It is not about the human teaching the horse; it is about the horse teaching the human….if only we could learn how to listen.
Well you can…..
Learning to be the best person for me and the horses that share my life is a journey of many layers. It will never end. They teach me in different ways. Neige is my comforter, solid, and full of gentle love. Chocolate is steady and sure.
Risada sends me to the depths of myself and never lets up. Her purpose I believe is to make sure I acknowledge every emotion I bring to our meetings, know it in its entirety, feel it fully, whether it be love, joy, or something that needs to change. Today she helped me sense deeply into a feeling I apparently often bring to her – nervousness.
I worked a while back with a feeling of worry about her reactions when other people were around and needed to ‘do’ something to her. Now she was asking me to deal with the nervousness I bring to her just as I go to touch her. To describe it is not easy because it is a sort of mixture of nervousness about touching her in case she doesn’t want to be touched today. There have been times when I have touched her and she has squealed at me. This then fed into my nervousness and wariness.
The other part of this feeling is the cover up feeling. I would tell myself that I was asking her if it was okay to touch her. But that was false. That was my way of telling myself I was being polite. I wasn’t acknowledging the nervousness underneath it.
Weirdly this is the first time I have felt that feeling in a while. I thought I had dealt with it, but suddenly today that feeling of nervousness came up strongly in my abdomen. She was reflecting back to me the underlying feeling I was giving her. It caught me by surprise as it always does with Risada. She was telling me I was ready to work with this one.
Time to acknowledge it and deal with it, change it. This is not a peaceful feeling to bring to an animal. It makes her jumpy and if it was an animal that is a stranger to me, the animal would walk away, or maybe even run away. My nervousness would make them nervous of me. Risada has an amazing way of reflecting my feelings so they don’t affect her. If they do affect her, she tells me about it quickly and precisely.
I went away and examined the feeling, tracing it back to a feeling I had when I was a kid. It turned out that it was a feeling that came up when I felt I had not been good enough and felt I had broken trust. This feeling had developed stronger and stronger through a number of events that had a similar feeling, the most recent being with Risada and not wanting to break my trust with her.
The trouble is by being nervous about breaking trust I was not offering trust. I was living in the future, sharing a feeling based on past feeling memories. I made peace with the feeling. Risada trusts me. It is me that doesn’t trust me. As I acknowledge these reflections she gives me and work through them, I trust myself more and more. I become more at peace with me, and therefore Risada can be more at peace with me.
Change the feeling you bring to a situation and you change the response you get in that situation.
If you would like to know more about ‘How’ you can understand the true feeling you are bringing to your animal relationship you can contact me through the ‘How to find peace with your animal’ page.