Children know how to find happiness: it is at their fingertips. Offer a toy at the airport or a pail at the beach and they are soon filled with passionate purpose. As we mature, we lose that intimacy with our spirit and that ability to dwell in the moment, and joy seems distant and elusive. We can dwell in happiness when we stalk it in the moment at hand.
Affection emerges from mutual respect. Humans have a physiological requirement for bonding during early childhood development. Without physical attachment, a child simply cannot develop normal emotional and cognitive skills.
Horses have similar needs. Across the equine world, affection and bonding are prerequisites for maturity and mental balance. Early in life, the dam provides affection to the foal. As a yearling, the horse will leave his mother’s side and move into the larger context of the herd. In the wild, horses have profound, lasting relationships with their fellow herd members.
But what happens to the domesticated horse, who, more likely than not, was sold and transferred away from what had been the social epicenter of his life since birth? Owners have an obligation to that horse to include him in their own herd. Even if it is just you and the horse, you must create a functional herd of two.
So it should not be a great surprise that horses live for those moments when we share our affection with them. I am shocked when folks do not take the time to show physical affection for their horse. When I query them as to why, almost always the answer is something along the lines of “Well, I didn’t want to interrupt anything,” or “I was afraid it would distract him.”
Distract him from what? What could be more important than showing your horse you care about him? Whenever you have a break, remind yourself to lay a little love on your horse.
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
Mahatma Gandhi
It seems trivial: practice affection. It is not. We must become mindful of opportunities to display affection and approval throughout our lives and our relationships; the horse merely teaches us how to look for such moments.
Why is this such a fundamental lesson? Because as predators we inherently believe that the merit, the reward, the good — call it what you like — lies in our actions, meaning what we embody and what we feel. But in the world of the herd animal, the reward lies in what we engender in others.
The fundamental premise of partnership is affection. If spirituality lies in reaching out to others, then affection is the first step in enhancing that spiritual connection.
Practice the discipline of directing affection through your gestures — mindfully infusing your movements with love. How do you do this? The same way you can take the hand of another person — a child, a spouse, an invalid, a dying person — and express kindness and trust. It is altogether different from cordially shaking someone’s hand at a cocktail party.
For another example, think of the difference between stroking and brushing your child’s hair and preparing your own hair in the morning before work. The former is affectionate; the latter pragmatic. We all implicitly know how to make our gestures convey emotion and compassion. The trick is to understand that the message is more important than the action.
One of the great secret moments of handling, one of the daily devotions, is to show affection for your horse while you groom him. Think of what that means. What do horses do for each other when they are best buddies and standing next to each other in the pasture? That’s right, they groom each other to celebrate genuine affection. It is a powerful bonding ritual that cements the herd members together, a ceremony that every horseperson should incorporate into the daily routine.
Show love for your horse at every opportunity. Start with grooming: Practice the discipline of love with your hands. Learn to fill each small act with care.
We can also seek opportunities where we can exert praise. By doing so, we pursue the Doctrine of Reward: Find rewards and avoid failures. The corollary of the doctrine is: Find success as soon as possible and avoid failure as long as possible.
An opportunity to succeed is more meaningful and productive than a chance to fail or to reprimand. Success is the stepping-stone to well-being and happiness.
When it comes to horses, praising builds partnership; rebuking and scolding undermine trust. Negative reinforcement has never helped a horse (or a human being) learn. It may prevent an animal from carrying out a certain behavior because he is afraid of punishment or negative reinforcement, but the lesson does not accumulate in his personal repertoire. It is devoid of happiness or any personal sense of success and accomplishment.
Praise, along with opportunity to succeed, is the only path that leads a horse to feeling good about learning a new task. The lesson then takes on an internal value and moves the relationship between rider and horse forward, making the next learning experience that much more appealing.
Stalk opportunities to create success. Our horse will not usually get the whole idea of what we are trying to teach him all at once in an “Ah-ha, eureka”–type moment. Instead, it is more like a lightbulb that flickers, goes out, flickers back to life a bit longer, stutters some more, and then eventually grows steadier until it builds to a bright, sustainable light.
It is easy to get caught up in the routine of schedules, progression, and milestones. We begin to organize the lessons into procedural steps rather than a succession of achievements. A gradual devaluation of success erodes the “fun factor” with our horse.
This also occurs with our coworkers, our children, and our spouses. We put a premium on completing the process and begin to take success for granted. We must yearn for opportunities for success and jump on the moments of satisfaction that punctuate even the most mundane of tasks.
Success and praise are the building blocks of gratitude, and gratitude is the foundation of happiness. So we stalk happiness by building in achievement, praise, and gratitude.
An astounding percentage of horses have suffered abuse at the hands of human beings. The disturbing pervasiveness of this cruelty makes me wonder if perhaps we carry a subconscious fear of the animal’s sheer size that drives us to hurt him. Because the horse cannot speak out and denounce the perpetrator, the cruelty is not curtailed.
Whatever the reason, humans hurt horses a lot. Often the perpetrator justifies the abuse by claiming it to be a necessary element of training. Violence, however, has no place in handling a horse — or in any relationship with a living thing. Abuse is never for the benefit of the victim, although it is almost always justified that way by the abuser.
