The horses are my joy.  They continue to teach me about living with heart and awareness and I continue to love sharing the lessons of Embodied Horsemanship.

For information about clinics or individual sessions, contact me at josajones@gmail.com

EMBODIED HORSEMANSHIP-HD (1080p) from Paula Josa-Jones on Vimeo.

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Sensing and feeling the mid-line can be a challenge when most of us feel out of kilter and out of balance a lot of the time.  A couple weeks ago my lovely Amadeo had a nice big buck while I was riding.  I was feeling fragile emotionally, and so not quick enough to come up out of the saddle to protect myself.  The result: a coccyx sprain.  I walked around feeling rotated, disconnected and fragmented until my next osteopathy appointment.  It was frustrating and interesting to feel that off my mid-line.  Andy Goldman, my osteopath, encouraged me to ride my mid-line in sync with the mid-line of the horse.  So on my next ride, I paid attention to my newly centered tailbone, feeling it connect to the horse’s tail, and sending my energy up my spine through the center of the occipital ridge while seeing/feeling the horse’s poll.

The result was a surprising deliciousness and sense of connection and balance in the ride.  I also noticed that Deo’s crookedness tracking right was connected to the way I close the space between my right shoulder and sternum (shifting my mid-line too far to the left), effectively closing the door to his ability to open to the right!  When I opened that space, with a feeling of widening and softening, he began to straighten and soften!

Revelations!

Then today, while coaching a performer (the lovely Sari Max), I asked her to notice her mid-line with a couple somatic exercises of moving away from and then back onto a centered mid-line.  Then I asked her to move from lying down to standing pausing along the way to look at where her mid-line was in that moment,  The result was that her movement from floor to standing was beautifully effortless and grounded.  Then we took that same sense of mid-line into the text of the play, connecting a physical sense of center and balance to the emotional through-line of each line.  The result was a deeper authenticity and groundedness in the language and movement.  Brilliant and transformational!

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I love working with horses and their humans.  Most of what goes wrong with horse and their humans is not in the saddle.  It happens on the ground.  it happens in the stall.  It happens on the way from one place to another.  A lot of it has nothing to do with the horse at all.  It has to do with things that are older and deeper that make their way into the relationship with the horse.  It is rarely intentional or malicious.  It often has to do with a lack of awareness, or regard, or attention or understanding.

Most often what I do starts with movement observation.  I watch how the person moves around the horse, how the horse responds to them, to its environment, to the various parts of tacking up, leading, riding.  I watch.  And then bit by bit, I start to decode the dance.  What is working?  What is confusing?  What is missing?

Much of what I do has to do with bringing both horse and human more fully into their bodies, and then more fully into connection with each other.  That makes for a better relationship.  And usually it makes for a better ride.  Happier horse, happier human.  I love that.

If you want help, you can contact me here.

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Spent another wonderful day at Little Brook Farm in Old Chatham working with the drill team and the lovely Mustang Amado and the brilliant Summer Brennan.  If everything goes as well as it has been, we will perform with him at the Extreme Mustang Makeover event in August!

I am not a fan of anything extreme when it comes to horses, and I do not think that Mustangs need any kind of makeover.  Nevertheless, watching Summer gentle this boy has been incredibly inspiring.  Her work with him has been gradual, caring and smart.

Bringing dancers into this event may shake things up a bit!  I hope so.

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I took many, many pictures of Capprichio yesterday.  He is a black stallion, a Baryshnikov among horses and the love of my horse life.  He is also very equanimous about having his picture taken.

Some horses are not.  Sanne, the Lily of Holland, Pam White’s big Friesian, is very cagey, wary and not especially cooperative.  he is not exactly nervous, but he is an avoider (much like myself).

That brings me to another subject.  After a certain age, I did not want my photo taken. I am more than a little embarrassed about this.  I would like to be easier with it.

I got some significant help yesterday when I watched the film Breath Made Visible about the now ninety year old dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin.  It is stunning.  She is stunning.  There is a glory in her that is so rare, so unabashed, so full that I just sat in silence for many moments after the film.  (It is available on Netflix.)

