Category: The (almost kinda) Daily

All this talk of red mares is nothing new.

Feisty. Furious. Opinionated. Difficult. Unpredictable. The category of options in the red mare handbook written by humans who prefer not to be stereotyped thank you very much.

Oh, a chestnut mare, they say.

To which I say, I have two.

Nadia. Let’s start here.

Nadia’s eyes are a deep well of molten chocolate. You can lose yourself in their liquidy gentleness. The wrinkle of slight concern that frames belies a vulnerability. A tussle between wanting to be safe in the world and perhaps a fear that she might not be.

Sometimes I want to stroke that line above her eye and say, it’s ok. Your place is here. You’ve already arrived.

Her body is strong, powerful, explosive. To rest a hand on her neck is to feel a strength I would never be privileged to experience alone. And yet each day, she lends me her speed and her grace and athleticism, and I’m lifted and carried in many ways beyond what is physically possible.

She has a dimple in her shoulder, and a little tear drop scar under her eye. I often wonder how it got there.

She worries away from her herd, but she lends her trust to me, and I do my best to hold it. My work is to get better at holding the privilege she grants me every day so I’m big enough to meet it.

Ah, you may think, these are the words of a romantic. Or perhaps, a dreamer. And to both you would be right.

But to me, they are also the words of a realist.

Because to me, this is the truth of the chestnut mare in my paddock.

And to see anything less, to experience anything less would be to do her a disservice.

So when I read the words of others, like I did today, dissing the chestnut mare, I smile to myself and think, you’ve missed a trick my friend, you’ve really missed a trick.

And I open the metaphorical gate and hope they land up in my paddock.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

I had a conversation the other day and something was mentioned to me that I had never heard of before: A silent disco.

What, I blurted out, is a silent disco?

Well, was the reply, we meet in a field. And we light a fire. We all put on our headphones. And we dance.

I sat there in the imagined glory of it all. In my mind’s eye, I was alone, in a paddock, dancing. No one around. Nothing to be or to do. No one to answer to. No need to shapeshift or need-to-fit-in-ness or questioning or considering. No deep dives or dark corners to shine lights in. No one to look after or think about.

Just myself and the wispy shadows of anyone who has come before me who cared to join me at that moment.

You may have followed along at the start of the month with a little thing I started called 25 notes to self: An advent calendar of self-reflection. I’m not sure what number I got up to when the words just dried up. Stopped. Like all the words had gathered together, looked at me, and said, sorry. Not today.

And I was like, um, hello? Words? This isn’t funny! I’ve started a numbered count-down thingey and you aren’t even trying!

And all I could see them do was pick up their little wordy backpacks and march off down the dirt road to picnic in someone else’s brainspace.

Hmmph, I said to myself, throwing my pen at them. Great.

So, I’m sorry for the lack of words. The truth is the end of the year has left me in this place. The words have left me and I have flash-mob thoughts of randomly dancing in fields.

I’ve sat with my blankness. And I’ve felt a bit cross with it. But my blankness has led me to much more being-ness. That is my true craving at the moment.

And I realized, the back of my horse is my own silent disco. When I ride, I fall into the gap. The gap of suspended animation that holds everything and nothing all at once.

My good friend Tania told me that if the words have left you, write from the back of your horse. I think that’s when I got it. The words left me because there are no words big enough to capture the relief my horses bring me. The words left because they knew that I would be trying to sum up what it felt like to be on the back of a horse, and they knew their own inadequacies. They were doing me a favour.

That was a place only for feeling.

So I told the words, you know what horses are? They are a big, glorious relief. They are a relief from having to be in the world with all its pretense and dissociation and disconnection.

They are a big holy, sacred relief.

They bring us back.

All the words I need are thank goodness for them.

Onwards.

Jane

If you need to rest, you should do that. Life is not a race to fill in the gaps.

❤️ Jane

It’s interesting, because a few years ago if someone had asked you to describe the word “anticipation”, it’s like that you would have paired it with anxiety. But now when you think of the anticipation, you understand it as something so much bigger than that.

In fact, when the word lands in your body, it creates a feeling of expansion. You think of anticipation with a sense of possibility, an arms flung open feeling, eyes above the horizon sensation, sung to the melody of “come at me, I’m ready for you”.

