Training a Difficult Horse

Training a horse shouldn't be a fight, it should be more like a session of meditation.

Sometimes, it's hard to not get frustrated or impatient- such is human nature to most of us living in this modern era. But when the pressure from your behaviour and your energy increases, the horses mind will have not only the task in training to think about, but that negative energy too.

Working with your horse should be like a sort of meditation, a flow of energy between you. Very often it seems the slower you go, the quicker they will learn. Keep your mind balanced, keep your goal only on the next tiny step, open yourself up to considering and accepting the horse's responses and adjust what you're asking accordingly, and don't think about the end result, because it is irrelevant in the present.. and present is what you need to be when you are working with a horse.

Apollo was by far the most difficult horse to introduce to a float that I have met (and that's saying something!). He couldn't go within 5 metres without completely flipping out.

Apollo has prior trauma from his early years with humans. He has a very intense energy, but we have been opening up together for quite some time now, and I felt that we had developed enough trust and training fundamentals for him to conquer this new challenge.

I took his float training very slowly over a period of about 6 sessions, and where in past experiences with float training I would get frustrated or (inwardly) angry, I instead let this experience help me develop as much as it did him, because he needed me to be present and actually feel and express the right sort of energy, not just the right technique and mask what was going on inside (we all know a horse can see right through that mask anyway).

And that is where the meditative feeling came from... from float-load training, (which I often found antagonising) of all things.

And so I enjoyed every step, learnt something new about myself as I so often do with these horses, and not surprisingly, Apollo overcame this challenge beyond what I would have thought possible for him.

In the past when things became difficult or overwhelming I would take a step back for a while to make sure my feelings weren't affecting the horse, but I find that happening less and less.. because as much as I have been training these amazing horses, they have been training me ten fold. I have been learning lessons directly from the masters of Zen, and have become a better person for it.