On Goals and Struggle

I've spent a good deal of time over the past several years pursuing goals--willing myself into doing things, aspiring to do things better, etc. And boy are there a lot of people out there with strategies to help you change your life and achieve your goals.

Generally these strategies involve big money words like courage, determination, heart--and what all of that implies: struggle. And the people who are promoting them generally have lots of positive things to say about struggle and how it is healthy for us to do the work, face our fears, develop our emotional fitness, etc.

Before I go further, let me be clear: it is a hugely valuable thing to know how to persevere in challenging situations and extra bonus points to you if you have a good attitude while doing it.

But if this becomes our normal operating procedure for life--if we're always on some quest, always turning dreams into goals so we can chip nobly away at them--well, for one thing, that's not very much fun.

It's becoming clear to me that there's a much better way. Mark calls it doing what feels good.

Here's an example. As I was riding Gracie, I was having trouble with finding softness at the walk. Mark asked if any part of me was tense. Lo and behold my legs were, from a long-time habit of believing that I needed that tension in them to keep forward movement.

As our ride continued I had a choice. I could say to myself, "I need to change that habit and create a positive new pattern. I need to have constant vigilance on this and do it better." Or, I could just carry on riding and when things weren't going quite right, I could check in with how I felt inside. Could I feel better in myself? Why yes, I could let go of that tension. Which of course made things better with Gracie too. And then carry on.

A more mundane example is my late-night Facebook habit. I can set a goal of getting off FB and going to bed by a certain time and do all sorts of external things to make this more likely and then stay up anyway and berate myself for it. Or I could just pay attention to whether I feel good staying on FB when I'm exhausted and do what would feel much better: go to bed. But, of course, I have to be willing to listen to what my insides tell me and not over-ride them.

And this is true of larger dreams as well. At one point my goal was to do an externship with Parelli. But a big part of me wasn't having it. I thought I was being lazy and fearful about hauling my horse to Colorado and that I needed to get to work on my attitude and confronting my fears. But a friend finally helped me see that actually, I just didn't want to do it that much.

Conversely, at the end of one clinic, Mark thanked us all for making the effort to come to the clinic and all I could think was, "What effort?" I dreamed about studying with Mark for years and it is all I hoped it would be and more and all I feel at the prospect of going to a clinic with him is happiness. "Effort" in this context seems irrelevant.

Now, I'm not saying this to either bash Parelli or make a plug for Mark. Different things feel good to different people. I'm just saying that maybe, just maybe, doing what feels good is the answer. And dreams coming true might maybe should feel good most of the way through and not just at the end.

Feeling Good is the Reward

Mark has been talking a lot this week about our tendency to quit just as the horse softens. A lot of us have been taught to quit frequently as an antidote to the all-too-common tendency to just keep asking more and more of our horses: we are trying, by quitting, to give our horses a reward/release for doing what we ask.

But Mark has been showing us how little sense this makes from the horse's perspective. We ask them to soften and then we just kind of drop them. It would be like going up to a dance partner, smiling, getting in a nice comfortable frame with them and then stopping before you ever start dancing.

I think that that's the key right there. We are not thinking about our horse time as dancing. We are thinking about it as training.

And looked at from a training mentality, we are asking our horses to do things that are, on some level and to some degree, challenging for them. So we don't want to ask too much and we want to give them a big reward when they do it well. And those are both good things to bear in mind.

But what if, as Mark said of his border collie Ring, the reward is to do things with them?

It's true that if we just want our horses to "do stuff" and if we are doing things with our horses without softness and awareness it probably does feel like work to them and the only reward they'll be interested in is getting to quit. 

But if we really are thinking of our horses as dance partners--if we're interested above all in finding that space where we both feel good moving together--then why not, you know, dance?

A Few Musings on My Horsemanship "Journey"

If I've heard once that horsemanship is a journey, I've heard it 132 times.

Until this year, what that phrase meant to me was that horsemanship was like one of those mythological quest journeys, full of wonder and new worlds, yes, but also fraught with hardships, set-backs, and some seriously ugly monsters.