This change in you was not a passive one. It has been hard-earned and we still consider it to be a work in progress. Let’s call it “the great decoupling”; the decoupling of activation from concern, of energy from worry, of vitality from a feeling of not being safe.

Your capacity has increased to the point where you are able to hold the energy of what’s to come in all its possibility, without it throwing you off centre in the “right now”.

You no longer need to escape from anticipation as a feeling. Instead, you see it as a necessary state of being for your body to rise to the occasion. As preparation to do some unfamiliar or uncomfortable. As a reminder to self that you can do hard things.

Your lens has widened to anticipate joy in the same way it used to be only available for concern. And for that, we are grateful.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

With so much going on in the world at the moment, it’s important to realise that you are more resilient than you might give yourself credit for. One of the ways we can resource ourselves and soothe any hypervigilance in our nervous system is through safe touch of the facial muscles, through gentle massage and mobilization.

These muscles of the face- the forehead, around the eyes, and cheeks- are key players when it comes to activating the social engagement system and ventral vagal activation and can help signal the rest of the body that it is safe to let go for a bit.

It’s a simple way of coming back to yourself, of extending nurturing and care, and of curating moments of pleasure and joy for us to develop a foothold in.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

Well, this year has been quite the time. There’s been stuff come up which has never really crossed your radar in terms of being on your “things I will probably have to deal with” list, and at times, we could generously describe it as being “challenging”.

You went away to teach at a clinic in Australia and the night before you arrived home, the first of the compulsory self-isolations for COVID began.

You joked in the beginning that the restrictions were not so far off your normal life, with perhaps a 0.5 % difference in social contact, but nonetheless, it was a very strange feeling. You found yourself getting a bit emotional when the text message came through from the government, complete with alarm sounds- all the bells and whistles- and found yourself caught in a moment of nostalgia that was not really yours to own, of all the people that had come before you that had found themselves in the midst of hard times or unimaginable circumstances, all the while being aware that you were in fact, safe, and what was happening was nothing more than a precaution.

The uncertainty is perhaps what has been the hardest, and all at the same time, the biggest blessing. You have learned that in fact, this paradox is something that exists in everything, and is most true when it comes to matters of the heart and mind.

Fear and courage, for example, exist in relationship.
Excitement and trepidation do also.
Gratitude and loss.

It occurred to you that we often wait to feel one in the absence of the other, when in fact, they are both born from the same seed and exist as a mutually dependent pair.

You have learned- or perhaps it’s more accurate to say- got better at holding the feeling of uncertainty in your body. And you now know that your ability to hold uncertainty is directly proportionate to your level of self-trust.

The voice that says, we believe that whatever comes up, you can handle it, is the voice that allows you to contain uncertainty within the edges of your skin without needing to grasp or grab for an answer that is nothing more than a shadow anyway.

Self-trust is the antidote for many things, and certainly, when it comes to uncertainty, it’s the practice that you continue to turn to.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

Outsourcing your power to trainers, clinicians, coaches, people at your barn. It’s a conversation that I am having with riders I work with all the time, and the biggest (and most crushing) lesson that I learned for myself last year- and all in the same breath, the most liberating.

I could make this conversation strictly about horses and the dynamic that we can and often do inadvertently fall into in training situations, but I believe this situation to be part of a wider cultural dynamic at play (and I’m going to stick my neck out and say especially for women) that relates to feeling like part of our job is to please someone else, or to somehow make someone else happy.

Let’s just think for a minute. If we removed ourselves from the idea that we had a duty to perform, please someone else or live up to an expectation we believe someone else has of us (and let’s be clear, this is our perception, not necessarily the reality), how much more teachable would you be, how much more available to question, how much less would you care about making mistakes, or changing situations that don’t work for you?

This is not about becoming arrogant, uncaring, or hardline. It’s about recognizing that you are 100% responsible for yourself and your choices and that it is not your job to shape, change, or restrict yourself to please someone else. That is not and never will be your job.

The reason that stepping out, back from or around a situation that is not working or no longer works for us is so hard is because it ignites a nervous system response. I know that in the situation that I was in (that was nothing really to do with the actions of anyone else, and everything to do with the hierarchy of power and the expectations I had set up within myself) I came out of it feeling like I was under attack. I wasn’t. Everything was perfectly fine. But my nervous system had responded to this very primal feeling of potentially not being accepted or being “ostracized from the pack” in a way that made me feel that my physical and emotional safety was threatened.

