April 18, 2025

#87 Dancing the Tightrope Ch. 8 & 9 My No-Riding Riding Lesson: Filling in the Holes

Show Notes
Transcript

In this episode of the podcast, I am reading chapters 8 and 9 of Dancing the Tightrope. I'm starting to put things together, as you will hear when you listen. At the very beginning of chapter eight, I had a wild experience going out and learning the negative-positive poll in a completely new or deeper way.

Let me tell you something that's interesting about that particular super tool as I call it. It is eight years later, and I am still BEGINNING to understand just how powerful this mechanism inside of us is if we learn to use it. If there's nothing else I have for you for this podcast, pay attention to that story and see how you can start using it for yourself, because this one is powerful.

I'm also beginning to find out all the holes in my training and all the things I thought I knew that I didn't really know. Because if there's any distinction, especially around this time of the book, but maybe for the whole book, there is a big difference between knowing something and having the wisdom to know how to use it in the right place and in the right time.

I hope you enjoy these chapters of Dancing the Tightrope.

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Lynn, Welcome to Creative spirits unleashed, where we talk about the dilemmas of balancing work and life and now here's your host. Lynn Carnes,

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Welcome to the Creative Spirits Unleash Podcast. I'm Lynn Carnes, your host. This episode of the podcast is chapters eight and nine of Dancing the Tightrope. I'm starting to put things together, as you will hear when you read, oops, sorry, you're hearing these chapters. At the very beginning of chapter eight, I had a wild experience going out and learning the negative positive pole in a completely new or deeper way. Let me tell you something that's interesting about that particular super tool as I call it. It is eight years later, and I am still beginning to understand, notice, I said, beginning to understand just how powerful this mechanism inside of us is, if we learn to use it.

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If there's nothing else I have for you for this podcast, pay attention to that story and see how you can start using it for yourself. Because this one is powerful. I'm also beginning to find out all the holes in my training and all the things I thought I knew that I didn't really know. Because if there's any distinction, especially around this time of the book, but maybe for the whole book, there is a big difference between knowing something and having the wisdom to know how to use it in the right place and in the right time. I hope you enjoy these chapters of dancing the tightrope. Chapter Eight, my no riding, riding lessons, the horse is your responsibility. As I was nearing Camden for one of the sessions, my phone rang. It was Bruce, do you trust yourself to trust me? He asked. I quickly answered yes, and then wondered what was about to happen. He gave me directions to a new location. When I pulled into the new farm, Bruce had a lesson going on, rather than working in the round pen. He and another person, a professional horse trainer, were working on trailering a large horse, putting a horse in a trailer is no small task. Well trained horses walk on calmly. However, just as with the dangers of a trail ride, asking a flight animal to subject itself to a tiny, rolling prison is a very big ask. Things go wrong, people get injured or die. Horses get injured or die, yet, moving horses from one location to another is necessary, so we humans train them to do it. The professional trainer in this case had been involved in a traumatic trailering situation.

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She had reached out to Bruce to help because she was caught between a rock and a hard place.

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She would rather never have to trailer another horse. She could also not continue to be a professional horse trainer without being able to do this essential task. I got out of the car and leaned against the hood to watch the lesson unfold. She would walk the horse to the trailer. Bruce, who was sitting out of her sight in the front of the trailer, would ask, what's your number. As she brought the horse near the trailer, step by step, he would ask her, what's your number, and then what do you need to do to balance your poles? I watched this session with great interest, because in my mind, he was working with an experienced horse trainer who clearly did not need the lessons the way I did. I was aware of how dangerous it can be to trailer horses observing her reactions. It was clear that this woman had been injured and had seen horses injured in the process, she was working with Bruce to recover her confidence after their session ended and she left, we sat down near the trailer to debrief what I had observed. They had been working with a rescued thoroughbred who had been mostly living on his own in a pasture for many years.

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He had only recently been gelded, so he still had a lot of his stallion tendencies. In other words, he was a lot of horse to handle while we were standing near the trailer. Bruce gave me the horses halter rope and said, the horse is your responsibility. You don't have to hold the rope the whole time.

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It's fine if you drop the rope and let him graze around us, but remember, he's your responsibility. We were not in a fenced area. It was wide open.

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At first, I held the rope. I didn't dare let it go. After all, my catastrophic fortune teller mind had already pictured the newly gelded thoroughbred running to the highway a mile away. After a few minutes, Bruce asked me to trust him again. I.

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Drop the rope and let's talk.

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The horse isn't going anywhere, but remember, he's your responsibility. My rules were screaming in my ear, don't let go. You know, better than to take that chance. What if something happens? Bruce's point was to build my tools, and it felt like we were back with the flags in the round pen. I had worked with him long enough to know he wasn't going to let it go, so I dropped the rope more to humor him than to trust myself as we were talking, the horse did indeed keep grazing as he nibble the yummy Clover farther and farther away from me, I felt a familiar tick, tick, tick, like an inner time bomb waiting to explode. It was a feeling I had discovered many years ago with my daughter, Jen.

