Everyone wants to have a meaningful life. Everyone wants to have a meaningful relationship with his horse. But when do we want to create this meaning? Sometimes people are living their lives thinking that the meaning will come, or that it will appear some-day…later on. Some people think that the meaning will come when they enter the Fall of Life, or when something important happens, and they will look into the whole life from bigger perspective.
In Reality, you are filling your life with purpose and meaning every day, with every actions that you take, with every interaction with other people, and with every meeting with your horses. It doesn’t matter if you are aware of that or not, every single action which you take gives a meaning to your life.
Your life is meaningful. Your life has a meaning all the time. But you are not always aware of the meaning it really has. If you do not know what is the meaning of the actions you take, very often the meaning they have is different, than the one you wished they have.
Many people believe that they can do something technically correctly, and that their actions don’t have to have any particular meaning. For example, a rider can teach the horse to come onto the bit and relax his jaw, and the rider can think that he is just doing some technical aspects of horsemanship, so it’s not important if these actions carry any deeper meaning. That it’s not important if his actions express his respect or gratefulness to the horse, or not. However, for someone who observes this action from aside, it is very obvious if the rider expresses gratitude, and respect or not. If someone is just riding a horse thinking that expressing gratefulness and respect is not important, and that it’s not important to express these values through the technical aspects of what they do — it’s very possible that these values will not be present at all in the actions taken by this rider.
What happens when there is no respect and gratefulness in the actions taken by the rider? Are such actions valued “NEUTRAL”?
Some people think, that when they act they don’t express anything — they just take actions and execute techniques, but this is not true. In Nature there are no empty spaces. Everything has to be filled with something. If you are not filling your actions with GRATEFULNESS and RESPECT, then it’s not that you are not expressing anything with them. You express UNGRATEFULNESS and DISRESPECT.
Many people realise this, and they try to remember to express gratitude and respect through their actions. They talk about it, speak about it with friends, read books about it. But it doesn’t always work… Why?
Because every actions is expression of YOU.
Every action shows who you are and what are your values.
Thoughts and words can be fake. Actions cannot be fake. You can now look for any video with any rider on youtube, and ask yourself: what does it express? And you will instantly know it.
In the same way your horse recognises instantly what YOU REPRESENT and EXPRESS.
When the rider is not aware which values he is expressing during the riding, he can be expressing gratefulness, but he can also be expressing ungratefulness. He simply doesn’t know. For such a rider it could be just practicing technical exercises, but in fact he will be all the time nourishing and empowering the most profound values present in his Life.
Every Life is meaningful, and we build meaning for our life all the time. We all want to nourish values with which we can identify ourselves, and we all want to act in the way that is supporting and expressing our values.
Knowing your values, and knowing how to nourish and express them becomes very important when you start to use powerful techniques in your horsemanship (like Relaxation, BodyMarc, and Optimal Performance Program). Every tool is just a tool and provides means and techniques, the path and the goal, but it’s your responsibility to fill it up with the MEANING.
YOU CANNOT DECIDE WHICH VALUES YOU WANT TO EXPRESS
We all know, and we have all experienced that it’s not enough to DECIDE which values we want to have in our Lives. We can agree, and understand on the intellectual level, but we see that its not enough to soak our actions with these actions. There is something lying very deep inside of us, which connects us with the CORE VALUES OF LIFE, and this deep level of our existence is expressing itself on the outside through our actions. This level is much deeper than our thoughts and emotions. But we reach this level and shape what is there with every action that we take, and it is how you can start consciously nourish the values which are important for you, and learn which values are really in the core of your existence.
I shared with my students recently many powerful training techniques — Conscious Muscle Relaxation for Horses (Optimal Performance Program), Relaxation of the Digestive Tract for Horses (Relax That Stomach Technique), Relaxation of the Residual Tensions with the Bit (RTR Technique) — and now I feel that it’s important to give my students technique that will allow them to fill the space created by these techniques with THE PURE MEANING.
All lives are meaningful. We create meaning of our life everyday. We are not always aware of what this meaning really is, but we all are attracted by the CORE VALUES of Life, which are: respect, openness, sharing and gratitude. We feel that horses have these values preserved in the purest possible way, and that is why so many people are attracted to horses, even when they do not clearly know why or how.
But when our CORE VALUES which we really have inside, are not corresponding with the CORE VALUES of our horse, then we have a clash.
Do we want or can change the CORE VALUES of our horse? – No.
So if we don’t want to have this clash, fight and disappointment, we need to look inside of our core values and learn how to identify them and how to nourish the core values we really want to have.
I have prepared the 4 PURE-MEANING TECHNIQUES Course for my Optimal Performance Program Students and everyone who wants to connect with OPP in the future to learn how to recognise the CORE VALUES which are guiding your Life, and how to implement and nourish the core values that you really want to have in your Life with horses.
The 4 PURE-MEANING TECHNIQUES are very short techniques which I do for about 4 minutes in private, and silence before my trainings with my horses — in the tackroom, or washing-bay when no-one is around. I do them in private, and in humbleness. Thanks to these techniques I really do feel that later on, when training my horses, all my actions are guided through these values and are fulfilling the PURE MEANING these values enliven in me.
For me it’s very important to see and know which VALUES I will be promoting and nourishing during my horse trainings, because I have learned that if you don’t know which values are guiding your actions, you very quickly can start to nourish the values with which you do not want to have in your life, and which are absent in the Core Values of my horses.
4 PURE-MEANING TECHNIQUES COURSE: https://gum.co/puremeaning (click to read on)