Gaining the strength to not only question but act in accordance with your own internal guidance system means that you need to have the skills to deal with this nervous system activation. Otherwise- simply put- it’s too hard, and consequently, too easy to roll with situations that don’t work for you and grow more and more out of sync with yourself.

My decision for this year was to throw myself into reconnecting with my own body and my own wisdom and letting that be the truth for what’s right for me and what’s not- and I can feel the difference. Reconnecting with my own north star, and not letting her be knocked out of the sky in deference to an opinion or style that doesn’t jive with her.

From that place, we are free to make choices that are ultimately in the best interest of ourselves and our horses.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

A big little thing that makes all the difference not only to how I evaluate my training sessions but also in my ability to stay anchored to the moment and keep running my own race…

I’ll come at this in a slightly roundabout way. Usually, when I finish riding and come into the house, my husband will ask me “How did he (or she) go?”. Not an unusual question, and one that we might be asking ourselves or each other all the time. The “problem” with it, at least in my experience, is that it tends to produce quite reductive answers that expand on some variation of good, bad or ok.

Asking instead “How did he feel today?” creates a whole different reflective experience. When I consider how he felt in the session, I detach myself from a pre-occupation on results and think directly about the process.

Thinking about the feeling he gave me leads me to consider how it is I went about balancing the energies presented in the session.

When I think about how he felt, I consider the connection between us, the level of responsiveness, the softness in my hand and to my leg, the relaxation.

Considering how he felt and using that as the point of consideration makes me reflect on the benchmarks that really matter and ask myself what it is that I would like to improve on for next time.

The big little things that make all the difference.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

One of the most common “deflation points” I see with riders that I work with are feeling of failure or disappointment around situations “coming back” that they had considered resolved; this is especially common in situations where there has been anxiety or trauma. For instance, if you had previously identified as being a nervous rider, but had got yourself to a position where the nerves had taken a backseat, feeling that familiar flush of concern in your tummy when it comes to saddling up can feel like the past has come back to haunt you.

I thought I was past this! I can’t believe this is happening! Am I never going to get over it?

The “will this never go away” feeling is a typical one when we are operating from a linear mindset. It causes us to compartmentalize what it is we are experiencing into categories such as good, not so good, working on it, and done.

The “done” box is where we come unstuck. When we consider an experience to be done, any experiences to the contrary are disempowering and deflating. We berate ourselves for not being better than this, stronger than this, less of a failure. What’s more, we think that we are “back at the start” and lose the sense that we have made any progress at all.

The thing is, we are only able to deal with a situation within the skillset and understanding that are available to us at the time. Doing the work does not mean that you will never experience anxiety, fear, or upset (for example) again, but it does mean that within the range of possibility that was available to you at the time, you created enough momentum to move you towards a better feeling space.

If in the future, the same fears or anxieties return, it’s not a failure or a reflection of deficiency on your part; you aren’t in the same place that you were before. You have moved forward. Instead, what you are now presented with is an opportunity to renegotiate that same experience or feeling state with the new skills, understandings, and resources available to you in the position that you are in. An upward cycle of progress.

Peeling back another layer.

Another invitation to take things forward.

Upward cycles of progress.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

I talk about how important it is to exercise our superpower of showing up a lot, and someone recently asked me what I think the biggest impediment to showing up is.

Before I answered, I asked them what THEY thought it was.

Discipline was the first answer, or a lack of.

Perhaps a lack of knowing WHAT to do was thrown in there.

A lack of mental strength to be able to push through when things were hard was the third suggestion.

I get all three, but I respectfully disagreed with them.

A lack of kindness or love I believe is one of the primary things that stops us showing up.

Think of it this way:

On Day One, you can get out there and do your thing.

But showing up on Day Two or Three requires that you are kind enough with your mind, your heart, and your spirit to forgive any mistakes, take the pressure off yourself to be perfect and to recommit to continuing to show up in the messy wholeness of who you are despite what you might see as your lacks, or your not-good-enough-ness.

The key reason I believe people don’t show up and ride as often as they can is because of how hard we are on ourselves. Because of the scathing commentary of the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee. Because of the fear of getting it wrong and not being good enough.

Kindness and love melts those concerns. It doesn’t make it instantly easy but it says, you know what. It’s ok. This is all part of the process. Let’s do it again tomorrow.

