12/12/2025
Wishing you peace.
The red mare and I started our odyssey thanks to an Australian gentleman called Warwick Schiller. Warwick has an online academy and from it I learned everything I needed to know - basically how to stop crying, stop feeling hopeless, and help my rearing, spooking, miserable horse get happy. I was on the verge of sending her back because I could not help her; that’s how bad it had become.
Today, I saw an incredibly patient post from him on his group. Someone had been complaining that ‘the self-improvement stuff had got out of hand’. They clearly wanted formulas and equations and solutions for their horse. And the funny thing is that I understand that. Back in the day, Warwick wasn’t talking about the human side of it. He gave you the horse-solving skills, and then the red mare told me that wasn’t quite enough, in her case. Better, but not enough. So I embarked on a wild voyage of discovery, and that became The Red Mare Self-Improvement Plan. She nodded her head and saw that it was good.
Warwick did the same at the same time and that’s why sometimes I rock up at one of his summits and gaze out at a delightful audience and say, ‘I’d like to give you The Place of Peace.’
Anyway, he very politely said, in response to the complaining post, that there was what he calls The Skills Path for people who don’t want the self-improvement. And he mentioned that, for the rest, once you see the white rabbit down the rabbit hole, you probably will want to follow it.
I smiled quite a lot. I thought of two days ago at the magic field when I had Tern one side of me, with a rope slung loosely round her neck (I am teaching her to neck rein just in case I decide to ride her with no bridle; you never know) and the red mare on the other. The red mare had just finished her breakfast and, seeing Tern and I hanging out, had come to join us. She was unhaltered and could choose to go anywhere she liked. She chose us.
I stepped into that magic. Yes, I thought, I’ll have some of that.
The red mare dropped into profound Place of Peace, almost as if someone had thrown a switch. She invented it, after all.
Tern is learning it. She came from a high-adrenaline job and that’s still fading out of her. She tends to look about, alert to noise and movement. But she could feel the peace and I could see her wanting it.
Their stillness and ease changed the very atoms of the air. Or at least that was what it felt like. I let them send their peace into me, one from each side.
I had been going to do some work. This was better than any work.
I smile when I think of the objection to self-improvement. Because of the red mare, for the red mare, from the red mare I have learned things I never knew before.
Here’s a quick list:
How to do emotional processing
What the nervous system is and how to regulate it, in myself and in my horses.
How to deal with difficult people and difficult situations. (Before, I’m sorry to have to tell you, I mostly cried, grew sullen or went away and pointlessly raged.)
How to let things go.
How to look reality right in the whites of its eyes.
How to deal with unrealistic expectations. (Turn your Expectation Dial down to minus three.)
I’ve learned awareness and agency.
I no longer see damaged people, rush over to them and say, ‘Here is all my power. Take it.’ (Obviously I didn’t literally say that. But that is what I did, in my younger days. Someone once came up to me at a party and said, ‘How is it you always manage to find the maddest person in any room?’ I took it as a compliment.)
Oh, and talking of which, I’ve learned to take compliments. I don’t bat them away as if they were wasps.
I don’t make other people responsible for my feelings, nor do I try to fix the other people.
I understand childhood survival mechanisms and know that we can let them go as adults.
I have made friends with Mabel, my shadow self.
I’m going to stop now, before I bore you to sobs. But the self-improvement stuff has saved my life and if the red mare had settled for second-best, I’d never have found it. I’d still be throwing ropes over her back and desensitising her and thinking that was pretty spiffy. There would be no Place of Peace.
I’ve been doing forty days of gratitude, running up to Christmas. Two minutes each morning, and sometimes later in the day too, of writing down what I’m grateful for.
I am passionately, breathlessly grateful that the red mare did not settle for second-best.
