Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Partnership is Letting Go

About the Book

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning. -Lao Tzu

I have often found it useful to apply Asteya, the practice of letting go or releasing to my life. While this sometimes has to do with physical things, it also very frequently has to do with ideas, modalities, and habitual behaviors. Time and again I find myself holding on to ideas about how something should be or an image of what I should do in a situation. As I've started to be conscious of this grasping I've also begun to taste the power of letting go of these ideas.

On my fifth ride with my Mustang, Koa, things were not going well. She was heavy, contradictory, and gate-sour. I was correcting nearly continuously. I was not happy and neither was she. I was also very, very confused. The first few minutes of the ride had been perfect. So had the previous rides. In fact, after each of the first four rides, I had been ecstatic about how well things had gone.

"Get down," was the advice from my fiancé, who was in the arena riding her own green Mustang. I wasn't so sure. Even with all my best intentions of putting the relationship first and being a partner rather than a predator, I was still thinking that I needed to stay up there and work it out or she'd learn the "wrong" thing from the ride.

Luckily, I listened and got down. The change was immediate. Koa was right at my side, sticking to me perfectly as I began to walk around the arena. I walked towards the gate. I walked away from the gate. I trotted and she trotted with me. We circled. We stopped. We backed and turned and cut. All of this with the lightness and responsiveness I had wanted when I was on her back.

What I came to realize was that early during our ride I had started to make Koa wrong for things. I had formed a very specific idea of what she was supposed to do. I began to say no to her ideas and it got progressively easier and easier to do so. I became very confrontational, making each turn into a contest. She would push and I would push. I would pull and she would pull back. She was acting out because she had become unconfident and uncomfortable with me on her back and I had made her wrong for telling me so. When I didn't listen to what she was telling me I had stopped acting like a partner and started acting like a master.

Once I was back on the ground, we both regained comfort and confidence. She was at liberty, not attached to me by anything other than our connection. I began walking and she moved with me, something we'd done many times. I was making suggestions about where to turn, what speed to go, and when to stop, but I was also listening to her. If she needed to go to the left a little, I'd go with her. If she needed to speed up, I'd speed up to. In short, the fight was gone.

By making the choice to let go of my power, position, and goals, I regained her partnership. Once back in a state of partnership, I had the ability to begin working towards my goals again, but in conversation rather than argument. When I went beyond the need to win, when I stopped hoarding my ideas about what I needed to get done, I regained what I truly desired.