We LOVE our horses! However, sometimes we are afraid of our horses for one reason or another. Maybe we’ve been in situations that tested our level of partnership and we realized that our horse didn’t trust our judgment. Other times we have dreams of what we’d like to accomplish with our horses but we’re afraid of some of the steps it will take to accomplish those goals. There is no other sport that people will stay in despite of the level of fear some of us have. The desire to accomplish our dreams and to have a great connection with our horses causes us to try to ignore our fears. We try to push through rising levels of internal turmoil and anxiety to attain them. You know it but repress it and your horse feels it and can’t ignore it. This causes a break down in your ability to communicate with your horse which in turn can lead to a multitude of undesired consequences. But we love our horses so we keep trying.
I don’t like motorcycles, actually I’m terrified of them. Therefore, I refrain from having anything to do with them. Except for the one time I fell for a guy that owned a motorcycle. I tried to push through my fear in order to be with him. Unfortunately I did not know how to process that fear which made me appear erratic in my behavior and in his eyes made me look a little crazy. Needless to say there wasn’t a second date.
For the first year of owning my horse Sweetie I was afraid of asking her to canter but I was persistent and I kept trying. In hindsight I probably should have gotten some lessons, but we will save that story for another time. I am also afraid of jumping anything, even if it’s small. Some of my students are afraid to get on their horses, others are afraid of trail riding. But we stay in the game and keep trying because we love being with our horses and we want to reach our goals with them.
So why do we have fear? At a primal level our brain thinks we could die and the fear response is our brain’s way of trying to keep us safe. In truth we know we may fall off of our horse and get hurt at some point but we love riding, so we keep trying. For most of us the rewards far outweigh the risks.
So how do we handle our fear? How can we do better than the “crazy” version of Margaret on a motorcycle?
To put it simply, fear is an alarm bell. Sometimes that alarm bell is real and we need to evaluate wether we have the knowledge and skills to handle that situation. Other times it is a false alarm but instead of evaluating the situation, we get scared of our fears and/or feel shameful about them. This compounds our fears and turns us into “crazy” Margaret on a motorcycle. Fear causes tension which makes our bodies ridged. In these moments we tend to grab our horses with our hand and legs and instantly lose focus. In these moments we often end up scaring our horses, just like I scared off the poor guy on the motorcycle. I was grabbing and holding onto him so hard I don’t know if he could breathe. We make it a lot harder on ourselves and our horses without actually meaning to do so.
We need to learn how to feel the fear, stop and evaluate the situation and then decide if it is valid. Ask yourself what is the fear trying to tell you. Do you have the knowledge and skills to handle this? If the answer is yes then breathe into the fear. Take a few minutes to stay with the fear, notice where it is in your body. What exactly does it feel like, can you describe it? Not the swirl of thoughts racing through your mind, but rather the sensations in your body. For me, fear feels like a very fast vibration and tingling in my chest. My throat becomes very tight, like my airway is being closed off. This is accompanied by sharp, painful sensations as well. If I resist or try to push it away, the symptoms intensify and my breathing gets shallow. I now recognize that deep breathing helps to loosen the grip fear has over me, so I try to open my chest to make room for it. Fear, when you allow it, is not a bad thing. People go to scary movies and jump out of air planes because they like the feeling and the adrenaline they provide. It only becomes a problem when we are afraid of our fear and fight against it. I can ride over jumps when I acknowledge my fears by: stopping, evaluating the situation and answering “yes I do have the knowledge and skills to do that”. This process allows me to breathe through the feelings of my fears. I can then relax and ride over small jumps. I am very proud of this accomplishment as jumping has always been a “fear factor” for me.
I reflect back on an experience I had 23 years ago, when I was riding in a level 3 Parelli clinic. The instructor had asked the class to jump over a barrel laying on its side. It was probably no more than 2 feet tall but I was terrified. I trotted up to the barrel staring at it, wide eyed. My horse, Sweetie stopped and looked at it too. The instructor told me that I needed to look up. “No, then she WILL jump!” I gasped in response. Ashamed, I turned and rode to the corner of the arena and cried in the sand. I had so much guilt about my fear. If I had known how to stop and evaluate the situation I could have said, “no I don’t have the knowledge or skills to jump a two foot jump when I had never jumped anything before”. I could have started with ground poles and worked my way up. Or I could have breathed into the fear and tried. I most likely wouldn’t have fallen off if I had relaxed and allowed myself to feel the sensations. Conversely, if I had tried resisting the fear in a tense, ridged, grabbing with my legs and hands kind of way I would have very likely fallen off.
We have all heard the saying, “feel the fear and do it anyway”. We are often afraid of things we haven’t done yet. We need to be able to feel the fear and move forward but that doesn’t mean brace against it just to get a task done. It means breathe into it, accept it, notice how it feels, watch it with compassion and understanding. Then try.
Fear can keep us safe, but it keeps us small. We can’t reach our goals or potential if we don’t learn how to truly feel through these moments, accept where we’re at and then try. So if the answer is yes I do have the knowledge and skills take a breath and go ride.