s stress and tension.

So what does it take to solve separation anxiety, herd bound horses, barn sweet, barn sour, whatever name you give to this problem that was caused by humans and can be solved by humans?

Whether it’s separation anxiety or any other root cause, here’s the keys to success in our work here:

• The Comfort Zone Model – adapted from Philip Nye’s lovely work – helps us understand fear and gives us a framework for training our horse effectively with curiosity and a robust confidence instead of fear.

• Our Release, Re-Learn and Re-program process – unique to us here – which enables us to help a horse Release even very old crappy stresses and the tension that came with it, to Re-learn how it could have been taught with curiosity and a confidence in the first place and to Re-program that new learning into muscle memory really fast.

• Feel for your horse – everyone’s ability for two way inner communication with their horse – that’s the key to the horse’s confidence in our support to eliminate separation anxiety and any other problem that might be their root cause. 

All of these keys to success are meticulously layered into the on-line program Fast Track to Brilliant Riding AND in the two (potential) upcoming clinics where I’ve asked that important question “Which clinic would you choose?” in the last blog. I’ve put a link to that question at the bottom of the page.

What does knowing how to support our horse to reach their full potential got to do with US living a wonderful life?

What if there was one single thing, one root cause, to release your own potential too? What if for you too there was one thread that if you could just tease it out, made the whole ball of twisted up knots just fall apart and be perfectly useful?

What’s YOUR version of separation anxiety? I don’t mean literally separation anxiety for you, though it could be, I mean one single root cause that if you could tease it out made almost everything else effortless.

Just like it’s you who can best understand and support your horse to solve whatever it is that is in the way of their full potential (we teach you how to do that here), it’s my job to listen to, understand and support you to find whatever that thread is that will enable you to release your full potential too.

I remember asking one of my old teachers “Do we ever get to the end of all this crap?” By that time I’d been working as a “healer” for myself and others for years and working for my own self improvement meticulously. She rolled her eyes at me because she’d been working for 30 years and was still at it.

The way I work now is vastly improved to the way I worked even a year ago and spectacularly different to the way I worked 25 years ago when I was asking that question.

These days I help you to tease out the thread that will release your potential too.

Are you ready? Check out how Through the Grace of Your Horse will be an inspired journey to your horse’s and your own potential.

Help me choose which clinic to run

Today’s photo: Is Suze riding out with Beau and Solnar. Their journey to solve separation anxiety provided great extra detail for a seminar that we added to the lessons that were already in our Fast Track program.