I sat on the round pen panels this morning while I worked on mounting, thinking back to when this horse first came into my life and how difficult this seemingly simple task was for him. And how there is still a piece of him that has difficulty with it. One of my students was watching, we were doing the same thing with her horse in our lesson earlier. She remarked at how good he was. He was good, but he could be better and that’s why we continue to work on it.
Often times people approach natural horsemanship trainers expecting us to fix a specific problem. As everyone who taught me will say “we aren’t miracle workers and we don’t fix horses.” If anything we are fixing humans. The horse didn’t come out of the womb anxious, angry, or dangerous. They are born curious, playful and trusting. Then humans got into the horse’s life. Guaranteed there isn’t just one problem that needs to be addressed. When you start unraveling the layers there are usually a lot of holes and a lot of braces.
Most people just see the end result and it looks so great because it is so great and they want their horse to be that way. But it takes a lot to get there. The journey to get to great isn’t always a fun, short one. It’s more often a long one in which you have to change your way of thinking to match the horses way of thinking and to set things up for him to be successful. I don’t have a book of steps that I follow or a checklist with boxes that get marked off when we get to a certain point. Like Ray Hunt says:
“It’s not so much what we do, it’s how we do what we do. And all you are trying to do is get this horse to where you can operate the life in his body, through his legs to his feet, through his mind. The mind might come last because he don’t understand. But you have to give him space to learn.”
I approach every horse with the same philosophy but not the same techniques. Every horse is different and every horse learns differently, just like people, and it’s my job to figure out how they learn best and let them learn.
It is never just a quick fix. It’s a lifestyle change, a philosophy change and a lifetime commitment to understanding your horse and working on yourself.
Comments