Thursday, November 20, 2014

Being a dressage pony is hard!!

I can't believe how much fun I have been having with Miss Sassypants lately!

We've started back into lessons about a month and a half ago, and I have nothing but exciting, happy things to say about the experience so far. I'm so grateful to have recently met a trainer who has extensive experience training drafts and and can appreciate my sassy girl for who she is. It's hard not to keep your sense of humor about your pony's little 'tude episodes when you have a trainer yelling, "So sassy!! You're just too darn cute when you're mad!" (To the horse, of course. The trainer has much less patience for my 'tude episodes ;)

While Syd has definitely let her freak flag fly on occasion during our lessons, (she has more than once stopped dead in her tracks from a trot to stomp both of her feet in disgust, and has done more than a few little squealing, head shaking temper tantrums at having to trot a circle. Oh the humanity!!),  more often than not you can see just how pleased she is with herself for having accomplished something hard. On top of that, she always leaves the lessons in a mellowed out, peaceful state of mind that only comes from a hard work out.

I am also immensely pleased to say that she decided in the past couple weeks that she is now a cantering pony!! Before we switched her shoes, it was impossible to get her into an extended walk, much less up into a trot. So the fact that she felt good enough to try some cantering all on her own and in the dreaded arena was just incredible. I feel like I have a real horse again! 

Cantering is soooo exhausting!
 Recently, our rides have focused on getting more flexion in the poll, more work on bending, and a lot of lateral work. She overbends tracking left, so I have to focus on keeping her outside shoulder in check, but falls into the circle when she tracks right, so I have to exaggerate the bend and give more space in the outside rein for her to step into. This also means our lateral work has difficulties on the opposite side. It's hard to keep her straight when she has to step right, but she does some absolutely beautiful lateral work on her underbending side. In fact, today during our ride, we successfully did some lovely leg yielding at THE TROT!! down the whole long side of the arena! It was magical! Granted it wasn't perfect by any means, but she didn't trip on herself, she crossed her front feet beautifully, and didn't pop her shoulder out. We're definitely getting there!

We've also been doing a lot of exercises to get her hind end built up more. Lots of transitions, and lots of reminding her to reach her hind legs under her. We've put a really strong emphasis on this for Big Mama because she is so heavy on her forehand, and with bad front feet that are too small for her body anyway, it's a recipe for disaster. So far, we've been making a lot of progress here too! The farrier was out today, and remarked that he could tell we had been doing more work. She has one hind foot that wears unevenly by a pretty significant amount, but after working her the past month and a half, the hind foot is starting to correct itself and not wear so unevenly. So cool!

Couple things we will need to consider in the coming months. She can't keep the heart bar shoe on with the snow, it would be too dangerous. The snow and ice will pack into the shoe and could cause her to strain a tendon or hurt herself in some other, creative pony way. We will need to possibly go to a straight bar with a snow pad, or I will need to keep her in when it snows. On the one hand, she's doing so well, I hate to mess with anything when it has all come together. On the other, I don't want to be scrambling to get the farrier back up to change her shoe in a blizzard...

Also, the never ending dilemma in my head recently... to clip or not to clip?? On the one hand, she's in work now, so she should probably get clipped. Then I would need to be serious about blanketing her. With all her wooly mammoth hair, I never have to worry if she's cold, but I would if I clipped her. On the other hand, she's out in the cold much more often than she would be working. Is it really worth trace clipping her, then smooshing down her nice, warm, poofy coat with a blanket all winter? How much good would that really do? Could I get away with trace clipping her and not blanketing? Ugh, so many questions! I did recently read an article about an endurance rider who never clips, so that gives me hope that it can be done. Guess I just need to mull it over a bit more and do some more research.

Last thing on the consideration list, Previcox. I'm not convinced that it is actually helping, I feel like the shoes did more than the meds. I discussed with the vet, and we put her down to half dosage to see how she does. It's been a couple weeks and the jury's still out. We had one work-out where it took her a solid 20 minutes to get warmed up enough to not be stiff, but all her other rides she has warmed up into a nice trot in about 5 minutes. I think I will give it another couple weeks before I decide to take her off of it altogether or bump her back up to the normal dosage.

So excited about all our progress, and can't wait to see what else the Sassy Pony will be able to do in the coming months!!

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

The difficult choice to shoe, why I went from barefoot to heart bar

   Prior to my forays into foot problems with Big Mama, I had long been a believer that shoeing a horse was the ultimate display of failure when it came to horse care. I had found an excellent barefoot trimmer that specialized in drafts, I spent hours researching hoof supplements and topical hoof care solutions. I had purchased just about every product on the market to harden feet, reduce thrush, protect the hoof wall, and build sole. I bought hoof boots, and when those got destroyed, I bought more hoof boots. I spent over $200 a month on the best hoof supplements I could get my hands on. I tried natural solutions, like washing the feet with dish soap, and using tea tree oil. I actually had to go see a chiropractor at one point because I threw my back out while bent over holding her feet in Lysol soaks to try and kill the thrush that was eating away at her soles. 

