This week I had the pleasure of introducing a friend to horses for the first time. We walked stall to stall alongside the barn, and I watched them stop a few feet from Lip, unsure whether to step closer or back away. Lip lifted his head, ears forward, nostrils working. For a long moment neither of them moved.

I have seen thousands of first meetings between horses and people. Somehow this one caught me. It got me thinking about first greetings, and about everything we carry with us into them.

We bring emotions. Excitement, anticipation, and longing, often tangled up with anxiety, fear, or trepidation. My friend had wanted to meet a horse for years, and was also a little afraid of the size of the animal standing in front of them. Both were true at once. They usually are.

We bring assumptions. Whatever we have come to believe about horses from school, from books and movies, from the stories people tell us. Horses are gentle. Horses are dangerous. Horses can smell fear. Horses love carrots. Some of it is true, some of it is half true, and some of it is simply what we were told.

We bring our habits of connecting. Every one of us has a lifetime of patterns for greeting another being. We shake hands. We hug. We pat someone on the back. We look people in the eye, smile, and speak. We offer food. These patterns are so automatic that we hardly notice them, and many of them don’t translate. A pat that feels friendly to us can land as a smack to a horse. A direct stare and a confident stride toward the face can look a lot like a predator. Most dogs will happily take an excited voice, a quick crouch, and a good rub all over. Most horses would rather we slow down, let them reach out and breathe us in, and wait to be invited closer.

And here is the humbling part. With everything we bring, what do we actually know about this particular horse, standing in front of us at this particular moment?

Nothing.

We don’t know his history. We don’t know how his body feels today, what he has learned to expect from people, or what he is hoping for or worried about. Every bit of that has to be discovered.

The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

I love that line, and I also want to be careful with it. Beginner’s mind is not the same as an empty mind. We can’t simply throw away everything we know, and we shouldn’t. What we have learned about connecting with others has served us well. It is a template, and templates are useful.

The challenge is to hold that template loosely. To let go of our expectations enough to take in the reality of the one in front of us, without dismissing everything that has worked for us in the world.

This reminds me of something we know about how the brain makes sense of the world. Psychologists talk about two kinds of processing. Bottom-up processing starts with raw sensory information: the light, the sound, the touch, the smell, all coming in fresh. Top-down processing starts with what we already know. It uses expectations, memory, and experience to interpret that information quickly.

We need both. Top-down processing is what lets an experienced horseman read a horse’s whole posture in a glance and know that something is off. It is fast, efficient, and often wise. Bottom-up processing is what lets us notice the thing we didn’t expect. The small shift of weight, the softening eye, the subtle tightening of the lip that doesn’t fit our story about this horse.

Too much in either direction and we run into trouble. With too much top-down, we see what we expect to see. We greet the horse we imagined instead of the horse in front of us, and we miss what he is telling us. With too much bottom-up, we are flooded. Every sound and movement feels new and possibly dangerous, and we have nothing to anchor us. This is often where fear lives for new riders. Everything is information and nothing makes sense yet.

Good horsemanship lives in the balance. We lean on what we know so we aren’t overwhelmed, and we stay open to the information so we aren’t blinded by what we know.

Back at Lip’s stall, my friend was finding that balance in their own way. They were taking in the size of him, the warmth of his breath, the way his ears followed every move. I suggested they let him come the last little bit, and they offered the back of their hand and simply waited. Lip stretched out his neck, sniffed, blew softly, and dropped his head. My friend chuckled, the kind of delighted and satisfying chuckle that comes when something turns out better than we imagined.

It was a lovely greeting. And it reminded me that the best greetings, with horses and with people, are not performances of what we already know. They are moments of curiosity. A question offered and an answer received.

Every horse we meet, even the ones we have known for years, is a little bit new each day. So are the people we love.

Bring everything you know to the greeting, and then let the one in front of you teach you the rest.

~ Paul

PC – Erin Gilmore Photography

Yesterday I was talking with a young rider I have known for a long time. She was telling me about her college application process and offered to share her application essay. Within moments I received an email, but I didn’t have time to read it thoughtfully until this morning.