What this has to do with for me (in part) is a willingness to be seen, to be witnessed, to be held in the attention of a single lens or a large audience.  These are the waters that I am stepping into again now.  At the end of the film, Halprin says that she wants her dances and her dancing to connect to something profound and shared.  (I am paraphrasing badly.)

That is true for me as well.  What I danced about before is not what I want to dance now.  In the past I made beautiful, feral dances that were like a Chinese sliding block puzzle:  you had to work hard to discover the order, the relationships and the meaning.  Now I want to dance you into the eye of the storm and into my wild heart.  I cannot wait to see what will happen.

Watch this film.  It is not to be missed.

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There are two places to kiss a horse’s nose.  One is in the soft spot between the nostrils, where the two lines are here on Nelson’s nose.  The other is between the top lip and the outer rim of the nostril.  There is no silk or velvet, absolutely nothing that is as soft as those two places, nestled around the fragrant breath.

Nelson and I are getting reacquainted.  He is allowing me to be near him, but his dark side is dark again.  Not sure why.  He and I have not been able to work in our usual ways for a lot of complicated reasons.  Whatever has happened, all the cues that we built between us are rinsed away.  Today I tried to remind him, and he was doing his best, but at the same time, telling me that he does not feel easy with the things that used to be easy.

The one thing that he was totally happy about was having his picture taken.  Again, not sure why.  Maye it is the clicking sound that is like the click that I make when he does something that I have asked him to do.  So I tried an experiment, and took a lot of photos of Capprichio today as well.  He also was very interested in the camera, but more pushy.

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This is Sanne, the beautiful Friesian belonging to Pam.   He was imported from Holland when he was three.  His name, Sanne, means Lily in Dutch.  When Pam saw him, she fell face first in love.  That was twelve years ago.

In this picture, he is performing in Scarlet and is ridden by Brandi Rivera.  Sanne is the great-hearted performer in all of my dances with horses.  He is the center, the soul, the horse that can handle it all  Dancers doing handstands on his side, yard of swirling fabric, crowds, choreography, changes in choreography, travel, loud music – he takes it ALL in stride.  Sanne is always in a good mood.  He is always happy to see whoever comes into his world.  He is a lover, a snuggle, a honey.

So when he suddenly started to drop muscle and weight and seem cranky, we all worried.  His back became stiff and sore, and he could not find it in himself to work.  As it turns out, he has Lyme.  He has been on Doxy for about ten days and already his back feels better, and he is back to being his sweet, affectionate self.

It was a scare.  I realized that I am completely vulnerable here.  Without him, my dancers and I cannot perform most of our dances.  More than that, HIS vulnerability came sharply into focus.  The vets get very nervous about muscle wasting.  It is often a symptom of catastrophic illness.  I got a lot of information about encysted parasites, muscle enzymes and equine polysaccharide storage myopathy.  I did not want to think about any of it.

Two days ago I heard from my former trainer.  She has been diagnosed with cancer.  She is facing six months of surgeries and treatment.  I do not want to think about that either.  What I want is for her to be fine, for Sanne to be fine, for my children to be safe forever and for all suffering to be at an end.

The temptation is to focus on suffering, on the lack of wellness.  I don’t think that helps my friend or my horse.  I know that it does not help me.  What does help me is this, from Abraham:  “Many around you want to point out “reality” to you. They say, “Face the facts. Look at what-is.” And we say to you, if you are able to see only what-is—then, by Law of Attraction, you will create only more of what-is… You must be able to put your thoughts beyond what-is in order to attract something different or something more.”

The way that I do that is this:  I keep looking for something to appreciate.  For something that makes me happy.  Lucky for me, I have seven cats, four dogs, three horses, two children, a beautiful wife and a wild and wonderful collection of friends.  And if all of that fails, today the peonies are blooming outside my window.

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Here is a new chapter in the story of Nelson.  For the past month, he has not let me get near him.  We went from being good friends to something else.

