Meet Resistance with Softness

The ethical framework I use to make horse keeping and horsemanship decisions is the same ethical framework I strive to use to guide everything in my life….

One of the things I say a lot is:

Meet resistance with softness

Softness does not mean permissive, or absence of accountability. It does not mean letting someone walk all over you…

It means empathy, compassion, and gentleness while setting boundaries that keep you both safe.

Softness is not giving up when things get tough.

Softness is persistent - although it often requires finding new and creative ways of trying things.

This horse is such an embodiment of this lesson at a time when I think I really need it most. He was so angry. So angry. When we started together in April.

I could barely touch him. Biting his lead rope constantly, biting me, pushing into my space and threatening…

Meeting that resistance with softness was hard - finding the right boundaries to keep us all safe, the owner trusting that the (extreme) level of softness required was worth paying me her hard-earned money for…

Could he actually improve? Or was he too far gone?

We didn’t know with any certainty, but we tried anyways.

It hasn’t been linear, it never is. But recently I really felt things turn a corner.

I can touch him all over, I can ask him for hard things and then help him find relaxation, he finds alternatives to biting his lead rope like yawning and lick/chews and no longer escalates to the point of being dangerous.

Only by meeting his resistance, his anger, his pain and frustration with softness…

Could we help him find softness.

As always, more work to be done, but I think you can see what I’m talking about

(OTTB with chronic kissing spines being managed non-surgically. Top photo from April, bottom from today just after pulling him out of the pasture, so this truly shows his shift in baseline)