Photo: This photo is a special brag on Oliver – a HUGE example of the benefits of being open to the RIGHTNESS of everything that you’ll read about in this lesson. He was – past tense – a very nervy horse in windy conditions and was terrified of being in a shed in a storm. This photo was taken in a big storm yesterday (May 2016) – wild swirling winds coming from all directions, the tin of the old hay shed flapping and cracking in the wind – and Oliver was standing with the lead rope on the ground, calmly having all four feet trimmed. It’s like we could feel his brain re-patterning yesterday. I just about burst with pride for him. Holding his feet up nicely for the trimmer was itself a big deal – we had to do a lot of work on that. So to be so calm in he shed in such a big storm – wonderful!
Here’s a reminder about how these lessons will work.
As we did in the Foundation principles – click on the button at the bottom of every page and that will take you to the next lesson.
There’s a beautiful simplicity in these lessons that can lead to a tendency in the more advanced riders to skip lessons thinking “that doesn’t apply to me, I already know how to do that.” But it’s not just about what applies to you, it’s what applies to your horse too and the opportunities within that to reach your horse dreams through solving what looks like a horse’s problems.
Maybe with your horse, you don’t have any specific problems, but you DO have a dream? That’s even more reason to open up to every lesson with curiosity. With some of the super generous horses, you’ll even be stopping health problems from developing by releasing stresses and tensions that you may not have noticed without that particular lesson.
By getting people to click through each lesson, even if they scroll through without actually doing it, their brain will at least know what that lesson is about and they’ll come back to it. Setting it up like this is part of my commitment to make sure that people get what they’re looking for from the program.
And the other thing to remember as you work your way through, these lessons were guided by the horses themselves as what THEY think is useful to both them and us.
Have fun diving into listening and taking action on your wonderful Feel for your horse.
And don’t forget questions are welcome and I answer every email.
Welcome to this part of Fast Track
How appropriate that this lesson about “The rightness of everything” be the “Welcome to this part of Fast Track” because this idea is so fundamental to happiness with horses. People often say “everything happens for a reason” but when the crappy things happen, we default to being upset about it. My wish is that when some “crappy” thing comes up with your horse, that this lesson gets you to thinking about those things differently!
When Oliver arrived here at 7 years old, he was like this giant gangly teenager who didn’t know where his body was. He was oblivious to his ability to hurt people in his oblivion of where HE was and where WE were. It’s like he was disconnected from his own body as well as from the people around him. In hindsight, this was a large part of what had made him so dangerous that this incredibly valuable horse was given to me.
So Day 1 of bringing him in from the herd to feed him separately, God sent me biting flies to start fixing the his obliviousness about where I was.
That makes me laugh to write that. That is Steve’s influence. Steve, the guy who had lessons / worked with Oliver for a couple of years, is a strongly committed Christian and an elder of his church and I am deeply spiritual and more likely to use the words The Universe than the word God, although we are both describing exactly the same divine energy. Steve and I have enormous respect for each other which has developed over the time that we’ve been working with Oliver with such pleasure.
What we noticed so strongly, was that time after time, we were given opportunities for progress that looked like crappy things at first glance (lameness, whopping sudden storm) and yet were really gifts from God to help us along. And these biting flies that we’ve never had on this farm before OR SINCE… were one of those lovely opportunities.
Oliver’s disconnection from his own body needed to be addressed somehow. TTeam / TTouch would have addressed it by bandaging in certain ways to bring his attention to different parts of his body. We could also have used my special version of the Friendly Game, which is about getting the horse actually happy to be touched all over, rather than just tolerating it and standing still. But we had what looked like a problem that was really a gift of a solution.
Oliver had a distinct aversion to being touched, that I have since “seen” came from a human’s touch being forced on him – maybe in deliberate foal imprinting, maybe it was accidentally imprinted into him because of the circumstances of his birth. He also has the feel of a horse who has had natural horsemanship techniques around touch being forced on him and been forced to comply.
But in Oliver’s case God sent me biting flies that I swished off him with my stick while he was eating, relieving his need to stomp and be irritated by them – so that he could relax and eat comfortably – and just coincidentally 🙂 , increased his awareness of his body AND where I was while he was eating.
So you see, there was a problem solving GIFT in the biting flies.
The technique
The technique was simply to stroke his body all over with the whip – sometimes with gentle energy, sometimes more vigorously as I needed to chase a fly off him. I remember that there was lots of focusing the stroking on his legs and belly.
But here’s a big deal – because of the biting flies, the technique had a PURPOSE. Can you see where I’m going with this as such a wonderful opportunity to help Oliver start to solve a problem, while at the same time being a bonding opportunity AND at the same time achieving the goal of “pay attention to me please, so that we can keep each other safe”? (There’s a lesson about “pay attention to me please” coming up.)
I think it was because of the PURPOSE, that the whole experience had a very relaxing feeling. Clearly I was doing him a favor, keeping these biting flies off him while he was eating.
I like a horse to ALWAYS be aware of where I am at feed time – it’s a key part of “Pay attention to me please so that we can keep each other safe”, so when we can have a very gentle awareness of each other around times of high natural instinct like feed times, that awareness of each other expands into even a big fright very easily. We want it to be a very gentle awareness though, building on that naturally over time – because we don’t want to put tension into their digestion at feed time!
The lesson
The lesson here is not about the technique, although keep in mind the three ways that I’ve talked about that can help a horse become aware of their own body and then be aware of their own body in relation to where the human is standing.
This lesson is about being open to the possibility of the RIGHTNESS in every seemingly crappy thing that happens – looking for and noticing and taking advantage of the opportunity that is inside every crappy thing that happens.
Steve coined this expression “Don’t argue with God”, which he and I shake our head and laugh about, every time we catch ourselves missing the RIGHTNESS and thinking that something that’s happening is crappy – thinking that some lameness was crappy for example or the storm in the video below.
Don’t argue with God
Although this video footage is from Day 71 of Steve working with Oliver, it is another huge example of the benefits of looking for the Rightness in everything that happens and I really want to put a HUGE emphasis on this philosophy right at the beginning of Fast Track. I think this is right up there as one of the most powerful things that Oliver taught us.
I made an executive decision not to include all the walking in and out of the shed and all the standing and waiting for Oliver to lick and chew and then walk forwards – the video would have been far too long, so just be aware that we probably worked for nearly an hour.
And yes, this lovely calm thoughtful way of working makes it look like there wasn’t even a problem there – and THAT’s because we’re working off our early warning signal that something is Not Quite Right, so that Oliver can actually release his fear.
If you need to troubleshoot the video, click on “Watch on Youtube”
The forum
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