It’s been a tough few weeks here in the Nelipot Cottage camp. Many of you will know some of my trials and tribulations with the complex little horse that is the Rockstar. If you don’t, then the brief version is- beautiful horse, conformationally challenged, incredibly athletic, also anxious, with a high octane buck that makes spectators gasp. He is hugely affectionate, very loving, and yet gets regularly threatened with the final trip to the sausage factory.
The last few weeks have been a rollercoaster ride, literally. Pole clinic with some acrobatics whenever spectators breathed or moved a muscle or we passed the gate of the arena. The next day a clinic with a new to us EDL instructor in a strange and very buzzy arena where he struggled with the new balance requests placed on him but never really acted up.
A week of in hand work in the dark followed before we had to face a long drive to a weekend Arne Koets clinic.
The negative thoughts were out in force.
“There’s no point in taking Rocky, it’s too far, too expensive, I’ll take Cal, he will get more out of it”.
“He’ll buck me off in front of all the new people”
“His back must be sore again, maybe I should get him checked out”
“I just want a nice fun weekend away”
The first thing to understand about these negative thoughts is that they are from our primitive lizard brain and ultimately their role is to protect us. They are our evolutionary alarms- don’t leave the cave after dark, don’t risk harming yourself, how will you hunt and eat if you are injured or broken….
Because these negative thoughts are part of our programming we can’t fight them. When you read about dealing with negative thoughts, all the self help gurus use war like language; we must beat them, challenge them, overcome them.
Resistance meets with resistance. Horses push into pressure, so do humans.
We can’t fight our own brain, let alone our own survival instincts. The primitive brain is an evolutionary mechanism that exists to keep us safe from harm; it’s not logical, or rational, or conscious. So there is absolutely no point in fighting the thoughts generated.
Far better to welcome them. First step is to notice them.
“Ooh look, I’m catastrophising again, how peculiar. I wonder why?”
Next step is to thank the amygdala for trying to protect us from harm.
Accept and let the thoughts in. If you can laugh wryly at yourself while doing this all the better.
Third step is to work out where the negative thoughts sit in your body.
Are your shoulders hunched up and forward or down and relaxed? Is your breathing shallow and rapid? Where do you feel tightness- is it in your chest? Is your jaw clenched, or your tongue relaxed? Are your fists curling?
All the negative thoughts are essentially fear. I’m a simple person- anger, frustration, nerves, disappointment, shame, failure- when you boil down the various emotions generated by the amygdala there is only fear.
Once you have found the effects of the negative thoughts in your body, you can start unfurling them. Relax your shoulders, lengthen your spine, open up your chest, smile, and breathe.
Remember the vagus nerve?
we touched on this in my last post
Breathe in for a count of 3 then out for 4. If you can’t manage that, breathe in for 2 then out for 3. Just make sure the out breath is longer than the in breath. Get your heart rate slower by activating the parasympathetic nervous system.
Once you know where the fear sits in your body, you can modulate that feeling by consciously changing your body state. You can’t change your thoughts straight off, but if you can change the physiological effects they have on your body, then that changes the feedback loop and the negative thoughts are no longer physical feelings but abstract concepts.
Fear setting is helpful here as the next step, one we have achieved some distance from our lizard physiology.
What is the worst thing that can happen? (Rocky might buck me off. It’s on a surface, I can wear a body protector, I can work him in hand for the rest of the lesson or I can dust myself off and just get back on)
And what will the outcome of that be? (I’ll be embarrassed, I might get a bruise or two, I might scare the spectators)
Versus how will I feel if I don’t do the thing that scares me? (We will never make any progress, I will never challenge him or me in new situations, he will never become the magnificent horse he should be, I’ll have a nice time doing safe stuff at home but I still won’t know how to deal with him in a challenging situation. I love this horse, I want him to be magnificent, I want him to enjoy every ounce of his glorious power. We can’t avoid all these challenges forever.)
If we back away from the fear we stay in our comfort zone. It’s safe and easy but there is no learning, and no growth.
We can’t fight negative thoughts. Rather than brushing them aside, we have to let them in, make friends with them, be nice to them and then we can moderate them with the opposite of fear, which is simply love.
Because love is the purest and most positive energy, whenever we need to find a source of strength then we just need to think of love. I still find it quite hard to think of love by myself so I think of my dog Ernie, the joy he displays greeting me when I get in from work, the warm feeling when his head is on my knee on the sofa. Or I think of the Rockstar, when he was a foal, resting his head on mine, breathing softly in my ear.
So what happened? I swallowed my fears. We went to the clinic. And Rocky was pretty acrobatic, so much so that I had to get off in the first lesson. And we did scare the spectators a little bit! But we did some good in hand work, and then some more in lesson two.
Had we been closer to home would have swapped horses after day 1. But we were too far away so I had to persevere! And in lesson 3 we found a place of quiet conversation in hand, where he could tell me clearly and definitely but still politely what it was that he was finding so difficult. I did some bodywork on him in between the lessons and his back looked better after every session.
And in the 4th slot I even got back on and we managed to continue the conversational approach to learning, and I now have homework and exercises for us to do to help him before the next time.
We will be going back for more training with Arne Koets at the end of this month!
It goes without saying that all this theory also applies to anything that might scare you- because the lessons that horses teach us are ultimately lessons in life.
buy the book- “Bare Hooves and Open Hearts”
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One of my favourite quotes
