02/11/2020
A few years ago, Tom helped me teach a young stud to be a gentleman so that I could ride him in public places. In addition to the other problems, the horse always resisted slightly when I bridled him. I had to use my thumb to pry his mouth open enough to slip the snaffle between his teeth. Tom no doubt noticed this problem the first evening, but never mentioned it until the third morning when he suggested that we work on the bitting problem.
Tom directed me through a series of exercises to encourage him to open his mouth at my suggestion. I held the horse’s head in my arms and between my arms and my body. Sometimes when he resisted more vigorously, I had to hang on real hard. When he became agitated I tried to calm him by petting softly. During one of the episodes when I was petting, Tom said, “Your hands are too hard.”
I had been stroking him very lightly and replied, “I’m touching him a soft as I can.”
Tom looked at me and, I suspect, struggled to keep from exhibiting frustration, then after a few seconds he tapped his chest with the ends of his curled fingers, and said very quietly, “It comes from the heart.” He spoke in a lower voice than he had before and conveyed strong emotion. It was a strangely intimate moment—almost embarrassingly so. It was as if I had forced him to open his soul to me so that I could see something so fundamentally important that I should have known it already.
I stopped and for a few seconds I thought about the horse and how much I liked him. When my intentions became good, my hands changed—they softened. Although I had been touching the horse very lightly, my fingers had been rigid—it had been as if I had been trying to comfort Buddy by touching him lightly with a board. When the tension went out of my fingers, my touch became both light and soft. And, I have no doubt that my shoulders and back softened too. My horse certainly did. In a few minutes he took the bit perfectly.
Because the horse had struggled hard enough to approach the limits of my ability to hang on, I’d had to tighten up and go into a competitive mode. For a moment, it might have been appropriate, but when the horse was ready to quit fighting I stayed stuck in what had become an unsuitable emotional state.
“It comes from the heart.” Yes, Tom you were right. It applies to so many things besides horses. - Jim Overstreet
From an article written by Jim Overstreet titled 'Tom Dorrance: More than a Horseman' which appeared in the Eclectic Horseman Magazine, Issue 13, 2003 - http://eclectic-horseman.com/content/view/82/33/
Image of Tom Dorrance is by Acey Harper.
