BlackHorse Horsemanship

22/01/2025

Do your shadow work , the rewards are waiting for you on the otherside of it!

19/01/2025

"You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known."

~ Anthony de Mello, ‘Awareness’.

Image by Elle Arden Images, licensed via Shutterstock.

18/01/2025

12/01/2025

"Not all horses are going to be show jumpers, not all horses are going to be dressage horses. So you have to sort of find where the horse physically fits into what might suit him, but all horses can be comfortable and all horses can have good, solid fundamentals."
- Buck Brannaman
(Photo of Betty Staley, Clinic Sponsor & Participant)

12/01/2025

Thought for the day:
Bad habits or unwanted behaviour can sneak up on you like sunburn.
Beware the little things you let go or deem not important enough to correct.
Just like sunburn, you may not realise you have a problem until it becomes uncomfortable.

09/01/2025

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09/01/2025

"I have an empathy for horses that are troubled and afraid. Some people get mad at their horses but I know what they [the horses] are feeling. But you can’t simply feel sorry for a horse and relinquish your role as a leader and a teacher. You can’t just spoil them. That’s sometimes what people do with kids who are coming from a real dark place. Rather than give them direction and something to do, they feel so darned sorry for the kid that they give ‘em a free pass. That’s as destructive as the other. There are no guidelines." - Buck Brannaman.

08/01/2025

Much of the reason why we give up, fall into despair and abandon our projects is not because things are hard per se, but because they are harder – far harder – than we had ever expected them to be.

It isn’t necessarily difficulty that sinks us; it’s misconceived notions of what a task should legitimately demand. We operate with recklessly inadequate views of what it might take to have a moderately good relationship, to run a more or less viable business, to have a circle of friends, to be healthy, to build a home or to achieve balance of mind.

Our panics are born out of a collective squeamishness about cleanly sharing information on the ubiquity of arduousness. A wiser society would include in every school curriculum a weekly class titled ‘Hell, your future,’ which would systematically induct the young into the necessary degrees of suffering required by any worthwhile life.

The educational establishment would at last recognise that we make people strong not by enchanting them with descriptions of magical opportunities, but by being aptly honest about how every life goes, starting with our own.

The wise keep going not because they are braver, but because they have learnt to be a lot better prepared, by which we mean, a lot sadder. They know that defeats and humiliations are unavoidable events, not anomalous or freakish punishments. They endure on the basis of having managed – with appropriate thoroughness – to extinguish all their more tender and delicate hopes.

To learn more, click the link.

https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/how-to-endure/

06/01/2025

“When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.”

- Edward Teller

05/01/2025

Thought for the day:
Humans often struggle with a horse’s behaviour and things get worse not better.
The biggest issue here is the mindset that we have to overcome anything that doesn’t suit us by either beating it or preventing it through unbending control.
Think about what humans like.
Our entertainment industry makes billions from tv and film that is popular.
What is popular?
Nearly every movie and much of our tv contains various amounts of winning through aggressive behaviour.
Overcome the odds and never back away.
Many kids are learning from an early age that anything can be overcome by bearing down, gritting their teeth and being more aggressive than the person or thing that they don’t want.
Some are learning that the same behaviour can get them what they do want.
I think much of this is driven through fear.
Humans love to see the things they are afraid of destroyed.
It probably even produces feelings of hope.
It’s probably human nature. Through history gladiatorial type entertainment was immensely popular as was bear baiting, c**k fighting, dog fighting and the list goes on.
If you lived in those times or places where daily survival was a case of kill or be killed its understandable to a degree.
Really that has not changed too much with the exception that it’s most often staged or virtual now days.
Truly successful people tend to be those who can use a “never say die” attitude towards working for what they want.
This has nothing to do with aggression but it does take fortitude.
It doesn’t make much in the way of popular entertainment.

Back to our horses.
Problems are often created by the fear, discomfort and confusion caused through a reluctance to trust the horse.
Aggressive riders and fearful riders often create the same issues.
Many aggressive riders are fearful of failure rather than their own safety.
Many frightened riders cause discomfort in a horse through an inability to let go.
Either way some courage is required.
Most times we have to grit our teeth, bear down, overcome our fears, relax and do less!

05/01/2025