Learning and Choices: How To Charm The Snake

It’s evening and the horses are eating their dinners. The sky is gorgeous with clouds still rosy from sunset, their glow almost obscuring a thin crescent moon. The bay and chestnut and gray noses are buried in green alfalfa hay, the sounds of contented munching audible from where I stand. Suddenly all the horses’ heads rise in unison at a noise from the scraggly, stunted juniper tree nearby. Something is in there!

Foxy twirls and bolts away, snorting and wide-eyed. Koko takes a few steps towards the bush, his nostrils flared. The other horses, all well away from the action, stand like statues, watching the juniper intently.

Jess, in her pen closest to the monster, spins to run but she has nowhere to go. She heads away at full speed towards the steel fence panel and I hold my breath, but she slides to a stop and rolls back to her pile of hay, then back to the fence again. The colt, head held up high, nose in the air, runs mindlessly next to his foster mother – he’s going wherever she goes, just as fast, just as far. Jess finally slides to a stop and freezes in place, muscles quivering, her attention focused totally on the bush, to the spot where the monster will burst from.

My dog, Hobo, steps out of the bush, panting, a smile on his face. He’s missed catching the pesky ground squirrel, but I can see he thinks it was by just a whisker. I shake my head, glad I wasn’t sitting on Jess or Foxy when Hobo went hunting.

The Reptile Mind is a good thing for a horse, in that it automatically and instantly takes control of his thinking mind and his body when immediate response can literally make the difference between life and death – those times when pausing for thought can get a horse eaten. However, when working with your horse, sometimes the things his Reptile Mind reacts to may not really be a danger at all. The result can be a very bad thing, indeed.

The simplest incidents can trigger a horse’s Reptile Mind – it could be the flapping of a loose piece of plastic, putting on a raincoat, a log alongside the trail, a dog running out from under a bush. Obviously, not everything that sets off Reptile Mind is sudden – a horse can panic just from being pushed to get in a trailer, or, in the colt’s case the other week, needing to jump out of the one that he walked into himself.

The same incident can elicit different reactions in the horses. In the case of Hobo in the bush, Koko, by biology, cannot just turn and run away – it is his job as a stallion to defend the mares. Foxy, timid and reactive by nature, is the first to flee and to go the farthest. The other mares stand and wait because their lead mare, Su, is unconcerned. Jess is closest to the juniper tree where the monster is, and, new to the herd and separated from them at dinner time, can’t rely on the lead mare. She’s trapped and wants to escape, like Foxy. The colt has no choice – he is young enough that he must follow his foster mother when it comes to things like danger.

To flee or not to flee…

We all know our minds operate on the conscious as well as the unconscious level. Fear experienced on the conscious level is learned fear. For example, you fear putting your finger in a flame because you’ve learned by sorry experience that it will hurt a lot. Your conscious mind has accessed memories of the pain from being burned in the past, along with the negative emotions the pain elicited. The negative emotions elicit fear. Now your fear keeps you from putting your finger in the flame so you won’t be hurt again.

The unconscious mind is the province of the Reptile Mind (limbic system), which causes you to jerk your finger out of the flame when you feel pain - an involuntary physiological reaction. In addition to jerking your finger from the pain source, your limbic system also stores the negative emotion associated with the memory of experience you just had. Your thinking mind will use this in the future in the form of fear.

For horses, anything that is unknown or unidentifiable must be considered dangerous and therefore fearsome – this is a hard-wired survival strategy for prey animals that keeps them alive. And of course, situations that remind a horse of those that have been dangerous in the past are fearful, as well. Sufficient fear triggers the Reptile Mind, involuntarily throwing the body into immediate reaction so it will survive the danger – even when the danger is not identified (or identifiable).

Yet the same danger may not trigger a reflex survival response in different horses, or even the same horse at different times. This is because of differing fear thresholds in each horse - a kind of biological set-point beyond which a system cannot handle any further input. On one side of the set-point the conscious mind operates, on the other, the reflex or Reptile Mind. The threshold or sensitivity of the set-point is dependent upon experience/memory, hardwiring, hormones, excitatory or calming chemicals, and various other factors present in the body.

When your horse’s Reptile Mind reacts to a situation, certain physiological events occur, e.g. freezing in place, rapid heartbeat, increased respiration. Stress hormones and other chemicals flood the body and the horse is propelled, willy-nilly, to action. The set-point for initiation of flight-or-fight behavior has been triggered. It is important to remember that once the limbic system takes over, the reasoning, rational mind does not function. There is no choice when it comes to survival response.

