My mare Zuzka comes to stand beside me at the gate, ready to have her halter slipped on. She is one who often will want to play games about being haltered, suggesting, no, I’m too busy today to go ride. Or maybe it’s just the game she likes. But this day she really wants to go out. I can often tell if she wants to go out on the trail, by how she stands looking off in the distance, when there is no activity on the horizon that can be seen with the naked eye. A sort of longing to be out there.
One of the hardest things for people to grapple with is the fact that their horse is not always nice. I talk about good behavior and model that for the horse, but sometimes the horse does not exhibit good behavior in spite of all the modeling. Sometimes we get a dose of teeth and hooves.
The phrase, “it takes a village,” refers to the raising of a child and the “village” involved in raising him or her.
What is the conversation between horse and rider?
Recently I’ve been working with a horse and rider team who are deeply bonded. After an accident the owner is building up her riding time. Her concern was that he would not sustain a trot for a length of time and that her body was not seated in the saddle evenly. Each side of her felt different, and one side felt unwieldy and unable to really connect.
Years ago, when I got my mare Zuzka, the trainer I was working with at the time was so happy when we were able to put her in the same corral space with my gelding Khami. The trainer said it helped her training because the mare would be moved around all day by him.
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.
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.
This mare is “staking a claim” on this hill. She doesn’t want her friend standing there. What differentiates this activity from others, such as just moving a another horse from behind, is its sudden and very territorial nature.
Body Language 