Spirit-to-Spirit Horsemanship

Did you ever teach a giraffe how to fish? No? Me neither. And yet when I really seriously think about the various things we expect to be able to get our horses to do, it's about as crazy a notion. The difference is that we haven't grown up seeing John Wayne or the Lone Ranger out by a pond fishing with a giraffe.  Now another big difference is that I don't think giraffes actually fish on their own and a lot of what we do with our horses, they can already do on their own....still, we have added the component of putting a predatorial species beside them, around them and even on top of them and asked them to give complete control of their bodies to us. Pretty crazy. And yet, people get sooooo frustrated with their horses. Pat and Linda Parelli say:  "Don't get frustrated, get fascinated".  I love this concept and have come to realize that the ONLY time I truly CAN be frustrated is when I am task-oriented.  I simply can't be frustrated if I ...

I remember studying logic in Philosophy in college.  I loved the clinical, clean, analytical structure of stripping away all emotion and prejudice from thought and getting down to the bare bones of TRUTH. Of course then I'd walk out into the light of day from that ivory tower of the classroom and be faced with the reality of life, teeming with chaos, unpredictable patterns and concepts that don't fall into the 'neat' and the 'tidy'. I wish I would have held on a bit more tightly to that respect that I had for the proper sequence of things, for logical progression and for linear movement.  I lost that somewhere along the way.  I now understand that all that chaos really does rest on predictable patterns. When I first was exposed to Parelli more than a decade ago, I used the 'smorgasboard' approach, or as a friend of mine recently described it:  treating it as a buffet .  Perfect terminology. That's precisely what I did with pretty much all the ...

....of what you've done with your horse". ~ Pat Parelli Sky    The above quote is from the Savvy Club DVD Issue number 43 and is in the context of balance exercises.  I found it, like so many gems that come from Pat, to be such a powerful statement. Get your opinions to match the facts. Oh boy. How many times my opinions did NOT match the facts. My horse accepts all the points of the skeleton of being rideable for one. I shouldn't see problems with saddling and then expect that I'll go on to have a flawless ride.  Facts vs. opinion. And yet, how many times have I allowed opinion to be the determining factor of what I do? I believe that each and every problem, wreck, upset or other issue I have had with my horses has been when I have been in a situation that I had not adequately prepared for in some way. That could include not preparing my horse well enough for what was going to be asked, or failure to develop enough savvy to recognize ...