Creating a vacuum for the Universe to fill

This Abraham quote puts a really interesting twist on how LOA works with Spiritual Horsemanship.

Every time you say, "I appreciate that. I really like that. I applaud that.  I acknowledge the value in that." Every time you do that, you spend some of your Energy, and it is the spending of the Energy that creates a vacuum, so to speak, or an attraction, so to speak, that draws more and more and more and more.

Every time you say “I appreciate that” to your horse, you create little energy vacuum that the Universe – and your horse – fills in with more of what you appreciate.

Every time you say “I really like that” to your horse, your horse receives a message of your liking and is encouraged to give you more of it.

Every time you applaud your horse’s performance, you attract more of that performance.

It’s so easy to focus on the negative behavior your horse exhibits, but the result is that you draw more of that to you from the Universe via your horse.  Then you look at the horse’s continued unwanted behavior and you blame the behavior on the horse when, ironically, the behavior is originating with you.

Horses, after all, obey the same laws of the Universe we do – the only difference between them and us is we have full choice and they have limited choice.  So when you create a vacuum in yourself by what you focus on – good or bad – you invite more of that into your experience from your horse.

When you purposefully spend the preferred quality of energy to create a vacuum that attracts more of the same kind of energy back to you, you create a space in your experience for the exact kind of behavior you want from your horse.  “Spend” more and more positive energy with your horse to give your horse the opportunity to give back to you the behavior you’re dreaming of.  Not only does it work, but it’s a whole lot of fun.

New Reality Transmission 11/11/10

"A growing body of scientific studies from around the world confirms that these spiritual ideas [that your consciousness changes reality] may have a theoretical ground in physics"

You might be interested in the November 11, 2010 New Reality Transmission to send a "pulse of belief into the Reality Matrix", in which you join a website at specific times and project your beliefs for 11 minutes.  There will be 11 days in a row of group reality transmissions.  The experiment is to see how group consciousness might change the world.

For more info and to sign up:  http://www.newrealitytransmission.com/   Note that the site is based on Flash - slower internet connections (like mine) may have trouble signing up, as I did - just be persistent!

Easy Does It: The three states of being

Copyright © 2010 Lif C. Strand
www.spiritualhorsemanship.com

Three states of being in Spiritual Horsemanship

• Soft eyes
  
• Relaxed body
  
• Peaceful mind
  

Your point of view

Spiritual Horsemanship is about choice and partnership with horses, as opposed to the historical use of force and hierarchy/dominance. It is about softness, allowing and pleasure – for yourself and your horse – rather than hardness, pushing and unhappiness. Softness, relaxation and peacefulness are attractive, not just to horses but to other humans.

Spiritual Horsemanship involves both your inner and your outer life experience, as each affects the other. It is based on the idea that when you make positive changes in your inner experience, your outer experience will change. It is also based on a supporting idea that changing any one area of your life will affect all other areas of your life. Thus, improving your relationship with your horse will have broad results in other areas of your life.

When you experience pleasurable states you feel good, and when you feel good, you are vibrating at (in a state of harmony with) a level like that of Source energy, the energy of the Universe (or God, Goddess, Great Spirit, your choice of terms). Vibrating at this level is energizing, because Source energy is infinite. The stronger your positive emotions, the better you feel and the more energy you have, because the energy comes from outside you. In such a state you are open to the world, generating energy, able to receive information and process it on many levels. The highest levels of positive energy are experienced as transcendent bliss.

When you experience negative emotions such as anger or fear - when you generate such emotions through pushing, dominating, forcing - you don’t feel good. Your Reptile Mind puts you in a self-protective state of being: Hormones are released into your system, your heart rate increases, your muscles tense as your body prepares itself for action on both the physical and emotional levels. A sort of shell of imperviousness protects you – you don’t feel much pain, you have a surge of energy. But the cost is high – you are closed off to the world. You can’t receive much information, you can’t think – your ability to process information is limited to what the Reptile Mind can deal with, and you become a hard shell of self-protection.

In such a state you are vibrating at the level of physical matter. Vibrating at this level is tiring because the energy comes from your own body and physical energy is finite. The stronger your negative emotions, the more quickly you use up your own personal energy. The lowest levels of negative energy are experienced as depression and despair.


Your horse’s point of view

Horses, like all prey animals, are of necessity masters of reading body language – not only that of their own species but of other species as well. This is what allows zebras to assess the risk from a nearby pride of lions – accurate reading of the body language of a hungry lion versus a lazy, satiated one is the difference between living to another day and becoming lion dinner.

