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.
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| 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!
