Tuning In & Tuning Out: A Broader Conversation On What It Means To Look After Yourself

The belief of not being good enough. The endless quest to be “better” than we are now. The constant busyness….

What we understand about all of these things is that they are not specific to only a handful of people but have come to be a predictable part of our shared psyche and habits. Consequently, when it comes to looking at new ways of going about things, we need to go beyond individual assessments and understandings and look at how our community and cultural beliefs are informing us and influencing our understandings and behavior.

It’s my belief that we are at a transition point in our collective and individual consciousness which leads to us navigating two different tensions; the one we are emerging from tells us that motivation and empowerment come from continual striving towards a future marker, the belief implicit to this telling us we aren’t good enough as we are now; the other calling for more introspection, presence, and responsiveness to the moment. This leads to a struggle between heart and mind as we seek to reconcile the conditioned thoughts that tell us how we should be or how things should look if we were successful according to the traditional paradigm, and a more intuitive sense of our place and how we would like things to be.

In this episode, we look at the intersection of self-care, the concept of flooding, or systemic overwhelm and how this feeds through to how we are showing up for our horses.

I hope you enjoy it!

❤️ Jane

Belief Is Learned In Relationship

You know the beautiful thing about belief? It’s learned in relationship.

Everything that we have come to understand about the world and ourselves has been learned in relationship to someone or something else. It’s an endless conversation of meaning-making and comparative analysis that causes us to decide how things are and that, in turn, shapes our perception.

In human to human interactions, our beliefs are heavily influenced through words and dialogue. We get easily stuck in the “meaning” channel, of assessments, and logical dissection that can cause the thoughts to spin around our heads in an endless loop.

And then, we stand before our horses, and this layer is stripped away. Without words, without the ability to relate verbally, what are we left with?

We are left with the task of redefining listening and our relationship to ourselves. Of establishing partnership at the level of the heart and body, rather than the mind.

We are called to drop back in, to hold space for ourselves and another that often lacks certainty and requires a level of subtlety and understanding that is frequently lost in the busyness of modern life.

When I ride Nadia now, I feel happy. I feel the aliveness in her cells and it’s contagious. The feeling starts in my chest and I find the enthusiasm spilling out in smiles on my face. She has taught me to get out of my head and into my body.

A belief and new understanding once again learned in relationship.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

Want to learn more about the Confident Rider Online Program? You can check it out here:

www.confidentrider.online/joyride