Being kind with your mind is the highest form of practice there is.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

You know, it can be really tough weighing in on conversations around dealing with fear. There are so many different philosophies that people subscribe to, have heard, or work for them that any time someone puts themselves out there and asks a fear-based, riding-related question, I often think that the answers that get thrown their way must leave them with a greater sense of confusion than they felt previously.

I think that I’m in a slightly different position where conversations around fear, trauma, and anxiety occupy the majority of my day. Musing on different scenarios and situations and finding creative ways to soften what can feel like an overwhelming and unnerving place to be is where I invest a lot of my energy, and I’m mindful of the fact that all of us are meeting the moment that we find ourselves in with a different set of experiences, understandings, and expectations. We all occupy our body in different ways, have different stresses that inform the shape it takes and the messages it sends us that in turn inform how we show up in the world and for our horses.

When there is some kind of injury or trauma that is connected to the fear- an accident or a fall for instance- we can be fairly sure that the body is holding onto the energy of that experience and has yet to fully metabolise it. As a consequence, we find ourselves in present-day moments that have little cause for anxiety or concern feeling paralysed by fear or triggered into what can seem like a disproportionate response that is both out of context and may defy logical understanding.

What IS happening, however, is entirely logical. The normal patterning of your nervous system has been interrupted, and a trigger that often lies outside of our conscious awareness signals your body that there is cause for concern. So there we are, knowing on the one hand that this is unnecessary, uncalled for, and potentially even ridiculous, but that doesn’t discount the fact that you have found yourself in a very real place of constriction and concern.

Often times, the diagnosis from well-meaning friends or mentors only serves to exacerbate the feelings that perhaps we should be stronger than this, that it’s some sort of weakness or flaw on our part. We then have input from the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee that compounds the anguish and we drive the feelings deeper and deeper.

The thing is, fear is not a choice. It’s not something you decide your way into or out of. When fear becomes paralysing, working at the level of the mind is often ineffectual. It’s like pulling out the lead rope when the horse you are looking to catch is a silhouette on the horizon. You’re much too late.

When we talk about increasing our capacity to manage experiences and emotions, what we are actually referring to is being able to manage the physiology of the experience. If we can learn to master how fear shows up in our body, for instance, and learn to stay balanced and centered in the midst of it, then we can channel find ways to stay in the moment and take small and incremental steps forward without feeling like we need to wave the white flag and run for the hills. We can gently, purposefully integrate the stored survival energy and begin to re-establish a more settled baseline.

To do this, we need resources. Resources that allow us to tangibly manage that energy and can act as a grounding rod when we feel like the circuit is going to blow. Your resources have to outweigh your stresses, and for as long as that scale is tipped, it’s going to be tough.

So if someone tells you that it’s all in your head, I would respectfully disagree. It’s all in your body. And in my experience, your body is the best place to start.

Onwards.

♥️ Jane

How long does it take to come back?

One of the most important questions to ask.

When you feel afraid, how long does it take to come back?

In the midst of surprise, how quickly can we reestablish a conversation?

If your feathers get ruffled. If you get upset. If you get confused. How long does it take to come back?

Desensitization or acceptance is often promoted as a core principle in many training programs.

If I wave this object, how tolerant are you?

If I expose you to this loud sound, how quickly to you acclimatize to it?

If I do this thing, how readily do you put up with it?

What I now understand is that harmony and connection lie not in dulling the response to an outside stimulus or training dull indifference; it’s in maintaining the aliveness, the noticing, the glorious sensitivity and in this midst of that being able to say, come back to me. And for the answer to be:

Yes. Here I am.

For the horse: If that thing over there scares you, how quickly do you come back?

Is a light touch on the rein enough to establish our connection?

Or have I lost you?

It’s not the “thing” that is the “problem”. It’s the lack of comeback.

Which leads, of course, to the next question.

What do I offer instead?

Have I established myself as reliable and consistent?

Am I a place of peace?

Do I understand your need to react and in doing so, let go of any need to punish it?

What do I offer instead?

How quickly can you come back to me?

And:

How can I ensure that I am desirable to come back to?

❤️ Jane

Developing your confidence requires midwifery. Us humans, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we need to go about things alone. We maroon ourselves on Not Good Enough Island or Here Comes the Anxiety Boulevard and think the movement towards feeling any different is ours and ours alone.