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At the time, I was still in the numbest of my numb years, she disappeared, and my negative pole, a feeling for which I had no name for in those years, pierced through the armor to get my attention. Jen and I were at the library in Charlotte on one evening, she was in second grade, and we had just moved across the country from Texas to North Carolina. I was in a constant state of feeling overwhelmed, trying to orient in a new job in a new town in a new state, as a single mother, while at the same time she was doing the same with a new school and a new apartment and lots of new expectations, I found us a table and familiarized her with the layout of the large library so she could find what she needed for her assignment. My plan was for the two of us to work at the table once she found the materials she needed, I had brought my own work to do as well, so I sent her off to explore and was quickly buried in some work long since forgotten. Having a few minutes to myself was heavenly. At some point, I felt the inner tickle that something was off. My attention started dividing between whatever I was doing and glancing up, expecting Jen to come around the corner any minute, the sensation sort of felt like a ticking time bomb, where the beat was getting ever faster and ever louder. With every peak, the inner tickle got stronger and more annoying. So did the inner struggle. A part of me did not want to be the helicopter mom who hovered and worried over every little assignment. Another part of me was anxious and impatient for her to be finished so we could go home. Still, another part of me felt she needed some space to learn how to navigate feeling this thing, whatever it was, was the price I had to pay to be a better mom than the control freak I really was none nonetheless, the super anxious part of me worried she had been kidnapped. Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore, and I got up to take a spin through the library and see where she was and how she was doing. I found her working just as she should have been, and immediately, the sensation of something being off diminished at the time. It did not occur to me that the feeling I was experiencing was a good and useful thing. I treated it as an indicator of what a bad mom I was. The feeling was the feeling it's as natural as the air we breathe. The problem was the story I was telling myself about the feeling both that night and every time I felt it.

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Bruce was helping me rewrite that story when the horse moved out of my arbitrary range, it felt like the inner ticking had become a bomb that was about to go off. I went to pick up the rope and bring him closer to where we were talking. Bruce asked, What made you go bring him back? I would start answering with things like he was getting too far away. I worried he would make a break for it. I thought someone might come up and spook him. In other words, I explained myself something I had been trained to do my whole life. Secretly, I was thinking, if I lose this horse, you are going to kill me.

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I do not want to be the one who caused this horse to get hurt. I don't want to get in trouble.

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All the visible justifications felt so rational and right to me, and no way was I going to tell him my secret fear of failure. But he kept pressing and I kept fishing for the explanation that would get him to leave me alone. We repeated this pattern several times. I would drop the rope. The horse would follow his nose to yummy grass farther and farther away, and my little inner time, Bob would go off, I would bring the horse back, drop the rope, and Bruce would ask me, What made me choose that moment to bring him back. I would fish for a better answer, and only one answer satisfied him, no amount of logic, rationale or pleasing Him stopped the pressure he was applying most of the time. He had to come up with the answer for me, you went to get the horse to balance your negative positive pole. He asked, What was your number? When you went to get him that time? Now, I had to admit that I had been trying to be tough the last time I had allowed the horse to drift.

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Pretty good distance. Perhaps to avoid the interrogation, maybe to get Bruce to think I could tolerate the pressure, possibly to test myself, maybe to see when he would jump in. Probably a mix of all those reasons my conditioning was interfering and my need for approval was fighting with my inner rebel.

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Oh, I don't know. I guess it was about an eight. I said, What made you wait that long? Why would you let your poll go as high as an eight before addressing it? My Kid Mode brain went into damned if you do, damned if you don't, territory.

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Still caught in the belief that my job was to please Bruce and show him I could handle the pressure I under reacted to the signal my negative pole was sending. At some level, I was aware I was under reacting.

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Damned if you don't, but my inner kid voice screamed, the only way to be safe is to hold the rope. Of course, this method did not consider that I would never have been able to hold the rope if the horse truly felt like he needed to run away from danger. Bruce was not satisfied when I held the rope, damned. If you do, Bruce watched my inner turmoil with amusement. My choices of micromanaging and not intervening went to war with each other. My kid voice continued to nudge, scream, beg and plead with me to find a way to please Bruce, get his approval or get him off my back.

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I was missing the point altogether. Finally, after several repetitions and some additional coaching from Bruce, I started tuning in to the ticking time bomb as a signal rather than a threat. This was not anxiety, and it was not a test of me to see if I could please Bruce. This was a recalibration of my instincts.

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This was body, mind and spirit training. We were developing my invisible tools. We continue to talk, and the horse continued to graze, and when the signal reached a certain level, I brought the horse back into the range that balanced my poles.

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Bruce's training with me that day had nothing to do with pleasing Him and nothing to do with me making mistakes. Pushing my pole up over and over again had everything to do with helping me recalibrate my system. He didn't care if I did things his way. What he wanted was for me to respond deeply to the situation in front of me, not from my rules in my past, but by impeccably using my tools to address the situation in front of me, responding under pressure, Bruce's methods were showing me new possibilities for something I had been practicing for years. I could react or I could respond. Reacting came from my past in Bruce's language. That mindset was tyrant. Responding happened in the present moment. That mindset was Alpha. It wasn't the labeling that made the difference. It was his absolute commitment to offering situations to respond rather than react under pressure, no matter how many times I told him it was the horse that, quote, unquote, made me do it. He came back with the answer, it's not the horse. It's the pressure created by the horse. His methods went to the very core of my being. In the 20 years prior to this chapter of my life, I had been on a journey to learn how to respond rather than react. My early corporate persona was a take no prisoner's hard ass who felt almost nothing that personality worked great for the type of roles I had, internal auditor, credit review, officer, loan underwriter, guard at the gate for the safety of the bank's money. There were rules, and I followed them to a T I expected everyone else to follow them too. Then the bank decided to re engineer the way it approved commercial loans.

