This is the view from my window as I write this morning. I've been awake for about an hour mainly fretting about fretting. I'm reading a book called the Power of the Herd by Linda Kohanov and, like everything I see and read about horses and about life, it unfreezes and then re-freezes the framework I have in my head. This book tells me something I have always known, that although we can act calm, act confident around horses, there is no con in confidence. Horses still know if we are frightened, angry, ambivalent. I've a lot more reading to do but I have always believed that we can work a little magic with matter over mind by acting confident, acting calm, evening acting happy. Just being aware that we have emotions can help us to bring them down just one notch and can convince a horse that we are worth sticking with - more so, we are convincing ourselves that we are worth sticking with. As a little aside, I worked with a woman last year (and her horse) who was a newsreader and every time I took a photo of her she just switched on her radiant smile. She told me that it didn't matter if it didn't reach your eyes, you just had to turn it on. I've done this ever since and I swear that I am actually happier.
I read a ditty on Facebook that said that peace didn't come when you had sorted everything out, if you found peace first them everything would sort itself out. Nice thought. I have always been terrified of peace as for me it represents death. As someone who has suffered from misophonia for most of my life, peace translates into silence and then I would be able to hear every irritating sound such as ticking clocks and even people breathing as if amplified through loud speakers. I can only get such peace when I am alone or with a horse. Even my sleep is littered with dreams, good and bad, as my brain processes everything that has gone on the day before.
The problem with being told to have a 'mind like still water', to quote Mark Rashid, is that we imagine that it is a mind that is totally still. Perhaps it is only a mind that is not at odds with itself. I have decided to try re-framing my thoughts about my own fretfulness and instead to applaud my lively brain which can be so creative, full of energy and logical. More of a going with the flow I suppose than a still pond. Of course I may end up at sea!
99% of my work with horses is really about the emotions of their owners. Yesterday I was phoned by a young woman who said that she was panicking and upset because she had bought a new pony and the the wrong one had been delivered. She'd had to get the vet out to scan its microchip and then arrange to have it taken back to the owner all at her own expense, financially and emotionally. By the time I spoke to her for a second time, she had arranged the transport, swapped the ponies over and arranged another vet's visit to make sure that she had got the right one this time (three identical looking ponies in one field!). Far from panicking, it seemed to me that she had been extremely logical and practical and had got everything under control!
My New Year's resolution then will be to embrace my emotions and let them work for me, not against me.
