Spirit-to-Spirit Horsemanship

It's been four years since I read James Clear's wonderful book, Atomic Habits. https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits One of my favorite quotes from his book is this one:   “ You do not rise to the level of your goals . You fall to the level of your systems. Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there."   Brilliant. Simple. Powerful. It's worthwhile to periodically, even regularly, examine one's systems or structures.  We all have them.  Even the ones that don't serve us (maybe especially the ones that don't serve us!) need regular inspection. I remember this observation from James' book so well probably because it is the story of my life.  When I succeed, I tend to have some structure in place to support whatever activity.  (James' book also inspired me to look into Bullet Journaling and I'm on my 3rd year of that structure/system.  It has helped considerably.  No more 5 or 6 differe...

Marginal gains. They seem to go nowhere fast. But didn't we learn a valuable lesson, in our very earliest years, about the tortoise and the hare?  The Tortoise always wins. Why??? Marginal gains and the aggregate or combination and build up of taking those small but consistent steps, over and over and over. I've just finished James Clear's book Atomic Habits . There is nothing earth-shattering in there, in fact, some of his strategies parallel some of my own that I've discovered over years of trying to solidify desired habits. But that is where the treasure of this book really shines through....in the simplicity of it.  There is an ease of application of the ideas and strategies and a sheer common-sense about it all...the "common" sense that often isn't so common. It is wonderful to have a 'master plan', a 'new idea' and a 'major upheaval', but where will the plan, idea and major change be in 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 y...

Molly, This post is for you. Although sequestered in my teeny tiny little spot in the blogosphere, you will likely never see it. Still, it is for you. It is July 5th 2022.  It's been quite a long time since I've written, but because of you, I am sitting here taking a few minutes to write.   I love to write. I always wanted to be a writer. But I wanted to "be" a lot of things and wanted a life with horses, and to be the best mom I could be, and to be a gardener my grandfather would be proud of, and, and, and.  And, so I often pursue those other things and push my little writer voice over to the dusty corner, the corner with the ideas of my books, at least 5 or 6 of them, now covered with cobwebs and barely recognizable. But today, I am dusting off my little blog and looking through old ideas and finding that I have a working outline of a book that you thought I might consider writing. How did you know to ask me that question? How did you know this is an ache in my sou...

Winter is approaching and is teasing us with what is to come.  We have had one good snowfall and now several days of sub-freezing weather.  Despite my resistance, I've been forced to dig out our winter gear and get it ready for dealing with horse chores during winter.  I am always somewhat amused when I see these peaceful gorgeous pictures of farms blanketed by snow, icicles and frozen ponds.  I do appreciate the beauty of a winter scape but I see beyond those images, as probably do most people who live on a farm. I see the sloshing of water buckets as that chore becomes more manual, the picking up of frozen manure as that chore takes twice as long, (why is frozen manure twice as heavy as thawed manure?) and I envision the reluctance to bundle up and go exercise horses. But this year, I feel it all coming on a bit differently.  I'm a glass-half-full kind of person, even in this the 'Age of Covid'.  In a way, a sentence to 'shelter in place' is no sentence a...

 Our 10 year old grand-daughter visited us last weekend. Time spent with her is magical. I often find myself just quietly standing, observing her and taking it all in:  how she sees the world, how her time with me influences her (and how I may need to adjust those influences!).  I catch myself striving to pass on some of the wonderful lessons I learned from my grand-father from our time spent in nature and those moments seem so.full.circle. She loves our animals and they (mostly) love her back.  The dogs and cats clearly adore her.  My more extroverted horses are fine with her stroking their faces and the soft hair under their manes.  My skeptical horses tend to turn away from her and are not used to the noise and excess movements of an energetic 10 year old. I am amazed at what she remembers. She often stops at our one empty run-in stall and pauses to think about our departed mare, Laura.   She may dust off the still mounted brass name plate and ...