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Somehow, I was tapped to lead that project. Now, my job was to rewrite the rules of commercial lending. I was called on to be a leader in the year of the re engineering project, I began to see glimpses of another way of being, another way of interacting with others.

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However, my personal operating rules were strong and my style was both compliant and authoritarian. At the same time, I did what I was told and I expected others to do the same when I was the one doing the telling. Looking back on it, I can see the mechanistic nature of my thinking. Being the one rewriting the rules meant I had to at least consider looking at creativity and spontaneity. A tiny spark was lit when I was asked to lead credit training for the entire bank, I realized that my job was now to facilitate true learning, especially since I had been charged with taking a one year program down to 10 short weeks, I had been subjected to some of the traditional. Additional credit training, where we sat for hours listening to someone drone on about how to analyze financial statements, fill out credit approval reports or call on a bank customer. The learning yield with this method was low, and we were never going to shrink the program from 50 weeks to 10 by selling and telling we needed a better way. My team decided to move to a more experiential learning model, where we facilitated opportunities for the trainees to learn and grow by trial and error. In one brilliant move, the design team recommended that we quit treating the trainees like royalty when they arrived for their 10 weeks of training.

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Instead, we built a treasure hunt. The only instructions the new bankers got when they arrived in corporate housing was how to get to their desk the next morning, there they would find the first assignment, which was to find the fax machine.

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This was a few years ago, and at the fax machine, they would receive further instructions. By the end of the first day, they would have familiarized themselves with their new work environment, gotten signed on to the computer and gotten busy completing their first assignment where our prior methods had yielded trainees who expected the answers to be given to them. This new approach created 100 hungry explorers who relish the hunt for their own answers. Taking this approach forced those of us in charge of the program to change our leadership style. No more command and control. Lectures where we ran the show were traded for a facilitative teaching style that encouraged the trainees to ask questions, push back and struggle with their learning process. Not only were we training our participants, but we also had to retrain ourselves. I almost washed out of my own facilitator training program. My old rules of command and control were so comfortably ingrained in my mind and seemed effective, at least to me. Learning to facilitate versus deliver a lecture was excruciating. The process added more sparks to my self awareness journey. Eventually, I got pretty good at facilitating, and so did many of my team members.

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Others opted out because they did not want to examine their own beliefs and assumptions.

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They most certainly did not want the uncertainty of facilitating a session where they would be called on to respond in the moment rather than react in a predictable fashion, we truly changed the culture of learning during this time. We were willing to do the hard work of working on ourselves and set the conditions for deep learning through this and many more experiences, I had come to believe I was a master at responding rather than reacting.

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Another level of mastery.

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Working with Bruce was starting to show me another level of mastery. After every session of finding the middle I would finally get to work with the horse on the ground. Bruce breaks everything a horse does into four parts, movement, direction, rhythm and track, the actions happen in that order. A typical assignment started with his picture. It looks like this. Get the horse moving. He picks direction once he's moving at a walk, keep him going in that direction for one full rotation in the round pin.

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Let the horse tell you how much pressure to apply when he reaches the start line. Turn your back in the opposite direction from where the horse is moving, relax and drop the picture from your mind. It sounds so simple. It is, if you can stay in alpha mindset.

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However, tyrant mindset is always there, promising a better way to handle all the ways things can go off plan. The horse doesn't move. The horse moves at a faster rhythm. The horse starts to move and then turns around. The horse stops to graze. I had watched many videos and live demonstrations of this type of work. It looks so easy, I had no idea how much unseen energy work was happening. To get a horse to move in such ways, I needed to come to a whole new level of listening and observing to stay in a responsive, energetic space. In one of my early round pen experiences, I was in the middle and the horse got to be wherever he wanted to be, my picture was to achieve movement with the horse. At the first sign of movement, I was to immediately turned my back and let the horse be I won't bore you with all the ways I had at my disposal to achieve that goal. It doesn't matter anyway, because I way overshot the goal. The horse's ear twitched, and then he raised his head and I kept adding pressure. Pretty soon I had him walking along the rail. After a couple of minutes, Bruce stop me and ask how I did I was so proud of myself. After all, I had that horse moving. Thank you very much. Then he asked me to review what had happened and the signals I had missed. Did you see the ear twitch? Did you notice his head come up? Did you notice him shifting his feet before he started walking? Well, maybe, did you not count the ear Twitch as movement, or did you not think you caused the Twitch?

