This was such a gentle, non-eventful, soft little walk with our beautiful Paint mare, BlueJay. It was an experiment (again!) for me in non-resistance rather than the normal pushiness I like to inhabit. BlueJay’s “aura” is pure goodwill, and she thoroughly enjoys being loved, and petted, and made much of, but most especially she enjoys getting more attention than the other two.

It occurs to me that I also (or parts of me) enjoy being made much of, and a chance to simply wander around without worrying about new, different, scary, adventurous, or slipping on the ice.

So often my love affair with horses has been so closely tied to the anxiety I have around doing what is slightly more than I’m comfortable with. Having very little opportunity for expert coaching or mentorship has made me unable to start small. It’s been an all or nothing sort of venture. Now, at this end, it feels kind of funny to go to the beginning of a relationship with a horse and just, you know, do a nice greeting, a little introductory sort of walk, a short check-in, rather than diving into my plans for using her to achieve Big Goals.

I have figured out (thanks in large part to absolutely unbreakable limits) that the small, unimportant, mundane, routine, moderately sized interactions add up. Gentleness and a slow conversation are extremely friendly to trust.

I was vacuuming the other day and noticing how easily I get frustrated and take it out on the “tool” - the central vac with its long hose that tangles and pulls and catches and generally is less than perfectly cooperative. I yank, and start to move more fiercely, clean more savagely, until all of the furniture and rugs are thoroughly scared into submission. It’s so very easy to think of animals as tools. It’s even easy to think of other people as tools. It’s definitely not a stretch to think of my body, my mind, or my heart as simple objects - to be yanked and pulled and shouted into place.

Anyway, that’s the tone and slow idea of this video. It left me feeling peaceful, grateful, and safe. I felt a good deal of reflected contentment from this lovely mare. Not a long or difficult challenge, but it kinda made my day…

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Moral superiority is a drug that is entirely legal, readily available, and is often even cast as virtuous. I doubt anyone has not partaken, and wow, does it feel amazing. In the short term, anyway. It does leave a long shadow, though, and can itself become difficult to untangle from who we think of as our own selves. Trying to get free from its grip can look like cognitive gymnastics worthy of Cirque du Soleil, wherein we attempt to pretend others’ behaviour is not morally outrageous, or their beliefs patently untrue, or their perceptions (as expressed) not dangerously one-sided or oversimplified.

There’s a middle ground I’ve landed on, accidentally, but with increasing gratefulness for its ability to create both clarity, and compassion, while not clouding any of what I myself believe, or perceive. It’s the concept of “othering” what is harming another human.

I love the imagery of the “uncanny valley,” and this is where I now almost physically push the "monsters” of distortions, assumptions, problems, and abstract, ethereal enemies to life which I (in this story) see as everywhere and nowhere, impossible to grasp, but very much affecting the situations I walk into, or through, or even that I carry with me into the situations I’m walking into, or through.

If you love someone who is acting or speaking in ways you find disturbing, dismaying, or dangerous, and you don’t know how to direct your anger and grief and sense of wrongness, maybe this podcast will give you a way to navigate in love, in truth, and in congruence with obvious reality, while not latching on to moral superiority as your only possible weapon. Ugh. That one is in itself quite liable to become monstrous.

We all fight them, and yet many of them remain in the shadows, unnamed, unnoticed, even defended as friends. They’re not friends. They are monsters.

Fridays are for fence-sitting; this one is the divide between what is useful, helpful, friendly, and what is most definitely not. I hope this affirms, or maybe suggests, a story to tell yourself when you badly need a villain you can fight with all the strength you have. Not other humans. Not yourself. One hard thing: name the enemy. Fighting it is much easier when it’s categorized as apart from what is human, worthy, and good. (You!)

That’s pretty much it.

Okay, well, the summary is more about how chaos is all around, and it’s ineffective in the extreme to try to control it. However, we do have significant ability to use our energy with lots of positive results if we stick to the little circle of space and air and intention we inhabit. If I can manage that “home base” then I’m safer for Tundra (and maybe even other people) to be around.

Hoping that bad things won’t happen, or that I’m going to be strong enough to reverse them when (not if!) they do, is not really wise. You can only get so far with that intention and worldview. Trust me. However, using my mind and body and heart to purposefully do the things that will make my home space safer, clearer, calmer, and more congruent with reality - that has the extremely beneficial effect of allowing me to travel within the chaos, and choose my response from a platform of stability. I like that a lot. It’s possible.