I settled myself on the front porch with a blanket and a cup of coffee and opened the document. I found myself reading it twice, then sat for a while with the dog at my feet, not doing much of anything.

I have watched this rider grow up in the saddle. I have sat with the frustration, the tears after rounds that looked fine from the rail, the quiet intensity that most people mistook for focus. What I had not seen, until this morning, was the whole arc laid out in their own words, with an honesty and grace that I am still thinking about.

The essay opens with a confession. Everyone in the horse world has heard that the horse comes first. At ten years old, this rider thought it was the dumbest thing they had ever heard.

I laughed out loud at that line, because I believe it. Their first horse was a winner. They went to shows and came home with ribbons, and the ribbons were the point. They describe sitting with friends who were gushing over their horses after bad rides and thinking those friends were soft. Weak, even. How could anyone be happy after a poor score?

Then comes the sentence that stopped me. They wrote that their scores were tied to their self-worth, and that even a good score brought relief, not joy.

I have spent decades listening for that distinction in my office. Relief and joy can look alike from the outside, but they come from very different places. Joy is what we feel when something good arrives. Relief is what we feel when something bad was avoided. A rider who only ever feels relief is not chasing success. They are running from a verdict. Every round becomes a trial, and the best possible outcome is a temporary acquittal.

That is what performance identity does to a person. When who I am collapses into how I placed, there is no such thing as a safe ride. The nervous system stays braced. And a braced rider is riding a horse who can feel every bit of that bracing.

This young rider describes their first horse, honestly and without self-pity, as a tool for success. When their ambition outgrew what that horse could do, they moved on. I do not read that as a confession of cruelty. I read it as a clear portrait of what it looks like when a child has learned that love is something you earn by winning. You cannot offer a horse a kind of acceptance you have never been offered yourself.

Then a new horse arrived. Funny, full of personality, and a beast on course. On the very first ride, this rider forgot about the scores. Riding stopped feeling like clocking in for a shift and started feeling like fun.

What happened next is the part every sport psychologist should underline. They did not trust it. They beat themselves up, worried that they were going soft, losing their edge, trading ambition for a good time.

I hear this fear from serious athletes all the time. The inner critic has been running the show for so long that it feels like the engine. If I stop being hard on myself, who will make me work? If I enjoy this, will I stop caring? The critic convinces us that our cruelty is our competitiveness. It almost never is.

This rider wrote that they had found the horse version of themselves. Full of ambition, and, they would discover, starving for connection and a partner.

That line is the hinge of the whole story. The ambition never left. What arrived alongside it was love. And love, it turns out, is not the enemy of performance. It is the ground performance grows in.

Then came a bad ride. They were upset, of course. But when they looked at their horse, instead of dread, they felt gratitude. Gratitude that he had tried as hard as he could. And then the sentence I keep returning to:

“On my first horse, our best was never enough, because enough didn’t exist.”

Enough didn’t exist. I have read a great deal of psychology in my life, and I am not sure I have seen the cost of contingent self-worth described more precisely. When worth must be earned, the target always moves. There is no finish line, only the next class, the next height, the next verdict.

What this rider found was not a lowered bar. They went on to win at the highest level of their age group. What they found was a floor. A place to stand that did not depend on the result. Their relationship with their horse became a source of safety, and from that safety came both joy and better riding. They noticed it themselves. The more they patted him, hugged him, and gave him their love, the better he went.

None of this surprises me as a horseman. A horse who feels safe with his rider has more of himself available to give. A rider who feels safe in her own worth has more of herself available to notice, adjust, and ask clearly. Connection before performance is not a sentimental slogan. It is how two nervous systems find each other.

The final paragraph of the essay notes something easy to miss. Winning used to be lonely. Now there are people, and a horse, to celebrate with. That is the quiet gift underneath all of it. Performance identity isolates us, because everyone becomes a competitor or a judge. Connection brings us back into the herd.