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Truth be told, I was waiting for the kind of human signals that caught me over the head. What I thought was good, Bruce called out as tyrant mindset. But here was the confusing part. He was okay with it. I don't want the horse to do the picture. I want you to have the opportunity to build your tools. What you just saw was how focused you get on the goal, so much that you forgot the frames that make up the picture. You need to break it down frame by frame. This time you overreacted, where was your listening and hearing?

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Where was your patience? How do I know when you are in tyrant because you are either over or under reacting? You are beating yourself with a two before for making a mistake. You're not letting the horse tell you what to do, when to do, how to do. Be the conduit, just as with the flags and finding the middle.

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You don't have to listen to the voices of your past. The answers are right in front of you in the here and now. The horse will tell you how much pressure to apply. You will constantly be adjusting. A mistake is not a mistake. It's an opportunity.

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When you feel your negative poll, go up, listen to it and listen to the horse, then adjust as needed. When he completes the picture, let him know by releasing the pressure. Now let's try it again. Bruce shined a light on something. I thought I was long past I wanted to be perfect, better than perfect, if possible, when it wasn't perfect, and it can never be perfect, I beat myself up in ways that offered complete deniability. I wasn't beating myself up if I was just getting frustrated for not being able to do something. Was it? It wasn't perfectionism if I wanted to be good, right? Even though I had been working on these very tendencies for many, many years, I had mostly been successful when the waters were calm in the space of the meditation retreat or working off the grid in the mountains, I could maintain my composure and respond in the present moment with any form of pressure. Came my old ways in a new package. Just because I wasn't raging or being bitchy did not mean I wasn't operating on old rules. The spiral into feeling not good enough was so automatic, it was invisible. The neural pathways were like well worn deer tracks in the woods.

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The energy followed the path of least resistance. I left the moment and operated from my rules of the past for several more lessons, we had many, many repetitions in the round pen.

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Sometimes I would slip into alpha, but tyrant would be waiting to pounce as soon as Bruce raised the pressure. On one memorable day, I had been making progress. More and more often I was able to reach for my tools. I was also getting more skilled in working with the horse from the ground, especially in creating movement, direction, rhythm and track, while my ego wanted to give me credit for getting good at this, the truth was that the pattern was getting somewhat predictable. Then on a calm day, nature offered some chaos to test my ability to reach for my tools. On a clear, sunny day, I was at the far end of the round pen, standing a good distance from Bruce, who was outside the fence, Mac the horse was standing between us when a huge tree branch from at least 50 feet up suddenly cracked and fell to the ground about 100 feet from where we were standing, boom as fly animals.

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When horses hear sounds like that, they run first and ask questions later. The two horses still in the pasture, took off away from the sound at full gallop. Before the branch even reached the ground, so did Mac toward me. He was seeking the safety of the herd, and as far as he was concerned, I was the herd, except I wasn't the herd.

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I was a much smaller, squishy human in his flight mode, he would have run over me before I could have taken two steps while I was still processing the branches, it fell. Mack took off in my direction. Quickly, I realized the danger wasn't the tree branch. It was the 1000 pounds of hooves, muscle and panic running straight at me. I had two choices. I could react in a self protective mode, which would have been to either turn and run away or drop and curl into the fetal position, both would have done what self protective actions often do give me a false sense of security that only make things worse. The choice to respond felt riskier.

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I could reach for my tools and respond by raising his negative pole enough to turn him away.

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Suddenly, Bruce is coaching up.

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Let the horse tell you what to do, when to do, how to do was a matter of life and death. The pressure that created the danger was extremely high. Max oncoming energy was showing me the tunnel vision of survival mode. In a split second, I made the second choice. I raised my arms and started waving him. Off. Then I started jumping in Mac's eyes, the jumping, waving woman in front of him was even more danger than the tree branch behind him. He stopped in his tracks. I dropped my arms and stood quietly. He stood quietly.

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The other horses in the pasture had stopped and were now standing quietly. The danger was passed. I looked over at Bruce, and he said, Well done, alpha under pressure, no second guessing, no beating myself up, no quest for perfection, allowing the moment to be and then pass, allowing the next moment to come in be and then pass, flow, feel, listen, hear, patience, timing, observe, feeling from within the sweet succession of the frames, allowing that to be my reward.

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This was the essence of versus natural, human ship method, just as the dog whisperer Cesar Millan found that most of his dog training was actually people training. This horse whisperer was retraining the human under pressure with no predictable outcomes. Slowly, I started realizing what was different in this work. No more road rage on my way home when traffic built up, I used it to practice patience rather than get myself worked up. When I was driving home in a blistering thunderstorm, I drove it frame by frame, rather than one, wondering through the panic how I would ever make it through when I got home, I welcomed discomfort as an opportunity to try out the new tools that the work was unleashing when I made a mistake, I was more likely to recalibrate rather than beat myself up. Yet, even as I felt myself changing, I still wanted more information about the horse. I still wanted to get on a horse and to be able to stop the horse. Then, by chance, I met a woman 20 minutes from my house named Lynn brown Len practiced natural horsemanship.

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She even ran guided trail rides.

