Getting Out of Your Own Way

 Carl Jung said “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” 

It irritated me when Kestrel got distracted and it felt like he wasn’t “with” me, when for years I was hopping on with all my mental baggage. And when he gives me that look “Don’t tell me what to do.” You know, I hate it when people tell me what to do, it  makes me want to do it even less.

We can know things like 'you need to have a clear mind before you ride', but until you understand why, it’s probably not going to happen. I knew I should clear my mind. Everyone talks about how riding is their escape and everything else just falls away. But anxiety makes that so difficult because you don't even realize how much you're carrying around. I blamed Kestrel for years for being distracted when really I was. Not in the sense of thinking of other things, but distracted in that my body was still betraying my mental baggage because I didn’t have enough tools to unload it. 

Until I started practicing how to clear my mind, I had no idea how scattered my thinking was and I was totally transferring that to my horse. “We need to work on our transitions because he’s so unbalanced coming out of them” when really I was unbalanced. I didn’t think I was, because to me it felt like I was physically doing things right. Another frustration was lack of impulsion; spurts of energy and then slogging through mud. I was physically telling him to move forward, but mentally I was dwelling on all the things that could go wrong.

But of course that’s reality, you don’t recognize something for what it is until you gain a higher perspective. We all know that horses are sensitive, but we don’t fully grasp their innate herd instincts for recognizing subtle body language until we realize the impact of the smallest actions, conscious or unconscious. The thing about knowing and understanding is while they seem like the same thing, they’re on totally different levels. Sometimes you can read all the books in the world and still not understand a damn thing until you learn how to get out of your own way.