The memory of a situation coupled with negative emotion (fear) will cause the same physical response in the body as actual danger – the same rapid heartbeat, increased respiration, etc. Reptile Mind, with no direct connection to the world (the sensory input of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch are not available to the limbic system) cannot differentiate between actual danger and the negative emotion associated with memory of danger (fear), but it will still trigger to the physical fear response, the raised heartbeat and respiration, the flood of chemicals in the body. Fear is no different to Reptile Mind than the real deal so that the end result is the same – the set-point of the fear threshold is tipped.

Charming the Reptile Mind

Ideally you want your horse to have more positive emotions (since they do not rouse the snake) and fewer unknowns to deal with in his daily experience. But in fact, you cannot guarantee that ideal environment for your horse. In real life, the snake is charmed – Reptile Mind is kept out of the picture - by raising the fear threshold, that is, changing the sensitivity of the set-point so that it takes a higher level of stress (physical or emotional input) to create the triggering fear.

The two systems – the unconscious mind (Reptile Mind) and the conscious (thinking) mind work as an efficient either-or system. The unconscious mind takes care of imminent danger, the conscious mind everything else involving voluntary actions. Although the Reptile mind cannot be contacted directly, the conscious mind can have an effect on it. If this wasn’t possible, we all would be at the mercy of the Reptile Mind at all times – we could never learn the difference between what is safe and what is truly dangerous because our Reptile Mind would be “on” most of the time, meaning we’d have no time for conscious mind to operate – to think!.

Learning is the key to keeping the Reptile Mind from taking over. A horse can learn to tolerate almost anything that would normally trigger Reptile Mind. Horses can be used reliably on the battlefield even with the smell of blood, the sounds of explosions and the pain of being wounded, and they can enthusiastically chase after a polo ball even with polo sticks swinging around their faces and occasionally smacking their bodies and legs. Buggy horses in cities ignore honking horns, squealing brakes, speeding vehicles, pedestrians that may dart in front of their faces. This is simply because familiarity, just as with positive emotion, does not cause the stress response in the body and the Reptile Mind response is not triggered.

A horse will learn from everything around it – from his mother, his immediate herd, other horses, his environment and from the humans he interacts with. He has no reason not to want to accept anything a human offers – as long as the Reptile Mind is not roused.

Early handling of foals works because a foal’s conscious mind is essentially a tabula rasa – a blank slate – that you can put anything you want in because nothing, other than instinct, is in there yet. Teach a foal early and work with him often and he is trained for life – for good or bad.

Older horses can be taught anything as well, but if they have low fear thresholds, their set-points must be raised, and this must be done while avoiding rousing the Reptile Mind. Older horses have established memories that will have been learned from all the same sources as a foal, but these memories, older and now established over time, will have more potency.

Charming the Reptile Mind involves both proactive measures and remedial ones in your horse’s life. Proactive measures keep your horse’s experiences positive and avoid the unexpected whenever possible. Remedial measures raise his set-point when the Reptile Mind has reacted, as it inevitably will. Charming the Reptile Mind is actually simple, but it isn’t necessarily easy to implement - particularly if some of the essential factors are not considered.

Next: Herd dynamics, for better or worse.

Learning and Choices: Avoiding the Reptile Mind

The “Reptile Mind” (limbic system) is a set of brain structures that support a variety of functions including emotion, behavior, long term memory, smell and automatic processes in the body. This system, which manages “fight or flight” chemicals, is considered a more primitive part of the brain, since common ancestors of both reptiles and mammals had well developed limbic systems.

The Reptile Mind makes choices for us. It provides a “no brainer” immediate response to danger – survival reflex – that automatically affects the endocrine and the autonomic nervous systems so that there is minimal lag time to the response. If you’ve ever snatched your hand back just in time to avoid being bitten by a bee, or grabbed hold of something without even realizing it was there in order to avoid falling, you have experienced the work of the Reptile Mind. It bypasses the logical part of the mind, the part that assesses and chooses.

A mother mouse will fight to defend its young from a predator that could eat the mouse in one bite. A tiny shrew will fight when backed into a corner by a giant human. Every hamster owner that has reached into a cage and been bitten by a normally friendly pet knows that the size or power of the danger source makes no difference to the Reptile Mind. This is because the Reptile Mind has no capacity for logical thought. A good thing, too, because under certain circumstances, thinking is slow compared to Reptile Mind response. A quick bite on a fox’s nose by a mouse, or on a human’s hand by a shrew (or a hamster) can provide just enough time to escape – no decision making process needed.

