Dancing with Balance
Leigh Shambo,
MSW
Human Equine Alliances for Learning
One of horse wisdom’s most important lessons is the dance of
staying in balance – staying balanced within ourselves and also
maintaining balance in our shared relationships (with horses or
people). Trying to stay in balance so pervades every aspect of
the horse-human relationship, physical, emotional and
spiritual—that it could fill five lifetimes of study! One of the
first salient lessons is: balance is almost never perfect—but
an ideal that we move closer and closer toward, experiencing
relatively fleeting moments of perfection.
....
Working toward our ideal of balance
requires that we stay in the flow. By developing awareness and
responsiveness to the signals that tell us we are out of
balance, over time we stay closer to a zone of optimum balance.
Jayne, a relative beginner in riding, would often freeze and
become self-critical when she found herself off balance in the
saddle. One day she commented after watching me ride, “I’ll be
glad when I achieve such perfect balance.” Jayne was genuinely
surprised when I explained to her that I had been completely
absorbed in a flow of balancing responses within myself
and in relation to the horse, precisely because the balance was
never perfect but always fluid and complex. Although I am a
more experienced rider than Jayne, our essential process
(feeling a loss of balance, then regaining it) was the same.
From that day on, Jayne began to honor her unbalanced moments
as instructive inputs into the process of finding and
maintaining balance with her horse in the face of a myriad of
factors. She began to develop her inner compass.
The
inner compass is an internal, felt sense based on a subjective
impression of an ideal state. This leads to my second salient
point: you have to be in touch with your inner compass in order
to work with the dynamics of balance. Your body must become
educated in the variety of feels that are associated with
balance in yourself and in the horse, in order that you can
fine-tune the balance through your responses. Until one
experiences the feeling state of balance and the range of
tolerable “error” on both sides, she does not have the template
that allows balancing responses to guide the quest for optimum
balance. Balance is its own reward; there is an exact moment
that is felt in the body as an energetic tipping point, and at
the peak of having tipped, there is a moment of effortlessness
which the body of human and horse can relax into. A moment of
freedom from effort. Good riders guide themselves and the horse
to find these effortless moments more and more frequently,
eventually staying within a zone of optimum balance.
While
the most obvious and concrete manifestations of balance between
human and horse are evident in riding (where loss of balance
entails the actual risk of falling), balance is not just in the
physical plane. Balance has important foundations in the mental
and emotional plane as well. Paying attention to the dynamics
of balance in the invisible realm of thought, emotion and energy
yields rich learning about one’s self— the horses reliably
reward us with more cooperative behavior when we pay attention
to invisible axes of balance. In fact, paying attention to
balance within the relationship, lies at the heart of
equine-assisted psychotherapy, since the internal compass that
is developed can also apply to human relationships and to life
decisions.
Just
like the physical sensors in our inner ear alert us if our
physical balance is disrupted, our emotional body has sensors
that will alert us when we are out of emotional balance, or when
a relationship with another person or a horse is out of
balance. Correcting the course always involves attending to our
own balance first. When we change, others must change and
adapt. This is just as true of human relationships as it is
with our horses, but with the horses we get to examine our
patterns in a simplified and very honest and direct form. No
wonder we can feel so natural with the horses—they invite us to
be sensitive and empowered in the very same moment. Now there
is an act of balance!
I
recently taught the Epona method of self-awareness to an
advanced rider who was concerned about her horse’s unpredictable
and dangerous explosions under saddle. In an unstructured
“reflective round pen” session, Annette had difficulty relaxing
into a state of “just being” with her young mare, Grace.
Annette felt plagued by performance anxiety, in spite of my
stated assurances that there was no specific agenda, no
expectation of an outcome at all in that particular activity
(reflective session). She was unable to shake the thought that
there was some “right way” to do the session, some way that it
was “supposed” to look, and this new awareness of an old and
unconscious thought pattern was a revelation to her.
As we
progressed into some ground training exercises she was routinely
practicing with Grace, Annette was for the first time conscious
of how much performance pressure she carried even into routine
training sessions. The self-imposed (and largely unconscious)
push to “get it right” created a sense of energetic imbalance
for Grace, who had trouble relating what she saw as play to the
sense of urgency conveyed when Annette was in the grip of
performance anxiety. As Annette learned not to let herself be
pushed by some false ideal of how it was supposed to look, she
found that Grace became more cooperative and generous in her
responses. By the end of our day together, Annette learned to
contain and self-soothe her anxieties so that they exerted no
push on Grace, and Grace rewarded Annette with more focus and
enthusiasm for their work—even ridden work— and most
importantly, no explosions!
Sometimes we improve balance in the relationship with a horse by
containing and soothing our feelings, as Annette did, but other
situations call for more dramatic expression of our feelings in
order to establish a good balance in the relationship with the
horse. One of my clients, Sherry, purchased an easy-going
horse named Clyde.
Although she rode as a young woman, Sherry had not ridden in
many years and found that age and lack of fitness had eroded her
skills and confidence. Sherry saw
Clyde as a big teddy bear of
a horse—a horse that would be “easy” given her aging body and
modest riding skills. At first, things went well and Sherry
felt that she had achieved a good working relationship with
Clyde. She felt that
Clyde
“took good care of her” on their rides.
One
day, Clyde became frightened of an unfamiliar object on the
trail. At a loss as to how to proceed, and wanting to preserve
their good relationship by avoiding conflict, Sherry simply took
a different trail. Soon, Clyde
sprouted a few more fears. He was afraid to work down at the
far end of the arena. He became reluctant to stand still for
her at the mounting block. More and more often, Sherry found
herself backing down. As time passed, Sherry felt intimidated
and disappointed in the balance of their relationship, where she
was clearly not validated as a leader. No doubt
Clyde
felt disappointed too—how could he be a loyal follower, if
Sherry was unwilling to stand firm as a leader?
Clyde’s
actions could even be viewed as his own attempt to reestablish
balance within the relationship.
With my
assistance, Sherry identified many of the feelings and
unconscious attitudes that kept her in avoidance of constructive
conflict with Clyde,
and she realized that these same factors contributed to her lack
of satisfaction in her family and professional relationships as
well. In order to reclaim her position of authority, Sherry
needed to take emphatic and decisive action. Within a
repertoire of safe ground exercises, Sherry gave herself
permission to be expressive and dramatic with
Clyde.
Sherry was able to show
Clyde
that she was a force to be reckoned with, and without punishment
or pain she was able to tip the balance and establish herself as
a leader to be trusted and respected.
Practicing dynamic
balance in the mental, emotional and energetic realms of
relationship are one of horsemanship’s healing gifts. Learning
this is the very essence of artful partnering with horses.
At HEAL, Human-Equine
Alliances for Learning, people learn to artfully use their
mental and emotional energy to communicate effectively with
horses— becoming aware of the many ways their internal compass
can guide themselves and a horse into a more graceful and
effortless balance in partnership. Learning to feel for and
trust in their own felt sense of balance and rightness in each
moment, and learning that the horse appreciates and responds to
such guidance, provides what is called in psychological terms an
“emotionally corrective experience”.
An
example of this is the join up tendency that horses readily
demonstrate at liberty, when the question of “who is leading
whom?” has been resolved to the satisfaction of both horse and
human. It is always a magical moment when a horse decides to
join up with a person. How often, in the human world, do we find
that others join in with our goals, deciding wholeheartedly to
follow and support us in spite of the imperfections of the
balancing process?
By
practicing balance with horses, we gain trust in our own inner
guidance. We can use this ability to more effectively and
gracefully move forward in the daily dance of our own lives.