   So last winter when the vet informed me that we had no choice but to put shoes on my princess because her lameness had gotten so bad, it's not entirely surprising that I viewed it as a complete personal failure on my part to keep my horse healthy. 

   Her lameness reached a climax when I sent her to a trainer that was an hour away from my home. The hard ground and extra workload took a toll on her delicate feet, and her usually stoic nature could no longer hide the fact that she was in real pain. We took X-rays, and found some discouraging news. Her soles were only about half as thick as they should be, and she was showing beginning signs of high ringbone.
X-ray from February 2014, shows thin sole depth, ringbone, and poor joint alignment.
  One week into her expensive training, I had to haul her back home. Well, shit. She sure seemed fine galloping full bore away from the trailer in the dark, six times, under threat of a blizzard, but that's a story for another day...
  
   Initially, when we got her back home, we put her back into her old shoes from about two years before. My farrier bevelled the edges and set them back a bit to increase her breakover and reduce the pressure on the joint with ringbone. We put her in leather pads with a packing underneath to increase support to her sole. Unfortunately, she had put on so much weight, she would just squish all the packing out within a couple weeks, but it did help temporarily. We also put her on Previcox.

  The results were not great. She was fairly sound on hard ground due to the shape of the shoes, but she was still dead lame in the arena. The vet and farrier agreed that this was likely due to the pressure the deep sand was putting on her thin soles. We tried for 3 or 4 cycles to get her sound this way, but it just wasn't working. We had to take the next step.

   Now, let me preface this by saying our next step was to move to heart bar shoes, and my farrier kept warning me that this was a 50/50 shot. She would either get much better, or go completely lame in a couple days. My other hobby, besides hooves, is worrying. So I spent months agonizing over the decision that could potentially cause a huge deal of pain and distress to my girl. The farrier even offered to leave tools behind in case I need to pull the shoe off before he could make it back to my farm.

  We finally set the date where the vet and farrier would come to the barn at the same time, take another set of X-rays, and measure for the heart bar shoe. I was racked with anxiety, guilt, and frustration that I couldn't get her better some other, more humane way. 

   Her new X-rays had some positive information in them. Her joints were much more aligned with the proper shoeing now, so some of the pressure on the joint had been relieved.  But, the X-rays also had some troubling news to reveal. She was having a flare-up of pedal osteitis, and her coffin bone was causing her a lot of pain. The very mechanics that were meant to keep a hoof healthy, that is, the flex of the hoof tissue that ensures proper blood flow, was actually the culprit for her discomfort. It was imperative for us to stop the flex of the hoof wall so that the internal tissues of the hoof would stop tugging on the already inflamed coffin bone. (I don't have copies of the current X-rays, but will upload them when I do.)

  The farrier would have to fabricate the heart bar from scratch, since heart bars don't come in size uber-mondo prefabbed, so the week after the vet appointment he would come back and put on her new set of shoes.

 The ones that would either cripple her... or be the miracle cure....

  The farrier explained that the middle portion of the heart bar should be enough to reduce the pressure of her soles, but to ensure that that would be the case, we also used a special, extra soft gel packing that had just come on the market recently, along with plastic pads, which, unlike the leather pads, would provide almost no give.

   Here was the final result:


New heart bar shoe.

Showing off her new kicks.

This is her bad foot. As you can see, this one is still softer than the other, and so is more prone to breakages and chipping. 
  After the farrier was done putting them on, he told me to take her out and lunge her in the field. Moment of truth...

   I took her out and asked her into a trot. After a few tentative steps, she began to stretch out and extend into the trot more willingly. There were no head bobs! No short ouchy steps! Holy crap!!!

  The next day I took her into the dreaded arena, her own personal torture chamber. But even there, she was able to stretch out willingly and trot out as soon as I asked her, no hesitation!

  The vet, farrier, and I are in agreement that this is not a long-term solution for her for a variety of reasons. We hope that by the spring we can either reduce her down to a less severe shoe, or maybe even pull them off altogether. We have also discussed the possibility of making her shoeing seasonal, so during the times when the ground is hardest, we will put her shoes on, then when the ground softens back up we can take them off again.

  I think the hardest lesson that this has taught me is that there are no black and white answers to horse care. I recently read a great article by Julie Goodnight that talks more about how we should never be so set in our ways that we can't even see the value in a different approach, here. That lesson is even more evident to me now. Some horses do great barefoot, others need shoes as a short term solution, still others need them for life. I can't deny the change it has made in Big Mama's soundness, or the concrete benefits they had on her joint alignment. So for now, I will put away the judgey thoughts of how I somehow failed my barefoot horse, and enjoy the fact that she is comfortable, happy, and that we are able to get out and ride more!

  Next post, we have started back into lessons and are turning into a dynamic dressage duo!