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Surely with her, I would get on a horse, chapter nine, filling in the holes, Swiss cheese when I walked into the barn at transitions, Lynn brown greeted me and introduced me to Phoenix, the horse that would be one of my greatest teachers. His first greeting was a toothy nip on the back of my hand. We were going to be such good friends. While I came hoping to ride. He was not saddled. It was a hint of things to come. Even though I was well into my lessons with Bruce, my proving mindset popped up repeatedly, I still found myself wanting to prove to Lynn that I was ready to ride, given that she regularly ran guest trail rides, I was sure she would put me on a horse today, she started by asking me what experience I had with horses and what I was trying to achieve. After I described both, she asked, Would it be fair to say that you want to build a solid foundation of horsemanship? She didn't ask me if I was ready to ride today.

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She didn't ask me if I knew how to saddle a horse, which obviously needed to be done if we were going to get on with my desire to ride today. She didn't ask me if I knew how to do ground work. She didn't have to ask me anything more. Phoenix was telling her everything she needed to know. Lynn's way of working with horses focuses on developing trust and connection with a relaxed horse, rather than using force, fear and intimidation to get the horse to do our human bidding. Horses communicate with subtle cues, and she was reading Phoenix to get a sense of how relaxed he was in my presence, what I saw was a still compliant horse just waiting to be settled. What she saw was a frozen, shut down horse just waiting to be killed, rather than begin the lesson with all the ways my body language and energy were sending scary messages to the horse. She started with Swiss cheese. You have been around horses and learned some things. What I have found with a lot of my students is that their horsemanship knowledge is like Swiss cheese.

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They know some beginner things and intermediate things and even advanced things, but they also don't know some beginner things and so forth. There are holes in their knowledge. Most of the time those holes don't matter, but sometimes an event happens and all the holes line up.

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That's when we have disasters.

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As she was speaking, scenes from my accident flash through my mind, thinking I knew how to stop a horse by pulling back on the reins, thinking I could stay balanced in the saddle, only to be quickly bounced out of my seat, thinking I knew how to fall in a safe way, only to land with a bone shattering splat, not even realizing that a horse could be operating in a fearful state of mind all the. Holes and the Swiss cheese lining up perfectly so that I could be chauffeured by the ambulance crew for a three day, two night stay at the local hospital.

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Those innocent holes now appeared more ominous. If I were ever to get back on the horse, I needed to close those gaps. So yes, it was fair to say that I wanted to build a solid foundation of horsemanship, it would have to start on the ground. Lynn approached the work with horses very differently from Bruce, and yet her lessons were also very complimentary. We did a herd watching experience.

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On my second lesson, she drove me up to an enclosed area where her six horses were standing around. In my eyes, they look like every other hoarder horses I'd ever seen. Horses were standing there looking around, not really concerned, noticing anything before we left the barn, she asked me not to speak as we went up the hill. When she finally did utter a word, she simply asked me what I observed.

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My ill informed eyes had seen very little. Well, one of the horses is swishing his tail.

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That's about all I see, I said.

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Then she took me through the basics of horse body language.

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It was a direct lesson in understanding the 50,000 years of DNA in a prey animal who communicates in subtlety and energy. First, she shared, horses have four basic needs, safety, comfort, food and play.

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Hmm, I thought sounds a little like human needs, as described by Maslow. Second, she explained that horses communicate with energy and gesture. They read each other and every nuance of our human body language. There was a whole language going on here that was invisible to me.

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In watching the herd of horses, she pointed to the pecking order. Yes, horses have a pecking order, just like chickens and just like humans.

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Did I notice the shift they made when we came near and then again when we started talking? Could I tell which horse was the leader at the moment, which one was keeping watch? Who was the low horse in the hierarchy? Which ones were connected or disconnected from the other horses? After we looked at her dynamics, we moved to individual horse body language, she had me looking at their eyes, postures, legs and mouths. Were their eyes soft and blinking, or hard and fixed? Did their body appear soft and supple, or more like a stiff board? Was a back leg cocked? Or were all four legs squared off? Were their lips compressed, or were they licking and chewing? In a short time, a whole new world opened up to me, a horse can either be in a comfortable place or a paralyzed place. To the untrained eye, that look almost the same.

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Horses are masters at stuffing their worry into a compact package. Quickly, I began drawing parallels to my experiences in a variety of corporate settings, listening patience timing on one memorable day, back when I was a banker in Texas, I was returning from a client meeting with a long list of promises to fulfill. Several of us on the floor, shared an assistant who was normally a very sunny, helpful person. On this day, she did not look up when I approached her desk. She was frequently busy and focused, so I thought nothing of interrupting her. When I started talking, she did not look up. I missed the first subtle signal, even though a little whisper in the back of my mind was saying something's not right, I started to dump my list of to do's on her rather than listen to what she was telling me, albeit with energy and gesture rather than words, I added more pressure. I justified it to myself, after all, helping me was her job. A part of me was beginning to see that she might be in anything but a relaxed, comfortable state. The go getter in me dove in anyway. Bad idea. Really, really bad idea. After a few more sentences, she turned on me with a fury that would have knocked back an f5 full tornado, pouring pressure onto an already pressure filled situation was not the right move. As I sulked back to my office, head down, our manager took me aside. He had witnessed the takedown and was smiling in a conspiratorial way, you picked a bad time, didn't you? We talked for a moment about my poor timing and lack of patience. He shared a little bit of the backstory on what had been going on at the office while I was out with clients that day. Had I been reading the situation, I would have seen dozens of signals that would have told me to be patient. It was a painful lesson on timing worth its weight in gold. I. Now back at Lynn's farm, I realized there were more lessons from this story. Adding pressure to a horse who looks calm and relaxed but is in survival mode while hiding his worry can lead to unexpected explosions. Spend any time around people who take their horses out of their usual environment, be it on the trail or in a trailer, and you will hear things like, he was fine, and then suddenly he ran the other way, or he was always so easy to get on the trailer. I have no idea what got into him.

