Our horses don’t need to be their dna either

Following on from yesterday’s article about dna, our horses don’t need to be their dna either, when we listen to them deeply and more importantly, when we ACT on our connection to our horse and our Feel.

I’ve got a great example of inherited reactions and behaviors in one of our horses here – our gorgeous herd leader Boots. His mother was a Sir Tristram grandaughter.  Sir Tristram was a very prominent, very successful New Zealand thoroughbred stallion who was caught in a stable fire and was incredibly difficult to handle afterwards.  One of my friends worked on that stud, I’ll see if he can add some details to that story.

Boot’s mum Taps, was a highly reactive nervous wreck when she came to us.  She got off the truck rearing and plunging around with her leg hanging half off with an horrific leg injury – I could actually see the inside of the joint in her bent knee when she was on her hind legs.

I remember someone saying at the time that a lot of Sir Tristram horses were very nervy. That’s where the inherited pre-disposition to reactions and behaviors comes in.  In 29 years of healing work I’ve seen it over and over again in both horses and people.  Trauma experienced by a grandparent or a great grandparent reflected in the reactions and behavior of the descendents. It’s like the trauma itself is imprinted in the dna and runs down the generations, often repeating similar trauma.  I’ve noticed that it’s more often grandparents that we inherit stuff from and I doubt it’s coincidence that all the old horsemen / breeders want to know more about the grandparents than the mother or father.

Certainly Taps had had a rough life.  I remember coming out of the house that first day, to walk across the paddock to the stable yard where she was (a hundred metres or so) and being horrified when she started flinging herself into the yard fence in terror.  I don’t remember how long I had to approach and retreat and stop and wait before I could even get near her, but it was a long time. 

From what I know now, Taps’s pre-disposition to flip out into the oh shit zone easily would have intensified her own life experiences and been intensified by all her own life experiences in a horrible escalation. 

We got that old leg injury healed in our alternative medicine hospital (gosh there’s so many great stories around Taps, but we’ll have to save them for another day.) Short story, I ended up buying her in exchange for a saddle and years later bred her to a lovely local quarterhorse stallion who ran in 200 acres of semi wild pasture and our lovely Boots was the result.

We only saw that same genetic pre-disposition in Boots twice.  He didn’t have the same kind of everyday general reactivity and nerviness that Taps had, because he’d had a wonderful life here, being listened to deeply at pretty much every stage of his development.  That curiosity you see in his first saddling here was pretty much how he handled everything and we took things slow and with Feel, to make sure that he had good experiences. 

However, that genetic pre-disposition showed up in the only two times I know of, that he hit his Oh Shit I’m Dead Zone.  The first time the terror was especially horrific, I’ve never seen anything like it.  He ran into fences blindly, bent a big farm gate into a bow with his body, hit a gatepost so hard he snapped it. He was so blind with terror that all we (me and the horse herd with him) could do was stand quietly, holding our own peacefulness and wait.  Every horse in the herd was standing right there in a group, all with their noses just about on the ground and that sleepy look on their faces while he careered around them.

We had to do considerable trauma release work around that event.

A few years later he hit the Oh Shit I’m dead Zone again but didn’t have the same kind of utter blind terror reaction that he had the first time.  This time we captured on video the work Mel did to release the trauma and the healing that came with it and turned it into a Fast Track lesson – number 54 for those Fast Track students reading this.  If you haven’t got Fast Track yet, it’s a great time to treat you and your horse, it includes detailed lessons on that trauma release work and the program is still heavily discounted while I’m updating its video quality to bring it more into line with modern video standards. I’ve put a link in the list below.

These days Boots is a sensitive and yet calm, wise and very capable herd leader who helps other horses and he’s specially good with people too.  He’s not ridden often but when he is, it’s more likely to be bridle-less like he is with my son Charles in this photo.  Actually I can’t remember the last time he was ridden with anything on his head.  On this day, he had stood for Charles to get on, down in the giant back paddock and he’d cantered up bareback and bridle-less with the whole herd. (I shake my head at the invincibility of youth! lol!)

So… back to the dna thing – horses’ inherited reactions and behaviors and all sorts of health conditions that go with them, can also be released and reversed, just like I spoke about in the article yesterday about humans.  When we listen to our horses on that deep level that we teach here, we can help them RELEASE old trauma from their own lives and do that so thoroughly that their brain neural pathways are changed. Ordinary people are doing that gorgeous “work” with our on line programs, every day.

Whether it’s horses or people, we do not have to be our dna. 

Here’s some of the horse resources:

1. Reminder – our free monthly event tomorrow, 7am Sunday 4th December Melbourne time / Saturday for the USA, UK, Europe, Canada.  Click here to register to get the details of every free live event.
2.  “Holy Shit is that really true?” the 30 seconds a day emailbook – although it’s not a horse book per se, it will help you fine tune your Feel for your horse – the horse people are loving it.  And it’s a mere $25.
3.   And last but not least, if you haven’t seen this before, Fast Track to Brilliant Riding – step by step, systematically helping our horse to release every source of stress and tension from their lives and create an incredible bond with world class horsemanship while you’re doing that.