The Reptile Mind keeps horses alive in the wild. There is no time for cogitating on how to respond when a mountain lion leaps from a rock above or a snake hisses from the path – survival depends on lightning quick responses. The Reptile Mind – the limbic system – takes over the thinking processes.


A horse cannot make choices when Reptile Mind is in control!

Reptile Mind is the reactive mind. It takes over when stimulated to action, and it takes the place of choice. While the limbic system is engaged, the “Thinking Mind” (the mind that can analyze and make choices) is inoperable. A horse can and does make choices all the time: what it wants to eat, who it wants to stand next to in the herd, whether it wants to stand in the shade or the sun, whether it wants to come to you when you call or keep grazing. We will see in future articles that a horse’s choices include decisions about going along with the request of humans, no matter how the human presents the request. However, when the Reptile Brain is engaged, any potential for choice is lost – a horse’s body must respond to the imperatives of the limbic system hormones and chemicals that flood its body.

Even memories of emotions associated with an experience can bring about Reptile Mind behavior, since storage of emotional memories is part of the limbic system function. The memory of fear associated with an experience can cause behaviors such as freezing, rapid heartbeat, increased respiration, and stress-hormone release when a similar experience is encountered – even when the second experience would not normally be fearful. (Positive emotional memories are stored as well, however negative emotions are generally more powerful for horses as they involve survival itself).


Avoiding Reptile Mind

It is obvious that it is best to avoid causing a horse’s Reptile Mind to take over in reaction to an outside stimulus. Survival reflex can make your horse more liable to survive in a life-and-death situation, but what Reptile Mind reacts to in every day situations is not likely to be appropriate.

Horses will spook at the darndest things – but they don’t have to. Fortunately, long-term memory for a given experience is not instantaneously formed, but is instead assimilated slowly into long-term storage over a period of time – and during this time the memory can be modified. This is why – for horse and rider’s sake – it is advised to get back on the saddle right away after a fall!

Additionally, emotional input after an experience can influence the strength of the subsequent memory of that experience. Rewards for a job well done can truly cement the long-term memory of an experience. Similarly, a negative emotion, such as brought about by punishment or even by a negative reaction of another person (or horse) , can equally cement the memory of that experience – but also help trigger Reptile Mind in the future.

When the colt panicked in the trailer, his Reptile Mind took over. It flooded his body with hormones and chemicals and overrode his lack of experience with jumping down from a height. It caused him to leap out of the trailer without consideration for how far down the ground might be – thank goodness it wasn’t a cliff with a hundred foot drop, because Reptile Mind doesn’t think, it just forces action.

If the colt’s foster mother had been upset or if the colt had hurt himself landing, the emotion associated with the memory of leaping out of the trailer would be negative. This emotional memory would be stored with the trailer experience and would help trigger the Reptile Mind reaction in the future. The colt might start associating trailers with fear, and eventually could even develop a problem with loading.

But instead what happened is that Jess was unconcerned, so much so that the colt was able to just go to her and nurse. The nursing was pleasurable, thus associating that positive emotional memory with the memory of the trailer experience. Since Jess goes in and out of the trailer often, the colt does, too. His long term memory for the trailer experience is modified – positively – each time that Reptile Mind is not evoked. And in turn, this means that in the future memories of experiences with the trailer will be such that the trailer becomes an ordinary thing – no reason for Reptile Mind to be alerted.

Next: How to charm the snake

Learning and Choices

Our colt follows his foster mother, Jess, into the horse trailer (which is parked with its door tied open for access from her and the colt’s pen) because Mom does so in a matter of fact way - nothing to be alarmed about. Jess stands nonchalantly in the shade inside and snoozes. The colt takes the opportunity to sniff around and explore. Eventually he, too, begins to become tired, and he lays down at Mom’s feet.

Jess later decides to leave the trailer. Since there is nothing alarming about being in the trailer and no urgency to her leaving - maybe she’s thirsty, maybe there’s a bit of hay that she has somehow overlooked - she ambles out without waking her adopted foal. When he wakes up, however, the story is altogether different.

The colt leaps up, whinnying for Jess. He scrambles to the open door, but he stops - he cannot jump down. He has been in the flat pen for the few days of his whole life, and has no experience of such a thing. The colt has never seen his mother do it, he has nothing to compare it to, and at this tender age with so little knowledge in his repertoire, he does not know how to learn to deal with this new experience on his own.