I did not teach this young person what they wrote. They lived it, with a horse who showed them the way, and they found the words for it on their own. My part, over the years, was mostly to keep the door open and to keep saying, in one form or another, that they were more than their scores. It is a strange and humbling thing to watch someone finally hear it, not from you, but from their horse.

The ribbons still matter to them. They always will. But they mean something different now. They used to say what this rider was worth. Now they say what the two of them built together.

The horse comes first. I suspect a ten-year-old somewhere is still rolling their eyes at that. I hope they find their way to enough.

Sometimes the best thing we can do for our ambition is to stop letting it decide whether we are loved.

~ Paul

Yes, it is that time again. Reflections after another amazing clinic with Pippa Callanan. Learning with her is like making a really good soup. It takes time, patience, quality ingredients, and the artistry and experience to add just enough of each.

One of the exciting parts for me is that my lovely mare, Nubble, and I were both sound enough to dance together. When you don’t take something for granted, you savor it in a way that brings a vibrance to the experience, and you start to notice the most interesting and subtle things.

Several moments from the clinic stand out as powerfully important, but one has flowed into every one of my rides this week. It seems small as I write about it, yet its impact has been profound.

During my ride on Nubble, Pippa had us demonstrate a working walk, collected walk, counted walk, and piaffe in sequence, carefully transitioning between them. I had performed each of these hundreds of times, but never in sequence. Never where I had to create and feel the subtle differences as I moved from one to the next: the changes in Nubble’s cadence, her energy, and the bounce in her step. 

This is just one part of Pippa’s brilliance. The exercise marshaled my attention in a way that let me both appreciate the experience and remember it. On top of that, I connected to our capability, Nubble’s and mine. That sometimes ephemeral sense of “I can do this!”

More than the learning and awareness, I have been filled with the desire to recreate those moments, to craft that soup again and again. What exactly were the ingredients? Was it the quality of the contact and Nubble’s relaxed jaw? Was it my posture and balance? Was it the position and action of my leg? Which ones were essential? How much of each? How did their balance need to change in creating each variation?

The thought I keep coming back to is that identifying the exact formula is impossible. Once again I am reminded that the result I want does not come from a linear process. It emerges from a constellation of ingredients, carefully collected under the watchful guidance of a caring and skilled mentor and through hundreds of hours of thoughtful, diligent practice.

I had a session this week with one of my youngest riders. We were reviewing her progress, and I asked her to reflect on what she had accomplished so far. Then I asked how she had gotten there. How did she make her soup? She said the most insightful thing. She started with, “All the tools.” Then she added, “We talked and worked on it and then all the sudden, poof, I did it.”

I could not have described it better. You gather the ingredients. You start putting them together, tasting as you go. You make the soup again and again, playing with the balance of ingredients and conditions, and one day, poof, it’s soup.

What soup are you making?

~ Paul

Walk down a barn aisle and you start to craft a story filled with seemingly benign judgments. That one is misbehaving. He is kicking the door. That one is trouble. She is pawing in the crossties. That one is fine… he is standing still.

I told myself those stories a thousand times, casually and automatically, because it is the story almost all of us were taught. Trouble is what you can see. So, when you cannot see any, there is none.

Underneath that is a single assumption. We assume a troubled animal will show us, that distress announces itself, that if something were really wrong we would see it. And nowhere do we trust that assumption more than with fear. Fear spooks, it braces, it bolts. So when the spooking stops, we believe the fear stopped with it.

Here is the thing. The absence of visible fear does not tell you that a frightened animal is at peace. It may tell you only that the fear is no longer being expressed in the way you expect.

Take a frightened horse and make him stop reacting. He may become watchful. He may stand still while every part of him remains organized around what might happen next. He is not grazing. He is not dozing with a hind leg cocked and his lower lip loose. He is not nosing the strange bucket somebody left in the corner just to find out what it is.

He looks, if anything, tense. Nobody walks past that horse and calls him fine.

