Let’s Talk

Today was so beautiful at the barn--huge blue sky and fluffy clouds, Dorian and Simon contentedly grazing in the sun. The grass is getting sparse, but they don't care!

I am so glad to be back in close communication with Dorian. I've gone through a lot of changes lately and I now see how off balance I've been, not present and as tuned in as normal. Often I don't notice those sorts of things as they're happening. I get it only in retrospect, but I guess that's better than not at all!

I know I've spoken about this before--how I communicate with Dorian and how he communicates with me--distance doesn't matter. As I headed for the barn today, I asked him if he wanted to go for a ride or get a massage . . . the answer was an emphatic massage!

"Animals know what we humans have forgotten: Staying connected to your core or intuitive self can be a matter of life and death." Marta Williams, animal communicator, practitioner, and trainer.

I started at his head, as usual, and since he gets a lot of massages, he knows what's going to happen the minute I lay my hands on him. He visibly relaxed, lowering his head, and we commenced.

This is the Masterson method--we start with the bladder meridian on both sides. I always start on the same side.

Forty minutes later we were pretty much done. I'd worked on him from front to back, and when we got to the spine, that area along his back was pretty flinchy, so I stayed there quite a while. Every time I run my fingers along that area, I get an image of Dorian on the racetrack and a rather horrible jockey experience. Dorian's so much better at letting that go than he was when we started working on that area, but it's still a bother.

Sleepy boy. :)

Today we talked about how he could just let that experience go completely. A lot of stuff came up for him . . . he always tries so hard to do what I want, and I saw today that was true on the track, as well. He has a congenital issue that prevented him from prevailing on the track (he's fine for what we do together), and today it came out that he felt terrible to be such a disappointment.

Some of Dorian's racing photos.

OK, so maybe I need to say a few words about animal communication. I think we all, if we're honest, know we know much more than conventional means of "knowing" allow. There's tons of research about this, a lot of it from physicists. Case in point--Russell Targ, whose experiments in the 1970s showed that people with no stated expertise in intuitive knowing were able to draw pictures of the location some researchers had traveled to; with training, they reached a 75% level of accuracy. In his book, Miracles of the Mind, Targ calls these collections of universal knowledge the "non-local" mind.

Communicating without words in my EAL workshop,

I've referenced Rupert Sheldrake's work and others elsewhere in these posts relative to this sort of intuitive communication, so I won't go off on a huge tangent here. But it exists, and the pools of knowledge associated with beings we tune into is called by different names by different researchers: astrophysicist Laurance Doyle notes, for example, that "consciousness is a field" (meaning it's everywhere); Sheldrake's term is "morphic fields"; Chris Duncan calls it the "Superconscious"; and Christianity notes the "divine consciousness"--the list goes on. The idea among all of them (I think) is that we're all part of one great collective consciousness though we have our individual expressions of it. I love quieting myself, stepping into it, and learning to listen and connect with others through it.

Back to Dorian's feelings about himself on the track . . . The truth is, everyone I've spoken to who was connected to him back then adored him. I even send pictures to one of the owners in his syndicate even now. He's 14, and he stopped racing close to a decade ago! One former owner loves to see how well he's doing and she always responds to me right away.

He's still a sweet boy, even makes friends with chickens :)

So as I worked on him, I told him how many people loved him. Even Elizabeth, who picked him up from the racetrack when he retired, said he was the sweetest stallion she'd ever met.

It's interesting to me how our perceptions can be so different from the reality. Why is it that so often we jump to the negative conclusion when the truth is just as often so unlike that?

". . . horses should be trained in such a way that they not only love their riders but look forward to the time they are with them." Xenophon, 350 A.D.

I think if we were a little more kind to ourselves (maybe as kind to ourselves as we are to our animals) we'd achieve the connection Xenophon speaks of a whole lot easier--a connection with ourselves as well as with others.

As for today, after our massage and talk, I sat off to the side for a while so Dorian could process and absorb the session. You should have seen his sighs, eye rolls, licking and chewing, yawning . . . he let go of so much angst and tension. It went on for a long time!

I finally got up and put the bareback pad on him, thinking we'd ride out a bit in the lovely weather.

Was planning to join some friends. "Was planning" are the operative words. :)

Nothing doing! Dorian planted his feet, tossed his head, and refused to move a step! I laughed, and dismounted. He was so darned relaxed and feeling so serene that he just wanted to enjoy his peace without having to go anywhere or do anything else. I get that totally. So back to the barn we went, Dorian got his carrots, and I hung out in the stall a while with him. He actually came over and licked me! I took that as his big, sloppy, kiss of thanks. And I went home a lot more serene than when I'd arrived, and I'd already been feeling pretty good. Horses are amazing partners!