Try this: look back and up over your shoulder, into the farthest corner of the sky you can see, or deep into that back high diagonal corner of your study. Then look back, up and over the other shoulder. Feel how that movement swirls the spine, takes you upward, outward into a different point of view. Don’t strain, don’t stretch Just invite your eyes, heart, mind, bones, fascia to spin up/back out. Taste that.
I always find that I am teaching the things that I most need to learn. During last night’s Embodied Horsemanship free teleclass, I got very clear that I wanted to deepen a part of my own horsemanship practice. I call it the intentional pause.
While I am riding, I use the pause to “unplug”, soften and center. Here is how it works: Several times during the ride, I ask Deo or Sanne to open into a halt and then drop the reins (loose contact, on the buckle). Then I just stand (sometimes with eyes closed depending on what else is going on in the ring) and focus on “homogenizing” the inside of me with the inside of the horse. I am looking for a feeling that all of my cells and all of his cells are humming on the same frequency – soft, opening, allowing. The breath is the portal and the anchor. I am looking for them to drop their head, or take a big breath and to lose any sense of needing to move. When we do start to move, I find that it is easier for me to offer a soft connection, easier to feel their body and my own.
However, I also find that using the intentional pause when I am not at the barn, not with a horse is just as important. Most of us, I find, tend to harden into our activities, using momentum and drive to get from one place, one activity to another. We think of moving from one “destination” to another, without a lot of consciousness about the transitions or the journey from here to there. The intentional pause helps us to feel into the whole bodily, sensory landscape of where we are. It is about being in the midst of doing. Here is how that works: As I am typing this blog post, or picking up my cup of tea, or walking from one room to another, I pause. Sometimes the pause is momentary, other times it is longer. In the pause, I open my sensory awareness out, remember my breath and soften the feel of what I am doing. Then I begin again. The pause is like a little intentional recuperation. I like to experiment with how long or how short I can make a pause.
Try it and let me know what you discover!
(I am available to work with you and your horse one-on-one or in a workshop or clinic. josajones@gmail.com)
Guillaume Roche
What holds bad things in your life is always your attention to those bad things, always. — Abraham
Today we had a little breath, a sip, a whiff of hope in the situation with our youngest daughter, the runaway. What happened was that suddenly I felt that I could feel my way into hopefulness and optimism. I have not felt any of those things for four months. Nothing concrete happened, but I could see a pale beam of light in the darkness.
I have been aware of what Abraham says about resistance and allowing. I have been aware that my resistance to what is happening means that I am not allowing change, or that it has to squeeze through a narrow aperture of my anger and frustration and fear. I did not want to know that. But today, I felt a vibrational shift, a little breath of sweetgrass, a swallow of cool water, a change in the light. I remembered that it is as easy to create big abundance and miracles as it is to create small ones. Counterintuitive, yes, but if what Seth says is true, then. . .
“You are meant to judge physical reality. You are meant to realize that it is a materialization of your thoughts and feelings and images, that the inner self forms that world. In your terms, you cannot be allowed to go into other dimensions until you have learned the great power of your thoughts and subjective feelings.” — Seth
My friend Carol Hinson sends out a daily email with a list of what she is grateful for and what she is attracting or manifesting. I asked her to add me to her list because I so appreciate this way of starting my day and the simple pleasures that she includes. So with thanks and all due respect, I am going to include my own list here, with a few direct quotes from Carol.