In the book No Life for a Lady, the biography of Agnes Moreland Cleaveland, the children were put in charge of catching a horse and riding into town in order to get supplies. This was New Mexico in the early 1900s. The author said that they didn’t have corrals so catching a horse could take half a day. The horses would know you wanted to catch them and would hide behind trees.
In Loving Memory – April 12. 1989-August 15. 2015 Khami, my bay Arabian gelding of 26 years, passed away quickly today of what appeared to be a heart attack. He was doing what he loved to do, running with his beloved herd, when he collapsed and died shortly after.
Like most things in life, when I learn about them, chances are somebody has already thought of it, researched, packaged and marketed it and knows way more about it than I do.
Liberty work takes on a life of its own. Even when I know the horses involved, they do not always do what I expect.
In Ortho-Bionomy we work with reflexes, and one of them is rebound. If a body does not have rebound then it has little ability to change, to heal itself. We want to reinstate rebound in the body in order to elicit change and the ability to correct itself. That ability can grow in a being and is directly tied into the continuing health of the organism. I seek that self-corrective response in each body I work with….and in my own.
Continue reading Healing the horse and human herd from within
After I had some time to think about it, I think the theme of this past Saturday’s Liberty Foundation Workshop was “horse listening.”
One of the issues for many horse owners/lovers is how to spend enough time with their horses. When I hear myself complaining or feeling guilty, I think it’s time to make a pie chart.
The mare saw the setup – one horse was going to move another horse into another horse and on it would go, a domino effect of movement, right into the little girl standing there watching.
The good boy horse is one who continually does what is asked. For some trainers and owners, this is exactly what they want, a horse that does not offer any challenges. For some good boy or girl horses, life is good enough that there is no need to question too much. For others, they have had their wishes trained out of them.
One thing that new liberty students may find troubling is their horse moving in and out of connection. In the beginning, when the student first gets a connection on the ground, real movement together, it’s very exciting. It feels wonderful. Then the horse decides to break connection and go visit with someone else or another horse. The student looks over at me, crestfallen, as if to say, what do I do now?