You manage to sail through the narrow strait with scary-ass perils on either side--hooray!--only to be blown back through it again because some moron decided to open the bag that contained all the winds.

This was the nature of my horsemanship journey for the past 14 years. It involved a lot of people telling me, "It's about the journey--not the destination," and me trying really hard not to be dispirited by the fact that there were a lot more monsters in my future and that I would spend the rest of my life, apparently, sailing into the wind. Happily, I guess, digging deep is my most fundamental, my most unfaltering skill. And boy did I get to use it a lot.

But all of that changed when I met Mark Rashid. Suddenly I realized, Hey! Vacations are journeys too. Why not let horsemanship be *that* kind of journey?

There's the same flash of new understanding on vacations, the same exhiliration of adventuring in unknown lands, but the difference is that we don't have to constantly remind ourselves that it's "about the journey" -- of course it's about the journey! That's the whole freaking point! To enjoy the trip!

With Mark, this is obvious, because studying with Mark is exactly like being on vacation. I feel all the mental burdens that I've placed on myself lighten. I move easily into the present moment and delight in being there. I feel how simple things can be when I just let them be. I pay attention to how I feel, and I do a lot more of what feels good. Things become easier, simpler, truer, and more clear. I go to sleep thinking about the amazingly cool vistas that opened up before me that day, and I wake up keen to experience more.

And the monsters and the winds? Funny how those things pretty much disappear when you're on vacation . . .

Just Breathe

One thing I've become really aware of since studying with Mark in February is how much I hold my breath (which is to say, how much I'm either not breathing or breathing very shallowly in the top of my chest). Basically, most of us walk around in a semi-adrenaline state all the time because of this tendency. Here are the reasons I can think of that we tend to hold our breath:

--We are actually fearful or on adrenaline. Sometimes we really are in a scary situation that demands action, though at *least* 80% of the time, I'd say, these fears are imagined responses to all the scary stuff we see in the news and in the movies and to our general culture of fear that tells us every day all the many different ways we might die.

--We are waiting for something. The original "holding your breath" phrase derives from the tendency to hold our breath whenever we're waiting for something to happen. This can be on a large scale, as in, "I'll relax when the semester's over, I've finished this project, etc. etc." or it can be on a tiny scale. I learned that we actually hold our breath when we take a bite of food because we're waiting to taste it and chew it. Since then, I've caught myself holding my breath while I'm waiting to start the car, say, once I have the idea that I'm going to do it. This goes beyond just living in the future in our minds: we are literally waiting to live (i.e., breathe) in the future.

--We are concentrating on something. Try learning a new physical skill, for instance, without holding your breath.

--We are braced against something, either physically or mentally, or, more likely, both. If there is something that we don't like or don't want to happen, we tend to clench up against it, which naturally restricts our breathing. So we’re getting less oxygen *and* a bunch of tight muscles.

It's gonna take awhile to change this habit, but I think it will be a huge piece of both getting more grounded/centered and actually being able to perform better, not to mention live more calmly, happily, and healthily. I'm starting just with awareness and reminding myself to breathe in a way that expands my lower rib cage in all directions and also to breathe out fully. (Mark: "Some of us have some breath left in there that we've been carrying around since 1967. I mean, that was a good year, but . . . ") Anyone who wants to chip in further suggestions, feel free!

The Limits of Strength

"In muscle there's strength, but in softness there's power." — Mark Rashid

You learn through aikido that strength is based in muscle, which means that you are only as strong as your muscles. But power comes from energy and transcends your physical strength. If you are using power rather than strength, advantages of size and weight are nullified.

The key here is softness because energy can only move through you when you are soft. When you are using your muscles with tension (which is what most of us do most of the time), you are actually blocking your energy and so reducing your overall ability to be effective. (Not to mention doing things in a way that is hard on your body.)

Another advantage of using energy instead of strength is that it eliminates resistance in others. If you are tense/braced, then others brace in response. (And rightly so because that’s when you’re likely to hurt them.) But if you are soft, they soften.

