Your focus determines your reality.

Okay, I’m going to take a bit of a break from the narrative sequence (even though it was building nicely along to a climax in Week 3). Partly I’m just more in essay-writing mode, and partly Alex is gonna drag me away from the wifi before I’d be able to get anywhere close to finishing up another week’s worth of blogging.

So one of the big breakthroughs of the course involved focus. The fourth responsibility for the human in Parelli world is to “use the natural power of focus.” Anyone who’s ever jumped a course has probably had drilled into them pretty well to look up and not at the jump (unless that’s where you want to land). And even if you drive a car, you know that if you stare at something to the side of the road for too long, your car will start to head that way, too.

At any rate, I thought I had absorbed this lesson pretty well over the years and gotten pretty good about using my focus when riding. Not only do I generally tend to look where I want my horse to go, I’ve also learned to use my focus a bit to shape my own body when asking for things like hindquarter disengagements so that Lupin will mirror what I’m doing.

But we learned in the Fast Track course to focus at a whole different level. First off, John talked about walking off with your horse and keeping your focus ahead of you, expecting him to follow. A lot of horse folks know not to turn around a look at their horse when they want him to follow off, but John added that you need to have a real sense of purpose, not just a resolution to keep your focus on where you’re going. Focus, for Parelli, is almost a sense of urgency, so that when your horse doesn’t follow your focus, whether you’re leading him or riding him, you get an anxious sort of energy about you that motivates your horse to find the comfort of being on your focus again. So, for example, if you’re riding a circle, you shape your body and legs to the circle, and if the horse comes off it, he should feel almost an electric pulse going through you.

John also had us practice focus when we were horse-shoed up around him in the ring. He told us to keep our focus on him no matter what our horses did so that they would learn they couldn’t change our focus. He would be really tough on us about this, and he explained that first of all it was a safety issue: when our horses were close together, it was dangerous for them to get out of line, and the only way to keep them straight was to keep our own focus straight. But he was equally concerned for us to develop some discipline in ourselves about keeping a focus.

I know that I’m guilty of starting with a focus but then abandoning it if it seems like other things become a priority. So, for example, in backing a horse, I tend to be more particular about the backward movement than I am about him staying on my original line of focus. I had always thought my lack of focus was just this: a lesser priority. But in our lessons focus became the biggest priority, and it was interesting to see how difficult it is to maintain focus even when you are, ah, focusing on it.

As I’ve suggested, focus for us became much more than where you’re looking. It’s a sense of purpose, which is often achieved by giving the horse something to do. So I began backing Lupin onto things rather than just backing him up and using sideways to open gates. We also spent a really cool session making connected circles across the whole surface of a freshly dragged ring. Even if the horse doesn’t care about or completely understand the purpose himself, he can feel the difference when the human has a purpose that they care about (beyond just getting the horse to do with his body what the human wants). Though of course the best purpose is one that the horse does come to understand (and for horses like Lupin, this often involves some form of food, as in, “Oy! Lupin! The best grass is this way!”).

Finally, John emphasized that focus is most crucial when your horse is going right-brained. Most people look at their horse when he’s freaking out, but a horse reads this as his human looking to him for leadership, so that once you’ve done this, he’s even less likely to care about what you think he should do in a panic situation. However, if you look at what you want him to be doing (going over a jump, going through a gate, etc.), then he will read you as being a leader because you’re maintaining your focus in a time of crisis.

Probably my hardest lesson in focus came during a session in the ring when we were working on moving the shoulders over. We were lined up with our horses’ butts against the rail, and we were to get a soft feel of our horses’ mouths and then move their shoulders. Lupin and I were not getting far with the concept of the soft feel, and he was wanting to swing his butt around and go backwards into the horses next to him. Pete came over to help, and I was feeling pretty stressed: I didn’t really know what I was doing, Lupin was reacting violently and disrupting other horses, and I’m never at my ease anyway when I’m getting one-on-one coaching, despite the fact that I frequently seek it out.

So I was going a little right-brained myself, and Pete kept insisting that I focus, and that I keep Lupin on my focus. It was challenging because I was tempted to care more about other things--getting the soft feel better, and Lupin's emotional state. But because Lupin was practically running other horses over, I learned a new appreciation for how important focus is and I got a sense of what it means to maintain it even when things are getting chaotic.

Needless to say, I will be focusing on focus when I return home.