But there is another possibility, and this one can fool many people, including me. Instead of staying up, the nervous system can shut down. It can quit.

There is a kind of horse who stands very still for long stretches. Neck flat and level with his back. Eyes open, staring, not much blinking. Ears fixed and pointed back. He does not react much to a person appearing at his stall, or to a sudden noise, or to being touched. He looks, honestly, like a horse who has finally settled.

He has not settled. He has given up.

Researchers have studied horses who display this kind of withdrawn behavior, and they found something that should stop all of us cold. Those withdrawn horses had lower plasma cortisol levels than their non-withdrawn neighbors. Lower. So if you had walked up and administered a lab test, the number might have looked reassuring even though there was something seriously wrong.

The number does not tell you the whole story. Neither does the behavior by itself. Neither tells you what kind of life is happening inside the animal.

On the surface those two horses could not look less alike. One is tight. The other is still. Yet neither is grazing quietly. Neither plays. Neither goes looking for anybody. The same things are missing from both.

That is why quiet tells you so little. Quiet is not the same as safe. Quiet is just quiet.

I have watched this play out with clients more times than I can count. Someone finds a horse who is dead quiet. Bombproof. Stands like a rock at the mounting block, does not care about the tarp or the traffic or the dog. They try him, they love him, they buy him. And three or four weeks after he gets home, he starts to act up. Suddenly he has opinions. And the question the new owner always asks, and it is a fair question, is whether he was drugged the day they rode him. Sometimes he was. That happens, and I am not naive about it.

But I have come to wonder about a different explanation. What if he was not drugged and not calm either? What if he was shut down? And then he went home with a kind person who turned him out with friends, and fed him well, and did not ask much of him for a few weeks… and he woke up.

That is not a horse getting worse. That is a horse coming back to life.

It just came back in a way the new owner did not order. Because what returns first, when a shut-down animal starts to revive, is not the pleasant stuff. It is the opinions. The reactions. The ability to say no. A creature waking up is not necessarily a tidy process. Yet I would rather have a horse with opinions and a plan for helping him than a horse who has quit.

I want to be careful here, because a horse who suddenly has opinions can be genuinely dangerous, and this is the moment to get good help. But it changes what you think you are looking at. The behavior did not come out of nowhere. It came out of him.

So it helps to better understand the flavors of quiet. A horse can stop reacting because reacting never helped, or because he is still watching, or because he has stopped expecting anything to change. None of that is safety.

Safety is not what remains when fear disappears. It is not an empty space where the trouble used to be. Safety has something in it. A horse who feels safe has room for the rest of his life.

He grazes. He rests. He investigates. He plays. He notices another horse and goes over to say hello. He wanders away again. He has opinions. He can startle and recover. He can say no and then come back. His nervous system is not simply quiet. It is available.

We do the same thing with each other, of course. Somebody says they’re fine and we believe them, because nothing is visibly on fire. No crisis, no tears, no call at midnight. But not falling apart is a very low bar to clear, and I have known plenty of people, and have been one myself, who cleared it for years while nothing good was actually happening inside their lives.

The absence of a problem is not the presence of an engaged life.

These days I ask different questions with both horses and people. I used to wonder what was wrong. The true answers to that question are often easy to disguise. Now I ask what is alive.

Is he eating like he means it? Is he curious about something? Does he play? Does he seek anybody out, or does he only tolerate being sought? With people, same question in different clothes. Not, are you managing. But, what lights you up and is there anything you are looking forward to?

It is a harder question. It does not let anybody off the hook, including me. But it is the honest one, because it looks for something rather than settling for the absence of something.

Peace is not what is left when the trouble stops.

Peace is comes from connection and is something a body goes out and does.

Look for that.

A horse’s lesson in healthy boundaries, relational safety, and staying yourself in close relationships.