Horses can immediately tell the difference in your emotional states and react to them. Your negative states of being can elicit fear in a horse - anger is interpreted by a horse as aggressive, predatory behavior. Predatory body language raises flight or fight behavior reaction and can lead to unwanted responses when a horse is not allowed escape from your negative states.

On the other hand, your positive states of being reassure your horse and are attractive to him. Like with a good lead mare in a wild herd, it is in the nature of your horse to want to do what you want if you exhibit the positive body language of positive emotion such as contentment, relaxation or happiness. Being able to get yourself in a state of positive emotion will bring you positive results with your horse.

Your relationship with your horse reflects who you are as a human being in general as well as your relationship with everything in your life. As you achieve success with the lessons of Spiritual Horsemanship, you will find your whole life responding. Learning to change your level of vibration with horses is the foundation for Spiritual Horsemanship.

The three states of being

The three states of being in Spiritual Horsemanship are soft eyes, relaxed body and peaceful mind. Being able to on-purpose generate any of them will lead to success with all three, and will allow you to become an open, non-threatening, spiritual partner with your horse. Practice with achieving the three states will make it easier to create them in yourself at any time – when working with your horse, when dealing with your family or your work or any circumstance in your life. Achieving the three states of soft eyes, relaxed body and peaceful mind is not only calming to yourself, but it attracts more of that same calm, higher, pleasurable vibration into your life and into the world around you. When working with your horse, you become non-threatening and attractive (in the sense of being an entity that your horse wants to pay attention to and be near). In such a state your desires for your horse’s response to you are more easily communicated, and you become open and sensitive to your horse’s physical and non-physical communication.

When you change yourself so that achieving the three states becomes natural and habitual behavior for you, then your relationships with other humans and your whole physical environment similarly change. Spiritual Horsemanship can become a way to resolve issues throughout your life, not simply with your horse.

Using “soft eyes” is the first step in creating a higher vibrational state of being. Soft eyes enable you to see a whole picture rather than just the details, to look at nothing specifically but see everything. This is right-brain functioning. Using the right brain can put you in a timeless place where you can dream of goals and end results yet you can get there working on many things simultaneously (rather than focused and sequentially). On-purpose use of soft eyes is a way to achieve a relaxed body and peaceful mind.

A relaxed body drains tension from the mind, which allows the shell of self-protection to dissolve. Having a relaxed body signals to a horse a lack of aggressive purpose. A relaxed body also feels more pleasurable than a tense body. It is more balanced, and allows for faster and greater sensitivity in response to your horse.

A peaceful mind is a mind connected to Source energy and is the result of soft eyes and a relaxed body. When connected to Source energy, you are most attractive to your horse and most open to communication from him.

When the three states of being are all positive, it puts you fully in the world, allows you to become a holistic part of everything, and allows what you are inside to manifest outside. In such a state, your horse can become part of you and together you become more than two beings working together, more than the sum of the parts. You become the Centaur, one being with one goal, joyfully achieved together.


Next: Practice makes perfect – soft eyes.

Whose problem – the horse’s or yours?

Copyright (c) 2009 Lif Strand

Here’s a few questions to ponder: When there’s a problem with your horse, how do you know if it’s really his problem or yours? When two entities are involved in a relationship, is it even possible for only one to be the source of problems that both experience? And just because the horse isn’t human, why does it have to be him that has to be “at fault” and therefore “fixed”?

According to the Law of Attraction approach to horsemanship, whenever there is a problem with a horse - whether it’s fear or spooking caused by an object real or imagined, or aggression or stubbornness, or even such things as your horse’s health or ability, whether it’s a new horsemanship problem or an old one – the first thing is to acknowledge is that that problems with horses start with humans.

The Law of Attraction says that everything that happens in your life is what you’ve attracted to yourself, either purposefully or unconsciously, through the choices you have made. The choices you have made create the person you are and the situation you find yourself in, no matter whoever or whatever else is involved, no matter whether you’ve been aware you even had choices or were making them.

Everything you do is the result of choices – everything. Until and unless you accept this tenet of the Law of Attraction, you can never be in control of your life, because you will be a “victim” of circumstance – things happening to you instead of because of you. This includes your being the “victim” of your horse’s own choices.