Jess, who has wandered back to see what is wrong, is an experienced mother and doesn’t get upset when she sees there is no danger to the colt. She whickers once to him, then turns away. She cannot teach this foal how to step out of the trailer because she has never taught any of her foals anything before and has no idea how to start now, even if she wanted to. Jess, like any other mare, has only offered her foals the example of her own behavior to learn from. In this case, the example of leaving the trailer is a lesson the colt missed.

The colt is frantic. He runs around inside the trailer whinnying shrilly. His fear escalates to panic - and finally adrenaline propels him out the door to make the bold leap to the ground, 8” below. He runs to Jess and begins to nurse. All is well.

Like humans, horses learn and make choices all the time. They’re born with instinctive behaviors that guide their initial actions as human babies are, but foals are born with more physical facility than human babies. Foals have to learn how to stand, to walk, to recognize their mother, to find the teat, to get milk from nursing and then to be able to follow their mothers wherever necessary. They have to do this within minutes of birth - otherwise, rather than enjoying their first milk from Mom, they may become some predator’s meal.

While horses may have strong instincts that drive behaviors, they still are able to learn and make choices like humans do - but for a horse, learning and choosing occurs within the framework of the herd and of being a prey animal. Still, the actual process of learning is not that different.

As I said in my previous article, learning is about acquiring (accumulating, not being born with) the skills or knowledge to do something. Learning is about pushing the envelope – going past an existing state of knowledge into the unknown. Humans and horses alike do not learn what they already know, they learn something new, but this means going beyond what is known. And that can be a scary thing.

For a foal that may become a predator’s dinner if it screws up, learning quickly what is necessary is an issue of survival, not a luxury. Foals learn by the examples provided by their mothers and, when they are days and weeks old, they start learning from other herd members. In the wild, things are divided into two categories: Known/safe and all else/unsafe. When it comes to survival, the unknown may be just as risky as known dangers.

Thus, when the lead mare goes to water on a certain path, and walks around instead of over a certain clump of grass, it makes survival sense to follow in her footsteps. The lead mare is in that position because she is a survivor and, more, she uses her knowledge to thrive. Any mistakes she has made were lessons she learned from, and with the excellent memory horses are blessed with, she wouldn’t be repeating. Herd animals have evolved to follow the leader because it is a short-cut to learning crucial lessons of survival. No need for the foal to get bitten by a rattlesnake in order to learn to not step in certain grass clumps – just do what the lead mare does and rattlers aren’t an issue. (I’ll be discussing what it is that makes a mare the leader in another article). Foals are not really choosing anything in this process, but rather acquiring knowledge that contributes to the building of an internal map of its world.

Learning within the herd is a fairly risk-free thing. If they follow the leader - whether it is Mom or other horses in the herd – they likely will not get hurt. Although foals are learning (taking in new information where no information was before) they are not pushing much of an envelope. They rarely trigger the unpleasant cascade of chain reactions in brain and body brought about by stress - this in itself is a reward for following the leader. There is little in the normal process of learning for a foal to become alarmed about or to develop negative emotions about. Even when a fearful incident occurs, such as with our colt and the trailer, the calmness of the mother throughout and afterwards, allows the fear to fade into the background.

Next: Avoiding the reptile mind

Choice and learning

The Law of Attraction is clear about choice: All any living being has power over in its life is its own choices, and everything that happens to the being is a result of its own choices. I know people argue against this – heck, I’ve argued against it: Suppose a meteor falls from the sky and hit me on the head – how is that my choice? Of course, when we argue against choice, what we mostly are saying is that the choice concept should only apply if we know the potential results.

Nice thought, but irrelevant. Life doesn’t work that way.

Here’s the way life really works: If I get hit on the head by a meteor, that’s the result of every choice I made in my life up until that specific time and place. I am the one who has directed my body to take every step along the way until I reach the one spot in the whole Universe that ends up with me in the line of impact of that one meteor. No one else lives in my body or inhabits my mind and has forced me to do what it took to get me in that one spot. And the meteor is not about me at all – it isn’t aiming to hit me, it’s only following its own path. Even if someone tied me up and sat me in a chair at the point of impact, I still took every step myself to get me to the person who did that to me. I’m the one responsible, because I made every choice along the way – even though I didn’t know that it would get me crushed by a meteor. (I guess that’s why the word “oops” was invented!)

Making choices to do things without knowing what the end result will be makes it sound like everything is just about meaningless chance but it’s not, because although I don’t know what the results will be, someone (or something) does know: My soul. I’ve got a soul (so does every living thing) and my soul has a higher purpose for my life.