Sit on a horse and you learn something about balance you can never quite unlearn. Balance is not a thing you get… and then keep. It is not a position you find once and settle into. It is a thousand tiny corrections, most of them too small to see, made and unmade and made again, breath by breath, stride by stride. The moment you stop correcting, you start to fall. Good riders do not look busy. They look still. But that stillness is not the absence of effort. It is effort so constant and so refined that it disappears.

I have come to believe that boundaries work the same way.

We talk about boundaries as if they were walls. Build them once, build them high, and you are safe. Keep people out and nothing can hurt you. I understand the appeal. But it has never matched what I actually see, in my clients, in my horses, or in myself.

A wall keeps everything out. That is all it knows how to do. And a person who has built one has not solved the problem of closeness or safety with others in this world. They have only stopped facing it.

A boundary is a different thing altogether. A boundary is not where I keep you out. It is where I end and you begin. It is my sense of myself, held steady, while you are near. And like balance, it is not a position. It is a living act, corrected moment by moment, and hardest to hold with the ones standing closest.

Here is something I have noticed about myself, and maybe you will recognize it. I can keep a clean, easy boundary with a horse that is not mine. All day long. I can be kind and clear and unbothered, ask what needs asking, and never once lose track of where I stop and the horse starts. Put me on my own horse, with my own hopes riding along, and it gets harder. The closer a thing is to my heart, the harder it is to stay myself inside it. My marriage of thirty-eight years is where I have practiced this the most, and still get it wrong the most. My grown sons, the same. The people I love most are the people I am most tempted to disappear into, or to wall off from. Same fear, two costumes.

Because that is the thing about losing your balance. It goes two ways.

Lean too far away and you harden. You become the fortress. Defended, unreachable, safe and alone. That danger is easy to see. We all know the person who has walled themselves off.

Lean too far toward the other and you disappear. You become the doormat, yes, but there is a deeper and truer name for what is happening. It is fusion. You melt into the other person, you become whatever the moment seems to need, until there is no you left in the room. And fusion is the danger we almost never name, because it does not look like a danger at all. It looks like devotion. It looks like love.

But it is every bit as dangerous as the wall, and in some ways worse, precisely because it hides so well. When I dissolve into you, there is no longer a me here to meet you. And two nervous systems with no boundary between them do not calm each other. They catch each other. Your worry becomes mine, mine feeds yours, and around we go, with no steady ground under either of us. I cannot help you find your feet if I have given away my own. The calm you borrow from me only works if I am still standing somewhere you are not. Fusion gives that away. It trades the two of us for one blurred thing that cannot hold anyone.

So both roads fail, and they fail in the same place. The fortress keeps everyone at arm’s length and calls it strength. The fused pour themselves out and call it love. Neither one has done the harder thing, which is to stay a whole, distinct person while letting another all the way in. That is why the person with no boundaries cannot actually afford the closeness they are chasing. Push them away, or vanish into them. Either way, no one is truly met. No one feels safe.

A boundary is what refuses that trade. If I know where I end, I can let you all the way in without fear of losing myself, because I know I will still be here when you go. It is the person with a clear, kind boundary who can afford to be generous. To be soft. To be truly open. I used to assume the most boundaried people would be the coldest. I have found the reverse. The warmest, most compassionate people I know are almost always the most clearly bounded. The fence is what lets them keep the gate open.

A boundary is a balance. It is the quiet, endless, mostly invisible work of staying yourself while staying close. You will lose it and find it, lose it and find it, especially with the ones you love, for as long as you live. That is not failure. That is what balance is.

The goal was never to need less of anyone, nor become one with someone else. The goal is to become someone who is solid and secure enough to be in close relationship with others, both horse and human and in this way build true safety.

~ Paul

PC – Erin Gilmore Photography

Several of my riding friends have asked about my mare Nubble and how she is doing after her recent lameness. The answer is not a simple one, but her diagnosis has presented an opportunity for some soul-searching about ambition, competition, and what partnership with horses really asks of us.

After a thoughtful examination, our veterinarian discovered navicular changes in her left front foot, as well as advancing arthritis in both front pasterns. In my conversation with the vet about the results of the evaluation, I came away with both an understanding and a question.

