Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Feb2

get happy

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Love is about bottomless empathy, born our of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.  And this why love, as I understand it, is always specific.  Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being.  Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.  When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting.  But when you go our and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.  And who knows what might happen to you then?

Jonathan Franzen. “Liking is for Cowards.  Go for What Hurts,” New York Times, Sunday, May 29, 2011.


There is nothing “just” about real animals.  They are the doorway, the path to finding out about love. They help to unblock the sticky places, because with them, there is no resistance.  They don’t extrapolate, they don’t hold onto historic, crusty ideas about us.  They are just here, now.

Even with my horse, Amadeo and the many years of stuff between us – a history of deeply imperfect communication – it isn’t Deo who is holding the anthology of woes.  It is me.  The proof of that was that when I came back from working with Mark Rashid, with my new understanding of softness and breath, Deo opened to it all as if we had just met, as if it was all possible.  No resistance, no baggage.

 Abraham talks often and at length about getting happy.  About how looking at the stuff we don’t like just produces more of it.  She says that if your mind is dwelling on something you don’t like, “Get of of it! get off of it!  I think that is the real secret (besides breathing) to the new direction with Deo. I wasn’t focusing on the problem.  I was looking for the feeling that I wanted. And that felt great.

Get happy.  Misery is way overrated.

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Feb1

sing for joy

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Pam White

So here is another treat from Brain Pickings:  Why Birds Sing.  I love this debate between science and art.  Do birds sing for joy?  The scientists say no – for them it is all mating, eating and territory.  Composer David Rothenberg has found something more.  Watch him improvising with the white crested laughing bird and waddle with the ducks and his clarinet.

I know that the mockingbird that sings from the top of our wild cherry tree in the summer is not just declaring turf.  He is unspooling what he has heard, what he remembers in joyous ribbons of sound.

 

Jan30

breathing lessons

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Since the workshop with Mark Rashid, I have been breathing.  It is becoming a reminder to stay connected to now, to myself.  When I feel myself tighten, I use that as a cue to breathe.  I have been breathing my whole life, but something about that day when Mark asked me to breathe in rhythm with the horse’s walk has stayed with me, put down roots and is blooming out into all of the parts of my life.

Amadeo noticed.  Today when I rode him for the first time in a week, I started with the breath.  I let it sluice down the reins into the contact with him, and used it to connect the inside of me with the inside of him.  I have struggled with Deo’s forwardness, with getting him to move off easily and softly.  Not today.  His walk was fluid, and when I whispered go with my leg, he sprang forward.

All the transitions were there.  Easily.  Walk to trot to walk to trot to canter, to halt.  No fight, no hesitation.  He was jazzy, even a little wild, so I kept coming back to breathing, steadying myself, steadying him. He felt a lot like the photo above of him with his trainer Brandi.

I don’t know why we get things when we do.  Well, actually I do.  Abraham says that we cannot receive something that we want until we are a vibrational match to that thing.  To be a vibrational match means that we are emotionally lined up with it, that we are open to it without doubt.  That is what happened to me in Savannah.  I knew that this teacher was going to unlock some things for me that I had been looking for.  And that is what happened.

Jan29

lesson learned

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Several years ago I went to a clinic being offered in our neighborhood by someone who was an “expert” in “Natural Horsemanship.”  We came with our daughters and brought some low chairs to sit and watch.  The instructor was working with a young Arabian stallion.  She kept shaking the lead rope at him – something that is often taught in Natural Horsemanship as a way of getting the horse’s attention, or causing them to move away from the handler.  It makes the rope look like a dancing snake.

Each time she shook the rope, she increased the force, saying in a sarcastic tone, “Hello!!  Hello!!”  The little stallion was clearly upset, wide-eyed, head straight up in the air and doing anything he could to get away from the rope and the person on the other end of it.  I could feel my stomach tighten and  my daughters’ consternation as they watched.,  Suddenly the instructor walked up to the horse and punched him in the face, turning to explain that she needed his attention and his respect.

In one movement, all four of us stood with our chairs, and walked out, my girls’ eyes streaming with tears.  She called sarcastically after us that we obviously didn’t now anything about horses.  That was a lesson I will never forget.

The little stallion also learned a lot that day.  He learned about distrust, about violence and flight.  He did not learn about softness, dependability, curiosity or cooperation.

All during the four days of my workshop with Mark Rashid, I was drawn to look at the mouth of his horse Baxter.  I found myself loving the roundness or it, the way he held his jaw, his lips, the softness there, the fact that he never opened his mouth or struggled with the bit.  The reason for that is that there was nothing to struggle against.  Mark’s hands on the reins are soft, flowing, generous and yet effective.  Baxter is a peaceful, quiet, balanced horse, which tells me he is working with a feeling, connected and kind rider.

The human habit of responding in kind – harsh to harsh, fast to fast, force to force does not work with horses.  For one thing, they outweigh us by usually around ten times.  They can always pull harder and run faster.  It also doesn’t work for us.  It puts us in a mindless spin of reactivity and one upsmanship.  A frightened animal (or child or person) cannot learn, cannot listen – we all want to get away from the scary thing.

Mark said that we humans are not good at connecting, but we are good at creating openings.  What I think that means is that our big brain is flexible, improvisational, and good at generating options and possibilities.  But for that to happen, we have to go inside.  We have to be willing to go deeper, to feel ourselves and let go of the program.  Sometimes, that requires a lot of undoing, and sometimes it can happen on an exhale.

That is the lesson that I learned, and one that I will happily carry with me in place of the other.