At least ten summers ago, I had a lesson with someone whose name is one you’ll never hear and whose presence has not stamped the horse world in any way that shows up on social media or much less be rewarded financially.
I can’t tell you anything about that lesson. I can’t remember what we did or the specifics of what was told to me.
It’s like a clear space where I understood that something happened and yet what happened, I do not know.
The only thing I know is that lesson was transformative. And now, having spent a decade and a half teaching myself, I can tell you perhaps why.
There are teachers and coaches who attempt to bring you round to their way of thinking. The work is heady; it involves a lot of processing and thought.
And then, there are teaches and coaches whose work may not completely make sense in the moment, or perhaps you can’t recall what happened or what you worked on, or you felt yourself to be in the mid-zone between understanding and complete miscomprehension.
And then you leave, and you find that something’s changed.
This is the work that works *on* you. Below the level of conscious thought. Outside the realm of your awareness.
Your cells have changed, how you approach things have changed and you may not ever know why. You weren’t aware of the moment you crossed over.
This happens with our horses; what appears like a mess in the moment can be understanding working on and through them, only for clarity to appear, the answers to the questions known days or even weeks later.
Perhaps we refer to this as latent learning but I don’t think that’s quite right. The learning was always happening; it’s our awareness of it that is latent.
I wonder sometimes if, in our in-love-ness with questioning and analytical thought, that we don’t give enough credit to, enough celebration of, enough allowance for, the wisdom of the unconscious.
The reconfiguration of the energetic body that filters through to the physical.
Where we know that something happened, that we understood something to be true, but we can’t explain quite why.
Learning, after all, is more than a little bit magic.
