So I'm sure most of you know the old saying 'Patience is a Virtue'. I'm pretty sure growing up, it was one of my parent's favorites. I always wondered what it meant. What is a 'virtue'? From what I always understood it is something that you have, or don't have, that other people admire. I think the key there was you either have it, or you don't. Making something a virtue certainly makes people strive to achieve it. Like Patience, our topic of the day. You're 5 years old and bouncing off the edge of your seat... ("Are we There yet???")... and your parents reply with some version of "no, not yet, you asked me that three seconds ago. You know Johnny, Patience is a virtue."
So coming back to working with the horses, I'd have to say in my experience, patience is not a virtue. Yes, of course, some horses have it and some horses don't, but they can all learn it. For that reason I'm now defining patience as a skill and not as a virtue. From a more personal perspective, horses will teach you patience. I'm not saying it's an easy skill to learn, because some days it's not. When you're energy is moving a hundred kilometers an hour and your mind is bouncing off the wall in another time-space dimension, it's really hard to focus. Some days this is pretty typical for us ADD people. Horses experience the same thing, and usually the younger they are, the worse this is. So if patience has now become a skill, how do we teach it?
Honestly, with patience. If you are able to set the example for your horse of how you would like him/her to react then eventually they will take your lead. It's a bit of a nasty circle sometimes. Horses as herd animals are so intune to other beings around them, whether that be other horses, or us as people. They pick up on so much that we can not even being to understand. Have you ever had one of 'those days'? The days where life just comes crashing down and your world seems like it's about to fall apart? It's on those days that you think a nice relaxing ride with your equine friend will make it all better but when you get out to the barn your horse seems to be in exactly the same mood that you are? There is only one common denominator between his bad mood and yours and that is you. Chances are he's picking it all up from you. Not that horses don't have bad days, because they do, but they have this amazing ability to undertake the emotional climate around them. They are empaths on the most amazing level. They not only feel the emotions of everything around them, they usually become the eomotions. It's a deep rooted survial tactic, you see it in most herd-based prey animals with a big flight instinct. Not only are they extremely sensative to all that surrounds them pysically, the awakened horse is intune to all levels of emotional and spiritual climates as well. So linking this back to our topic of the day; Teach Patience with Patience. Understand that it may take your horse a while to get something, but all the time that you put in to 'waiting it out' will come back to you in the end, and it will come back with a stronger, more willing horse leading the way.
On the other side of things, I always have to think of what the horse feels and thinks. After all, here we have this amazing creature of beauty, power and just overall awesomeness, and we are constantly expecting them to interact on our level. It comes back to the speaking german analogy. Your horse is speaking German, in three different dialects, all at the same time, and we humans are speaking plain old english. Infact most of the time we are speaking so much english that we miss the german all together and interpret the things we do hear as something completely out of context. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for us horses are intune with our own deeply buried german speaking parts, if you will. This creates in them a willingness to try and speak english for us, if we come in with a valuable reason why they should. Most of the time, in traditional training techniques, this comes in from a discipline area. 'If you don't do this, I will let you know you did it wrong'. This is the survival instinct of the herd, which is why horses respond so well to negative training techniques. If your horse does something that is not acceptable in his society, that is; if he is rude, not paying attention to other herd members, or doing something else that could endanger the well being of the whole herd, he is reprimanded. So is the reason why he responds when we say 'NO!'. Unfortunately, with this situation it is so easy to get into a dominating way of training, and very rarely are us humans ever willing to take a step back and learn to speak German. So many times we see the horse as 'just a horse', not as an individual with emotions and feelings, spiritual awareness, ect. So what happens when we cross that brigde? when we take that step back and allow the horse to teach us? Now we are truly learning to be horse-people. We are learning how to speak three kinds of german simultaneously. Most of the time we suck at it, but the horses are patient teachers, and in being so they teach us to be patient with ourselves.
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