We finished straightening up the viewing room, and I was getting a hot drink ready to head out into the cold. All the while, I heard a friendly bouncing of commentary – one person’s horse was bound to have rolled in the mud to spite her, another horse was always a challenge in new places, this person expected to be the first person to mess up, another person was sure she would get there first.
“Listen up here, ladies, just for a moment. We’re about to get the horses out, and you’re about to experiment with some things you may not have tried before. Does anyone know what I mean by a little voice that chants things like ‘oh I did that wrong, I screwed that up, I’ll never get this, I’m the only dunce that can’t do this… I did not do enough… I failed…’?” The noises around the room left no doubt that this was a familiar refrain.
“It is a tough one to crack, that I know. But… as Leslie pointed out to me soon after we first met, if you are talking to yourself that way, you also load your horse up with it. He is responding to your best effort with his best effort, based on the feel you present. If you judge yourself to have failed, you also judge him to have failed.” The room went a bit quiet, just as I had when Leslie painted this picture for me in ‘07.
“Of course none of this was part of any plan I had for my horse, or myself, for that matter. It was compelling though, when she put it like that”.
The question is, how do you make a shift? How do you jump to the other track?
“This is the beauty of going out there now to work through feel. There is no sheet of instructions to go out and pass or fail with your horse, there are no boxes to check and no red ink” I said. Students would be experimenting with offering a certain feel, with a plan for a particular response from their horse. “If you don’t get the response planned, it is just an opportunity to absorb what your feel actually meant to the horse in that moment. Nothing more than a chance to learn about feel, which is exactly what we are here for.” I continued, “It is just a moment in time, in which to consider how you might adjust for the horse to understand what you really meant more easily, and take a fresh start.”
By now the room had become so still you would hear a pin drop. For a split second I caught myself contemplating the possibility that the feel I was presenting was… bombing. I smiled inwardly at the irony of such a thought bubbling up at this particular moment.
This seemingly small thing – a moment of self-doubt – runs deeper than one imagines: it literally short-circuits pretty much everything we have to offer. It disables our light, our individual gifts. It is limit-based thinking that manifests those very limits in real life – perception becomes reality. Since it is merely a perception, it is also a choice to go with it, or let it go. Awareness must come first. It feels like the lightness, the joy in you goes thud, as the force of self-doubt weighs you down, pulls you down – it is just a matter of how far. You feel yourself sliding into the abyss of inadequacy, unless or until you catch yourself. Most of us learn self-doubt well, very well, and it is a hard habit to divorce. I’m not sure we can altogether, if it is deeply rooted in our foundation of life experience. A rather dismal reality in some ways, but one I can smile at, since I discovered you CAN learn to “jump the tracks”, and the more aware you get, the better you get at jumping. And right there, in that room was the spot: I could let that moment of self-doubt pull me down - and in this particular context take everyone down along with it - or not.
I felt the still for the next second or two. It wasn’t subdued, or dull, or grey, or heavy, as it seemed for that moment when I slipped ‘into my head’. It was rich, had depth and a lightness to it – rich in its openness to the wonder of what might just be possible, depth in the dimension added when heart enters what you do, and the lightness in an awakened passion, inspiration and release of potential.
I had a very good feeling right then about what was to come that afternoon.
I had been swishing my ginger tea around in the cup for about the right amount of time by now. I took a sip and wound the label and string around the cup handle – then greeted a new auditor who arrived at that moment, with impeccable timing to release everyone without further ado.