Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

The Habit of Action

Inaction, contrary to its reputation as being a refuge, is neither safe nor comfortable. -Madeline Kuhn

Sometimes not-doing is the hardest thing for us to do. Often it as also the most important thing we could do. Very often we act without thought, without being truly conscious of what we are doing and why we are doing it. We act out of the need to fill a space, the need to avoid the awkwardness of stillness, the need to prop up a façade about ourselves that we fear is crumbling. But in doing without thinking we are simply reaffirming our habits, reinforcing the behaviors that have become our conditioned responses. In effect, we stay asleep at the wheel of our lives. When we allow stillness we invite the vibrations of life to inform us in making wise decisions.

Being without doing was conditioned out of me at an early age. In the household where I grew up, being inactive was simply not an option. There was always a long list of projects to be completed, repairs to be made, things to be built, and chores to be done. To be caught not working while someone else was – and they always were – was to be burdened with a heavy sense of guilt.

I don't know that this made me better at doing. In fact, I doubt that I became any more productive for this conditioning. What I did learn was a need to pretend to be doing. I could not sustain the pace, so I developed the need to deceive to try and save some face and deflect some guilt. What I've started to realize is that in learning to pretend this way, the main person I was deceiving was myself. I tricked myself into thinking that the pretending worked, so I kept doing it, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Soon it became a habit to act like I was acting, even when stillness was what I really needed. It's a behavior that still retains some grip on me to this day.

The lesson of non-doing is one that has risen like cream to the top of my horsemanship journey many times. Looking back, I can see that I was being offered ripe opportunities to learn it from the very beginning. However, it took a long time for me to even begin to see it as an opportunity, to recognize the value in the chance to simply be without having to do.

From the start, I was very concerned with needing to know what to do when I was with a horse. How to do this, how to do that. What order to do them in. What to do next. What to do if that doesn't work. How many times to do it. Where to do it. When to do it again and when to move on to the next thing. What is the next thing? How do I do that? And what if this other thing happens, then what do I do? I was very uncomfortable, unable to just be with the horse without a plan of action.

I began to first glimpse the power of pausing when I worked with a nervous colt named Rosie. Looking back, I'm not sure if she was naturally nervous or if I was bringing that energy to the situation. Whatever the case, Rosie was scared of new things and tended to get overloaded with frantic energy very quickly. I discovered that often she would just need to stand still to process something that had happened. As I helped her to bring her energy down by stopping and waiting with her, I started to learn my own lessons about stillness.

When I began teaching at the horse rescue, my tendency was to want to be hands on with everyone all the time. I didn't realize it at the time, but I can now see that I was very concerned that they not be uncomfortable in the same ways that I was when I started with horses. I was compelled to make sure they never had an unanswered question or an undirected moment. It took me quite a while to realize that this was not helping, to see that I was simply adding energy to a situation where I was trying to get nervous people to help nervous horses become calm.

I remember one session specifically. We were a couple of months into the program and to the point where there were regularly eight or ten volunteers at the rescue for our weekly lesson evening. We had even more this week than usual, enough bodies that I couldn't possibly be holding each of their hands the entire time. Initially I tried, rushing here and there, calling directions across the arena, and generally getting frantic. Then I started to realize something mind-blowing: the volunteers that were getting the least attention were, in fact, having the most success. They didn't need me helping all the time. They just needed an idea and the space to explore that idea with their horse.

For the first several months that I worked with Koa, a rescued Mustang, I thought she needed a lot of activity all the time. She is really curious, always picking things up with her mouth, pushing objects with her nose, and putting herself in the middle of any group. During the time that I was working with her but still running the volunteer program, I was primarily rewarding her curiosity and creativity. I had plenty of horses to work with that had problems to solve, and I was content simply being with her and seeing what she had to offer me.

After finishing my year of service at the rescue, I started to put a lot more attention on Koa. I no longer had sixty volunteers and a hundred horses to put my energy into, and without realizing what I was doing I began asking her to fill that entire vacuum. I started asking far more of her than I had ever before, and got much more strict about what I was looking for in our relationship. It wasn't long before things started to fall apart between us.

Yet again, I was being offered the opportunity to learn lessons in non-action. I was lucky enough to have someone who was able to open my eyes to what I was doing. I began to understand that my constant need to be doing, fixing, and changing things with Koa was driving a wedge between us.

One day, after I had asked her to perform some specific task, she froze and would not come to me. I backed away, pulled gently and then more firmly on her rope, moved from side to side to try and help her get unstuck, to no avail. I knew pushing too hard when she was frozen would be disastrous, so I did the only thing I could think of to do. I stopped. I squatted down in the sand, let the rope slack, and waited. And waited. And waited some more. I don't know how long it was, likely only a few minutes, but it seemed like an eternity.

Then the magic happened. Koa blew out a little. Then shook her head, blowing some more. Then her mouth opened, her lips hanging loose and eyes rolling back in her head, and she yawned one of the biggest yawns I had ever seen. She yawned and yawned, and just when I thought she must be done, she shook and yawned some more. And then, with the sweetest look on her face, she walked slowly over to me and licked my outstretched hand.

I am not cured, by any stretch. I am still apt to fall into the trap of believing that action is the answer. I continue to get uncomfortable standing still when I feel like I should be fixing something. But I do feel these tendencies changing. I sense the slight unraveling each time I am able to stop and be still for a moment instead of falling into a conditioned habit. I touch a sense of ease when I can simply be for a moment instead of doing. In these moments I can feel the vibrations of life resonating in my body, my mind, and my heart, and I can feel those vibrations shaking loose my old patterns, creating space for a greater opening to blossom.