Saturday, August 30, 2014

My horse, my yogi

I've been a recreational user of yoga for the better part of the past decade and a half. When I was first introduced to it, it seemed like the ultimate expression of possessing a powerful physique and displaying uncanny feats of flexibility. I got myself a few DVDs and strained and pushed myself into the poses I saw before me, often holding my breath to brace against the pain I was causing my body to bend into ways it had never bent before.

I managed to force myself into some of the poses. I even remembered to breathe sometimes. But the draw of more challenging things and the lure of a good sweat often led me to abandon my yoga practice just as I was gaining some headway.

A few years ago I made some very major changes in my life, and decided to get some help for challenges I faced in this new life I had chosen. I was diagnosed with complex PTSD after enduring many years of abuse, and all of a sudden, my recreational yoga hobby turned into my prescription for a happy, healthy, whole me. Not the kind of yoga I had been straining to master before, full of ego and and an overly vocal inner critic barking orders to "stretch harder!!" But instead yoga with a true understanding of being present with my body and being able to consciously breathe into discomfort without pushing past it or trying to suppress it.

What on earth does this have to do with horses?

As it turns out, the horse is actually the ultimate yogi master. 

Horseman's yoga studio
The more I became conscious of the way I held my breath, hunched down, and pushed far past limits that my body was very clearly setting, the more I realized I was treating Big Mama the same way. I wasn't giving either of us the space to breathe into the sense of fear coming from a vulnerability of being in a place neither of us truly understood, with very poor communication of our expectations and needs. I was pushing us so hard to be something neither of us was.

So, I decided to apply some yoga wisdom to my horsemanship. A major precept in yoga is non-attachment to outcome, and breathing into discomfort. In fact, the very act of exhaling audibly actually activates your own sympathetic nervous system as well as that of the people (or animals) near you. How cool is that? 

With these new insights in mind, I set out to try a completely different approach to helping Big Mama and, to a greater extent, me, work through the anxiety we experienced when we felt vulnerable. I decided to hand walk her through the areas that she found the most challenging, over and over until they didn't feel so scary any more. My progress would be measured by how many new areas we could conquer in-hand, then in the saddle, each day gaining a little bit more ground. My goal initially was to get her to calm down in these places that she had so much difficulty with, but the more surprising outcome was that I actually ended up teaching myself to calm down in these areas.

As we walked, I could sense her head starting to go up as her anxiety level increased. As soon as I felt this I would ask her to stop, then I would take several long slow breaths. She watched me curiously at first, then took a long slow breath herself and lowered her head. I almost couldn't believe that it actually worked! Each time her anxiety increased, we went through our ritual of stopping and breathing until the tensions flowed past us. Some interesting things started to happen as I did this. First, I started to really have true compassion for her and her emotions. I really started to come to understand her as an individual with needs and concerns of her own, instead of a bull-headed miscreant that I needed to control. 

At one point she threw a very impressive bucking fit, squealing and stomping her feet in frustration. As I stopped and breathed, trying to find the source of her frustrations, she let loose a waterfall pee that she had been holding in for who knows how long because she couldn't figure out how to relieve herself when she was away from the comfort of the barn. It was the first time she had ever peed outside of her home turf! A few days later, when she threw a fit in the same spot, I was able to stop and tell her it was ok to pee, that I would wait for her. She looked at me expectantly, stretched her front feet forward, checked her left and right making sure no lurking squirrels were nearby, stretched her feet out a little more.... And to my surprise, she rested her chin on my shoulder before she felt comfortable enough to relieve herself. I started to replay some of the many bucking fits we had experience together and wondering how many of them had been purely because she was uncomfortable and couldn't figure out how or if she could relieve herself when out in the park!

The next interesting thing I learned was how often my own anxieties were manifesting themselves when I was out of my comfort zone. I started to be able to associate the tensions in my body to an impending spook in Sydney, and then breathe into them before they turned into something she felt she had to act out. As a PTSD sufferer, this is a huge deal for me. A major coping strategy in trauma survivors is dissociating from all bodily sensation and emotions, so she was slowly teaching me to stay present with my discomfort instead of hiding from it. We've actually slowly started to learn to lean on each other for support instead of fighting one another. 

It's really been an amazing few weeks, and I'm so glad we were able to take a step back, break the attachments to outcomes I thought I wanted, and work on tolerance to vulnerability. I've learned so much, and I'm looking forward to finding out what else my beasty pony will teach me!
 

Friday, June 27, 2014

The well laid plans of horses and women

This post was going to be about how I had discovered a new well of motivation that I planned to tap into for training the Sassy Black Horse.  She had other plans...

When I set out to ride the other day, I knew it was going to be a bumpy one. My work and school schedule have gotten a little out of hand as of late, and poor Syd's training has once again fallen to the way side. But, I was determined to gut it out, I was feeling good about my abilities, and I was ready to get started on a new chapter.

After our customary 5 trips back and forth across the busy road to desensitize her to traffic, I walked her up to the mounting block near the trail head, checked and double checked her girth, and hopped into the saddle. There are a few different directions to head out on the trails, and  I decided to take her in the direction that she has less problems with since she hadn't been out in a while. After our ride that day, I believe there are officially no directions we can go that don't have problems...

We got up onto a long grassy stretch and I asked her to trot out some of her anxieties, which normally gets her mind back online and helps her sort out trail obstacles later on. We trotted out a whole entire two strides before she decided to do her cast iron horse statue impression: not budging. Nope, nope, nope.

This is not a new tactic. I took a deep breath, relaxed, and urged her on. I ride with spurs and a dressage whip, but when that horse has decided she ain't doin' it, well, there's just not a whole lot you can do. Finally, after much squeezing and tapping and clucking, I got one step. I praised her, gave her a rub, dropped the reins. She apparently took this as a sign of weakness, because at that moment she decided to duck her right shoulder down, spin, and head for the hills.

Ah. We're playing the "Let me pretend to be nervous so I don't have to work" game. Ok, got it.

I got her turned around and pointed back towards the trail, and she resumed her statue position.

This is always the time where my fear, apprehension, and frustrations start oozing out. I know I need to stay calm and firm, but I can feel her tense under me like a coiled spring, ready to demonstrate to me how athletic 1500 pounds of muscle responding to a threat in unison can really be. I can feel the tiny electric charges when one or two muscles spasm in preparation for a big spook.  I'm not scared of falling, I've fallen before and I will fall again. I'm scared that I can't figure out how to connect with her in those moments, I'm scared that I will fail her and she will get away from me and get hurt herself.

More deep breathing.

I let out a long, deep sigh, took a moment to recenter myself and consider my boundaries. Took a moment to really take in the fact that I was certainly not going to get bullied by an animal that I pay to keep in orthotic shoes and on expensive human Zyrtec for her hay fever (yes, my horse is allergic to hay. The irony is not lost on me.) Time for plan B.

I decided the long grassy stretch would be our new arena for the day. We would work some patterns, some nice bendy turns with great emphasis on keeping the shoulder up. No barrel horse impressions.

Sydney decided that her plan B for the day was that bucking was an appropriate response to discomfort.

And so there we were for the next nearly 30 minutes. I would take a deep breath, keep chest up and heels down, and firmly demand we move in the direction of the scary things, she would give a little squeel, shake her head and hop while simultaneously stomping her feet like a tween who had just been told Justin Beiber can't sing.

Slowly, ever so gradually, she came around to the idea that we were working in our makeshift grass arena, and began to anticipate the forward, halt, turn. I did my absolute best to ask with the least amount of pressure possible, and release when she responded to me. Things were finally starting to come together...

And then the dreaded, killer cyclist burst out of the bushes.

Right as I asked for the turn, a kid on a bike flew out of a blind spot right at Sydney's hind end, and that's when my world slowed to crawl.

When she wants to, Big Mama can move! Before I knew it we were galloping full bore for the barn. Her normal reaction of "two spook strides, ok I'm over it spooking is hard work" had been soundly replaced for "GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!!!"

Strangest thing about adrenalin, it does amazing things to the brain. I remember clearly having an entire soliloquy going on in my head that went about like this:

Hm ok, it appears I have no brakes. I should probably do something about that. Ok, one rein stop. Ha! Look at that, she is galloping with her head cranked to the side. I thought they couldn't do that. Why is she still running?? And uh, I wish we were at least on the trail, there could definitely be some gopher holes in these bushes she decided to run through... OK, well I have about 50 feet or so until that ditch we crossed, so I need to either get her stopped by then or get my hunt seat ready. Woops! falling to the left side of my saddle, sit back sit back... Ok, that ditch is coming up pretty fast actually, let me see if I can transfer both reins to one hand so I can get a better grip on this one rein stop. When I do this, she might lose her balance, so deepen that seat a little, ok there, ready, CRANK!!!! OK, awesome, got her nose to my toe, and looks like she is slowing down... Oh, hell yes! We stopped before the ditch! Go me!

When she finally came to a screeching halt in front of the ditch, we were both at the end of our nerves. I could feel myself and Big Mama shaking from that little adventure, but I knew there was no way we could end there. We had to go back.

After several minutes of standing still and calming down, we went back and did three pretty good loops in both directions of our makeshift arena and called it a day. I never did get her mind back with me, and so she piaffed like the most beautiful dressage horse you have ever seen all the way home. It was beautiful unless you knew what you were looking at, then you could see what a wreck we both were. I tried to give her her head, but she just kept her chin tucked behind the bit even with no pressure, and jigged the entire length of the trail back.

I didn't learn anything mind shattering that day, but I didn't fall off and I felt like we ended on the best note we could. I guess the next ride will be the litmus test to that. I got to spend a lot of time practicing keeping my cool and staying loose when she was tense, so that was good. I still can't ride her in the arena first because the footing causes her pain, so I will be spending some time thinking about the strategy for our next rides and how we can progress. Challenges!

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Rubbing elbows with celebrities

It has been one helluva week.

My stress levels have spiraled out of control, my ability to cope has suddenly become non-existant, I'm terrorizing the people I love, and shutting out the people that support me. And I didn't even get to ride!

The one silver lining in all of this is that I got some much-needed horse wisdom to edify my soul this evening. Linda Kohonav, one of my all-time favorite horsewomen and authors, was scheduled to give a talk and do a book signing today, and I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to see her in person. As the coolest added bonus ever, two other amazing women were in the audience, as well: Meg Daley Olmert, the woman who pioneered the idea that the human-animal bond is based on a mutual production of oxytocin, and Linda Tellington-Jones, creator of the TTouch method. Too cool!

I learned so, so much tonight, and I'm sure it will take me a while to digest it all. I wanted to share a few of the more profound insights I learned so that I don't forget them.

Linda's new book, "The Power of the Herd," is all about learning to balance predatory and non-predatory power in ourselves. She believes that horses are the ultimate "non-predators" because they have prey animal wisdom, but are not victims, which is very often the image attached to the term "prey animal." Instead, horses draw on other, less overt forms of power that can be very useful to humans as well.

Something that really struck me about this idea when she broke out a list of characteristics that tend to generalize each form, predatory vs. non-predatory, was that I definitely tended to use many more predatory power techniques than non-predatory. The big ones that stuck out for me were a focus on goals over process, and a focus on territory over relationships.

Having just spent the drive up to this lecture in a tiff with my significant other over the phone, I felt a twinge of guilt at the realization of how important territory had become to me at the expense of relationships. I could almost see myself huddled down, crouched and ready to pounce at the slightest perceived invasion of my emotional territory. Ugh, how embarrassing. On the other side of the coin, horses are never territorial. They are pastoral, and depend on the other members of the herd for support regardless of where they are. This idea really got my wheels turning. Letting go of my "territory" is definitely something I will need to work on.

Also, with Sydney, I get so caught up on setting goals and reaching them, that I am almost annoyed that there has to be a process at all. Instead of creating an environment where we can both learn, I set us up for failure. Geez, emotions are hard.

The other idea that really impacted me deeply was a thought that I had only scratched the surface on previously: setting boundaries, but also being willing to open up and strengthen your heart empathetically to the suffering of others without judgement. Whew, just the thought raises my blood pressure a bit. Linda used as an example a pastoral tribe in Africa who has a kind of rite of passage ceremony wherein one male would challenge another, but the goal was not to see who could beat the crap out of the other. The goal was for the challengee to take the beating of the challenger with arms and heart wide open. In his outstretched arms, he holds a mirror so that his full attention is solely on his own reaction to what is happening to him.

An emotional interpretation of this is being able to stand, arms and heart wide open to other challenging situations in life, whether it be an aggressive, screaming, boss, a challenging argument with a loved one, or even, in Linda's case, an extremely aggressive stallion. The message is, "I am strong enough to hear whatever it is you need to say."

I am strong enough.

I had never thought about it like this. I always assumed I had to be on the counterattack, and always making sure the playing field was level so that I wasn't taken advantage of. Letting go of this need to hold on to emotional territory and being willing to open my heart to the pain and frustrations of others seemed completely counterintuitive.

I will definitely be spending some time digesting these thoughts, and thinking about ways to apply them to my relationship not only with Big Mama, but also the people I'm having trouble connecting with today. Thankfully, they all seem to have figured out this "arms and heart wide open" concept, and haven't all left me for greener pastures yet, so hopefully I can have a chance to show them the same kind of love and empathy.

If you made it all the way through this rather disjointed post, thanks for reading! There will be better posts when I am slightly less irritated and bleary-eyed :)


Saturday, June 7, 2014

Afraid of Fear

There is one thing that I am almost guaranteed to hear whenever I mention my four-hooved beast to the non-horsey initiated.

"They're beautiful animals, but one time xyz happened to me while riding and now I'm terrified of them. They sense fear you know! They know I'm afraid and they will take advantage of it!"

I've spent a lot of time pondering this almost ubiquitous observation. Why is expressing fear such a bad thing anyway? Why is fear an emotion so closely linked to horses? And why does one bad experience turn us off to all other similar life experiences?

In all honesty, the maxim, "they can sense fear" can really be applied to almost anything. For instance, small children can sense my fear of all things sticky and snotty, and will often eschew entire gaggles of cooing, baby-feverish mothers to climb all over me like a sticky spider monkey, leaving a trail of boogers and peanut butter in their wake.

*Shudder*

Similarly, when we are out on a trail ride, every squirrel in the entire county can sense Big Mama's terror of small furry things with twitchy noses. You can almost hear their squeaky giggling in the trees when one jumps out at us and Sydney rediscovers her inner Derby winner.

So if we all feel fear, and can recognize it in one another regardless of species, why are we all so averse to it?

Even more importantly, why on earth do we think we can hide it?

For me personally, for a very long time I subscribed to the, "fake it 'till you make it" school. Pretend you aren't afraid and eventually you won't be! And so I wore my stoicism around proudly like a padded push-up bra: propping up and over-inflating my rather small, and jiggly sense of courage,  and misdirecting the eyes of those around me away from what was lying just underneath.

The biggest problem, though, was that it really wasn't working. My bottled up fears were finding new and exciting ways to make themselves known. They came out explosively, or shut me down entirely, or manifested physically as heart palpitations. I was so consumed with pretending not to be afraid that I was completely ignoring the fact that I could actually handle the situation just fine if I gave myself half a chance to do it.

In my riding, this meant that I spent so much time and effort focusing on not being afraid when Sydney spooked or bolted, that I was ignoring my chance to be a better rider and to learn more about my own inner workings. I assumed that if I just concentrated hard enough on not being afraid, that she would magically become this docile, husband-friendly horse that would plod happily anywhere I pointed her. And as long as that wasn't happening, I must therefore be a royal screw-up, right?

My opinion on this changed dramatically after a very enlightening riding lesson recently. My instructor took us out on a bunch of school horses for a trail ride. While this was pretty much a novelty for many of the younger riders in the class, I was disappointed that we weren't going to be doing something more challenging. As it turns out, though, I learned more in that one trail ride than I have in months of formal riding lessons.

What I learned that day, like so many other things in life, was so ridiculously simple that I was a little surprised I hadn't ever let it sink in before.

The instructor, a very experienced eventer, was riding a green OTTB out with us on the trails.

"Just remember," she called back to us calmly as her mount jigged and danced around with excitement at the prospect of getting a good gallop in, "our heels are down, our chests are up, and our knees are nice and loose. So that way when our horse does something silly, it's no problem! Just ride through it!"

Light bulb!

Holy crap! It was never about not being afraid, or forcing Sydney to not be scary. I'm not ruining my horse just because I haven't yet figured out how to help her get over her irrational fear of squirrels. Heels down, chest up, and you're ready for anything! How did I know this for so long, and yet not know it at all??

So, my homework for myself has been this: express how I'm feeling, and then have the confidence to know I have the knowledge and ability to deal with the situation. I tell Sydney, "I feel afraid that you will plunge us both into a ravine to our deaths when you see a squirrel, but I'm willing to work through this with you because I know how to keep my heels down and chest up. Also, you have tons of hair that I can cling to for dear life."

I still do occasionally feel afraid when we ride out together. Sometimes, very afraid in fact. But the very act of allowing myself to do this makes the feeling dissipate much more quickly, which also has the added benefit of allowing Sydney to switch gears from bat-out-of-hell back to plodding, lazy, fat horse again much more quickly. Win win!

We may never completely "get over" our fears, in that all scary things in this world will not suddenly cease to exist. But that doesn't mean we have to be paralyzed by them either, or pretend they're not there. Fear, just like any emotion, is one of the things that makes us living souls on this planet. Living life fully to me means taking it all in, even the irrational fears like small sticky fingers, or twitchy rodent noses.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Setting Boundaries by Getting Mad


I've never had a good relationship with anger. Growing up, there were only two things that I knew about it. The first thing is that you never under any circumstances allow that emotion to show itself, and the second was that raging out brings you a great deal of power. Needless to say, I grew up very confused about what to do with this very controversial emotion, so I ended up swinging back and forth between the two extremes. 

This was also why I never had any clear boundaries set for myself.  I grew up thinking boundaries were a thing for the selfish.  If I was to be a good person/Christian/friend/whatever, I would have to quietly (albeit, passive aggressively) sit and allow my boundaries to be repeatedly violated until I had mentally tallied up a sufficient number of violations to make raging out an acceptable alternative. It's not something I'm proud to admit to, but it's also very habit forming and tended to follow me in nearly every facet of my life.

Enter the Four-Hooved Diva.

I swear that mare made it her one and only job to find my buttons and push the shit out of them.

In our three or so years together, she figured out how to bully me pretty ruthlessly at times. She bit, shoved, bucked, pushed, and terrorized her way to the top of the food chain. I, like the good person/Christian/friend/whatever that I had learned so well to be, let her do it. I let her do it because, well, she had had such a hard life growing up as a PMU baby, and because she's so sensitive I couldn't discipline her, and because I loved her and wanted her to love me back. I told myself and others that I just hadn't yet learned the key to being a good leader for her, that she was just misunderstood.

Yeah, turns out that is all bullshit.

It's bullshit because when I finally decided to have boundaries and to get mad appropriately, I had an amazingly calm, obedient, and confident horse almost over night.

One of my favorite authors and horse people, Linda Kohonav, made an amazingly astute observation in her book, "Riding Between Worlds,"that I have tried to take to heart ever since I read it. She said that, "The fear of feeling blocks self-knowledge and true connection with others. Yet this particular fear has almost no chance of dissipating until people learn to treat emotion as information."

