The Next Step, Equine Activities

09/08/2025

What will your next adventure look like? We are ready, our horses are ready...

The secret is to turn your feeling of dread into the excitement of opportunity.

07/27/2025

Thank you to Durham Equestrian for hosting us with The Equus Effect program! Our horses, as healers, were helping the healers...

05/02/2025

Thank you Durham Equestrian Center for inviting us to work with your fabulous participants, volunteers and horses! Can't wait to return...

09/13/2024

An amazing experience, we are thankful for the Guardians in all of our lives.

09/13/2024

02/07/2024

Curious? Longing to feel settled and connected? Our horses can help.

Contact us to take your Next Step.

These last few days, as life sometimes demands of you, I’ve spent many more moments than planned away from my computer and from work.

For the most part, I restrict my playtime on social media. I have a chrome extension on my computer that blocks my Facebook news feed, only allowing access to pages and groups I intentionally visit.

I no longer have social media apps on my phone.

But occasionally, after extended absences away, I reinstall the app and spend some minutes seeing what’s been happening.

I stumble across a post from my very brilliant friend Kate Sandel at Soft and Sound, go down the rabbit hole of investigating the dressage test to which she is referring.

Yet again, a horse in the not so delicate hands of a human. A Grand Prix dressage test. A well performed warmblood, a much-lauded rider, receiving commendation for a questionable performance.

I pray to the universe that if I’m to come back to this world a horse, let me be one without athletic vigor. It appears us humans struggle to do little more than extort this for our own benefit.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m operating in a parallel universe. I know a handful of people there that join me.

I really don’t get it. I struggle to understand. I don’t fully grasp why this is something we have to explain or argue for.

That horses are sentient.

That they have an elaborate and complex emotional life.

That it’s an everyday miracle they let us get close to them, let alone ride on their back.

That we need to take more care. The most care.

I think back to the last Black Friday sale. I click on a link, get taken to a page selling bridles.

I can’t find a single one without a crank noseband. My eyes, now used to the vision of noseband-less horses finds the cascade of thumbnails and strapped tight mouths confronting.

I forget this is the norm.

I make an enquiry. If I want one- one without a noseband- I am told, it will be a special order. To modify the bridle to remove it. It will cost extra NOT to have the noseband.

I sink into my seat.

Just now, I decide to change my cover photo on my page. I choose one with my young horse, of no more than five or six rides, being ridden in a halter.

I wonder to myself if this is the right image. Maybe it might pigeonhole me I think, place me in a stereotype.

I counter myself moments later. If that is the case, I think to myself, let the halter going rider be the box in which I’m placed. I would claw my way out of most of the others.

Yesterday, I’m told a pocket of land close by to me that might be for sale soon. I feel bereft. I often wander the tracks there, am friends with the Fuchsias, the Manukas and the Ferns. I talk out loud to them with the expectation of hearing back.

‘I talk to trees too’, my friend said recently, ‘but I don’t tell anyone else, in case it’s weird.’

‘I think it’s weirder not to’, I say back. ‘To assume the landscape we’re a part of exists without the capacity for reply.’

I worry about the next custodian of the land, that they might take it upon themselves to clear this ancient stretch of bush that’s so alive.

I understand the people that lay in front of diggers and tie themselves to trunks. I think I might be one of them.

My son rang me yesterday, he’s at the top of the South Island camping. A wilderness that’s pristine. He took his fishing rod, planned to sit on the docks and see what happened.

Did you catch anything, I ask him?

‘No mum’, he replies. ‘There are no fish in the water this close to the shore, you have to go out in the boat.’

Those waters should be teaming.

‘That’s sad’, I say to him, and he agrees.

We are not sad that no fish are caught.

We are sad the waters are empty of fish to catch.

The trawlers are out early. Evidence of unsustainable quotas leaving spaces in the sea.

To my mind, these aren’t a series of divided stories without connection. The dressage test and the bridles and the trees and the fish and all the things.

They all interrelate.

And perhaps it’s not the norm to ask,

do you know what the phase of the moon is currently

or how many wild foods can you identify in your area that are safe to eat

or where is due north

or can you point out different star constellations and outline them in the sky

or do you know what the clouds are telling you about the weather

or what the grasses are in the paddocks where your horses eat

If we are looking for the cause of our apathy and our entitlement, this is it.

So many of us do not know the answers to these questions.

We have lost our wider sense of connection, forgotten the intended context of a human on this land.

But the clay of our body remembers, and it’s her whispers that we hear that creates the quiet and unyielding discontent.

The insistent and persistent voice that tells us to stay with the search for better ways.

So with that in mind, to the search for better ways, the process of remembering, and to horses, who one and all are Saints.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

07/03/2023

Something I wish that I had come to terms with sooner...

The difference between being unwilling. And unable. This slices both ways. Because the rule of empathy says that you cannot be for a horse that which you cannot be within yourself.

Something I own work on daily, is understanding, feeling and sensing when a horse says

"I am not willing"
"I am not able"

It is that CAN'T vs WON'T thing we hear said. But I think it is much deeper than that.

It is the search for willingness in a horse. Or the belief that some horses are in some way, not willing to get along.

If we are traumatised by helplessness and a history of not feeling understood by the world around us, someone saying to us, "No, I am not able to do that right now..." will feel like, "...and I do not want to"

A toxic stoic fairytale: "You Always Make Time For The Things That Are Important To You".

It takes a special sort of personal and cultural privilege to believe that everyone, everywhere is able to actually act on the things they want to act on.

Some of us want to. Really want to. But actually cannot. It has nothing to do with attitude, or preference, or consent, or care. But because very real logistical, cultural, financial or personal obstacles are in our way. And 9/10 we didn't make the obstacles, they were set in our way.