Not so.

Confidence requires a team to bring it into the world.

It starts with giving yourself permission to explore a different way of being. To consider the possibility that it’s available for you in the first place. To entertain the thought that it could be yours.

And then, you find your people to hold you. To let you try it on for size. To be curious about your boundaries of comfort and to discover your okay-ness within that. To tell you that you and all you bring are welcome here.

Curiosity allows you to adventure, to be inquisitive, and both allow you to recognize your creative powers, your generative ability.

Confidence is not a solo operation.

It needs permission to exist.
Support as you explore.
Curiosity to flourish.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

It’s easy to lose yourself in trainings, theories, and teachings that are focused on finding solutions to your stresses, anxieties, and challenges. But in our best attempts to help our horses and ourselves find a place of peace, we can over-focus on our “problems”, and find our solution-seeking ways are leading us away from vitality and aliveness rather than towards it.

Absolutely do what you need to best understand yourself and the position you are in at the moment. But remember what we are seeking is not a “loss” of something or a way to better “manage” things- be that anxiety, fear, concern, trauma, stress- but a gaining of enthusiasm, connection, capacity, robustness.

Along your travels make space for things that move your soul and actively seek them out. The healing is in the wonderment and finding the pockets of life in which it lives.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

Like many others no doubt, I’ve been struggling a bit recently.

The nature of my work means that I spend a lot of time online, so perhaps of late, with the world climate being what it is, with social media and news sites being particularly loud, my mind has been disproportionately fed the opinions and thoughts of others. And tiny bit by tiny bit is has taken me away from myself until I sensed a lingering feeling of disconnection. From what, I wasn’t exactly sure.

Last night, I sat down- with my feelings and thoughts and slightly ache-ey heart- and asked, what’s up?

And I realised, that things were a little shaky. That my foothold of belief in people’s fundamental and basic goodness had grown a little shaky. Where previously, my weight had rested strong in this understanding- the entirety of me feeling steady and well supported- now I had the feeling that it was only the grip of my toes and a few clinging fingers anchoring me to land.

And so I searched. I searched for affirmation of this underlying thread, this invisible silk that binds us all together. In that search, I brought to mind two facets of my learning that brought me comfort, and I share them in the hope that it may do the same for someone else. They come from two very different places but are connected by the same root; the Shambhala tradition of Buddhism and The Polyvagal Theory, as proposed by Stephen Porges.

Let’s start with the first. Shambhala Buddhism is cradled by the understanding that people are formed from of a fundamental, basic goodness. The word that they give to it can be broken down into three main parts that translate to “from the beginning”, “pure” and “complete”.

Pema Chodron uses the analogy of a glass of water to describe our basic nature. Imagine there is a glass of water, she says, clear, sparkling, and fresh. Imagine then someone takes a teaspoon of dirt and drops it into the water and stirs it. Now, the water is not clear, but murky and muddy.

For as long as we keep stirring, the water remains foggy and dark. But if we stop and just rest, the dirt begins to settle until it will come to settle at the bottom and, again, the water will be clear.

What, then, is basic? Is it the churning that is basic? Or the water?

Stephen Porges, when questioned on the essence of his Polyvagal theory comes back to this:

At our core, he asserts, humans are connected, co-operative, and social. Our nervous system is such that the way we engage- through our facial muscles, speech, and physical touch- cues us for feelings of safety or feelings of threat.

That last part is really important; it tells us that as much as our nervous system responds to prompts of concern, it also needs prompts or cues to feel safety and connection. We establish this through physical touch; through the looks of love and connection on the faces of others; through the prosody and tone of the voice. This is not necessarily something that we return to in the absence of threat, but something that is actively established when these markers are there for us to synchronise, unite, and regulate with.

Reminding myself of this caused me to exhale.

At our most basic, we are the water. Basic goodness is our essence.

To viscerally feel this, it is not enough to limit exposure to things that activate our threat systems. We also need to actively seek out that which cues us for safety. For connection. To seek out that remind us of our underlying nature.

For those of us committed to the water underneath, we have to dare to keep finding ways to stop stirring the glass.

So when the dirts in our hair, in our eyes and clinging to our skin, there’s still a voice that whispers,

We are the water.

We are the water.

We are the water.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane