Monthly Archives: August 2013

Aug19

workshop!

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a workshop with

Paula Josa-Jones MA, CMA, RSMT

Saturday, October 5
9:30-1
at The Equus Effect*
37 Drum Road, Sharon CT

$75

information:  860-364-9313
josajones@gmail.com

Sign up here

Sometimes the reason we were first drawn to horses gets lost. We lose touch with the playful, joyous part of being with a horse. We become automatic and hurried – fragmented in our attention. Slowing down, focusing intention and being present are often the biggest missing steps in horsemanship.  They can get lost in the rush of preparation, the push of riding goals and the pressure of competition.
This workshop is for those who would like to become more relaxed, confident, aware and improvisational in their relationship with their horses on the ground.  This is an unmounted workshop for all levels of experience. 
  • Building feelings of confidence, mindfulness and a spirit of improvisation
  • Expanding mindfulness, embodied consciousness, softness and authenticity.
  • Learning basic movement awareness and listening skills on the ground.
  • Learning basic Tellington TTouches.
  • Creating physical and emotional balance for you and your horse.

Paula Josa-Jones is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist and Tellington TTouch Practitioner.  She teaches an intuitive, improvisational approach to the human-horse bond through movement and touch.  For the past fourteen years, she has been creating dances with horses.  www.paulajosajones.org

What a gift to horsemanship and consciousness! I can’t wait for Paula’s next class. She provided great practices and tools for transforming the foundation of our relationship with our horses – as well as any other living creature. Such a shift will bring more grace, ease and joy into the lives of all. I will enjoying being present with my four (and two) legged partners more and simply noticing the “problems/challenges” disappearing.
Louise Dobish, Michigan

 

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Aug18

metta

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Painting by Pam White

I have an alter for my absent daughter.  Every day, I make sure that the flowers are fresh and focus on sending her love. A friend pointed out to me that unless the love that I am sending is reciprocal, the power of those intentions is less than it could be.  In Buddhism, metta practice is a lovingkindness meditation that focuses on sending love.  The first (and hardest) is sending love to oneself.  The last (and hardest) is sending it to someone that you see as an enemy.

May I be happy.  May I be peaceful.  May I be free from suffering.  May I be filled with love. 

 

 

Aug18

opening

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I took this photograph this spring.  When the peonies are not blooming, I still want to see peonies.  So I have the images from this spring set to scroll as my screensaver.  This one caught my eye today.  I thought about unpeeling, about layers, about what it takes to get to the center of something.  My daughter is missing.  We are trying to find her.  Finding or even approaching requires the delicacy that it takes for this flower to open itself without disturbing the dew on each of its petals.

How to do that when I am not feeling gifted at that kind of grace and subtlety?  I want to come in like Ironman or Matt Damon’s character with the exoskeleton in Elysium.  Violent and merciless with good intentions.  I do not want to wait for the right moment, be politic or nice.

Waiting has never been my thing and this process is like sitting in an empty waiting room for months at a time.  Like standing in line when you know that they have already run out of whatever it is you are queued up for.  Like not being able to wake up from a horrible dream.

Back to the flower.  My mail from Abraham this morning had a clue:  Appreciation and self-love are the most important tools that you could ever nurture. Appreciation of others, and the appreciation of yourself is the closest vibrational match to your Source Energy of anything that we’ve ever witnessed anywhere in the Universe.

I can appreciate the picture of this flower and my memory of it and I can appreciate my cat Maggie pressing into me and my granddaughter’s exuberant smile and her mother’s/my daughter’s sweetness. I can appreciate my movement as I rehearsed today, and the feeling of my horse standing next to me, and my friend’s generosity and I can even appreciate my willingness to write more than I think maybe I should here.  And in all of those little appreciations, there is a little opening, a little softening, a little breath.

Aug9

a gift from Garrison

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If you don’t subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac, here is another good reason.  I have not thought of Paris enough.  I do not know Butes-Chaumont yet.  And you?  Where will you travel?

Plans

by Stuart Dischell

She plans to be a writer one day and live in the City of Paris,
Where she will describe the sun as it rises over Buttes-Chaumont.
“Today the dawn began in small pieces, sharp wedges of light
Broke through the clouds.” She plans to write better than this
And is critic enough to know “sharp wedges” sound like cheese.
She plans to live alone in a place that has a terrace
Where she will drink strong coffee at a round white table.
Her terrace will be her cafe and she will be recognized
By the blue-smocked workers of the neighborhood, the concierges,
The locals at the comptoir of the tabac down the block,
And the girl under the green cross of the apothecary shop.
She plans to love her apartment where she will keep
Just one flower in a blue vase. She already loves the word apart-
Ment, whose halves please her when she sees them breaking
The line in her journal. She plans to learn the roots
Of French and English words and will search them out
As if she were hunting skulls in the catacombs.
On her walls she’ll hang a timetable of the great events
Of Western History. She will read the same twenty books
As Chaucer. Every morning she will make up stories….
She looks around her Brighton room, at the walls,
The ceiling, the round knob of the rectangular door.
She listens to the voices of the neighbor’s children.
A toilet flushes, then the tamp of cigarette on steel,
The flint flash of her roommate’s boyfriend’s lighter.
When she leaves she plans to leave alone, and every
Article she will carry, each shoe, will be important.
Like an architect she will plan this life, as once
The fortune in a cookie told her: Picture what you wish
To become, if you wish to become that picture.

“Plans” by Stuart Dischell, from Good Hope Road. © Viking, 1993. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)