What is always yours to control is you – your thoughts, your words, your actions, and where you are placing your attention. No-one else is your business, not even your dependants (the animals or people in your care). Your dependants needs are your responsibility, as long as they are dependants, but Who they are is their own business.
The Wisdom of Wildness: Healing the Trauma of Domestication – Ren Hurst
Control only what is yours to control is the second principle that Ren Hurst explores in her book, which looks at our behaviours and practices in relation to animals in our care, domestic animals. There are thirteen principles and they all relate to each other and become a way of living our lives, of learning how to be in relation to ourselves and others, animal or human.
This principle was a very interesting one to explore for me. I had always had a sense that control was not the best way to go with animals, but didn’t know how else to be, particularly around 400kg of horse. It was all about keeping everything under control.
But now, since letting go of the majority of external control and/or manipulation of any of the herd, except where absolutely necessary for health and wellbeing reasons, I realise how life is so much easier and so much more fun without it. Stop training. Start asking.
It is frightening that. Just thinking about asking for co-operation and really feeling into the fear that comes with possibly and, depending on how much you rely on external control, probably not getting it, puts us in an emotionally vulnerable place. A place we often don’t know what to do with. It can bring up frustration, anger, neediness, sadness and a whole host of other feelings that we have walled in as things in our life that we don’t want to see. Instead it is easier to blame the one we are trying to control.
In addition, when we do start to look at how much external control and manipulation we have allowed ourselves to use, we realise how much hurt we have caused ourselves and others, and then we have to move into forgiving ourselves and moving forward in a different way. And that can bring up a lot of grief that needs working through. It can actually have a huge physical affect on our bodies as well as an emotional one.
It is a principle that has to be moved through slowly, a step at a time. And at every step it will always be about how we, as domesticated humans, feel controlled by external forces and our response to that. The control we try to wield over others to hide feelings is just a behavioural response to our own fear of being controlled. Blaming others to defend our actions is just a behavioural response to our own fear of taking responsibility for our actions.
The other side of this coin is that we can feel we are being controlled all the time. So much of our lives is centred around ‘doing the right thing’, or not ‘doing the wrong thing’. But who defines right and wrong? In society the lines have gotten very blurred. Spending a lot of money on technology is right. Spending a lot of money on food is wrong. Since when did technology sustain our body? Allowing ourselves to be manipulated by external forms of control is the paradox. By fearing being controlled we bring it into focus and become controlled by our fear. To manage the fear we try and control it and, because we are not emotionally mature enough to look at the fear head on and change our behaviours, we become controlling – we point it outside ourselves, instead of looking inwards.
At the end of the day it is all about freedom. We all have free will. We all have freedom of choice. Every moment of every day we make a choice, choose a path. Every choice however small has a consequence. A friends example comes to mind and I quote “We do not have freedom : we have to do our taxes”. In actual fact we do have freedom of choice. To do them or not. Both have consequences. In tax havens we don’t have to do taxes. But that has consequences to. You can look up those yourself.
What it comes down to is letting go of what we cannot control – the fact that the place we choose to live in has a tax system); and controlling what is ours to control – how we feel about doing our taxes. We can make a choice by changing how we think about it; change the words we use; and change where we put our focus – put it back on our self not on those outside our self. Here is a little comparison that can be used in many different situations:
“I have to do my taxes today and I don’t like it. I pay too much and the government never does anything”; or
“I get to do my taxes today and by paying my taxes I make a contribution to the comfortable society I am priveleged to live in”.
The first statement is wanting to, but not being able to, control external factors and thus blaming others for that.
The second statement is taking control of our thoughts, feelings and actions and paying forward for when we may need community support.
Say each statement, or find a statement of your own, and say them out loud to yourself (in a mirror is always good). They feel very different in your body, if you let yourself feel. Everytime you feel the need to control, or feel like you are being controlled, try this little exercise. It teaches us how to feel the fear and release it.
Control what is yours to control : Your words, your thoughts, your actions, and where you put your attention (which should always be on your self).
