06/14/2023
🐎✨🪶💕
The emotional processing is done, at last. Some days it takes longer than others, but it always works in the end. Why is this so important, and why did I spend months and years learning it? I had a tremendous Why - I wanted, and still want, to be the best human I can be for my horses. If I’m carrying trapped grief or fury or angst or resentment, I won’t be fully present for them. I won’t be the steady, understanding human that I need to be. Also, if I’m denying my own emotions, which are powerful and sometimes unsettling, I believe I won’t be able to fully empathise with my horses.
They have emotions too, just like we humans do. And just like us, some of them feel things more deeply than others. And they too can adopt survival mechanisms which often involve a degree of hiding. At the extreme, this is the shut-down horse, who gives up on the world and goes internal, deep into the inner dark. But there are shades along the spectrum. My Florence was never shut down, but I have discovered, after a long observation and some misinterpretations along the way, that she almost literally swallows her feelings. When things get too much for her and she’s marching towards overwhelm, she does this incredibly subtle little breathing thing, with tight nostrils. It’s so small that I missed it at first. Unlike the red mare, who reared like a circus horse and threw herself about, Flo’s signs are so delicate that I have had to squint to see them.
But now I know and I can help her through them. This gives me more satisfaction than I can express. I play around with all kinds of inventive ideas, but at the moment we are concentrating on helping her release. She is turning out to be a World Champion at this, now she knows that she is encouraged and not judged. All the emotions are allowed at our field, in the humans and in the horses. Shutting things down and bottling things up and pretending we are all fine doesn’t work for any of us. That’s why I’ll often write you my emotional storms, which do blow in from the north and sometimes, even now, take me by surprise. Flo is a sensitive person just as I am, and so we work through the typhoons together.
I sometimes wish I was not so sensitive. I do occasionally gaze at the people who seem to be able to barrel through life, shrugging off the slings and arrows. I think they do exist, just as there are horses like that. But perhaps this profound sensitivity is a superpower after all, because it allows me to tune in to the mares who also take the world to heart, and to comprehend them and not grow impatient. Just as I take them for who they are, I can take myself for who I am, and let go of the shame of my younger years. (I always thought I should be tougher and feared that my keen feelings were a sign that I was a wimp.) Just as I work with the horse I have that day, I have taught myself to work with the human I am that day. It can’t all be tap dances and show tunes. Sometimes, we - the mares and I - show up in a minor key. And that is all right.
