Moonlit ride

Geraldton has experienced the oddest weather this summer. Hot and muggy for weeks and weeks while it is normally very dry and windy in the summer. Feeling like I've moved to Asia! It's been a bit tough as far as playing with the horses so I took the opportunity of a free night during the full moon to experiment with night time playing.
I am writing this a few days later and since this magic night both my big kids have left for college and my horse is cut off from me due to severe flooding! Not sure what is most painful. Well in all honesty I was prepared for my kids leaving home but psychologically not ready for being cut off from my horse. This is the week where I was going to spend heaps of time at the farm with the horses. Life rarely goes as planned and one of my challenges is to learn to go with the flow (the river flow as it is) and embrace changes. So rather than feeling sorry for myself I am using the free time to do lots of other useful things such as buying a good camera to video my level 3 auditions and reviewing my training program.
Back to the magic of the moonlit night. Got to the farm in time to feed the horses. Some time later as the full moon was rising I went to see if Cisco was ready for a play but he definitely was not. He hardly came to say hi and quickly returned to his hay. So I sat down to enjoy the night. The peace and silence was surreal. After a few minute Trigger came softly to nuzzle me. He was the one wanting to play. So we did some soft yo-yo and HQ disengagements. Everything felt so much softer and slower than during the day. I really loved that! Trigger is my beginner horse who has confidence issues and I felt really privileged that he offered to play at liberty in his paddock while the other horses ate.
Finally Cisco was ready to be haltered so we set off along the tracks playing online as we went. It was the first time ever that we played at night and I just wanted to make sure I didn't barge through any threshold. I found it so much easier to be in tune with my horse and listen to him during the night. Maybe because I had to listen to his breathing a lot more to check on his mental/emotional state. I felt that we were having a proper conversation, lovely.
All was well so I saddled up and we just walked and trotted not too far. I was so pleased that Cisco stayed left brain and never got worried about shadows or anything.
I took Cisco back to his pasture riding him bareback and he was really relaxed with lots of blowing. When we got to the pasture the other horses came cantering towards us. It was a magnificent sight with the moon glowing on their coats and the dust rising behind them looking like smoke. Cisco stayed quietly beside me in no hurry to go back to his pasture buddy.
I am going to try to renew this experience as often as possible. I think I am better at being soft and attentive to my horse in the dark. I love the silence and peace of the night. It was a bit like being under water, in a bubble just Cisco and me.

What I don't understand

Well, really there is lots I don't understand but right now I just don't get why people choose not to do Parelli. I have a bunch of friends who know about Parelli, partly because they hear me talking about it constantly, they see how good my horse is and yet they choose to struggle on with their problem horses. They go over the same problems day after day, they get disillusioned, their children fall off their horses and yet they still make excuse why they can't do Parelli. They seem to think I am just lucky with my horse. Occasionally, I am called to help with theirs.
The last time I tried to help, I was not told the whole story and ended up getting hurt. To cut a long story short, the pony was mistreated when young. The only person he trusts is the young girl who owns it, but she is only 12. He won't let anyone near him and even season local Natural Horsemanship people (non Parelli) have given up on him. Of course I didn't know that and ended being dragged at the end of the 12 feet rope when he took off with me, till I thought of letting go. I was too surprised to react! He is only a 14 hand pony so I didn't expect such extreme RBE. I must have misread him as I only have Left Brain horses. The result of this misadventure is my ego and my behind being bruised! I found out afterward that he does that to everyone except his little girl. Great!
So, I have decided that I am not going to put myself at risk trying to help people unless they want to help themselves. I will kindly direct them to the Parelli website, lend them my videos and it will be up to them.
I have to add to this that after seeing a number of horses who have done a bit of Natural Horsemanship under various trainer, I am not impressed. There is not one program around which is as comprehensive as Parelli.
It's just like Pat says, "People say they don't have the time to do Parelli, but they have the time to do the wrong thing, time and time again"

New Year Resolution

I usually avoid New Year Resolution because they make me feel trapped but this year I feel really clear about my goals. Parelli has given me a much clearer picture of who I am and where I am going and it is with confidence that I can write those lines.
My short term goals are: to become proficient at driving, reversing and hitching my new horse trailer and to start doing some filming in preparation for my level 3.
My long term goal is to save enough money to attend the fast track course in Australia in 2012.
My overarching goal is to become better at applying my horsemanship principle to the human in my life. This, I know is going to be the hardest one for me. My husband watch me playing with my horse and ask me why I couldn't be as patient with my family as I am with my horses. It was a fair comment so I'm taking it on board. So I will strive to translate my horse savvy into human savvy this year.
2010 as been a fantastic year, the start of my Parelli journey, my first horse...I am looking forward to 2011 with an open heart and mind.

What if everything was meant to be.

When I started my Parelli journey I was full of regrets for the years lived in ignorance and for having lost my way and drifted away from horses for a while. A year later I view things very differently.
It now seems that everything in life has prepared me for what I am doing now.
The years of riding in France under classical masters taught me to have an independent seat and to feel at home with horses. The years studying doing my PhD taught me to be a good learner. The years of child rearing taught me love and patience. A bad fall lead me to do some Palates and use core muscles in everything I do. A few years of crewing on a tall ship taught me to be handy with line, very useful when working with the 45 feet line!
The childhood dream of being a professional in the world of horses has been rekindled and with Parelli to guide my way, I have everything I need to be successful plus a few grey hair for wisdom!
So perhaps everything was meant to be just the way it is. There are no regrets to have, things come in life when we are ready for them.

