Lessons to be learned

Here is our photo that won a third place in the "Savvy times" photo contest last year.

Madeira is nearly ready to play like before her injury. I’m still not riding, although there is no reason why I couldn't start slowly, but as you all know I’m always just a little more careful than I really need to. She also will not be jumping for at least another 6 months, but she has come a long way and is doing very well. See it for yourself from the little video clip “Mikko playing with Madeira.”

Mikko is my brother who is visiting us from Finland. He knows very little about horses and has never played with one before. But they both (him and Madeira) were good sports and Madeira played along although this is quite elementary stuff for her by now and at times she looks a bit bored.
Check it out! (And remember, after you click on the video clip, scroll back up to the top, since the clip will show at the very top of the blog.)

So it has been a long road to recovery with Madeira, but one that has really paid off in building our relationship. We all know how important it is to just hang out with our horses, without doing anything, or asking anything of them. “Horses love the art of doing nothing.” (Linda Kohanov.) But I never realized HOW MUCH this time spent doing nothing would deepen Madeira’s trust towards me. See, I used to think that when you want a horse to perform a certain way, you have to work, and work at it. But now I really understand that it IS NOT about the task. It is about TRUST!
All those times that we sat on the grass while our horses grazed, and Joe, Virpi and I complained to each other, that there we were just launching, getting nothing done, as we all felt that we were suppose to be working on our levels tasks. We didn’t realize, that we were achieving something much more valuable. Our horse’s trust.
This was just one of the light bulbs that have gone on in my head in the recent years. Here is the whole story.
Two summers ago, when I was starting my second level of “Parelli Natural Horsemanship” and one of the tasks was to play the seven games with a “flag,” (which simply means to tie a plastic bag to the end of a carrotstick,) I used to get incredibly frustrated, because Madeira would absolutely freak out about the plastic bag. Well, although by that point her freaking out was more like “phase one” freaking, instead of the wild rearing beast, that she used to be. She rather turned away going into sort of a locked up state, “introverted,” where she could escape my intentions with the big bad horse eating plastic bag. And I worked, and worked, and worked at it. Approach and retreat. Approach, more retreat. And although I realized, that she was not actually afraid of the bag itself, but the ruffling sound, that it made, it seemed that by the end of the summer we had not advanced in this task at all. Each time the “flag” game out, we were right back to square one. I eventually gave up, in frustration, because IT DIDN'T WORK!
And the winter came along. Rain, cold and wind. Seemed like the mud covered everything. How it got from our boots to our faces, I have no idea, but we didn’t exactly feel like playing. All winter long we huddled within the over sized hoods of our rain coats that covered us all the way down to the top of our rain boots. We coiled up the leadropes, so they wouldn’t drag in the mud, and walked to the nearest fresh patch of green, that grew faster than our horses could eat it.
At the dawn of the spring as the ground dried up we kept to our leisurely routine, only now we could sit down on the grass while the horses grazed.
Then one day in the early summer we decided, that it was time to start playing. And when I pulled out the “flag” Madeira was a completely different horse. It was as if a switch had been turned off in her head and it no longer blinked “danger.”
I was dumbfounded! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I could touch her with the ruffling bag all over her body, pull it over her head, and she never even flinched. Just stood there calm and confident, trusting, that I was not going to hurt her. Amazing feeling!
It was one of those crucial times that I realized, that it didn’t matter if I was using the correct tools and techniques, if I hadn’t won her trust first! I had to take the time to prove to her, that I was trustworthy.
I could see how easy it would have been to give up stating, that this Parelli stuff didn’t really work, and slip right back to the old traditional way of handling and riding horses. (At least we could have saved ourselves from being ridiculed by the “normal” people.)
Thank God I never gave up! Now I’m in a place where I care more what my horse thinks about me, than what other people do. And I know that my horse will thank me forever.