00:35:26.840 --> 00:36:28.880
Go slow, to go fast. During my early lessons, Lynn took me into the world behind the horse's eyes. When I was a kid watching Westerns or going to the rodeo, it looked to me like all you had to do was hop on the horse, give it a kick, yank the reins, and off you went. I honestly thought the most difficult part was swinging the leg over how naive working with Lynn and Bruce, I learned that horses are always, always, always assessing their safety. Their body language constantly telegraphs how safe or unsafe they are feeling. My first assumption went out the window. Just because a horse is standing still does not mean he feels safe. I now realize how incredibly well trained movie horses are, too by learning to read the signals communicated by their eyes, ears, tail, feet and more, I was now much more highly attuned to how my gestures, energy and even breathing and heart rate affected their sense of safety and trust. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.

00:36:30.139 --> 00:37:07.259
After many lessons with Lynn still on the ground, I was sold on the process of developing trust and connection with the horse. I had also started connecting many more dots between what I was learning in the barn and how it impacted the ways I developed trust and connection in my human relationships. Every session with Lynn started with a debrief of how I had applied the principles she was teaching me in different situations, most involving no horses at all. One day, I came into the barn and Lynn said, today, you are getting on after months of groundwork, it was finally time for me to start writing Phoenix.

00:37:03.418 --> 00:37:20.119
By this time, many more of my early assumptions have been blasted to oblivion. I was enjoying working with the horse on the ground, whether leading him up and down the road or moving in the round pen. Now it was finally time to saddle up.

00:37:16.318 --> 00:37:20.119
Well, okay, sort of saddle up.

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You have developed good trust with Phoenix. Today we are going to start by having you develop connection through your seat.

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Lynn said, as she showed me the bare back pad, we would be using the pad connected to the horse, much like a saddle, but had none of the support of the western saddle in the form of stirrups, saddle horn and wooden tree that holds the rider in place. The only thing that would be holding me in place as we moved around would be my balance and connection to him. She taught me through the process of saddling, focusing especially on being gentle and connected when it was time to tighten the cinch that held a pseudo saddle in place, I was about to realize that just because I had changed my mind did not mean I had changed my ways. I started out very present, my invisible tools of listening, hearing, patience and timing were all in play as I began saddling Phoenix. Lynn had reminded me that he was a rescue horse once destined for Olympic greatness. He had been training in a high performance show barn where the horses were treated like machines rather than sentient beings. In his performance life, his daily routine involved being brought out from his stall, which might feel like a prison, to an animal whose DNA is programmed to run free over wide open spaces, tied up on each side of his face, to be brushed, have his hoof picked and then settled. Phoenix's fear had boiled over years ago in the show barn. One day, he said, Enough is enough, and flipped himself upside down while tied up to be settled. At that point, his rider decided he was more trouble than he was worth, and moved on to another horse. Lynn eventually rescued him, and he became her star lesson horse.

00:38:59.679 --> 00:39:51.398
Now he was standing patiently waiting to be my teacher, step by step. Lynn continued talking me through the process of saddling, which I had learned to do in middle school back when my assumption was once a horse is, quote, unquote, broke, he is safe to ride. I didn't know it yet, but my proving mindset was just waiting to pounce when it came time to pull the Cinch tight. I had gone through all the steps, she explained, all while staying present as I worked with Phoenix, just putting the pad up there was a process of letting him sniff it and waiting move in and move out, give and take, try again and assess each moment was designed to give him space to realize that this wasn't going to kill him. Finally, he took a deep breath and relaxed. The pad was on his back. In my mind, we had just reached the pinnacle.

00:39:51.639 --> 00:41:09.059
It felt like I had summited Mount Everest, as my inner self did the happy dance. Lynn explained how the straps went through the different loops. My inner celebration completely drowned out the guidance Lynn was providing in that moment, I totally went back to my past. It was tyrant mindset. In an instant. What happened inside me reminded what happens when I'm in deep meditation or in flow while water skiing, as soon as I think to myself, I'm doing it, I'm not doing it anymore. When it came to the cinch, I had one goal. It should be tight. This was a rule I had learned as a preteen. A loose saddle can come off to the side and lead to a bad accident. I failed to hear Lynn as she described the frame by frame, moment by moment method, which would help me reach the goal while at the same time, keep Phoenix's mind feeling safe and connected to me. I gave it a good yay, just like I had been taught as a kid, and just like the Cowboys do in the movies, Phoenix stomped his hook, swished his tail and brought his head around as if to say, what the hell all were signals that the horse was feeling very unsafe. Phoenix just showed me how far I had to go. Some horsemen would ignore that kind of behavior because the horse didn't run or bite.

