Thanks for coming in to listen to the pre-registration safety lecture! 🙂 The written version is below
Click here for an alternate audio of the Pregistration safety lecture
Written version of the audio
Most horsemanship teachers gloss over this bit and slide mysteriously worded forms across the table and hope you don’t read them. Well not this little black duck.
Horses can be dangerous, we all know that.
They can also be the most wonderful satisfying amazing beautiful forgiving thinking and incredibly powerful beings and they can teach all of that to us too.
I used to be the kind of person who regularly turned my safety over to other people and gave them responsibility for my safety and that way of being gave me blinding headaches and a level of fear that I look back on shaking my head.
How could I have done that?
Well because that’s because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. We were taught to be brave, get on with it, get back on that horse – we’ve been taught all kinds of crap.
What I’m going to teach you is the peace of mind that comes from taking responsibility for your own safety – the pure happiness – the pure happiness and amazing relationship with your horse that comes from paying attention to even the tiniest hint that you or your horse are not OK.
And I’m going to help you to develop your instincts into an incredibly positive experience.
They say that you can’t teach the feel of a world class horseperson. Well I’m happy to tell you that they’re wrong – because that’s exactly what we’re doing in this course. So here’s the part that you play in that.
I want you to think about and make a commitment to yourself to keep yourself safe – and your horse too.
I want you to think about and make a commitment to yourself to listen to yourself above and beyond anyone else, including me. You are the one right there on the spot. You are the one who will know what’s right for you and your horse.
Horses and people alike, we all have automatic instincts. We have reactions that happen automatically when we are afraid or when our survival responses are triggered. And horses are big animals who have usually lived with a lot more fear than we realized – so their reactions can be big too.
So even though you may be developing the most… you WILL be developing the most amazing relationship with your horse, you must still make allowances for those automatic reactions in your safety procedures.
We’ll be working throughout this course to make those automatic reaction as useful to you and as safe as as possible. But you still have to be aware that you’re working with a horse.
Inside every horse is a wild heart.
So by moving forward to complete your registration for this course, you are actually undertaking to take complete responsibility for you and your horse’s safety. Blunt words.
I’m here to help you, but its not my job – your safety is not MY job – it’s YOUR job.
And you can have so much more fun when you’re both feeling safe.