My horse teaches me

Ok, so yesterday was not a "good" horsemanship day. I get one of those every few weeks. What I mean by this is, that by the time I was walking back Cisco to his paddock, I didn't have the warm fuzzy feeling in my belly that I get after a good session. I hadn't been at my best and it is OK because those "bad" days often teach me more than the good ones. 2 hours of food shopping in a crowded super market obviously didn't put me in the right space to be a good leader for my horse. The funny thing is that I had this little bit of anxiety in me when I went to get him, like a feeling that we should probably just hang out but being a human, my brain overrode this feeling plus I had a plan: I was really eager to try my new 45 feet line. Nothing went really wrong because Cisco is a forgiving horse who just puts up with my inadequacy. In actual fact if only I had only done a third of what we did, it would have been super day! The problem tend to arise when I teach something new, it's knowing when to quit. There are occasions where Cisco is simply not quite ready for what I have in mind, others where I probably go about it the wrong way and yet other time where he just doesn't want to do it because he has his own opinions. Being able to judge which is which and what to do when, is the tricky part of the whole equation and no matter how many hours of Parelli DVDs I watch, I have come to the conclusion mistakes have to be made along the way.
Luckily Cisco is very good at telling me when I am in the wrong. It's just the way he goes a bit introvert and looks at me with an air of long suffering martyr. It makes me feel like a child abuser!

So what do I learn from this: Listen to my inner horse! Didn't I write a blog about this only a few weeks ago? Well obviously I need to learn that lesson a few times. I must be a slower learner than my horse! I like the way Pat says:"learners can't make mistakes". It makes me feel a little better when I lack savvy.

Pat and Linda

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while and it is dedicated to Pat and Linda Parelli, who have inspired me and guided me on a day to day basis in the last 12 months.
First of all, I want to say that at the age of 46, I have never before been inclined to follow someone else program. When I home-schooled my 3 children, I wrote my own curriculum and now that I have become a high school teacher, I still write a lot of my own material. In brief, I am not a follower and Parelli is not my latest fad.
As I said in a previous blog I discovered Parelli by chance and got to play with some Parelli horses last year in the UK. It is a day I will never forget and from then on I wanted the horses in my life to have that look in their face.
Back in Australia, I started buying the home study program and studying in earnest.
By day, I play with my horse and by night I watch Parelli DVDs. Obsessed? yes, absolutely! I have a lot of things on my side, but time is not one of them and I want to become a Parelli professional before I come of retirement age!

Education has been my passion for nearly two decades and never before I have come across teaching material of such high standard. I have acquired quite an extensive collection of Parelli videos, from the old VHS and to the latest pattern series with everything in between. It gets better and better, thanks to the relentless efforts of Linda, my favorite teacher!
Not only the teaching material is brilliant but the customer service through the Savvy Club and now through Parelli Connect is unequal.
So, I spend a couple of hours with Pat and Linda on a daily basis and they have become part of my life. They have given me so much that I don't even know where to start.

Pat has given me the courage to live my dreams and to believe in myself. He gives me my daily dose of Pat wisdom. When I face a problem with a horse, I can play in my head a number of scenario from the demos horses that Pat has shared with us over the years and think, OK what would Pat do now? I don't say I always get it right but now I can forgive myself my mistakes and learn from them rather than beating myself up.
Linda is a gifted teacher. I can watch a DVD one day with one of her task and if my horse is ready we can be doing it the next day. I love the way she gets all teary at times because I am like that. I love her enthusiasm when her students succeed. I love how when things don't quite work out she can laugh. I can deny that she has become a role model.

What is so special about Pat and Linda is that they can share with us their humanity. Even now that they have become stars, it is not all glamor and Hollywood. Pat can talk about Caton, his son, and share his grand daughter's first canter or the loss of a special horse. Linda blogs about her successes and set back. This has given me so much faith and courage in what could be achieved by "normal' people.
So I wanted to say thank you to those two beautiful people for the huge amount of work they put into helping us becoming better human for our horses. Thank you for never loosing hope that we can make the world a better place. I truly believe we are! The only place to start changing the world is in our everyday life and this is what we, students of Parelli are doing, thanks to Pat and Linda and their fantastic team.

Listening to your inner horse

Reflecting on yesterday's blog I realised that long before I discovered Parelli I always had an intuitive feeling of what horses needed. It's like I had a little horse voice in my head, telling me what I should do. Unfortunately, I mostly ignore the horse part of my brain and listened to the human part.
I remember a horse a long time ago who was very RBE. I kept thinking, I need to get out of this horse's mouth, she would be better off without a bit. When I suggested this to my instructor, he just laughed at me! Rosie was a stunning chestnut mare but unfortunately I didn't know what I know now and it was only my intuition guiding me. So the bit stayed in her mouth and she stayed unmanageable and out of control. She was not my horse either but she remains in my mind as a horse I have failed!
Thanks to Parelli, I have learn to listen to my inner horse. There are still time where I think like a human and try to push through thresholds and I get too direct line but overall those times become less and less.
And when I let my horses guide me and set the pace, the results are amazing!