Unconscious Incompetence it is called in the great 4-step paradigm of learning.    The scale goes like this: A person is Unconsciously Incompetent at something (just beginning, doesn't yet know what they don't know). They learn a bit and practice some and become Consciously Incompetent .  This is the "uh-oh" stage as I think of it, the "what have I gotten myself into" stratum of the scale.  Many people quit at this point as they realize they aren't going to just practice guitar for a week and then be able to belt out Stairway to Heaven in two weeks (or La Villa Strangiato for fellow Rush fans).    This is where a person begins to think, "geesh, there is a lot more to this than I thought." They know they need work and are aware that there is a lot to learn. Next step:   Conscious Competence .  Now the person on the path of mastery in any given endeavor is developing a skill-set, as well as learning how to self-assess/self-correct.  They k...

Progress.   That sometimes elusive element that makes our heart soar, sing or sink depending on if we have touched it or whether it has, once more, escaped our reaching hands. I started this post one year ago and want to get some notes down on my journey since. My blogs, like my life in horses and in other areas, have stuttered and started in fits and lurches forward, backward, sometimes stagnating altogether. I've been working on my own emotional and mental fitness for the bulk of 2014.  I am feeling now that all of the various offshoots are starting to come together and reference materials are over-lapping, coalescing into simpler and clearer paths.   Similar messages resonate strongly with me in the various materials I have selected to study. My work is centered on getting myself more disciplined and strong.  Yoga is a good tool and I'm enjoying both the physical challenge and results from Trudie Styler and James D'Silva's Warrior Yoga dvd.  After only ...

This is Dani, my RBI. Here she is clearly asking a question and this is, 'can I have a cookie?'.  But she's also a bit apprehensive.  Look closer at her nostrils and see how tight they are as they are extended in a full take-in-all-I-can mode.  That's because I am on the other side of the partition/window and who knows what I might have up my sleeve. She never fully trusts, rarely lets it all down, and it is a trait I can relate to, as I am RBI as well and tend to hide behind my inner walls. She and I both are also prone to explosive RBE blasts, when it all just bottles up too much in our efforts to contain it and has to blow. Oh, I understand her....I do, and through learning to help her become more centered, I have become more centered myself. That is the beauty of horsemanship in general, and Parelli in particular; if you are going to go down this path and strive for an equine partnership, you are going to do the often intense work of personal developme...

Pat Parelli is a genius.  Linda is one too.  I am not going to allow myself to fall off that slippery cliff of Hero Worship again, but it is difficult not to sit back from time to time and just go, dang, that guy knows a thing, or two.....or seven. Like his Seven Keys to Success. Attitude, Knowledge, Tools, Techniques, Time, Imagination, Support. I've been cycling through the keys....trying to touch on each and every one and assess where I need work, move on, rinse, repeat. I noticed a funny thing about those keys.  Key number 6 is "TIME".   Tool number 3 in teaching is also TIME  (Principles, Purpose, Time). Hmmm.  Time, an integral but oft-overlooked ingredient in any recipe for success is almost just.too.simple. As I see my savvy hours that I am logging on www.parelliconnect.com go up and up, I see a direct co-relation to my accomplishments.  Of course, it isn't the one and only thing as I have spent at least two gazillion hour...

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 ...

I had a very challenging session with my LBI mare last night.  She pushed ALL my buttons and I had to fight and fight hard to not go all "Clinton Anderson-direct-line" on her. It shows me just how much work I have to do on myself and how my emotional fitness is not where it needs to be. My mare simply would not move.  And if I did manage to get her to move, she exploded with huge and repeated caprioles in place with such height that I believe even Xenophon would have been impressed. This morning I e-mailed these thoughts to someone who has been a life-line to me....she's rapidly becoming a major portion of the 7th key of success to me:  SUPPORT.  (Thank you, TK!) It seems like if I write to her and also get on here, I can get a stream of consciousness kind of thing going and maybe get a little piece of wisdom to break loose from my very thick skull. Ok, so I'm trying to think of all the ways I can progress in the areas I need to in order to be more EMOTIONA...

