Past

When we interact with our horses we cannot separate the deeper layers that are present within horses from their current responses. When a horse has experienced some trauma in his or her past it will influence our current interaction. That is why it is beneficial to discover whether or not your horse has a certain layer upon him or her. If we realise what this trauma is and how it influences our horse, we can take steps within our interaction to enable healing of the past.

Because of an overlapping of past and present, it is unwise to judge a human or horse based on the current responses of a horse alone. It is important to expand our awareness as an observer so we can see what is hidden underneath the responses that are shown. From there we can discover possible alternatives to respond to specific reactions.

In this video we can clearly see how past and present are layered upon another and reveal questions from a horse. The beauty of observing is that our horse shows us in fact possible answers to his or her request.

Present

Within the horse’s responses we can also discover his specific answers to our request. It is one moment in time and within that moment we can see many different shifts. Every horse has his own way of responding. Some horses are more outgoing and will show very expressively that they don’t agree, other horses are more introvert and close down more easily.

In this case too it is helpful to learn how to understand your horse by reading and feeling what he feels in that moment. When a horse is angry with you, it doesn’t necessarily means you did something wrong. He just might not understand something. Assess yourself first and check whether you did something that might be offensive or intrusive etc.

For instance, I was lungeing one of my horses Amal in freedom and at one point he wanted to come inside and get his reward. But he did not yet connect with me on the circle and was just trotting on his own. So I told him no, you cannot come in yet. Because he couldn’t come in yet and thought to himself: I already did it, no? He was very angry with me. If his eyes could have shot lightning he would… We just continued the interaction and when we did connect I let him come inside…

This response from Amal doesn’t mean that I have a bad relationship with him, it just shows that we had a misunderstanding. Though if your horse is angry all the time, in his regular behaviour or very regularly within your interactions, then there is a big issue going on. Then we have to look deeper and need to look closely to ourselves: are we the primary cause of his response or does this come from a past experience with another human? Either way we need to solve this for our horse and ourselves, because I think and hope everyone in the end wants to have a lovely relationship with his horse…

In this video we can see how Palunga seeks connection with Madara. Because Madara is filming and interacting with her horse at the same time, it is very difficult to establish this connection. In fact it is extremely dificult to film and interact with your horse at the same time and get such a beautiful result. Although we can see very clearly here that Palunga expresses that need for connection, for me the way Madara made this video is in fact perfect because the issue Palunga has is clearly shown… Maybe if it would have been filmed from distance it wouldn’t have been as clear to us, who are just looking inside their relationship for less than a minute…

Helena Sidiropoulos