It starts with the smallest thing.
A hint of a whisper.
A question.
A second thought.
And then it expands
Until you can't ignore it any longer.
You are awakening.

The signs had been there for a while. The little nudges telling me that this couldn’t be right. Life with my horse was not supposed to feel like this. But I kept shoving my feelings aside. Until I could not ignore them any longer.

I remember riding a circle. Another one of the thousands of circles my horse and I must have done during the previous seven years. None of them were ever good enough, though. My instructor always found fault. He told me I looked like a sack of potatoes or a floppy fish. My body was never in the right position. My horse never had enough energy or balance. Our transitions were too abrupt. We were always struggling not to fall apart. Cantering was an elusive goal.

I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Somehow, I had managed to devolve from the kid who would gallop around the countryside with overflowing confidence into a feeble adult who felt like she couldn’t even steer properly.  I had competed in every event I could find with my spirited Arabian mare. From halter classes to western pleasure to trail to reining to hunter hack to speed events, we showed up and embraced it all.

Now, with my beautiful Friesian, I should have been on top of the world as I pursued dressage.

Instead, I was seriously debating selling my horse and never riding again because I hated myself and I hated riding.

Every day I went through the torture of knowing that I had somehow gone from feeling in tune with my horse to not being able to manage a simple circle. My body and mind remembered when I used to gallop my mare across the countryside, fearless. Or the time I cantered over cross-country jumps without any instruction at all on my brave gelding. Now, years later, I wasn’t even competent enough to trot a circle and my horse was too anxious to be ridden outside an arena. It seemed like the more lessons we had, the worse we got. My horse world had shrunk from the whole countryside and every type of competition I could find to a single arena.

As my riding instructor once again directed me to keep riding on the circle, telling me it still wasn’t good enough, something inside me broke. I felt this incredible rage exploding out of my body. I turned my horse off the circle and headed toward my instructor while raising my dressage whip to hit him. Something stopped me before I actually swung the whip. But I will never ever forget the rage that I felt. The desire to truly hurt someone. And I’ve always wondered how much of it came from me and how much of it came from my long-suffering horse, whom I had spurred and hit with a whip for years, all to achieve someone else’s vision of what we should look like.

There was no going back from that moment. I don’t know if my instructor ever understood quite what happened that day, but I was left with the realization that I could not keep doing what I had been doing with (and to) my horse.

I finally woke up.

I started making the changes pretty quickly. I stopped taking lessons with that instructor. I moved my horse to a new barn where he could have more turnout. I took off my spurs. I took off the flash from his nose band. I started taking more responsibility for my own riding, although I did continue to work with riding instructors and other professionals over the years. I signed up for more classes and clinics than I can even remember, and piles of books and DVDs accumulated while I tried to fill the void inside me and squash the feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

The reality was that a certain amount of damage had been done that I could not undo. I regained some confidence, but not all of it. I still spent more time than I cared to admit being apprehensive in the saddle. Even though my horse became a really lovely partner, my mind and body never completely forgot the days when he would spook, buck, and bolt outside the arena. Every abrupt transition and unbalanced canter felt like a failure, even though I reminded myself how far we’d come. That apprehension and sense of failure simply laid in wait and manifested again years later in ways I could not ignore.

I lost my beloved horse very unexpectedly, suddenly, and traumatically one day in 2020. The world was already in chaos from the pandemic, and the loss of my horse sent me into a spiral of grief. It took years to process it. Meanwhile I had to deal with the increasing suspicion that I had learned how to be with one horse, but I didn’t have a clue about how to be with another one.

I wasn’t even sure I even wanted to get another horse. But the universe was insistent that horses stay in my life. First, there was a yearling filly who needed a home.

And a year later an 8-year-old mare for my daughter, who was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the same little girl I had once been, longing for a horse of her own to love.

After 20 years of only working with geldings, I was now a two-mare household. And these mares wasted no time identifying every insecurity I had and challenging me to learn more and be better. As a result of their influence, I worked on getting my horse-handling skills in order and filling in the gaps of my knowledge that were limiting me.

But the most important thing I did was to learn how start trusting myself again.

When I was growing up around horses, I never doubted that I was meant to be with them. I never questioned that I was doing the best I could for my horses, even though sometimes I had a learning experience that helped me realize I could do better in the future. I trusted myself, and I trusted my horses.

One of the things that became so clear to me as I negotiated my own awakening and journey of transformation was that equestrians often feel at the mercy of and under the control of equine professionals. Our horses typically have an entire team of caregivers – farrier, vet, chiropractor, bodyworker, riding instructor/trainer, saddle-fitter, nutritionist – and while each of these professionals can be valuable, how can we even tell when they are giving us bad advice or providing inappropriate care? And if we dare to question these professionals too closely, we are often dismissed or we can even lose the care of that professional. That dynamic creates a terrible situation where equestrians do not feel empowered and often makes us feel forced to accept whatever care we can get, even when we suspect that the care isn’t optimal for our horses.

So what is the solution to overcoming that situation? First, we can remember how to value the hints of a whisper, the questions, and the second thoughts. And as we value those whispers and questions and thoughts, we move toward trusting ourselves. That trust translates into an ability to choose the best professionals to meet our horse’s needs (and our own) and the ability to discern when we need help and when we can provide the care.

Because we can learn to do a lot of care for our horses ourselves. We can tell if our horse’s feet look balanced, and we can even trim hooves or apply some of the simple glue-on shoes that are now available. We can give dewormer and vaccinations and do basic health care. We can evaluate our own horse-handling and riding skills. We can look at a saddle and tell if it fits our horse. We can analyze our horse’s diet and know if they are getting the right nutrition. We can even assess our horse’s posture and movement and help them improve.

If you have been hearing the whispers,

if you have started asking the questions,

if you have wondered if you are in the right place,

then I know where you are.

I know it can be scary and exhilarating at the same time. I know about all the doubts that can surface and the constant second-guessing. I also know about the excitement of finding a new path that feels aligned. But it can be a lonely path if other equestrians around you are still finding their way. It’s why I am working on building a community where all of it can be honored and supported. There are so many beautiful resources available now, and I’d love to help you sort through them to find the ones that feel aligned for you and your horse. In future posts, I’ll be sharing about my successes and challenges. The resources I love and why. And about the horses who have guided me so perfectly into this new space where I can trust myself and my horses.