So, if this is the case, what message does anger provide? Linda believes that anger is a message that a boundary has to be maintained or rebuilt, and that if this message is not heeded right away it leads to rage, fury, and exploding at others initially, eventually turns to shame and guilt, and then finally to apathy. So, basically, by not setting my boundaries with my horse early and often, I was not only doing a disservice to myself, but to her as well.

Sydney and I had a "come to god" moment with this very concept very shortly after I got her home from our abbreviated training program. I was frustrated and feeling hopeless that Sydney was home, untrained, dead lame, and still a bully, but I was stubbornly determined to try to make the most of it. I decided to take some of what we had learned and implement it at the walk (the only gait that she was sound at) and in-hand to prevent any accidents. As it turned out, she had other plans, and 5 minutes into my brilliant training plan for the day, she gave me the proverbial finger (pretty sure I actually heard her tell me to fuck off, actually), spun around, ripped the rope clean out of my hands and at a dead gallop (quite spry for a horse in pain, I might add), took off through the park, across a busy street, and up to the barn where, as the very last straw, she ripped her expensive, custom, padded shoe off. 

(WARNING, RAGE ALERT)

When I finally caught up to Hell Bitch, I had worked myself into a lather that would make a rabid raccoon proud. As I grabbed the lead rope and let loose a barrage of profanity that would make a sailor blush, I also unleashed months of built up guilt from not knowing how to be a better horse mom, shame that others might find out my horsemanship skills were crap, and even the apathy I had felt by letting her languish in the pasture instead of getting up the courage to face the bad pony attitude head on. I backed her all the way up a 50 foot hill by swinging her lead rope wildly at her and screaming like mad woman. While I'm fairly certain I never actually made contact with her during the whole performance, I am pretty sure the neighbors believed that a crazy woman had escaped the looney bin and was running amok on their property. Sydney's eyes were the size of dinner plates, but she never once even made a move to rip out of my hands again.

I'm certainly not proud of how that went down, and as I drug Sydney back down to the barn to put her in her stall and call the farrier to come out and re-shoe her, a wave of guilt and shame came over me that I had once again let my temper get the best of me.

As bad as I still feel about that incident, it was definitely a turning point in our relationship. Partially, I think, because Sydney finally realized I had set a boundary and was dead serious about it, but more importantly because I vowed to never let myself be pushed so far that that level of rage would explode out again.

As part of my plan, I had Scott Purdum, a local natural horsemanship trainer, come back down and work with me on setting some proper boundaries with Sydney. (You can see the video of us practicing on Scott's Facebook page, Advantage Horsemanship, here.) 

During our training session that day, I learned a very interesting thing about getting mad. You can do it almost in passing, without it being a huge, hour-long performance. You can actually get mad, reset a boundary, and get back to your life in like 5 seconds. Holy crap!! What a concept!

It's been a few weeks since Scott came out for that lesson, and a few months since the Battle of Horsey Hill, and I'm proud to say that so far I have been able to approach my time with Sydney in a way that maintains my boundaries (no pushing, no biting, no rushing ahead of me, PERIOD), while also respecting hers. In fact, I've become even more aware of her state of mind, as well as the things that calm her and also make her fearful. She's more trusting of me, and while she does still push at times, she's pretty much dropped the bullying act altogether in favor of enjoying being around me. I am consistent with the boundaries I set, and I no longer view them as a selfish indulgence. This was quite an epiphany for me! Thank you, my dearest Hell Bitch, for being such an awesome teacher! :)

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Staaaart over. Back to square one, again.

It's always something.

This is a phrase I resort to a lot in my journey with the sassy black horse. Today, it's the epic Battle of the Left Front Hoof. After a bout with laminitis caused by complications with an anaplasma infection a couple years back, followed by an abscess, and a horrendous case of thrush, Syd's poor left front hoof has just never been quite right. We've tried many hoof supplements and just about every topical hoof hardener on the market. We've tried alternative treatments like Lysol soaks, Tea Tree oil, and packing her feet with Betadine-soaked cotton. We've gone barefoot, booted, regular steel shoes, and shoes with leather pads, but we still haven't quite found the magic combination.

This winter I thought I'd FINALLY figured out how to keep her feet in one piece and keep her sound enough to get some good training in, but alas, it was not meant to be. She went dead lame one week into the expensive training program I sent her to, and still hasn't recovered.

And therein lies the predicament. I really need help with strategies to deal with her colossal temper tantrums, but I can't get help until she's sound, but I can't get her sound until I can work through the colossal temper tantrums.... you get the idea. Catch 22 at it's finest.

We were supposed to go through the full gamut of lameness exams today, but we were rained out, so we will have to wait until Saturday to try again. We've already gone through the nerve blocks and X-rays earlier this year, but it looks like we will have to do them all again to try to find the problem. Argh! Always something!

In the meantime, I've had to get creative in applying some of the lessons we learned in our one whole week of training. I must admit, even though it was short, the biggest takeaway I got was actually very profound and useful in the rest of my life as well.

