When the Student is Ready...

The equine teacher appears

Iʻm a little more rushed than usual writing this post. The beautiful news is I am typing these words in stolen moments on a weekend business trip to Maui, sitting in an oceanfront condominium. It was also rushed because I lost most of a day this week to an equine veterinary emergency with the teacher you are about to meet. Sheʻs fine. Maybe better than fine. Iʻm still shaken and playing catch up. Isnʻt that the perfect introduction to this post?

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Where we left off in this tale, in the summer of 2001, I found myself dumbstruck by the message I received from a horse I had just met: "I understand you're asking me to slow down, but I also sense you really love it when I move fast. It's a mixed message so I'll do what pleases you. Is this okay?" I could easily get that horse to go, but not to slow down or stop. The good news was at least the horse wanted to keep moving, to keep matching his energy to mine without resentment. The bad news was the team members working for me and with me had not always been as enthusiastic or comfortable with my pace.

Had I always been like this? My mind drifted back to my college years. The couple who hired me to manage The Strawberry Pony (ironic name, in the context of this story, but true), the new ice cream and sandwich shop I passed on my 2-mile walk to campus in Boulder, became my friends and we remained friends after I graduated. Eventually when I married for the second time, in Central Park, 25 years later, they were there. We had all migrated from Colorado to New York and the kids I had once babysat now had kids of their own. Maybe because Judie remained my friend for those decades, I had never forgotten the moment early on when she looked at me and asked with a bemused expression, “Do you ever just sit?”

Not sit and read, she clarified. Not sit and talk. Just sit.

Do I ever just sit? Apparently the answer was “no".

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My experience with the horse came almost a decade after the 1992 trip to Tibet I wrote about here on Substack, the trip on which I learned to sit in meditation or chant mantra for hours. It came seven years after I met Velvalee and started learning to sit and “hold the frequency.” I thought I had been on an path of intensive training in “just sitting.” But apparently as soon as I stood up, and definitely as soon as I took leadership in a situation with even one other being, I was all about motion. Fast motion. Going somewhere, doing something motion. Maybe even my “sitting” (which is how folks with a meditation practice tend to refer to that practice) was never “just sitting.” I was always revving my internal engine.

Ariana could easily modulate her energy up and down, inviting the horse to partner with her in his movement. I clearly had an up button but no down button or throttle when it came to my energy. It somehow seemed like a valuable skill to acquire or lesson to learn. I needed a teacher to help me develop that capacity to modulate between doing and stillness. And that teacher turned out to be an equine teacher - a sensitive, willful, rescued Arabian mare.

Zara ranks top among my greatest teachers and most enduring relationships

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The Tao Te Ching says “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” A few months after the equine guided education workshop, I was at home in Connecticut. The date was September 12, 2001. I had barely slept after making it home from the events I had witnessed in Manhattan the day before. Ordinarily I dealt with emotional stress by getting into action (duh- see the pattern here?), but my running shoes were in the Italian leather overnight bag under my desk on the 21st floor of 74 Trinity Place, never to be seen again. I pulled on a pair of boots and walked slowly up the hill, drawn to the Stables. There was no conscious thought behind it, and it was a strange choice to walk on roads rather than find solace in the woods a few steps from my home.

Or maybe not. As I stood outside one of the paddocks communing silently with the large chestnut gelding who came and put his head over the rail to touch my shoulder, the stable manager walked over to ask if she could help. I turned to her with tears starting to dampen my eyes. “I was there yesterday,” I said. She just nodded. “Take your time,” she answered. Every horsewoman understands the healing power of horses.

When springtime arrived, my husband gave me a thoughtful birthday gift: a certificate for eight rides at the Stables. It was April, before the official opening for the year, but one of the “barn girls” offered to take me out into the forest and see if the trails were open. She picked the two most reliable horses; I was on the gelding who had comforted me in September. We bushwhacked a bit. Stepped over logs. At one point a deer burst out across the path and the horses indulged in a minor spook. We had to back down a portion of blocked trail. At that point my guide turned to me and said simply, “You ride.” I laughed. She continued, “Pam was just saying yesterday that she wished someone would show up who she could ask to volunteer with the two Arabian mares eating her out of house and barn. Sheʻs not had time to work with them as she needs to in almost three years since she took them in as rescues. Would you be interested in doing the ground work to get them tame and adoptable?”

Iʻd noticed the two gray mares who stayed far from the human activity at the back of one of the paddocks. I had never worked with rescues, I confessed, so I might need Pamʻs help. Pamʻs husband was the animal control officer for the County; sheʻd taken these two mares in as part of a rescue from a defunct breeder. They were mother and daughter - the daughter had never been handled at the time of rescue, and they were starving, so she was still nursing at age three when help arrived. They were confined to a small pen, and apparently the horse I would rename Zara herded her mother and grandmother behind her and fought her would-be rescuers so forcefully that Pamʻs husband asked if she had a death wish taking on this mare.

That was three years prior. The routine at the barn was to let each group of horses out of their paddocks to come in at liberty to their stalls to be fed, then reverse the process when they were done. The younger mare, then called Jenny, could now be haltered in her stall if you were brave enough. Her dam, Rosie, was a kind mare unless you came near her with tack - approach with a saddle or bridle and she would pin her ears and bite or strike with her hooves. Something had gone wrong somewhere. The barn girls would put them on cross-ties and groom them. Except that Jenny refused to be touched on her belly or her legs below the knees, kicking and stomping. That meant she was now six and had never had her hooves picked out or trimmed. Luckily she had feet like a mustang, strong, well-shaped hooves.

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What had I gotten myself into? I had no idea how to reach these two mares, and to keep doing what the others had been doing would only produce the same result. Fortunately, we had just adopted a very rambunctious mixed breed puppy (our 9/11 “baby”) and the puppy kindergarten we enrolled ourselves in was using positive reinforcement methods rather than the choke-chain collar Iʻd learned to train dogs with as a kid in 4-H. I wondered if there was not a similar approach for horses. The local bookstore had exactly one book that looked promising: Natural Horse*Man*Ship by a cowboy named Pat Parelli.

And so, unbeknownst to me, both equine and human teachers had appeared.

The story of how training a horse trained me continues next week.