Although we don’t generally know much about our soul’s higher purpose for us, we can figure out some things. The Law of Attraction teaches us that if we trust to our higher purpose, we can use our emotions to make the choices in our lives. It’s like playing the game of Hot & Cold: Positive emotions are the warm and hot, and negative emotions the cold. When we choose based on positive emotions, we are on the path of higher purpose. When we choose based on negative emotions, we are not on that path.

Why do we have to play this game? Simple: Our souls are part of the infinite and we, incarnate in these bodies, are finite. Finite beings cannot comprehend infinity, we don't have the capacity for it. Our souls aren’t hiding anything from us, no more than an adult hides anything from a baby - the adult world is just not comprehensible to a baby, as babies don't have the capacity for it.

For babies, things are pretty cut and dried - they get hungry, that upsets them and they cry. They get fed, they are satisfied (after a burp) and they smile. Babies start out with instincts (to cry when hungry, to smile when satisfied) and follow them blindly. As a baby’s instinctive actions are experienced they are stored – along with the associated emotions (pleasure, pain, positive emotions, negative emotions – hot and cold). Babies soon grow from instinctive action to using stored information (emotions + experiences) to make choices of actions in order to get certain results.

The baby is learning.


Learning is about acquiring (accumulating, not being born with) the skills or knowledge to do something. When we learn, we experience something and then store that experience along with the emotions that we felt at the time. We use what we’ve learned to make our future choices. The emotions associated with the learned experiences are the guideposts for making the choices both in daily life and from the higher purposes point of view.

Next: How horses make choices and learn – and what it means for the human/horse relationship.

A foal is born - learning to learn

06/06/09
Copyright © Lif Strand for Spiritual Horsemanship





If I was really good at the Law of Attraction, I wouldn’t get frustrated and irritated by some of the garbage that is put forth about horses*, but I still do. I am getting better at catching myself, but it still happens.

I got ranting the other day about that imprinting nonsense. Imprinting is an automatic (involuntary) psycho-physiological process, not a learning process, and it is hard-wired into the brain. Imprinting is a survival mechanism for certain critters (birds are all I know of) that triggers species specific patterns of behavior. This is because critters that can imprint need to get the information they need for survival fast – they can’t afford the time to learn it.

I'm not sure any mammal can imprint. However, while equines don't acquire all their species-specific behavior patterns when they are first handled by humans or nuzzled by their mothers in the moments and hours after birth, the initial information taken in by a foal during that time period “sticks” more readily than it does at almost any other time in a horse’s life.

That’s because the slate is clean. The storehouse of experience is empty. A foal has nothing else to compare to, to judge by, in order to choose. A foal will choose most anything it experiences at that point if it doesn’t hurt – but that is not imprinting.

In the wild, of course, there are no humans around to provide input of any kind at in a foal’s first hours and days. The input the foal receives is either provided directly (mom’s presence, her smell and voice, are security and nurture; a cactus smells a certain way and hurts when your nose investigates closer; the lead mare is not to be approached or touched unless she invites you) or indirectly (the herd members all snort at and skitter away from a coiled thing that buzzes and hisses – so the foal does too; the herd runs from a pack of wolves – so the foal does too; the lead mare avoids going down that canyon, and no one else, including the foal, does either). All learning is accepted because it is provided within the frame of every-day living and is demonstrated and reinforced every moment by mom and every member of the herd. And, of course, whatever is taught within that framework is going to be “natural” behavior for the foal - it is well within the range of horse-abilities and horse-proclivities. At that point, the foal will choose whatever is given to it by its mom and the herd. There’s no reason for the foal not to.

Horses are born wanting to do the things that the rest of the horses in the herd are doing. They will of course test the boundaries as they grow – that’s the nature of a being that has free-will, and it gives rise to a changing herd dynamic and thereby ultimately to the genetic diversity that would not exist if everything was always the same.

For most domesticated horses, however, things are different. Humans don’t look like horses. They don’t sound or smell like horses. They sure don’t act like horses – and the communication most humans offer isn’t even in the language of Horse. Most horses don’t get to be born or raised in a natural environment, they don’t get to live in a herd, they only get input on how to be a proper horse from their moms for a few months, and after then from other horses over fences and in passing. Yet humans expect horses to overcome all of this to learn how to not only be good horses, but to be horses that do what humans want – and by and large, horses manage to do just that.

