Mindful Training With Horses Starts With Connection
The farrier is coming at nine. You’ve known for weeks, and still your stomach tightens a little as you walk out to the field. Last time your horse snatched his hoof away again and again, and you stood there apologising while the farrier lost his patience.
Your horse wasn’t being difficult. He simply didn’t understand what was being asked of him, or why. A hand lifting your leg and holding it there is not something horses do to each other.
That is where Mindful Training comes in, in this case Groundwork. But it’s not where it begins.
Mindful Training grows out of connection
In my work with challenging and traumatized horses, I learned this once, and then over and over again. When people start training their horse before there is a real and natural connection, it rarely goes well. The horse may learn the exercise, but he learns it without a strong foundation of trust and connection underneath, and sooner or later that shows.
So in Horsefulness Training, everything starts with Liberty Connection Work™. Your horse is free, with no rope and no halter. You learn to be calm and present, to read the language your horse speaks all day long, and to answer in it. Nothing in Liberty Connection Work™ is new to your horse. It’s how horses have always found each other, which is why it’s the most natural, the most relaxing and the most horse-friendly place to start.
Only then do we pick up the rope.
What groundwork with horses really is
Groundwork is everything you do with your horse on the ground while he’s guided by a halter and rope, or by a neck rope. And here something changes. Where Liberty Connection Work™ speaks your horse’s own language, groundwork teaches him a few words of ours.
Because no matter how naturally we keep them, our horses live in a human world. It’s a world of trailers and tractors, saddles and vets, a dentist, a farrier, a wall to stand tied to, a plastic bag dancing in the wind. None of that would ever happen to a horse living free, so someone has to help him understand it. But in the human world he needs someone to help him with this and that someone is you. As a horse owner, you are always also your horse’s trainer, whether you chose to be or not.
I like to compare it to learning the alphabet when you’re six. If nobody teaches you, you can still be perfectly happy. But once you can read and write, life in our society becomes so much easier, and so much more fun. Groundwork is a bit like that for horses. When your horse understands what a gentle hand on his chest means, or what you’re asking as you walk toward the trailer, the human world stops being a place full of things he has to endure. He can relax into it, and even learn to enjoy it.
And there’s that moment I never get tired of, when the penny drops and you can almost see your horse think: oh, now I get it. From then on, it’s simply part of the conversation between you.
Groundwork carries the connection you built at liberty into situations that ask more of both of you.
It helps fearful or traumatized horses find their way through what once frightened them, at their own pace. It brings your horse calm and confidence in new places and in traffic. It gives variety to his days, which so many domesticated horses lack.
Mindful training, on the ground and in the saddle
Groundwork is where Mindful Training begins, but for many horses and their women it doesn’t stop there.
Some horses need help with their body. A horse who moves crooked, a a horse that moves with tension under saddle, a horse that has never learned to move in balance,... can’t feel truly at ease during lunging or riding, however connected he is. With gymnastic groundwork we help him become more supple, strong and balanced, slowly and in a way his body understands. Not to make him perform, but so he feels good in himself, and moves during groundwork, and later under a rider, with ease.
And for those who want to ride, Connective Riding is where everything comes together. The calm, the clarity, the listening you built at liberty and on the ground come with you into the saddle. Riding stops being something you do on your horse. It becomes something you do together with him.
Mindful Horse Training Grows From One Root.
That root is connection: the trust, the clear communication and the calm presence you build together in Liberty Connection Work.
Groundwork, gymnastic groundwork and connective riding are three ways of continuing that same conversation. You don’t have to do all of them. Some women stay with Liberty Connection Work and groundwork, and their horses are happy and safe. Others want to go all the way. Both are good, as long as everything grows from that root.
The heart of it stays the same as during Liberty Connection Work: clear & calm communication, connection, listening, and respecting your horse’s blueprint instead of trying to change it.
Sounds a lot to you?
You don’t have to find your way through this alone. In my Liberty Connection & Beyond Program, I guide horsewomen and their horses from the very beginning, starting with Liberty Connection Work™ and growing into Mindful Groundwork, with the Groundwork Essentials included. It goes step by step, in the right order, so nothing is built on sand.
Discover the Liberty Connection & Beyond Program → Liberty Connection & Beyond Program. That's where you'll already find the Groundwork Essentials as a wonderful bonus.
And if you have questions, write to me. I’d truly love to hear from you.
With love,
-- Karine ♡
© Karine Vandenborre - Horsefulness Training. All Rights Reserved