Shall we dance?
Starting off on the right foot with Kūkūilama
Welcome to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. I am glad you are here! Welcome back if you are a subscriber or regular reader. This year mostly I have been writing a series of essays about lessons I learned from horses. Which means writing about communication, relationships, personal growth, even spiritual practice. Lessons I hope you can use in family or professional life.
Last week I reintroduced my young Arabian gelding, Kūkūilama. What Iʻm really introducing with him is more thoughts on the topic of how we make and maintain trustworthy connections with another person (horse in this case). With all my horses, a big theme is how we cope in our committed relationships when our own and our partnerʻs past experiences and traumas show up. It is sometimes easier with my horses than with other humans for me to remember to appreciate the lessons we learn only by being in relationship.
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Iʻm glad to know that touch dancing has not gone the way of cursive, which younger people can no longer read or write. Dancing with the Stars is in its 33rd season. Tango finds its way into a show set in Auckland1. Still, it might be in danger. I was disturbed to read that liberated Gen Z and millennials find twerking normal but slow dancing with arms around a partnerʻs neck or waist too intimate and frightening. Hmmm. I am not sure how horse years translate to human years, what generation I should call my gelding. But letʻs just say Kūkūilama had learned to tolerate all kinds of commotion, but felt protective about his face, his beautiful face with the classic Arabian dished nose and extra bright intelligent brown eyes.
The first thing I noticed about 3-1/2 year old Kūkūilama when he came home is that he was “head shy” - which actually should be called something like “hand shy” because what it means is that when I moved my hand towards his head, he jerked it away. Clearly he had experienced something uncomfortable, being slapped or forced into a bridle, or otherwise inadvertently trained to avoid human touch near his face.
Once I did manage to halter him, next I might lift the lead rope slightly, say to the left to ask him to step left with his front feet. His response would be to lean against the pressure, turning his head to the right, his focus firmly elsewhere - a clear “no”. Or sometimes his response was the opposite: to bend his head all the way around in my direction to completely evade the pressure of the halter against his face. (Does that make sense? If I lift my hand with the lead rope towards his left, it will put a slight pressure on the halter on the right side of his face. He would turn his head left but too far, losing the pressure entirely instead of taking a step.)
Why did it matter that Kūkūilama avoided touch, and was not moving in the direction I was suggesting? Donʻt you just kick a horse to go and pull back on the reins to stop?
Well thatʻs one way to do it. But you canʻt do very much thatʻs interesting for you or the horse if your level of communication is essentially yelling at them. (Human colleagues and teams also resent yelling, by the way.)
The alternative looks like magic. Imagine you are dancing, ballroom or lambada or touch disco. One partner “leads” and the other partner “follows.” The leading partner communicates to the following partner with gentle pressure of their hand on a waist or hip, or the lift of entwined hands to initiate a spin. But the follower also has to be active in placing their feet appropriately, and seeking proactively to maintain the connection as the partner moves a different direction and their touch recedes. Imagine if when the leading partner began applying the slightest increase in pressure, the following partner took a big step away and broke the connection. Or if as the leader changed direction, the following partner just stood still rather than following. With the connection broken, there there is a breakdown in communication. No dance.
Touch dancing requires a partnership, both parties engaged. And riding a horse, even coordinating movements when they are at the end of a lead rope or simply interacting with me at liberty in the pasture, primarily depends on a similar kind of refined communication with my partner. I wanted Kūkūilama to be attentive to, to respond to, the slightest pressure from the reins or my leg or even the feeling through the saddle as my hip bones shift when I look right or left before we turn in that direction. Instead I had a horse who was technically ridable - but the only steering he understood was his head being yanked around by the big bit in his mouth.
There was no joy in that.
But hereʻs the thing. As I explained in this post about falling, I had figured out much earlier that the horses were there to show me whatever lessons I needed to learn somewhere else in my life.
Kūkūilama arrived in August 2020. Think back to that month, to what you were doing, how you were feeling, as we began to emerge from months of isolation. Were you maybe feeling a little “head shy,” nervous about being touched or hugged, leery of interpersonal connection after months of masks and gloves and avoiding other people? Were you questioning what would come next in your life, in your relationships, in your work, in a changed and more threatening world? In late 2020, how did you, how did we, begin to trust engaging with people in ways that had previously been easy and affirming, but now seemed awkward and dangerous?
The feeling of trust is something we lose and regain, over and over as life happens.
As I reflected on this time with 20/20 hindsight, I has a second realization. I was asking Kūkūilama to let me touch him his face - which, although I did not yet know it, was how he most wanted to engage! Say what? The way he preferred to connect and did most naturally, had become something he was afraid to do. It was not a matter of whether he trusted me and other humans in general - I could groom him and lead him and pick out his feet, very different than my beloved mare Zara when I first met her.
Heʻd been “told” that his natural manner of communicating was “wrong.”
Where do I even start with all the ways this resonates. Have you ever received negative messages about your communication style? Do you talk too much? Or too little? Do you speak too softly or too loudly? Too emotionally? Too directly?
How easy it is to lose trust in ourselves when we accept the feedback of others, whether those assessments are well grounded or not! If we canʻt trust ourselves because we have accepted their assessments that contradict our own inner truth, we may lose trust in our ability to assess the trustworthiness of others. And then we lose our ability to lean in and dance.
And one more thing. Language matters. It certainly matters a lot where I live. Have you ever been told to speak proper English and only English, to speak a particular style of English, when another language or dialect comes more naturally and perhaps expresses more accurately what it is you have to say? Do you have to code switch?
Was your native language taken away from an entire generation?
That did not and does not happen to me, but it happened and happens to a lot of people I care about. Body language may be universal, but my new horse and I were still learning not to make assumptions about each other based on our communication styles. I had at least as much to learn from Kūkūilama as he had to learn from me. We would have to trust that we could build trust across our fundamental differences.
“Head shy.” How shy we can be about implied intimacy, how hard it can be to trust in trust! How scary it can seem when we imagine future hurt. But thatʻs the lie. In truth, trust does not make us more vulnerable or dependent. Trust does not diminish us; it opens whole new worlds. Both Kūkūilama and I needed to trust that physical connection, for him to put his nose in my hand when I offered it outstretched.
Trust is amazing. It can be broken and restored indefinitely. Trust becomes stronger, more trustworthy, for having been challenged and reaffirmed.
Trust was the fundamental question for me and Kūkūilama as we contemplated the shared life ahead of us. Do you trust me? Do I trust you? Shall we dance?
Latest addiction: Lucy Lawless in My Life is Murder. The tango was in S3.E1 …
This came at just the right time. Thank you.