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Others would force the issue, insisting through fear and intimidation that the horse comply. Some would take that as a signal to abandon the ride and hope for a better day tomorrow.

00:41:14.579 --> 00:42:09.958
Lynn's standard is to do none of those things. Early in my lesson, she said, You need to realize that every time you ask something of a horse, you take a little bit of his confidence away. It pays to let him know when he's giving you what you're asking for they want to please us. She showed me how to tighten the Cinch without the Yank. It was a much more humane process, and the result was just as effective. However, just because I had succeeded in getting the Cinch tight, there was no way she was letting me back on the back of this horse while he was in a fearful state of mind. His pot wasn't boiling yet, but it would get much hotter if we didn't turn down the temperature before making such a big ask. We slowed way down. We walked the tightrope. We were not harsh and we were not soft. Instead of force and fear or quitting and placating, we stayed with him.

00:42:05.398 --> 00:42:13.259
The horse's stomping didn't stop me from saddling or riding him.

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It just meant that I had to restore safety and regain trust and connection before I could make that kind of request of him. Once he let us know he was relaxed. I had the first of many terrific rides in each moment, she showed me how to continually bring the horse along and pay attention to the signals that he was with me, alpha and not in survival mode or tyrant. It was a constant series of making requests and reassuring the horse. We had to go slow, to go fast when I skipped steps, it took much longer, because I had to dig myself out of the hole I had created. The gift of stressors. Dancing among several activities reveal the holes I had been digging my whole life, but also the positive side of the stressors that create pressure, uncertainty and fear when riding at Cedar Creek, just walking up and down the steep hills, flooded my body with adrenaline. So did a bobble on my water ski. Walking near the edge of anything high off the ground was enough to make my knees turn to jello. Just about anything physically scary sent a flock of butterflies through my entire torso. It is a wonder I didn't take flight at every possible trigger. It wasn't until I started applying the lessons from Bruce and Lynn as I was writing Phoenix that things really started to change. Once I began to see pressure as a gift, albeit only occasionally, a whole new world opened. First I had to own what I was starting to call my mistake cycle, which I did more often than I did the what's next cycle, thinking of it as the what's next cycle, turned my mind to focusing on the next frame, rather than allowing my past to interfere.

00:43:53.679 --> 00:44:31.759
My words and beliefs simply did not fully align with my feelings and actions. This was not because I'm some huge hypocrite who means one thing and says another. It's a battle between my intentions and my conditioning. Old habits die hard. Decades of the survival training called Life had established their ways with me, while my brain and my mouth has balanced the value of mistakes in the learning process, my body brace for the consequences with with the slightest hint of a mistake, every cell in my physical system vibrated with warning signals that bad things were coming, just like what happened in finding the middle.

00:44:27.739 --> 00:45:08.278
It took the pressure of getting back on the horse with the gift of teachers who could show me the incongruity, to begin unwinding the twisted cords that held me in a stiff, pseudo safe place. I had chosen teachers who went way beyond writing technique and equitation. Both Bruce and Lynn had seen the cost of human created mistake cycle on the horse and human their approach worked at the root cause of many of the problems with horses, which is the way humans deal with things not going perfectly in. My own perfectionistic tendencies would cause me to either beat myself up or beat others up around me.

00:45:04.438 --> 00:46:04.079
When Mistakes were made more than once, Bruce called me out for beating up the horse when I couldn't get him to do what I was asking him to do. I didn't think of it as beating anyone up at all. In my mind, it was just the normal frustration of learning in truth, it was the mistake cycle in action. It was as if Bruce could read my inner dialog and not even the parts that I could hear. He was reading the dialog behind the dialog, the energy that was running my actions in his book open Andre Agassi describes in agonizing detail just how the mistake cycle works on our inner dialog. After years of hearing my father ran to my flaws, one loss has caused me to take up his rant. I've internalized my father, his impatience, his perfectionism, his rage until his violence doesn't feel like my own. It is my own. I no longer need my father to torture me from this day on, I can do it all by myself.

00:46:05.519 --> 00:47:48.219
It wasn't necessarily a raging father or mother that caused me to take up a rant. It was the whole gamut of teachers and parents and siblings and bosses and so much more. It wasn't necessarily a rant in the traditional sense of the word, which I envisioned like a temper tantrum. It was more like a low level of frustration, just as Bruce had described dozens of times with my clients and me in the round pen with the horse, you feel a mistake, and you start hitting yourself over the head with a two before you start second guessing yourself. You get up in your head, rather than letting the horse tell you what to do, when to do and how to do, you leave the moment that's the past interfering in my mind, as I said, I started to spell interfering this way, the past is E N T, E, R, F, E, A, R, I N G. My fear of mistakes was causing the very thing I was trying to avoid. It was not intentional. It was automatic, and I had repeated it millions of times in my life. In the face of a variety of behaviors, Bruce could repeat the mistake cycle to his clients with confidence, because everyone he had ever worked with found themselves in the cycle, not every time, nor all the time. It happened when the pressure got high enough. He also frequently described the other side of fear. Rather than making myself feel better by buying another car or working with myself to death or eating another bar of chocolate, he suggested that our own human endorphins offer a genuine reward, one that can't be taken away if I were to get out of the proverbial hole I kept digging my actions and feelings would be the thing to lead me out of it, not my brain and my mouth.