You can join me for the whole walk and talk if you like - there are swans! Also it is just an amazing day out. Such gifts, each one in November. Whatever you choose is fine by me. I’m here, and you are welcome to come alongside, with your circle of control intact and secure and comfortable to be with.

Happy Wednesday!

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I’m sitting atop the divide between what’s visible to others as our personality and persona and general appearance - and the vast unexplored (in my case, anyway) country inside. The interior is larger than the exterior, as is the improbable theme of so many good stories, and I’m exploring how this could perhaps give us a different source of inspiration when we become depleted.

Here’s the visual I refer to as a model informing occupational therapy:

The circle in the middle labeled “spirituality” is seen in this case as informing and directing our occupations. I am calling this circle the “soul” and my idea here is that maybe it isn’t just a small circle on a primary-coloured chart. Maybe it has (we have) more depth than that. Perhaps there are wellsprings of…life? love? hope? the grand possibilities of innocent childhood still lying there like the “empty” prairies before fences made them fields.

I don’t know, but that’s the divide for today. There’s the outside of us, where we busily put our best foot forward. And then there’s what we’re so earnestly and diligently protecting. Possibly even forgetting its mystery and purpose…

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I’ve always been so distressed by others’ distress that I’ve sailed in and “fixed” problems before the “other person” really even registered a problem.

And yes, this goes back to feeling unsafe and responsible, as a child, for managing others’ large emotions. However, it’s no longer necessary. It’s a great skill in its place, but that place is not on a walk with my quite calm and collected horse!

I’m working here on trying to overturn a strong pattern in myself by slowing down, asking rather than controlling, communicating my needs with more clarity and less blame (hopefully no blame!), and calling out my own tendency to want to over-manage everyone else’s actions.

Interestingly, the behaviour I’m using as a lesson for myself is Tundra’s choice to try to eat while on a line with me. Normally I use pulling energy (Draw) to communicate my disapproval. I swap this out for pushing energy (Drive), which keeps the lead rope loose and asks her to respond, rather than forcing her to respond. So much easier for me, kinder to her, and ultimately appropriate energy for the communication, if I’m speaking “horse.”

And yes, another beautiful day out here in mid-Saskatchewan! Each one is a gift right now. I’ll take them. Come for a walk with me.

So first off, here’s that chart I keep coming back to:

The boundary or fence I’m sitting on today is that line just between the purple row - Edgy and Anxious, and the one below it - the spring green of Just Right, or Fun.

I’ve spent a LOT of my life in the Scary and Edgy storeys of the tall building of stress. Coming down is possible, with the work I’ve done, the supports around me (now), and the diminishing of some significant crises. The thing is, it’s hard to actually make the journey. This fence, or trip down a set of stairs, or whatever, is kinda freaking me out a little. Rational? No. But when are humans actually rational? Not that often, that’s when.

Anyway, if any of you out there have spent way too much time in the higher realms of stress, and you have the opportunity to perhaps get to safety, and then stay there a while, and you find that shift unaccountably difficult…I get you. That’s what I’m looking around and talking about today.

Have a listen and tell me what you think. Is increased calm and lowered productivity and so on perhaps a little…threatening in a weird and counter-intuitive way?

We can do this. We can change our brains. We can move from a place of less internal order and safety, to one with more coherence, congruence, and connection. Lots of times, we have more choices than we want to believe.

Fridays are for fence-sitting, and this one is a Really Big Deal. For me, for my inner team, and for everyone who has to watch me live my life in the real world - yeah, it’s definitely time to come down a storey or two.

Once again, I’m creating these videos not at all expecting them to be useful to horse owners everywhere. This is far more about people relationships than anything else, with Tundra standing in for the many humans we rub shoulders with (literally and figuratively) and who may occasionally edge into “our space.”

I’ve spent a fair amount of energy attempting to control those sorts of invasions through unbalanced Drive or Draw methods. These look like (in the people world):

* sudden aggressive reactions to what I perceived as a hostile move (often taking everyone by surprise, as sometimes it really wasn’t meant to be hostile at all)

* moving away, away, away, and away in a “you can’t locate me” sort of Tag, or Hide and Seek energy

* forging forward with so much speed and energy that no one could, or would want to, “keep up”

* becoming as large and threatening as I could, while at the same time edging backwards - providing a stew of mixed messages that no one could possibly decode or respond to with any clarity

* inviting people in via placating or false friendly tones, so as to neutralize (hopefully) any threat they might pose despite my discomfort with their position

* ignoring people who got too close, so that they would forget about me and move away on their own

* becoming passive aggressive - continuing on as if I wasn’t feeling invaded, but occasionally pushing back with a little more force than was friendly

* chasing people away - if they moved back, following them and pushing them again, even though they were clearly no longer in my “bubble”

* attempting to control exactly where people (plural!) were relative to me in all directions like a conductor or dance choreographer, except without those titles or skillsets

I hope you can see how the act of negotiating a walk with a horse has all sorts of meaning for me in terms of how I could (now, with a lot of work on my own energy) create a safe perimeter in a similar walk (or work project, or adventure, or conversation) with a person.