I can’t believe how strongly I fought the concept of personal responsibility in the past! I started out by arguing that random events couldn’t have any connection with my choices – the old “what if a meteor struck me on the head, how could I be responsible for that?” argument, which translates to “why am I responsible for unconsciously made choices?”. Then I argued that sometimes I’ve been forced to do things by people more powerful than I, as if somehow some other entity was inhabiting my body, making me some sort of puppet, which translates to “why should I be responsible for choices I made that maybe weren’t the best for me?”. And then I argued that I couldn’t have choice if my soul/the Universe had a Higher Purpose for my life, which was really the same argument as the previous one. And of course, there’s the “but I didn’t know better!” position to fall back on, as if I somehow shouldn’t be held responsible for choices if I didn’t already know all the possible outcomes.

The opposite side of the coin of non-responsibility is that once you accept that you are fully the chooser, the only one who directs your life and the only one who can be held responsible for everything in it, you become the conscious creator of your reality. So, if you choose to accept responsibility for your own choices and thereby to create your own reality, it follows that if you are experiencing horse/human problems, the only sure way to fix them is to fix yourself.

The Law of Attraction says that likes attract likes, that you will attract to you from the Universe that which matches who you truly are. Who you are is not just “parent, teacher, sibling, friend, enemy, boss, owner, horseman” or any of these or many more possible descriptors, because these labels are so limited – they can only identify isolated facets of you and not the most fundamental core of who you truly are. Who you are isn’t any one aspect of yourself. Who you are is not simply who you think you are, or who you want to be. Rather, who you are is the totality of your unconscious as well as conscious mind, your thoughts and beliefs, your actions, your Higher Self (soul) and your physical expression of your Higher Purpose at any given moment in your existence, all of which are the result of the accumulation of choices you have made (on this plane of existence as well as spiritually).

This is important for three reasons: One, you have be what you want to attract in all facets of your life - not just in one finite area - because you aren’t just one thing, you are all those things at every moment; and two, the choices you make affect all facets of your life, not just one aspect of yourself; and three, becoming on the “inside” what you want to attract even in one area affects everything else that is attracted to you from the Universe, including better behavior from your horse.

How does it work?

First, you’ve got to commit to change. This is so fundamental, yet so often ignored. You can’t get to a new place without leaving the old place.

Second, you’ve got to actually change. As Yoda in Star Wars said, “do, or do not – there is no try”. It is hard to actually leave the safety of the known behind to go boldly into the unknown – even when the unknown might be much, much better. This involves making choices every moment that support the new person you are becoming, and leaving behind the choices you’ve made in the past that anchor you to who you have been.

Once you’ve changed, have become a different person, then the new person you truly are will attract new things from the Universe.

The trick, of course, is that you are wanting to become a person that you’ve never been before – not an easy thing. And, unless you successfully do change (not just try, but actually change), you’ll just keep attracting the same old things you’ve been attracting all along. If the issue is horsemanship, then nothing will change in your horse, either.

Question is, if likes attract likes, just how do you become a person that attracts a better behaved horse – when you aren’t a horse (well behaved or otherwise), yourself?

Upcoming articles:
Yoda’s words – try vs. doing
Techniques for separating the symptoms from the causes of problems

A foal is born, a life in our hands

Colt, Carmine and QH foster mom, Jesse


The colt is learning how to drink from a bucket - much better than trying to bottle feed him. This development makes it easier to believe that the colt will survive, but there is still worry: Worry that he won't thrive, that he'll be stunted, that there's something else wrong to deal with - that he won't make it at all.

The Law of Attraction says that what we focus on is what we create in our lives. Dwelling on what can go wrong can never create what we want to happen, it can only attract what we don't want. On the other hand, it can seem so Pollyannaish to assume that all will be well - by only focusing on a problem-free future for this colt, we could end up missing a vital clue that could make the difference between survival and death.

What to do?

The Law of Attraction also tells us about acceptance. Last post I mentioned accepting that this colt’s soul has made choices for his life in this body, and honoring that what I am seeing reflects higher purposes that I cannot know. I can accept the choices or fight them – but I cannot alter them.

How, then, does this acceptance work with respect to the responsibilities we each have to the critters in our care (and to children, for that matter)? Do we just strive to ignore the possible problems, only think happy, positive thoughts, and hope for the best?

One of the gifts – or perhaps burdens - we as humans have is that of free will. Unlike the colt, with his limited range of choice or responses to the events in his life, humans have countless choices that can be made in any situation. We can imagine anything, and what we imagine, we can potentially do. We can imagine all sorts of futures in our minds and, ideally, then examine those futures and use them to make best possible choices. When we work with our horses, we do this imagining of the future all the time: We dream of winning endurance rides or halter classes or polo matches or cutting competitions - any or all of it with the colt in front of us that is just learning how to keep his legs in the proper order.

As humans we imagine a future for this colt in front of us, but of course, the choices can only be for ourselves. We may want to make choices for this colt, but it is his soul that’s driving his existence in this life, not ourselves as we stand looking at him.

