I was thinking about this question the other day when I was standing with the horses waiting for the hoof trimmer. We were doing nothing in particular when a man appeared. He works on the farm and came over to have a chat. Within minutes he was scratching one of the horses’ faces with his beard! It happened, spontaneously, without thinking. It was lovely to watch; man and horse having a connected moment. He hadn’t planned it, or gone looking for it, it simply happened.
Connection with horses can be an elusive thing. Like chasing a butterfly. As the saying goes – When you keep chasing butterflies they will fly away. The harder we try to catch them, the more elusive they become.
But if you build a beautiful garden, the butterflies will come.
So how does this relate to connecting with horses? What is the beautiful garden we need to build to draw the horses close?
To attain connection, we need to go inwards. Connection is an inside job. It’s not a heady, thinking place, it’s a feeling place. Clients often express that they don’t feel like themselves, but don’t know how or why they lost that feeling. That’s when time spent with horses can help you work it out.
Mostly we lose self-connection when our attention goes onto words like ‘should’, ‘must’ and ‘ought’ and we lose sight of what we instinctively need or want. We worry about what others will think, our outward status, societal expectations, doing the right thing. We can get lost in the thinking place because we lose connection with our own intuition.
If we go back to the man with the beard, he was not trying to do anything with the horse (thinking state), he intuitively started scratching the horse’s face with his own. He was in his authentic flow. He did not worry about should he be doing it, or what might I think, or a plethora of other disconnecting thoughts. He got the butterfly moment.
Having sessions with the horses can help people to come out of the thinking, analytical head state and drop into their feeling, sensory state, and align with the true authentic self. This is where we find connection, not just with horses and ourselves, but with our dreams, desires, and the wider universe. We feel like ourselves again, in the moment, in the flow of life. That is connection.