However good horses are at overcoming the obstacles necessary for success in the human world, it’s a measure of the faultiness of the usual approach to human/horse interaction that almost always there is a point (or a number of points) in the relationship when the horse isn’t responding the way the human wants – that is, the horse is “choosing” something “wrong”. Generally this is considered to be a problem with the horse. I submit it is always a problem with the human.

----

* Throughout my writing when I say horses, you can probably include any equines – however I want to note that I have worked very little with non-horse equines, so maybe I’m wrong in this assumption.


Next: Choice and learning

A foal is born - 15 days

Photos taken 06/04/09 at 15 days old


He's still a scrawny thing, but he's looking more like a horse and less like a bag of bones.

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.

A foal is born, a life ends

SE Despree, a Desperado V daughter, had a hard time with her first foaling two years ago – the long-legged filly had one foreleg pointed backwards and needed veterinary assistance to be born. We think there’s a chance that Spree suffered some internal damage during that procedure because when she foaled last Wednesday night, even though she produced a healthy colt, there were complications - the result of which was an orphan foal.

The neighbors had recently weaned a yearling colt and that mare, Jesse, still had milk. Spree’s bay colt got a ride up to Jesse in the back seat of a pickup truck even as Spree was taking her last breaths. The foster mother mare, fortunately, accepted the foal right away. Unfortunately, while Jesse had milk, she didn't have much of it, so the foal, now a week old, still looks like a 2-day-old, all ribs & hip bones.

We brought the mare and colt down to my ranch this morning and both have settled in nicely, Jesse (much to the neighbor’s surprise) not phased at all by the llama that was in the next pen. The colt is on Foal-Lac as a supplement to Jesse’s milk, and the mare herself seems to be producing more as the foal nurses. Hopefully the colt, still nameless, will survive and thrive, but we are worried for him in the immediate future.

Over the past week I’ve had lots of time to meditate on life and death, trying to come to grips with the drama here. The only solace I can feel is when I remember to honor the souls of the horses involved. Spree’s soul chose the circumstances of the life she lived and the death she died. It is not for me to question her choices, but to honor that she had a higher purpose in making them. The soul of the colt, too, has made choices that I can honor - or that I can ignore and torture myself with. The choice to honor and accept, or reject and suffer, is my own.

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.

Back to work!

I took a hiatus from this blog, but not the project as I wrestled with content, WordPress (highly overrated in my opinion - I've never received spam comments using Blogger!) and other technical issues.

However, that's in the past, and this is now.

This blog is for input on the work, which will primarily be at www.spiritualhorsemanship.org. This blog is where you, the reader, can have input and help me out as I go. Your questions and comments will be truly helpful - thanks!

Re: [Spiritual Horsemanship - project development] 9/28/2006 03:53:24 PM

Quoted from Lif Strand's message at 05:48 PM 9/28/2006:
Quoted from cj's message at 03:53 PM 9/28/2006:
>Lif,I think it would be interesting to see your book published both
>as a hard copy, and as some form of an e-book. That way if, let us
>say, someone happens to leave their book at home when going on a
>trip. They can log on to either your web site or somewhere and
>continue to read the book until they get back home.cj

Great idea! Thanks!

------------------------
Lif Strand, Research Associate
Southwest Center for Resource Analysis
Western New Mexico University
(505) 773-4897
(505) 212-0108 FAX

Spiritual Horsemanship team members

I'm looking for more team members to help me with the development of
this project. If I've invited you directly to help and you like what
you see so far, I'd appreciate your referring other people who would
be seriously interested in the project to join us. Thanks!

------------------------
Lif Strand, Research Associate
Southwest Center for Resource Analysis
Western New Mexico University
(505) 773-4897
(505) 212-0108 FAX

2. Initial chapter info

I'm wrapping up the final few pages that'll probably be the first chapter or maybe the introduction for Spiritual Horsemanship. I'd like your help - could you ask me questions so that I know I've covered what I need to cover in this early part of the book? What would you want to know before you bought the book, or when you were standing in the store (or at Amazon.com) considering it?

Thanks!

PS: Soon as I'm relatively happy with this first bit, I'll publish it here, then you can comment on the writing itself.

1. Project development

I haven't decided yet whether Spiritual Horsmanship should be published as a hard-copy book, or as an e-book, or both. If it's an e-book, I wonder if it would be best published as an email-subscription, or as a web document, or both?

I'd appreciate your thoughts on this issue. Thanks!

PS - I'll be putting drafts of chapters on this blog - I hope to have lots of input on this project!