The Law of Attraction teaches acceptance, but acceptance does not mean inaction. We are here to actively live lives, not to merely sit back like voyeurs and watch the world go by. We are here to choose to do in order to maximize what we see, feel, hear, smell, taste and experience in all possible ways. It is the journey, not the goal, that is the point of living. What goals we strive to achieve are, in the big picture, not so important to our souls as how we get there. If this were not so, what would the point be of living once a goal was achieved?

We can set the goal of doing whatever we can to keep this colt alive, but our journey, how we go about doing this, is key. The act of doing for the colt - the bottle and bucket feeding and all the special care - is ultimately for ourselves, for our own life experience and for the higher purposes our souls have for us. We can grow from this, no matter the outcome, or we can struggle and suffer, torturing ourselves with focusing on negative outcomes. The choice is always ours, no matter where we find ourselves in life.

The Soul of a Horse

“My horse fights with me and fasts with me because if he is to carry me into battle, he must know my heart and I must know his or we shall never become brothers.

"I have been told that the white man, who is almost a god and yet a great fool, does not believe the horse has a soul.

"This cannot be true. I have many times seen my horse’s soul in his eyes."

-Plenty Coups, Chief of the Crow”

Relationships and vibrational levels

We are each and all the product of our life experiences, which includes interaction with others, both human and horse (and all living beings). We develop beliefs based on life experiences; these beliefs affect the choices we make - whether consciously or unconsciously - and manifest as the actions we take in life. We too often cling to our beliefs without realizing that they are hindering our relationships with others and limiting our growth.

Our interactions with horses are based on existing beliefs - those of ourselves and those of our horses. When problems arise, we each are confronted with the need to make choices about how to proceed. If we, the humans, choose to “stay true to beliefs” while we are asking for change (trying to resolve the problem), what we are really doing is asking the horse to make the choice to change. However, as we so often discover, clinging to beliefs for the sake of staying true to them will not necessarily serve us best, that is, the problems aren’t resolved. This is because a fact of life - truly a Law of Universe - is that the only control we each have in life is that over our own choices, not those of others. Thus, resolving problems between ourselves and our horses means being open to change, but it is only ourselves that that we can change.

When things are going right with our horses, we have the same goals, we make the same choices to get there. From the spiritual point of view, we are vibrating at the same frequencies. When things don’t seem to be going right with our horses, when it seems we have different goals and are making different choices, what we are experiencing is the differences in vibrational levels.

The more significant the difference in vibrational level, the more uncomfortable interactions between human and horse feel and the more difficult communication and relationship will be. When anger and other negative emotions come into play, vibrational levels change, and the interactions become even more difficult. Resorting to use of forceful training methods (such as forcing response through fear or pain) simply increases the difference in vibrational levels, and leads to increased force or simply failure.

Successful training or other interactions with horses (getting our horses to do things that we humans want at any given moment) is about successful communication that encourages our horses to make choices in alignment with our own choices. When our horses fully participate in relationships with us and freely choose to accept us in the leadership (decision making) position, then they more readily respond to communication, thereby requiring fewer communication aides or amplifiers (that's what the devices such as whips, spurs, bits, or even halters are - communication amplifiers).

When the relationship is such that the horse fully accepts the human in the leadership (decision making) role, communication can be extraordinarily subtle. A sheepherder working with a sheepdog or a cutting horse working without reins are examples. Once our horses understand the "language" of training - what is being communicated - then the rest is about the human/horse relationship. The closer in vibrational levels that our horses are to us, the better the communication and the closer we are in the choices we make to achieve the same goals.

Although we have no control over the choices or vibrational levels of anyone (or any thing, such as our horses), we can change ourselves. If we are experiencing “differences”, we only have the power to choose to change our own vibrational levels - higher or lower, it is the only control we truly have over any situation. Use of force (increased communication amplifiers) is like shouting louder - it may bring about different actions in others, but has it changed their beliefs and vibrational levels for the better? More importantly, will it bring our vibrational levels into alignment?

I believe that making choices that raise our vibrational levels is why we are each here in this body at this time. When we recognize differences between ourselves and our horses, we can be thankful, because we have been given a clear signal that we now have the opportunity to make new choices for change in our own vibrational levels - and thereby also improve our relationships with our horses.

Taking responsibility for what we have power to change in human/horse relationships - ourselves - and making the appropriate choices is the basis of Spiritual Horsemanship. Fortunately, we have the best teachers possible to learn how to do this: Our horses themselves.