As I might have
mentioned in my last
post, basically what Mark teaches is how to live through feel rather than
the mind. We all did this as kids, but then we started analyzing and looking
for results instead of experiencing and, well, feeling.
I'm not talking
about being in touch with your emotions here, though I'm sure that helps; I'm
talking about having awareness and intentionality about what's going on in your
body, what it takes to move your body, how you change your energy to do
different things, etc., and then having awareness about those same things in
the horse.
So much of the
horsemanship out there is physical application of an external technique learned
through the mind. It is mechanical in nature. And Mark will be the first to say
that there's nothing wrong with that: technique, mechanics, and knowledge are
important things.
But horses
themselves don't operate like that. They are feeling creatures. They don't
analyze; they just act and react. You're not going to be truly in harmony with
them if you're using your mind instead of your feel. For one thing, you're
always going to be at least a second or two late in everything you do. (And if
you're an academic by training, you can add several more seconds if not some
minutes onto that.)
This weekend I'm
learning to let the inside of me talk to the inside of the horse and vice
versa. We're having a conversation entirely through what we feel happening
inside each other. Which sounds mystical, but it isn't: it's what happens if
you pay attention to what's going on in the parts of you that aren't your
brain. It's what happens if you stop analyzing and judging what your horse is
doing and just feel what he's doing.
As it turns out,
it feels pretty darn good to feel. And it feels even better if you have a horse
under you to feel with. And at that point you don't have to think about being
happy either, because that's just the way you feel when you feel.
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