08/31/2020
For me, the horse industry has been both one of the safest places for me to be myself, and yet one of the scariest places to be myself. For so much of my life in this industry, I have gone out of my way to find various ways of expressing myself just as much as I needed to in order for me to feel okay, but never fully embracing my most authentic self, for fear of making anyone feel uncomfortable or uncertain. I held, and am still doing the shadow work around, the fear that if I was fully myself and expressed my most controversial viewpoints, I would be ostracized from the very community in which I felt the greatest sense of belonging. I embraced people of all different backgrounds and beliefs, yet never granted myself that acceptance- totally burying my own beliefs and expression of them in order to avoid being metaphorically burned at the stake. I was teaching people and horses to express the fullest, wildest, and most authentic versions of themselves, all while showing up as the most acceptable and uncontroversial possible version of myself. I was teaching people and horses to be their own leaders, to rewild, all while holding myself prisoner to my own conditioning of always being the โgood girlโ, โquiet girlโ, โnever too much girlโ, etc.
Recently I had a conversation with about my relationship with my horse Mรคgnรบs, in which I said something to the effect of โI realized I needed to empower all of him, not just the parts that felt safe and socially acceptableโ. Then I realized the thing that made it all make sense. By holding myself back, by only expressing the acceptable and desirable parts of myself, I was holding my horse back. I wasnโt being my own leader, so how could I ever have expected him to step out of the mold I had subconsciously stuffed us both into, to be his own leader. Only when I approached him with the mindset of โletโs unleash our wildness togetherโ, did we find our way back to each other. So Iโm gonna make a promise- to my horses, my clients, but most of all to myself, that I will put all of the energy I used to put into being โjust enough, but never too muchโ into being the fullest embodiment of my most authentic self.