Part of my daily discipline is the studying of Parelli materials.  I tend to cycle back and forth between videos from the vault found on www.parelliconnect.com , to levels materials, to the Liberty and Horse Behavior set.  I am currently on disc 4 of that wonderful set and have already decided that when I complete the last disc, I will put the first one in and start over again.  That is a set that I will need to view again, and again, and again. I've just gotten through a leadership segment that Linda covered. In it she & the students composed a list of positive and negative leadership qualities.  Terms like 'focused', 'calm', 'persistent' were on the positive side and concepts like 'scared', 'frustrated' and 'scattered' were on the negative side.  Linda pointed out that those of us with the traits on the 'negative' side are attempting to lead our horses in those states.  And that is why we have problems with our horses...

Pat Parelli speaks quite a bit about wanting to help us become better puzzle solvers. I had a chance to really think about this concept this week as I set about de-bugging the figure-8 with three of my horses. All three of them were doing the same thing, basically blowing by me in continuation of a circle,  instead of crossing over...always after the second barrel. These horses are two mares (RBE/RBI, LBI/RBI) and a gelding (extreme LBE), so clearly the common factor was me, not the horse. After getting frustrated and feeling deflated, I remembered one particlar video where Pat looks intently into the camera lens and says:  it is my goal to help you become a better puzzle solver. Well, you can't solve a puzzle if you don't have one to solve, so I realized this was an opportunity for me----I just needed to up my first key to success:  ATTITUDE, and jump in.     I walked into the arena and it hit me where the hole is in my figure-8.  I re...

Lately, I've been working through a few of the Parelli concepts.  The Keys to Success is such a powerful paradigm.  Key number 3 is TOOLS.  One of the beautiful things about the Parelli program is that there really are very few tools needed, and in fact, key number 6 is IMAGINATION.  Looking around our place, there is a endless supply of materials and items that can be used in a different way to help me on my horsemanship journey. My mini-pedestal has become a really fun tool, but I decided it needed a bit more stability.  (See original construction post of mini-pedestal here:  http://www.spirit2spirithorse.blogspot.com/2013/02/i-dont-need-no-stinking.html  ) It seems like if there is a funky way to step on this thing, Dani will find it.  (At least I have the problem now of her stepping on it!!!  That is progress!). My LBE, Sky has also found it difficult to position his front feet squarely on it....the top surface of the pedestal is a ...

One of the most delightful aspects of the Parelli program is the fact that it is a PROGRESSIVE program.  Progression:  Movement from one member of a continuous series to the next. ( www.freedictionary.com ) This concept could be the single most powerful aspect of Parelli Natural Horsemanship. As I look back over my long and varied history with horses, I can where my 'failures', my accidents, my ineptitudes all are completely explained by a violation of PROGRESSION.  That is, I either went too fast for my horse or too fast for myself, leaping forward past steps and over-estimating our abilities, or underestimating the time it would take for us truly to master a step before moving on. Most times, I just wasn't on any sort of an organized CONTINUOUS SERIES at all. I can also look at the successes I have had and see where the concept still applies....I was systematically going in a proper sequence and also reading my horse and presenting things in a manner that...

Life with a Right-Brain Extrovert.... is fulfilling.....     is joyful....          has its tender moments....          and its invigorating ones....           ....always keeps me on my toes....        and is oh-so-special when I've passed her test.              Sue, playing with fire, in Ohio  

.....saw horses. --------------------------------- I'm at the point where in the Parelli levels where a pedestal would be handy.  I have tools.  We have scrap wood.  Hmmmm..... Let's make a pedestal. Horse pedestal, lazy-girl-style.  (Full disclaimer:  I am not known for my attention to detail and thoroughness in my home-projects.  I tend to start hammering first and ask questions later). See that square board in the photo?  That's what I've been using for a pedestal.  And actually, that has been about the right gradient for Dani's learning curve....Dani, who is terrorized by ground poles. She put her foot squarely on that board yesterday....and left it there.  Wow.  MAJOR progress. So, we are ready for a little pedestal.  I just want something that will be more sturdy and a bit more of a challenge. Being basically lazy, I mean adept at the conservation of energy, I thought I could just work with that...