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Researchers have studied horses who display this kind of withdrawn behavior, and they found something that should stop all of us cold. Those withdrawn horses had lower plasma cortisol levels than their non-withdrawn neighbors.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

I have so many things on my mind this morning.

I sat down to write with a clear idea of where I wanted to go, but by the time I finished the first sentence another idea had arrived, and the first one lost its luster. Then came a third. A fourth. A fifth.

So instead of a carefully formulated essay, you may simply end up walking with me through the swirling mass of ideas that fills my head.

When Too Many Ideas Compete for Attention

Most of what I am reflecting on is the direct result of our recent clinic with Pippa Callanan. I carried so many emotions into that weekend. A deep sadness that I would not be dancing with my beloved Nubble (more to come about her in the weeks ahead). Worry about Revel, who was recovering from both lameness and a gastrointestinal infection. Guarded optimism and curiosity about what a full clinic experience with my sweet, goofy partner in crime, Lil’ Joe, might be like. Joy at spending time with my friend and mentor Pippa. And delight in sharing a community of horsewomen and horsemen committed to searching for and practicing what Pippa so beautifully describes as “gentle and effective, and in alignment with the nature of the horse.”

As I type these words, I feel every one of those emotions again.

As the swirl begins to settle, there are a few things that I feel compelled to share. Nothing earth shattering or blindingly illuminating. Just a handful of ideas that have become deeply important to me.

Celebrating Someone Else’s Success

The first is the pride and joy I feel watching the accomplishments of everyone who participated in the clinic. They truly did their homework. Especially, as you might expect, Justin and all of the ponies that have challenged him to become a better horseman stand out in my mind. Watching their partnerships blossom has been one of the great privileges of my life.

I found myself searching for words to describe the feeling. It is a genuine, selfless pride in someone else’s accomplishments. It turns out there are words for it, just not in English.

In Hebrew there is firgun. In Sanskrit there is mudita. Both describe the sincere, generous, non-jealous joy we experience when someone else succeeds.

That is exactly how I feel about Justin and about everyone in our Riding Far community who continues to challenge themselves to grow in their relationship with their horses.

Eighteen Months in Preparation

The next thoughts arise from my own experience with Lil’ Joe.

He was a rock star throughout the clinic. We took so many meaningful steps forward in developing his balance and strengthening our partnership. Movements and moments that once seemed out of reach emerged naturally, if not always easily.

Throughout those moments, I kept hearing Pippa’s voice.

“Eighteen months in preparation.”

And indeed it was.

I realized that all of the small, slow, consistent work we had done together over the past year and a half had quietly accumulated into something remarkable. I simply hadn’t noticed it happening.

It reminded me of something I tell my clients all the time: we are often terrible assessors of our own progress. We live inside our own experience, making it difficult to notice gradual change. Trusted friends, colleagues, teachers, and mentors often see our growth more clearly because they have the benefit of perspective.

The Difference Between Asking and Inviting

Finally, one last thought for today.

There is a familiar saying in many psychological circles about parenting: “Ask, tell, help.” I have always appreciated it as a respectful progression. But Pippa and Lil’ Joe taught me there may be another step that comes before all of them.

Invitation.

If I am honest, I tend to be someone who wants to make things happen. I cannot count the number of things I have broken over the years simply because I tried to force them when they refused to work the way I wanted.

One of the greatest lessons I have learned from Pippa has been the importance of the release of the aids, especially the hands. Her words echo constantly in my mind:

“The purpose of the aids is to request or restore, never maintain.”

What I had not fully appreciated was how every application of every aid changes if I think of it first as an invitation.

An invitation is different.

It carries no demand.

It leaves room for choice.

And it is completed with a release.

That simple shift became a game changer for Joe and me. After each quiet invitation and each release, Joe did not take advantage of the freedom or insist on his own agenda. Instead, time after time, he offered more of the answer I had been hoping to find together.

What Invitation Might Mean for the Horse World

That experience has me thinking far beyond riding.

There are so many transformative ideas emerging in the horse world about how we care for, train, ride, and compete with our horses. Yet if you spend even a few minutes scrolling through social media, what you mostly encounter is conflict. Ironically, that conflict often comes from people who are passionately advocating for more relational, connected, compassionate ways of working with horses.

It makes me wonder what might happen if we learned to invite and release instead of trying to convince, correct, persuade, or make things happen.

Perhaps invitations create more space for curiosity than arguments ever can. Perhaps invitations are more likely to change hearts than demands. I know this is an idea we will continue exploring at Riding Far.

So consider this exactly that…

An invitation.

~ Paul

Several weeks ago, Nubble came up lame. She has struggled with arthritis, and we will work diligently with our vet and bodyworker to make her more comfortable. I have every hope that, in time, she will feel better and we can continue our journey together.

I hate to admit this, but one of my immediate reactions was disappointment. We had been working so well together. Pippa Callanan was coming back in a few weeks, and I had been looking forward to sharing what we had built, to taking the next step. And then, the way these things go, the step did not happen. I found myself standing in the barn with a lame horse and feelings I am not proud of but will tell you about anyway.

I was jealous of Justin.