So I like to feel out with a horse these nuances.

I am going to make an experiment and extemporaneously list, all the felt types of "I am unable because..." that I have perceived in a horse, somewhere. Either in my personal sessions with a horse, or in observation with a client.

All of these I have felt in a precise way, acted on them in 3 different ways, and had them confirmed by the horse with their resolutions. When I say that, it means I asked the same question, to confirm that which I felt from the horse, in 3 slightly different ways. And if I got the same response, I considered it the truth. In science they call that a data point. Empathy, science and feel working together.

Some of these listed below I have met more than once, and in those cases, when I see a repeated "I am unable because..:" I believe the horse the first time, and will not ask 3 times for confirmation.

The "questions" I ask the horse and the solutions I offer are often totally spontaneous, and if I have no inspiration to be creative in the moment, I pull from my technique toolbox. yin/yang, technique/inspiration.

The List of the Unables, to find the Unwilling.

I am unable because I don't feel right physically

I am unable because I don't feel right emotionally about that, right now, because I do not have a strong relationship to learning a thing

I am unable because I don't feel right about it because I remember when that was terrible for me and I do not trust it will be different this time, because I do not know you

I am unable because, ouch,.

I am unable because you have not proven to me that you can be trusted with that you are asking me to give you

I am unable because you have asked that of me before, and it frightened you, so I will not do it again to protect you, and me, from your jangled nerves

I am unable because I have no sense of regard for you at this time, I am mentally, physically, emotionally over there... not here

I am unable because you are asking for deep awareness and that makes me feel vulnerable with you.

I am unable because you're now suddenly asking for deep calm, and you have not taught me any value in deep calm, how can I value that if you have not shown it to me first?

I am unable because I am keeping you safe

I am unable because I am keeping me safe, from that thing, which you are taking me to, and I don't want to go there again. That thing is not a place in space but a way of being.

I am unable because I have been used, and used, and used, and used and I gave and gave and gave and gave and now my brain has pulled up hard on the handbrake, and burn out consumes me

I am unable because my body is in absolutely the wrong frame of going and your request constitutes and square peg, round hole for me physically

I am unable because of the lateral side of my left hock bothers me and I cannot load it, and do that well for you

I am unable because my medial right bar is long, and it has formed a pressure point

I am unable because I would rather just get on with something else than stay here and fix this issue, which is a really hard issue for me to work on and now I resent the focus on it

I am unable because I am hungry

I am unable because of last nights storm, and my body needs more capacity to work with you in the way you like working with me

I am unable because being around you is like looking into the sun without sunglasses, it is too intense and I need some shade in my being, so I can get to doing

I am unable because I am stuck in a position I was told to make, and I will not leave this position anymore, because it is the only way I got any peace

I am unable because you're hurting me and you do not know about it

I am unable because I want to stay here instead

I am unable because my friend struggles when I leave

I am unable because I am not safe and feel alone when I am with you

I am unable because you are not deserving of that, because you do not care

I am unable because my teeth hurt

I am unable because my tongue is stuck

I am unable because my gut is unsettled

I am unable because the flies have bothered me all day, and my patience is at its end

I am unable because....

In fact. Come to think of it, while asking my brain to remember all the ways my body sensed from a horse what they were unable to do to make this list... I have never actually met a truly unwilling horse.

Unwilling in the sense that the horse actually "said" or felt like I WON'T. I have not met that horse, yet. I have met people who felt that, because they didn't feel or hear what the horse was unable to do and why.

But I have not yet met a horse who said No, without a really good reason, or who was actually unwilling without a reason.

So I cannot with truth say I believe in the Unwilling horse, at all.

07/02/2023

06/26/2023

We were pleased to share our unmounted workshop, “Why Does My Horse Do That”, at Guilford Riding School yesterday. We had a great group of riders curious to learn more about how their horses see the world, and how to use that knowledge to create better partnerships with their horses.

The Next Step

06/26/2023

We’re in the thick of horse show season, so let’s talk about something. Horses are not meant to go to horse shows. I whole heartedly believe that horses are athletes, and many of them truly want to be competitive and know what it means to win. But they only want it because we do. They don’t want to have their hair twisted in to tight knots in the middle of the night. They don’t want to ride in trailers for hours. They have no concept of year end awards or points or qualifying for a final or championship. They don’t know they were bred selectively to be champions. They don’t plot to have the last rail down in the jump off. They don’t get injured at the most inconvenient times on purpose. They think about their friends and their food and where the closest predator may be hiding. Yet, they do nearly everything we ever ask. They get on the trailer. They stand in a stall at the horse show for weeks on end. They even go against every instinct to let a predator sit on top of them and agree to do the crazy unnatural things we ask. Sometimes it’s not perfect, but neither are any of us. They are just horses. So when the pressure is on and the stakes are high, do your best to remember how kind these animals are, even in their worst moments. They do not think like we do, yet they rarely complain that we expect them to be on the same page. Show some gratitude to your show horses. None of our horses asked to be living an unnatural life on the road chasing our dreams. But they are there. With us through the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Every step of the way. Give them an extra pat, an extra carrot, and take them for that extra hand walk, and when you get home, let them feel the sun on their back while they play with friends. Because after all, they are just horses, and horses are far too kind to the human race.

05/19/2023

We were pleased to be asked to present at Westbrook High School’s Mental Health Awareness day on The Equus Effect program, and the benefits of partnering with horses.
For young people, the ability to be present, authentic, and aware can be challenging, but working with horses can guide us and illuminate the path.
Horses always show up as honest, non judgmental, and provide real time feedback in to how we show up to others…
Curious? Contact us to take your Next Step. 🐎