It’s not about controlling others. It’s all about simply creating a safe distance I would prefer them to keep relative to me, communicating this clearly, and then letting us both go ahead together with trust and the least force necessary to maintain this awareness on both our parts. Not to mention me respecting their equivalent messages!

This was great fun, as I finally felt safe to move with a happy, forward, fun sort of walk through our yard, without worrying about escalating Tundra into a place where she might have done harm to herself, to me, or to the connection we had going on. It was a little bit of work to create and communicate my boundary, for sure, but not nearly as much as micro-managing Tundra’s four feet as well as my own.

Energetic balance is a Good Tool! I hope this gives you some ideas for walking with your favourite people (two or four-legged).

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Welcome to how my mind works, which is a slow meandering through loosely related topics and ideas, but circling back eventually (eventually!) to a real point. This podcast is longish, but I do think I’ll work on these concepts for a while, and I have hope that the ideas I’m introducing here, applied, will actually start to make some observable gains in my intentions to create and defend and maintain a safer home for myself, and those who must live in my vicinity. By extension, I have some hope that these ideas may help you as well.

Boundaries, as fence-sitting implies, are neutral aspects of an orderly environment, and have two sides, both good, but requiring separation for some reason. In this case, it’s the idea of creating a felt separation between the present (which is usually safe, or at least safe enough) and the future (which is almost always, in my imagination, dangerous) so that my inner team has a chance to breathe, rest, and communicate with far less anxiety colouring all the messages flowing between us.

A little awareness of the future is great. A tendency to live there, in one’s head, and then heart, and finally body? Not great at all. The future is not yet Real, and so is a way of escaping the Present, which is Real, and which requires my presence, awareness, and leadership.

I’m thinking so very much about intentions, and outcome measures to show progress against those intentions, and how we crave the little burst of pleasure (dopamine) that comes when we see or do or register something that relates to meeting a deep want or need. In my case, I don’t register a lot of pleasure in the present, probably because I don’t, fundamentally, feel safe there. The future is always coming, always tightening my chest with dread, always threatening whatever is lovely and abundant now, with scarcity and abandonment later. This is therefore getting in the way of me being able to craft believable outcome measures against authentic intentions.

My poor inner team! They are stuck with me, as their “leader,” constantly shooting off to parts unknown, in a futile effort to prevent calamity. This self-defeating structure of my personality is fairly fixed, but I’m going to work to fight it nonetheless. I love figuring out what’s not working, so I can begin to construct an alternate approach that may not work to solve the problem I thought was so important, but will solve the problems that are present and real and under my actual control.

First off, though, I need a fence! I need to separate What Is Happening, from What Could Happen.

Secondly, I need to adjust the layout, decor, and function of my inner home to signal and reinforce how safe we all are, in the present.

Only then can I begin to gather my team, assure them that I am showing up, staying with, and doing whatever it takes to keep them safe, and to provide the supports that let them know for sure that they can do their jobs, with a safe enough environment to progress (ironically, thereby almost ensuring a safer future).

If you have any anxiety at all in your makeup, this podcast may resonate at some point with you. If not, well, carry on and God bless. You are one of those rare people who have other, different (and quite unknowable to me) problems.

But no matter who you are or how you function in our challenging times, may you have a safe enough present, with the gift of awareness of your safety, and the ability to gain true pleasure from all that safety allows.

Some cheat notes for this video.

* I’m wanting to measure my progress against my intentions for my relationship with Tundra.

* This requires me to be pretty clear as to what those intentions are. They need to be all about my experience, my actions, my changes in state or skill or sensory feedback. I can’t make Tundra’s goals for her. That’s not my job.

* As far as I can tell, my intentions (broken down by my inner team’s various roles in this soul work) are:

* (Body): My physical cues, responses, and actions will be clearly functional in caring for Tundra’s needs as well as keeping me safe. My physical gestures, postures, expressions, and movements will be congruent with my Mind’s and Heart’s plans and hopes, respectively, in this moment.

* (Mind): My plans and sequence of actions will be consistent with the language and cues that Tundra already knows, and will also introduce new or enhanced information gradually, at a pace that she shows she can handle and is comfortable (Just Right Challenge) learning within.