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Pressure would get me into a feeling space where true change was possible. Phoenix offered me a golden opportunity to feel differently, learning a lot from across the arena. Lynn yelled, your back is locked again. Every time I asked something of Phoenix, my flow went out the window. My body went from moving with the horse in harmony and balance to rigid and stiff as a board. I sat up straight as if saying, now I'm in business with my body. I talked at Phoenix rather than with him. All I wanted to show my teacher was that I knew, quote, unquote, what to do in my own mind. This felt like the way to ride. Me telling the horse what to do, and the horse instantly responding. Except what I was doing gave me the exact opposite of what I was trying to achieve.

00:48:35.719 --> 00:48:47.079
My stiffness communicated danger to the horse. Sitting up, took me out of my balance seat and made me more likely to fall off.

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All I was showing Lynn was that I had a lot to learn. I was unintentionally creating the very thing I was trying to avoid. Without Lynn watching me and calling out what was really happening, I would have blindly felt great as soon as she pointed out my locked up back. I could feel it. I just couldn't imagine doing anything differently. My automatic response was to brace for danger. What if he ran away?

00:49:09.480 --> 00:49:24.139
What if he balked? What if he stopped suddenly and I went flying over his head? I thought my mind threw 1000 potential catastrophes at me. She pointed out that my own nervous state was causing the horse concern.

00:49:24.920 --> 00:50:35.539
When I didn't breathe, he moved with more stiffness, trying to figure out my instructions and to make sure I wasn't about to kill him. By this time, we had been working together for several months, knowing how to do this versus actually doing it under pressure were clearly two different things. I was in the froth, that place of discomfort where the old way doesn't work and the new way doesn't work either. The froth is my term for the productive learning zone, like the froth at the edge of the ocean, where the bubbles are water and air mixed. The froth is a state of mind and body sensation where the old and the new mix together. In the froth I feel agitation. I'm toggling back and forth between the comfort of the deficient old way and the tentativeness of the new way. Would I ever get past my fault? We were about to find out, relax, breathe now slight pressure with your right leg while you look left and stay relaxed. Lynn said, in one of the most vulnerable moments I've ever experienced. I somehow finally let go. I took a deep breath, relaxed and gave the slightest pressure with my leg, the horse smoothly turned, and we moved together in a flow that could only be called magical.

00:50:32.300 --> 00:50:39.260
Just writing about it almost makes me want to cry with joy.

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In that moment, the sensation course through my body, felt like it was opening to a flow that I had been seeking my whole life. I felt it down to my toes, which suddenly felt light and fluffy rather than tight and gripping. I was dancing the tightrope on the back of the horse for the rest of the day. I felt the sensation of doing things from a relaxed and focused state of being my feet both felt lighter and more grounded at the same time, my body moved with ease. Later, I came to realize it was the stream of endorphins, those feel good, hormones that Bruce had promised as a payoff. I had caught my first glimpse of what was possible in the afterglow of the experience, I reflected on how I had been approaching every aspect of my life, from daily routine to the dangerous bracing with fear was second nature.

00:51:26.840 --> 00:51:38.000
After the experience with Phoenix, I played with ways to bring the flowy feeling into my everyday life. My awareness on my feet was particularly keen.

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The more I tuned in, the more I noticed how often my feet clenched in a death grip, yet with some attention and intention, I could let go, and my toes and feet would relax. My fluffy toes would return for a moment when I faced the next thing, whether a phone call, a personal encounter, the next ski set or the next horse. My feet would brace for danger and death. My movements lost their float. My awareness would tune in and I would rock back into fluffy toes. My awareness would shut down, and I was back to grippy toes, rocking back and forth. I've been tuned into my feet ever since, constantly increasing the time I spend in fluffy toes, becoming ever more aware of the dance between bracing and embracing, bracing for danger and falling into my rules locked me up, both in mind and body, embracing pressure, fear and uncertainty as an opportunity to use my tools, opens me up to handle anything now I could see, in a way, that I could bring into practice, that It was the very act of facing pressure and uncertainty that would become the medicines to heal me. Thank you for listening to the creative spirits unleash podcast. I started this podcast because I was having these great conversations, and I wanted to share them with others. I'm always learning in these conversations, and I wanted to share that kind of learning with you. Now what I need to hear from you is what you want more of and what you want less of. I really want these podcasts to be a value for the listeners. Also, if you happen to know someone who you think might love them, please share the podcast and, of course, subscribe and rate it on the different apps that you're using, because that's how others will find it. Now I hope you go and do something very fun today.

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#87 Dancing the Tightrope Ch. 8 & 9 My No-Riding Riding Lesson: Filling in the Holes

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