There are a few reasons for this, having to do with out-of-my-control changes by his owners in his training program.

I like and respect the other person who is working with Nelson.  He is smart, horse savvy and can do things with horses that I would not attempt.  Having said that, it saddens me that Nelson no longer trusts me.  All humans look alike, I guess.

Today, I felt that he was looking at me, through me in a way, and that I had become unreadable to him.After a long while of hiding, he did let me get near him and I was able to pet him and do some very simple movement work with him.  But mostly he was ready to take off if the wind went through the trees.  For the first time I felt like it did not matter how calm and settled I was.  He was on his own track.  Watching his own inner movie, nervous system on full alert.

At the same time that this is happening, there is another Mustang around.  The lovely folks at Little Brook Farm in Old Chatham have brought Amado, a Mustang straight from the wild (after six months in a holding pen), to their farm.  Summer Brennan, the daughter of the owner, has entered the Extreme Mustang Makeover, a competition in which she hopes to take Amado as far in his training as she can in three months. She is documenting the process here.

When I first heard about the Extreme Makeover idea, I was nervous.  “Extreme” anything and horses are not really a good fit.  But Summer and Amado are.  Her idea is that he will tell her what he can do and when.  The basis of the training is love.  You can see it in the pictures.

I don’t know what will happen with Nelson. I am remembering something that I have heard Linda Tellington-Jones say when she encounters a difficult situation with a horse:  “Isn’t that interesting.”  That opens the door, and lifts the limits, which is exactly what Nelson and I need right now.

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I was doing some research for my book, Horse Dancing, and came across the Jacques Derrida book, The Animal That I Therefore Am.  The book was sparked by Derrida’s experience when his cat followed him into the bathroom in the morning.  He asks what this animal sees when it sees this naked man.

Derrida aside, I wonder about our emotional nakedness before our animal companions.  I know that I feel more exposed and more uncovered with my horses than anywhere else.  I have to be more self-aware, more vulnerable with them than I do at any other time.  It doesn’t happen all the time, because I am not always that conscious, but if I let myself be seen, if I am listening, there it is.

I wonder if we mostly can’t get quiet or humble enough to really feel that sense of nakedness, if we are just too busy being the apex species to let that in.  Or it is too much trouble to take off all the armor, all the habitual responses to our animal companions.  What is it like to allow ourselves to be seen, to be observed?

I read in one of Klaus Hempfling’s books that humans get triggered into violence with horses because the horses uncover their vulnerability, their lack of skill, their awkwardness, their ineffectiveness.  I have experienced that many times.  You can’t ride for very long without stumbling into that tarpit.

So here is a question to which I would love some responses:  how do you experience your nakedness with animals?  How much do you let yourself be seen?

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I don’t usually do an outright ask on the blog.  And I will not do it often.  This is an ask for help with our new horse dancing project, All the Pretty Horses.

Since I started working with rescued horses, it has been my dream to create a performance with these “throw away” horses and local dancers.  We have now found the perfect partnering organization, Little Brook Farm in Old Chatham, New York.

Little Brook has been saving horses for many, many years.  The unique part of their program is that these horses then become active, participating partners in a range of activities:  riding, performing, vaulting, jumping and teaching generations of children and adults about horses and all of the ways that we can connect with them.

A visit there is moving.  It is a humble place, staffed by passionate and dedicated volunteers.  The effort goes into the programs, into the care of the horses, and into sharing the joy of horses with humans from age three to the sky is the limit.

In order to bring the project to fruition, we need to raise $3500 to offset fees and travel for the professional dancers from my company who travel from Boston.  Those funds are also for publicity, costumes and modest administrative costs to assure that the event is a rousing success.

The performance will take place October 6 at Little Brook Farm in Old Chatham, NY.  Mark your calendars!!!

Please help us to whatever extent you can.   Dancemakers Inc. is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Donations are fully tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. To contribute, click on the link below or make your check payable to Dancemakers Inc. and send to the address below.

Dancemakers, Inc.

P.O. Box 773
Sharon, CT 06069

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