Before I left for Florida I had come to the
conclusion that peace--your own internal sense of being calmly centered--is the
most precious thing you can offer to someone you love.
In Florida I began to see that it’s even
deeper than that: peace isn’t a gift you give so much as it is the environment
necessary for love to truly flourish. Without peace, love just doesn’t come
through the same way.
I have loved Lupin his entire life. That
love has kept me with him through times I felt like there was no way we were
going to work things out between us, through times I felt overwhelmed by
everything I didn’t know about how to help him, through fear that both of us
would get hurt. I’m a stubborn person, but I don’t think you can be that
stubborn over that long a time without love lying at the root of it.
At the same time, though, I have rarely felt
like that love really came through to Lupin very clearly. In a certain way we
were pretty strongly connected, but not in a way that often felt great to either
of us. For my part I was always cranked about all the things I didn’t know yet,
about not doing it right, about screwing up my horse. Lupin was more often than
not only half engaged and pretty quick to shut down. I’m not confident that
either of us were truly keen on spending time together. But I kept at it,
because I love him.
And I’m not belittling that kind of
commitment. Sometimes that’s what love is: working hard and gutting it out for
someone you care about.
But I also think we make love into this far
more often than we need to. We have this immense amount of love for someone,
but only a tiny bit of it manages to trickle through the wall of tension that
we’ve built around it. Tension created by the fear that we’re not good enough,
or worry about what will happen, or stressing over what the other person/animal
thinks or feels, or focusing on things that we perceive to be problems in the
relationship.
I think it’s a lot like what Mark says about
physical power: our power is far greater than our actual muscular strength, but
power doesn’t come through if we are tense. We need to be soft internally for
our power to be anything close to fully effective.
To me it’s the same relationship between
love and peace. We can have vast amounts of love, but if we aren’t peaceful, it
just doesn’t come through.
The best part about my time in Florida was
that everything was peaceful. Learning was peaceful, connection to my horse was
peaceful, being in general was peaceful. Not only do Mark and Crissi foster
this kind of atmosphere; they teach their students how to cultivate the peace
that’s within themselves in the form of softness, calmness, and staying
centered.
The first day I spent in Florida I lay in
the sunshine enjoying how good it felt on my skin and how beautiful Lupin
looked in it. As the two weeks went along, it felt more like that sunshine was
inside me, inside Lupin, and connecting the two of us together in a soft,
relaxed, golden feeling that I can only describe as deeply peaceful love.
Well Marian, reading your blogs has been so very timely. You have just helped me immensely by bringing sharply into focus something I have also been slowly lumbering toward.
ReplyDeleteRecently, I have been following the teachings of Anna Marciniak of Poland and she emphasises 'Calmness' as the foundation of her approach to hms. The same word can convey different things to different people and as I have listened to Anna teach, I have become aware, on some level, that Anna's idea of Calmness encompasses far more than most think. It embraces Calmness of the mind, emotions and body. But it also incorporates a sense of Peace. I had sensed it but couldn't put a name to it - but that is exactly what it was. So thank you!
And Anna's approach is also deeply steeped in Love.
So your insight about the connection between Peace and Love had been enormously helpful to me.
And most of all, you have helped me to understand the connection between Mark's 'Softness' (which I greatly admire) and Anna's 'Calmness'. It has left me feeling quite buoyant as I can see how each approach compliments the other. Perhaps I ought to say, rather, that they are both accurate descriptions of the 'Essence' of feel and connection that we are all aiming for. In the end, perhaps attempting to describe, 'Feel' shows the limitation of words. It's ironic but 'Feel' can appear almost intangible: definition = "Unable to be touched: not having physical presence.".
All language is ultimately based on polarisation - of defining polar opposites. Maybe it's hopeless to try and describe the Unity we feel when we have connection with horses. Maybe it is beyond description. Maybe we just have to feel 'Feel'. Maybe we just know it when we feel it...