#warwickschiller

As I lay here at 3:46am listening to my 31/2 month old son kick, grunt, squeal and slowly start to be upset… I want to help him. I know if he figures out how to work it out on his own he will be so much better off. I know I can give him his binky, I can flip him over on his stomach & rub his back and it will put him back to sleep. But in the long run its not helping him… So to stop myself I’m writing this… I took my lesson this Friday… Hmmmm… Fascinating … Different trainer same theme as Al’s feed back. “Slow Your Hands Down!” Ahhhhh. I feel soooooo slow!! NOTHING’S happening fast enough! Haha! One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…four… I have come to a conclusion, one that I have come to several different times in my life in various different places. I can’t deal.. Well wait, I have a hard time dealing with things (ie people & animals) struggling. Wether it be physically, mentally or emotionally. It is so hard for me to sit back and just let that happen. Even though I know it’s for the better. *sigh* I have a story about that as well. Where I REALLY learned that.

As some of you may know I am EAGALA certified. That is a EAP organization. Equine Assisted Physiotherapy. As I said I like to help people so naturally the idea of combining the two was obvious to me! In this model there is an Equine specialist (me) and a therapist of some nature. Little did I know it’s all about letting the patients figure it out in their own… Not telling them where they’ve gone wrong & how to fix it haha… You are just there to provide a safe and effective environment for them to do that..You must attend follow up continuing education so my partner, Angela Sherman and I headed up to the course together. I will explain what a session may look like, specifically one we were put into together as an exercise that really resignated with me.

We were the “patients”… “Fun!” We thought! “Like acting!” The rest if the group would take turns conducting a session with us as the client. This exercise is meant to help ask questions the right way at the right time. Sometimes it means not speaking at all. So we thought about what we would “pretend” we were as everyone came up with a “task” for out session. We thought “I know! We will be a new team starting out, trying to get our business together and become better partners!” Because that’s what we were. But we decided to pretend she wasn’t a horse person and was doing dangerous things around the horses ect ect. About a min in of unnatural acting we found ourselves smack dab in the middle of something very real… There was an obstacle course of a bridge, some ground poles and barrels to get around. We were to name the obstacles and take one or all three if the horses through the course with out talking or touching the horses (in these sessions horses are turned loose in an arena, how many depends on the session the facility ect ect) As the facilitator you watch the horses (essentially mirrors of the people out there interacting with them.) You ask questions based on what the horses are doing. A lot of times people will project their own feelings out to the horses. They are much more willing to speak about what is going on for the “horses” that with themselves as in traditional talk therapy… So thats where you gather your information on what might be going on with the patient… Ok back to my story. So we take our few moments to sort out what the “names” of the obstacles are. I can remember we named the bridge “get more clients” so we set out to navigate through the course. The dynamic between her and I is me being the “lets just wing it” person and her need to plan plan plan went out the window. I wanted to talk about a plan & she just said” let’s just see what happens” “what?!” Haha I immediately felt the anxiety she probable does when I say that. I was all of a sudden very aware and empathetic to that (that was the first 30 seconds of the session!!) so off she went & I followed right behind thinking piece of cake. I made my career out of getting horses to go where I want just by body language. We got them through the poles… No problem… Then around the barrels… Simple.. We got to”get more clients” & they all bolted!!! What!!! Errrr… “Lets try it again! Something must have spooked them” haha. So again around “business plan” through “workshops” then boom!!! Scattered!! So we stopped to sit and contemplate what that meant. The most helpful thing in that whole session was when we were trying to talk through what was happening, the “facilitators” running the session were trying to “help” by trying to make us see what was going on… Obvious to them but we needed to come to the conclusion on our own. Finely silence. They let us sit there in the session for about 10min with out saying a word. That was the most powerful part of the whole session (as the one facilitating the session sometimes you feel the need to “talk” or “ask questions” to feel like you are giving people their moneys worth ect ect. But sometimes what people/horses need is a safe place to figure it out in their own)… Much more powerful then them shouting out what they see going on! As we sat & contemplated what it all meant the horses walked over the bridge all in their own… First horse, second horse, third horse… WHAT!! So what our realization that we came up with was if we spend the time building and planning our business model, and stop trying to force the process the clients will come. It will just happen when the time was right. And we also gained empathy for each others natural way of operating…We both needed to meet in the middle and everything would come together… Surrender.