Just let it go! (I heard you all break into a moment of "Frozen" karaoke just now... cut that shit out! ;)  )

Such a short, simple phrase, and yet it's one of the hardest things in the world to do. During our evaluation lesson with the trainer before I sent Syd to pony boarding school, he noticed something about my riding style that I hadn't recognized previously.

"You really need to get out of her face, you are annoying the hell out of this horse," he stated bluntly.

I was a little shocked. I thought I was doing the right thing by getting stronger, and more controlling when she tried to boss me around the ring. I honestly thought I was being helpful by forcing her nose where I wanted it to go and making her pay attention to the bit.

Once again, turns out she is way smarter than I give her credit for, and she was using the fact that I got tense and controlling to get out of doing real work. She would "spook," I would try to force her to pay attention, she would giggle in her head at the dumb human as she got to slow down and give less effort. Doh.

Once I got out of her face, and let her look around as much as she wanted as long as we kept a good forward motion going, she stopped spooking and bracing so much. Hmmm.

This is the lesson I am working on taking to heart. Just keep moving forward. Don't brace and get forceful about the scary things. Even if you get startled and have to take a few steps back (or even if you try to gallop back to the barn!), turn around, relax your grip, take a deep belly breath sending oxygen and peace to every cell in your body, and move forward again. It's a lot easier said than done, but boy is it worth it when it all falls into place!

Friday, May 2, 2014

Confessions of a green rider (and writer, for that matter!)

Hello! Thanks for stopping by my blog! 

I decided to start writing this to have some concrete documentation that I actually am growing and progressing in my horsemanship and the training of my 9 year old draft cross mare. Horses teach amazingly valuable lessons, and as a mere human, I tend to forget them and need to relearn them unless I write them down! :)

 I have always been passionate about two things in my life: writing and riding, and it's only really been recently that I've been able to really indulge in either one (that itself is a long story best saved for a later post). So, this is me, growing a set of ovaries, throwing care to the wind, and sharing my experiences. Since it scares the hell out of me to try, it must be worth it! ...right?


My journey with the sassy black horse, affectionately known as Big Mama by those who love her, Hell Bitch by me every now and then, and Sydney to all the rest, began a little over three years ago. It started out innocently enough. I had outgrown the husband horse I had been riding for someone else and thought I was up for a challenge. Truth be told, back then even the husband horse scared me on occasion, but I wasn’t going to admit that to anyone, least of all myself.


So I set out to buy my very first horse.  You name the stupid, amateur mistake that a new horse owner can make, and I made it. I fell in love with the first horse I saw. She was magnificent. Her beautiful flowing mane was like a cape of billowing black silk draped across the stately crest of her neck. Her massive, draft legs pranced so gracefully through the snow it was hard to believe she was real. And so, like any insane woman in love, I bought her. 

I wasn’t allowed to do a test ride because there was nowhere to ride her, and besides, the owner hadn’t ridden her more than once in the three years she had owned her (red flag number one).  I didn’t hire a trainer to tell me whether I was making a good choice or not. It took me nearly THREE DAYS to get her loaded in the trailer to take her home because every time I tried, she knocked me down, jumped over me, and ran away. We actually had to hire a professional to load her. (Red flags number 2,3,4,5, and 6). When I got her home it took me nearly 4 months to be able to brush her without her smashing me into a nearby fence (red flag number 7). But she was mine, and I’d be damned before I gave up on this beautiful black beast.

It took me a little longer than it should have to figure all this out. Ok, maybe a lot longer. But when the full force of the realization hit me about the exact implications of my decisions and how they were going to affect me for years to come, it was almost too much for me to face.

I was THAT horse owner.

You know the one. The one that makes all the stupid rookie mistakes and then ends up with too much horse for their abilities.  The one that still has a green horse 3 years after they buy it. The one that stares longingly at all those lovely riders that can just grab their mount and head off for untold adventures to their heart’s content.

Yep, that was me.

Fortunately, even though horsemanship didn't really run in my blood, stubbornness did!

We’ve come a long way since then, her and I, but we certainly still have a very long way to go. Even though it's been an uphill battle from the beginning, I wouldn't go back and change a thing. This horse saved my life (despite trying to kill me on more than one occasion), both literally and figuratively. She's shown me raw, unadulterated power and a kindness only horses are capable of. She's shown me how to be more honest with my emotions, and how to admit to even the uncomfortable ones like fear and anger, and to work through them instead of repressing them. In the end, you're not fooling anyone, especially not your horse! Lastly, she's taught me to accept another living being for exactly who they are, not for who I think they should be. She is 100% unapologetically Sydney. She's strategic and cunning, has no work ethic and a huge attitude, but also has an uncanny softness when you can communicate with her on her level. Because of her, I've learned to be more authentically me and to be more accepting of other people, flaws and all, for exactly who they are, too.

I hope in the coming months (hopefully years??) I will be able to continue making progress with my curvy, sassy, black horse, and that documenting it will keep me more honest and consistent in our growth and training. 

Thanks for reading!!