Why I want a deep Comfort Zone.
In their Comfort Zone a horse can elevate their back and carry us with strength and grace. In ground work their stride is fluid and rhythmic whether soft or powerful. In their Comfort Zone a horse can think and learn and enjoy their interaction with the person.
Willingness
We’re brought to this work for all kinds of reasons and I sure didn’t start my journey understanding the incredible nature of the horse – that knowledge unfolded over time. But I think willingness is a big deal – a willingness to “see” the horse as they really are. And then our knowing of the horse as a thinking feeling being capable of great wisdom and with extraordinary gifts can unfold in our OWN experience.
Willingness creates a deeper Comfort Zone.
Ability to Quieten your mind
On-going practice of quietening your mind will help you continue to refine your Feel for your horse. I find that creating a habit of WHERE and HOW I do my Quiet Mind work, makes it easier to drop into a Quiet Mind if I’m ever overwhelmed. Life does throw us curve balls every now and again and being able to find peacefulness no matter what’s going on in my life is a gift waaayyy beyond horses.
Quietening my mind is the strongest tool in my problem solving toolbox. It helps me get the ahhaa moments to understand where the horse is coming from and to find a solution that fits these individual circumstances. If understanding your horse and what to do next doesn’t flow in the moment with your Feel, then stopping and using a Quiet Mind to deliberately access your inner guidance system to work things out, is an incredibly valuable tool – specially while you’re establishing your Feel.
And it gets easier and easier with practice.
The ability to Quieten your mind creates an even deeper Comfort Zone for both you and your horse
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human
Understanding the Comfort Zone Model
If you think about the Comfort Zone again in the context of these other lessons that you’ve had since, you’ll notice there’s a depth to this simple lesson that opens up a whole new way of being with and learning together with your horse.
We can’t eliminate the Oh Shit Zone from our horse’s life, because it’s a survival mechanism just like our own – a big hit of adrenaline that enables them and us to keep ourselves safe – but it becomes a mission in life to not cause the terror of the Oh Shit Zone by our own actions.
And it becomes such a joy, to use those opportunities for profound healing to develop a deeper and deeper Comfort Zone and systematically expand it to cover more and more aspects of our horse’s life.
And experience the Deep Comfort Zone as a rich connected, happy dance together.
When we “train” or learn together to expand the Comfort Zone around all the routine of our horse’s life, the Comfort Zone gets bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper.
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human
Understanding the meaning of our emotions
Horses are quite good emotional communicators and to be really good with horses we need to understand emotions even if they’re not a strong part of our natural way of feeling. I can tell you from personal experience that it truly is only our resistance of our feelings that hurts. I found that understanding the meaning of my emotions helped me with the process of flowing with my emotions instead of resisting them, which in turn led me to being able to embrace them as the inner guidance that they are.
Every step we take that has us flowing with and understanding our feelings creates a deeper and more joyful Comfort Zone.
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for Horse and human
Conscious connection to our horse
Being able to consciously connect with our horse and increase our ability hear / feel them increases our horse’s Comfort Zone dramatically as well as opening up a whole new method of two way communication. You’ll actually get good enough at feeling the connection that you’ll be able to feel both connection AND disconnection. THAT’s stepping into a whole new level of Feel!
When our horse feels heard and we act on that, our horse can get confident withing a deeper and deeper Comfort Zone.
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human
Not Quite Right
USING our conscious connection and deliberately refining the early warning signal that something is Not Quite Right AND TAKING ACTION ON IT, like you’ve been exploring in simple ways during this program – also dramatically increases a horse’s Comfort Zone and increases your ability to feel good. peacefulness, excitement curiosity, deep contentment, happiness, joy – all these things get more and more common as we listen to and take action on our Not Quite Rights.
Acting off that early warning signal with your horse – as a communication either from your horse or from your own inner guidance system – means that vast amounts of intensely crappy feelings just don’t need to be there any more, because we’re listening to the subtle ones.
And the Comfort Zone keeps getting bigger and bigger…
Using our early warning signal that something is Not Quite Right AND TAKING ACTION ON IT, brings more confidence in their Comfort Zone, more confidence in our own skill and a deeper and yet more joyous Deep Comfort Zone.
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human
Magic Questions
The impact of them on our whole lives. Vacuum cleaner telephone thing. How sensitive people can feel like they’re drowning in it until they REALLY get it all the way to their bones that the intensity of the feeling doesn’t make it yours. Generally speaking – the ignoring of the feeling, the cumulative effect of ignoring our feelings is what makes it intense.
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human.
Profound healing
Understanding the profound healing opportunities in backing off at the FIRST SIGN of the inner guidance that something is Not Quite Right. We have to really understand energy, be consciously connected to our horse, have all these threads working for us and be a leader, for our horse to be OK with being in the Not Too Sure Zone for the longer periods of time. And by the time you get top that point, most of the stuff in the Oh Shit zone now will be in the Not Too Sure Zone instead and the Comfort Zone will be enormous.
When the release of old stress and tensions is involved you’re talking about seconds and even split seconds as you use your Feel to back off, take the pressure off your horse. Think about it – you’re COMMUNICATING with your actions, that you get it – that you “hear” them, that you get THEM. And the sheer power of that in terms of having confidence with another being – is ENORMOUS and profound.
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human
Horse personalities
Understanding that different horses express their distress differently is an incredibly important part of being able to work the Comfort Zone. Understanding that some incredibly generous horses give you little to no signals with their ACTIONS and that you have to use either acute observations skills or better still, your inner guidance system, that you have to be fine tuning and working with your Not Quite Rights, to eliminate that distress.
Understanding that different horses react differently to stress enables
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human
Be the change that you want them to be
Understanding the PROCESS of personal growth and its impact on our horsemanship and our life outside of horses as well.
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human
Understanding change places
Helps us to look around and figure out what it is that has to change in order to reach our dreams instead of struggling with the same old stuff over and over again. helps us find an ease in moving through change places that would have previously had us struggling like butterflies caught in a net.
Deeper Comfort Zone = more happiness for horse and human.
Deep Comfort Zone.
All of this leads to a DEEP comfort zone for us and our horse, a deep confidence in each other and a joyousness in all of that. MUCH deeper than a mere Comfort Zone…
When we pull all these threads together, all the unique gifts that WE bring to the partnership as humans and all the unique gifts that horses bring to the partnership are added together with synergy – magnifying us not just as one plus one equaling two, but One Plus One in such a profound way that we can equal anything we want to be or do together.