He has multiple horses. Talented ones. Horses that, through his commitment and consistent effort, are coming along well and offering him the kind of progress in horse training that makes you want to get up in the morning. And there I was with Nubble out of work, with Joey and Revel waiting in the field, horses who, in my discouraged state, felt like more problem than possibility. Joey with his balance issues. Revel with his clear preference for exerting as little energy as possible. I did not want to spend my time managing those challenges. I wanted to progress. I wanted what I had with Nubble.

I share this not because it reflects well on me but because I suspect it reflects something human, something many of us experience whether we’re working with horses, building a business, raising children, or simply trying to move forward in life.

Discouragement has a way of narrowing the field.

Everything looks harder than it is. The horses in front of you seem like the wrong horses. The timing is frustrating and inconvenient. The whole enterprise can begin to feel quietly futile.

What I did next was not glamorous. It was simply what I could do.

I went to work.

I put time in with Joey. And at first, something good happened. He was soft. There was a new quality to our connection, and I felt the first flicker of genuine excitement about where we might go together.

Then last week it fell apart.

The softness disappeared. He started bracing through his neck, getting twisted and tight in his body. My reaction? Disappointment. Frustration. That degree of despair that I was never going to get anywhere with him and that the whole setback had been a detour leading nowhere.

Fortunately, I had enough sense to ask for help.

I asked Justin to ride him.

After getting a feel for Joey, Justin gave me a few specific things to work on. Simple things, as the most useful things in horsemanship usually are. They made an immediate difference. But honestly, what made the biggest difference was not the technical instruction. It was that Justin had taken the time to show up, to watch, and to care about what I was working toward.

That made all the difference for me.

Here is the part I did not see coming.

Not only did that session renew my excitement about Joey, it sparked something I had not anticipated. I found myself wanting to ride him with Pippa, the very clinic I had been mourning because Nubble could not be there. And then, almost without noticing, I began to enjoy my time on Revel. He started offering more. I started receiving more.

Something had shifted, though I could not tell you exactly what, when, or how.

I have seen this pattern enough times in my work, and in my own life, to know that it is not an accident. Setbacks have a way of redirecting us toward things we would not have chosen but sometimes needed. The narrowing of discouragement, if we can stay in it long enough without giving up, sometimes turns out to be a focusing.

The roller coaster does not stop. It never does.

That is not a reason for despair. It is simply the nature of horsemanship and life: progress and regression, lameness and soundness, discouragement and unexpected joy, often in the same week.

Maybe even the same day.

The invitation is not to get off the ride.

It is to stay on it with your eyes open and, when it gets hard, to have the good sense to ask someone you trust to take a look. ~ Paul

How Childhood Expectations Shape Our Relationships With Horses

I was four, maybe five years old. We were at church, which, as any four year old could tell you, is not an experience designed with four year olds in mind.

I could not sit still.

Quite honestly, I am not sure I was actually capable of sitting still.

When the family returned home after services, I found myself in time out. I know my parents were well intentioned, trying to teach me self control. Yet it had a different impact than they intended.

What I did not understand then, and what I would spend a good portion of my adult life working out, was that an expectation had been set that I simply could not meet. Not because I was defiant. Not because I was bad. But because of my level of development and maturity on that particular Sunday morning.

The bar was set at a height I could not reach, resulting in pressure. Pressure to control the behavior. Pressure to contain what could not be contained.

Lately, I have been thinking about this a great deal.

Several clients this week found themselves exploring similar territory, tracing the patterns of early relationships forward into their present lives and, in more than a few cases, all the way into the saddle.

It is one of the quieter revelations in equine psychology and horsemanship work: the way we learn to relate to authority, expectation, and pressure in childhood often follows us into adulthood. It shapes our relationships, our leadership, and very often, our relationship with horses.

It shows up in how we respond when our boss sets an impossible deadline. It shows up in how we feel when our partner needs something we do not know how to give. And it shows up, reliably and sometimes painfully, in our relationships with our trainers and in how we ride.

The Pressure We Bring Into the Saddle

When I reflect on my early years with horses, I can see it clearly now.

I spent a great deal of time trying to control behavior that was not controllable. I set expectations that did not account for the horse in front of me, their age, their experience, or their particular nervous system on that particular day.

When they could not reach the bar I had set, I applied more pressure.

I was not being cruel. I was doing what had been modeled for me, in church pews and elsewhere.

Control the uncontrollable.

Contain what cannot be contained.

What I was inadvertently doing was recreating, in the arena, a dynamic I had first experienced as a small child.

Different players. Same script.

Trauma, Expectations, and Horsemanship

This is not an indictment of our well intentioned parents, nor is it a reason for self criticism. It is an invitation for curiosity.

The patterns we carry are not character flaws. They are adaptive strategies we developed to navigate a world that sometimes asked more of us than we could give.

They made sense once.

They may not make sense now.

Many riders unknowingly carry old expectations, fears, and relationship dynamics into the saddle. Horses, however, have an extraordinary ability to reveal those patterns. They respond honestly to pressure, tension, inconsistency, and emotional incongruence.

They also respond to presence, clarity, patience, and emotional regulation.

In many ways, horses become mirrors for the unresolved dynamics we still carry.

Whose Expectations Are You Riding With?

The question worth sitting with, whether you are in the saddle or not, is this:

Whose expectations am I riding with today?

Are they mine?

Are they my horse’s?

Or do they belong to someone, or something, much further back down the road?

Your horse will tell you if you are willing to listen.

They are remarkably honest about what is being asked of them, and whether it is something they can actually do.

~ Paul