We could make her sound. With the right shoeing, injections, medication, and ongoing management, Nubble could likely return to work comfortably. But comfortable is not the same as healed. The degeneration underneath would still be there, and pushing her fitness and collection further would likely accelerate it rather than reverse it. We could manage the symptoms. We could not undo the underlying changes.

And so, the question that has stayed with me since that conversation is not really about her soundness at all.

Why? To what end?

When Competition Changes the Story

That question has really challenged me. Most of you know that I returned to competition in recent years. This year, Nubble and I qualified for the USA Working Equitation Region 6 Championship. That pursuit had led me to ask more of her. Not any sort of intense or draconian more. Just more. More fitness. More practice. A higher level of responsiveness and collection.

There is nothing inherently wrong with asking a horse to become fitter, stronger, more balanced, or more responsive. Thoughtful training can contribute to a horse’s well-being and help both horse and rider grow. Competition can also be joyful. It can give our training direction, invite us to test our communication, and create opportunities to learn alongside others.

But the meaning of competition depends partly on the story we bring to it.

What I realized was that my motivations had shifted. The story I was living had changed slowly and almost imperceptibly. It had become more heavily layered with my own ambition. Somehow, it had become increasingly important to prove something to myself and perhaps to the world by winning. Competition had shifted from playful exploration toward a personal agenda.

Examining Ambition Without Assigning Blame

I want to be clear. I have no idea whether Nubble’s soundness issues are related in any way to this shift in our story. Each of her challenges is progressive by nature. This could all be part of a natural degenerative process and have very little to do with my ambition.

This is not an attempt to create a simple causal explanation or assign blame. Horses experience arthritis, navicular changes, and other degenerative conditions for many reasons. Even with excellent care, thoughtful training, and attentive management, their bodies change over time.

But uncertainty about the cause does not relieve me of the responsibility to examine what is guiding my choices now.

The question is no longer simply whether we can make Nubble comfortable enough to work. The deeper questions are:

• What would I be asking her to do?
• Why would I be asking her to do it?
• Who would benefit from that decision?
• What risks would she carry so that I could pursue my goals?
• What does genuine partnership with horses require of me now?

These are uncomfortable questions, but discomfort is not necessarily a sign that we should turn away. Sometimes it is an invitation to look more honestly at the story we have been living.

The Stories That Shape Our Decisions

The stories we live inside shape what we notice, what we pursue, and what we ask of ourselves and others. Most of the time, they do this quietly.

When our story is about curiosity and partnership, we make one set of choices. When it becomes a story about winning, proving ourselves, or securing our worth, we may begin making different choices without consciously recognizing the change.

Play can become performance. Exploration can become conquest. A shared experience can become a personal test.

Ambition itself is not necessarily the problem. Ambition can inspire learning, discipline, creativity, and growth. The challenge is remaining aware of when our ambition begins to eclipse the needs of the horse who makes that pursuit possible.

That awareness matters because the story I am enacting will guide the decisions I make from here. Recognizing my shifting motivations can help me choose what comes next. It can also help ground me again in my core values.

Returning to Partnership and Mutual Belonging

Nubble does not exist to gratify my desire to conquer others in competition or to prove myself. She is not a vehicle for my ambition or a measure of my worth.

Rather, we both belong to this shared world of horses and humans. We belong to each other.

That belonging creates responsibility. It asks me to consider not only what is technically possible, but also what is kind, fair, and worthy of the relationship we have built. It asks me to listen when circumstances change and to let the shape of our partnership change with them.

Within that partnership, I will care for her. I will work with our veterinarian and farrier to keep her comfortable. I will remain curious about what she enjoys and what her body can comfortably offer. Most importantly, I will not allow an old competitive story to determine what our future must look like.

Together, we will return to playing, exploring, and discovering what remains possible through partnership and mutual belonging.

Perhaps that is the deeper work for all of us: not simply deciding what we can ask of our horses, but remaining honest about why we are asking.

~ Paul