I’m standing, against all odds for a woman who has spent most of the last four decades in New York City, in the middle of a paddock, surrounded by about eight horses and ten other women. At this ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, you communicate with horses.
The gorgeous owner of the ranch, a tall, slim, silver-haired woman, tells us that horses are the second-oldest mammals in the world. And they’re pack animals, exquisitely sensitive to what’s going on around them; their lives have always been dependent upon whether or not they can sense a pack of coyotes nearby. So they have thousands of years of highly perceptive wisdom for us, if we know how to listen.
She teaches us a little about how to listen. I don’t know why, but as soon as we enter the paddock, tears start streaming down my face. And now here we are, just kind of standing around the horses while they stand around us, all of us listening.
We stand peacefully, absorbing wobbly May sunlight from the sky and unconditional love from the horses, when it happens. Two horses suddenly go at each other. Angry neighs shatter the sunny silence, and one horse’s huge teeth lunge toward the other horse’s strong neck.
This goes down a few feet from me, and I am scared to death. A hundred thoughts race through my head: “What am I DOING? Horses are ANIMALS, they’re HUGE, they’re ANGRY, I don’t know WHY, what if they stomp on my feet, what am I supposed to do, why did I COME here?”
But one thought outshouts all the others: “This shouldn’t be happening!”
This shouldn’t be happening. They shouldn’t fight. They shouldn’t be angry. They shouldn’t be so close to me. The ruckus ends as quickly as it started. The horses expressed themselves, and they were done, the gorgeous ranch owner tells everyone. They resolved a conflict about who should stand where, she says in a calm, even voice. I glance around. The other women seem fine.
My heart is racing. I stand still in the middle of the ring, trying to regain my composure, as now my main thought is: “I shouldn’t be upset.” I doubt any human looking at me could tell that I’m feeling anxious. But the horses know.
One of them, who had been a little ways away from the two biggest horses who had the altercation, comes over to me and gently noses me, placing his long face against my chest. It was the sweetest gesture. “I was so scared!” I say to him.
He stands there with me, calmly radiating compassion and complete, rooted stillness. Yeah, you really were scared, he seems to be saying.
And that’s it. He doesn’t judge how I was scared, and no one else really was. He doesn’t tell me to calm down. He doesn’t move away from me because I’m harshing his vibe. He just stands there with his face on me. Both our hearts beat steady and slow.
I think he may be saying something about rooting down into the earth, feeling my feet on the dirt, because suddenly I’m aware of my feet, solidly on the ground.
With even a few minutes’ perspective, I see how interesting my reaction to the little horse fight is. It’s a bit strange, really. Not the fear, which is a natural instinct when giant animals a few feet from you start a fight, but the thought “This shouldn’t be happening!”
How strange, to feel so strongly that what IS happening SHOULDN’T be happening.
By the time I had that thought, the event had already happened. What good does it do to decide if something should or shouldn’t have happened? It has no impact whatsoever on the event.
And anyway, why would I think that I am the one who gets to decide what should or shouldn’t happen? How bizarre.
And next, I decided that I SHOULDN’T have felt the feeling I was feeling. This actually does have an impact: it makes the feeling last longer. It makes the feeling more insistent: feel me. Feel me. FEEL ME!
And if we still won’t feel it, because we think it’s a bad feeling or we’re scared of it or we don’t have time to have it, we stuff it down inside us. And it comes out later, expressing itself as insomnia or a headache or stomachache or rash or something.
How often have you looked at the political situation, your parents, your spouse, your kids, your work and thought “This shouldn’t be happening”?
How much time and energy have you spent on the betrayal, the disappointment, the resentment – the strong sense that you know how things should be, and they’re not that way, and why not?
Do you ever have a huge feeling, then immediately tell yourself you shouldn’t be feeling that way?
When we do these things, we’re wasting our resources. The horses are trying to teach us acceptance of others and ourselves. Stillness. Rootedness.
The quicker we get to this acceptance, stillness, and rootedness, the faster we can actually do something about the situation we’re unhappy with. But rejecting what is? Doesn’t work.
If you find yourself overwhelmed with issues from family to politics, and you’d love to learn how to flow and feel peaceful, please reach out to me for a free session.