An inspirational revelation emerges, however, from all the physical abuse heaped upon horses: the discovery of their profound capacity for forgiveness. No matter how much cruelty a horse has experienced, he will rarely generalize it and hold it against all other human beings. An abused horse would have every right to be defensive and assaultive, but instead, his heart remains open and vulnerable. He is willing to take the chance that the next human being he encounters will be the one who is gentle and kind.
I was once called to look at a horse that had been badly mistreated: the owners had fashioned a terrible bridle made out of barbed wire. The horse, bleeding from scores of small cuts, was removed from the premises and taken to the American Humane Society. The lacerations were easy to heal. But could this horse forgive humans for the mistreatment he had received? I had serious doubts about his ability to be rehabilitated and become safe around people.
To my utter surprise, he quickly proved himself able to evaluate each human being who came along on an individual basis. His mistreatment at the hands of some human beings did not prejudice him against all other human beings. The horse made a decision — the way of the herd — to commit to forgiveness, an ability that I found inspirational.
We need to develop awareness of how and when our bodies assume passive or active energy states. Since our vital energy is most easily condensed into our breathing, learning adequate breath control is the best way to concentrate energy for active alignment and assembly of intention.
Active body language requires the rider to summon energy and let it fill the body with each inhalation. The body becomes tense with energy, which the rider learns to direct and shape with intention. When the intention has adequately focused the rider’s energy, it can be brought to bear on the horse. Active energy states inform the horse he must respond to the intention the rider applies to him.
A passive state, on the other hand, requires the rider’s body to empty itself of energy and let it drain back into the ground. A deep cleansing breath leaves her body relaxed and empty. Passive body language creates an atmosphere of total release. It puts the horse at ease and asks nothing of him. Exhalation is the essential ingredient of release.
Control of our energy comes with learning purposeful breathing. Peter Matthiessen, a writer who spent much of his life focusing on Zen Buddhism, put it this way: “In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.”
When we care too much, we screw up the result. That is one reason athletes work so hard to stay loose before a big game or event. The rider who cares too much about the outcome of a particular task or session becomes too attached to it. Her intention suffers because of the agenda.
An example that seems to repeat itself over and over in my classes is the classic training lesson of trying to get a horse to cross a “teeter-totter,” a thick plywood board balanced over a pole laid on the ground. When the horse steps on one end of the board, it will tilt. As he walks across it, the board pivots on the pole. This lesson allows the handler to help her horse confront the problem of a noisy and shifting platform under his feet. Good practice for trail riding, where ground can crumble or a branch snap under the weight of a horse.
Students often become overly focused on getting the horse across the balancing board during the course of the class. To accomplish that, they are willing to drive him relentlessly — sometimes to the point where he tries to vault dangerously over the entire length of the board. I am far more impressed by the student who first tries to figure out what her horse will comfortably tolerate now. She pulls out the pole from under the board and lays the plywood flat on the ground. If her horse cannot yet handle the noise of the plywood underfoot, then what is the point of focusing on the teeter-totter?
This is where the handler must dwell to benefit her horse. Trying so hard to achieve the objective leaves the horse perilously out in the cold. We can create impeccable intention only when it arises without attachment to the outcome.
The handler must almost take the role of spectator, watching from the outside and letting things happen of their own accord, by their own rules. It sounds almost paradoxical, but the horse will let things unfold at his own pace. The less the handler tries to set that pace, the faster the horse will learn.
Horses can get themselves wound up in an endless spiral of anxiety. The adrenaline builds. The horse starts to run. That pushes more adrenaline into the bloodstream and then, as they say at NASA when the rocket engines get ignited, “the candle is lit.” The horse is off in a full-blown panic.
First, allow me to point out that a horse in such a state is potentially a very dangerous animal and needs to be handled with experience and caution. Many owners will advocate just letting him run himself out. My concern with that strategy is several-fold.
First, if the horse is very fit, it could take quite a while until he runs off all that adrenaline. More important, he could get himself hurt or dangerously overheated in such a panicked, fear-stoked state of mind. Finally, the handler or rider is inadvertently building up a behavioral repertoire that includes blind fright.
We always want to teach our horse to think — and not react — his way out of things. Letting him run around in circles in a tizzy is a bad habit. So when your horse starts to get reactive, get him turning and moving his feet. The more frenzied the horse, the more turns we want to demand. This holds true both on the ground and under saddle.
Moving the feet is the answer to panic. That means making the horse circle. Notice that the more frequently you make him turn, the more relaxed he gets. Why? Because we are asking him to focus on his handler and not on his own reactivity. By continually turning, he repeatedly disengages his hindquarters, losing the capacity to “rev up” his engine.
Sometimes the secret to resolving life’s anxieties is to turn in a new direction.
A calm and engaged horse will lower his head and even lean forward. One who is uncertain or leery will raise his head up and lean back on his hindquarters. We want to see our horse pull his head up a bit when he encounters something out of the ordinary but then quickly lower it to investigate. The more time we spend learning to read our horse, the more time our horse will spend with his head down, relaxed and engaged.
There is no finer compliment than going out on the trail with our horse and watching him hold his head in a relaxed, engaged manner throughout the ride. It means we have been so in sync with him that we have let him think his way through the entire ride without needing to react.