* (Heart): My objective in relating with Tundra will be obvious to me and to her - no hidden agendas, no covert contracts. If I want safety, then I will be clearly working towards safety. If I want affection, then I will be rewarding and inviting affection. I will keep the interaction focused on one hard thing (or preferably, one easy thing) at a time.

* Measuring how I’m doing with these intentions requires me to take in what Tundra is doing, and use it to let me know what I need to improve upon. She’s being honest and reflective of my current skills, plans, and clarity of purpose. I would be wise to take this in as very neutral positive information, and to adjust myself where I sense that she is showing a lack of clarity, comprehension, or comfort. All of that is on me, not her. Her behaviour is communication, and that’s it.

* Suppose I figure out that Tundra is responding to a “shadow intention,” and not to what I’m consciously trying to cue. For instance, she may be sidling up to me and sticking her nose all over my head. This is based on my Draw energy, unbalanced with enough Drive to communicate a clear boundary outside my skin. She is feeling and responding to my invitation to “love on me,” which can be explicit, but can sometimes be hidden from my own awareness. This is not a horse problem, in other words, but a me problem. I can use this behaviour by her to fix a lack of balance in my “circle.”

* Horses, like children, or like highly stressed humans or any other mammal, really do respond quite authentically to what we are doing, expressing, energetically inviting, or energetically pushing back, and these responses can make us very confused, angry, frustrated, disappointed, or even very happy, but the responses are always a mirror to us as to what we actually are doing - which probably leads back to what we (perhaps unconsciously) intend. It’s a way to reverse engineer a sightline to our own shadow and all we’re trying so hard to hide from our own self awareness.

I could have gone on and on, and I will in later posts. This stuff is so interesting to me, so immediately practical in my other (more human) relationships, and also so important as I work to uncover what it is I really want. What do I want, intend, aim for, honestly hope for progress towards? It’s not as clear or obvious as I’d like it to be. I rely on my “mirrors,” my animals, my close allies in life and love and work, to give me the feedback I need to figure this out.

And where I discover that I’m sending out mixed messages, muddy cues, or flat out confusing and double-bind-inducing instructions, I can change. I can get more clear, honest, aware, present and skilled. That’s on me. Which is great, because then I don’t need to really control anyone else (which, you know, was pretty exhausting and discouraging work when I was really trying to do that).

I hope this tracks with some of your experience and can help you come up with your own little ways to check on your progress towards your own clear and carefully chosen intentional goals.

Happy Wednesday!

You don’t need to intend to love a dog to listen to this podcast, but it helps.

I’m struck (as always) by how my relationships with my animals tell me so much about my relationships with people, and how they shed so much light on my true relationship with my self.

Boundaries are a good thing, but they’re not obvious, not easy, and often challenged by the other beings in our lives. When they’re shown to be inconsistent, or even non-existent, we have a choice. We can blame the offending party for letting us know something we really don’t have time to deal with, or we can…take a deep breath, thank them for the information, and set aside the time, energy, and learning “space” to do the work of protecting ourselves, caring for ourselves, and then communicating our (legitimate, valid, reasonable) limits to others.

This is love, and it’s a really wonderful form of it, because when we do this work, we take the pressure off others to try to do it for us; to try to meet needs in our soul that are not “meet-able” by anyone else, to try to fill gaps or mend walls or add nourishment or whatever. Those holes, needs, renovation opportunities exist for sure, but are our work, not anyone else’s.

Dogs so often get placed far too near our soul’s centre, and so often are asked to balance the unacknowledged inconsistencies we carry, from hurts that happened long ago. This isn’t fair to them, and it ends up causing us frustration and even anger, directed at a being we thought would “love” us unconditionally (and comprehensively).

Yeah, we ask too much of dogs, but also of children, partners, people in general, even our own selves.

Intention is our soul’s work, and it requires humbling ourselves in order to determine what we need (truly, deeply), and who is most able to fill those needs (NOT likely possible to expect from another soul with their own pre-existing deep needs).

In the absence of attempting to draw a dog right into our core to heal what we don’t even know is hurting, there is a more healthy possibility: to manage our own “home,” and to expect and facilitate a dog managing their own “home,” and then to more or less enjoy each other’s company as we support this mutual self-management through sharing of resources, attention, affection, and love.

And, of course, how we love a dog is how we love ourselves is how we love our neighbours is how we love…anything. So…welcome to Friday’s podcast! Sitting on a fence, and looking out in all directions, and considering how to keep those fences as sturdy, beautiful and effective as possible.

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