The difference became very clear to me in the dojo. When my partner used physical strength only, it had a completely different feel than when he used softness. Both moves resulted in my arm being twisted behind my back and the rest of me lowered to the floor, and both were effective in disabling me. But one felt good and one felt like something was about to break me. If you're going to achieve your goal--in this case to protect yourself--either way, why not pick the route that feels good to others? Aren’t they more likely to take a better perspective on things if they’re feeling better?

And obviously when we’re talking about horses we are only working against ourselves when we use strength instead of energy. A horse is stronger than we can ever dream of being. We get away with what we do in part because of leverage, but that only works up to a point. Mainly we get away with it because horses are beings looking for connection rather than a fight. I think a nice way to repay them for this is to stop fighting on our end and instead offer them a connection that feels good.

Not a Problem

Auditor: "But there's a right way and a wrong way."

Mark: "No, there's a right way and a *long* way."

One of the most refreshing things about Mark Rashid is that he doesn’t see problems. He sees how he would like things to be inside him and inside the horse and between the two of them, and then he does what he needs to do to communicate that to the horse. He doesn’t get lost in what the horse is doing.

Of course he’s aware of what the horse is doing, but that isn’t his focus, and he doesn’t see it—whatever it is—as a problem. Nor does he go to analyzing it or troubleshooting it. He just calmly stays with what he’s asking the horse to do. If the horse needs him to do something different, he will, but it won’t be a big deal.

Lots of people talk about looking for solutions instead of looking at problems, but Mark lives it. His mindset and the very words he chooses just don’t admit problems.

I will always have in my memory an image of Mark at a demo with a fairly substantial person holding onto his wrist and putting their entire effort and strength into holding Mark in one spot. Mark, however, was calmly walking around where he wanted while the person who was holding him strained and twisted and wound up off balance and in a mess.

Mark first explained and demonstrated that, when he thought about the fact that another person had his wrist, he literally couldn’t go anywhere. However, when he remembered that he had control of all the rest of his body and focused on that, he could move easily.

It was more than a mental trick. When our minds identify a problem, two things happen. First, in thinking of something as a problem, we tend to brace, which usually just makes us part of the problem. Second, when we focus on a problem, our minds go to where the problem is. When this happens, we have lost our center and therefore our ability to shape what happens next. We are off balance both emotionally and physically.

When we come back to our center, we are at our ground zero for both making decisions and moving our bodies, and we have, at that point, a lot of options.

Studying with Mark has made me realize how often my mind is out, not just finding problems, but hanging out with them, developing a nice cozy relationship with them, and quickly forgetting that there is any part of the world that is not a problem. If my horse does something—anything—that I didn’t ask for, my mind immediately lights up with, “Ooo, a problem!” And so derailment begins.

Obviously the first key here is that I am finding the behavior problematic. Labeling it a problem means that I am braced against it. I have also lost, not only my center, but my connection with my horse because my mind has disengaged with him in order to engage with the “problem.”

The second part of the deal is that, once my focus goes to the “problem,” that leaves exactly nobody focusing on the original plan. So we started out with my having one idea and the horse maybe having a different one, but now that I’m focusing on what he’s doing, then we're both having the horse's idea instead. And he wasn't necessarily all that married to his idea, but now that I'm over there in it with him, where else are we likely to go?

Here’s an example of what that looks like: I was working with a horse named Sebastian doing transitions from inside of me using just a change of energy. Sebastian would generally shift his energy in response to mine, but not always to the point of changing gait. So I would change my energy from, say, trot to walk, and Sebastian would change his noticeably but still be in the trot. At this point I tended to focus on the fact that he was still in the trot, which meant that my brain was where? On trotting. Which meant that we stayed doing what? Trotting. Mark explained that the key was for me not to get distracted by what Sebastian was doing but keep my idea and energy at the walk until he found it.

Once again, as always, this stuff applies way beyond horsemanship. Show of hands: how many people spend the majority of their time seeing and solving problems? (Those of us who are particularly advanced in this field have even been known to *create* problems from time to time.) What would life be like if, instead of letting our attention get sucked into the problems, we calmly carried on with a positive, happy focus on what we originally intended to do?

Feel It, Baby!

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.