You may have seen on the news that prior to the Paris Olympics dressage rider Charlotte Dujardin was suspended from competition following the release of a video showing her repeatedly whipping a horse during a training session.

This event, just like any other that arise in our awareness, offers us an opportunity to get curious.

It’s a universal invitation to explore what contributes to such an occurrence and what could pave a new way should we decide we no longer wish to fuel what we’re witnessing.

It’s common for a community to scapegoat an individual for displaying such an ‘unsavoury’ behaviour, but it seldom does much to address the root of the issue.

A much more courageous community approach would be to take collective responsibility for the culture that has been created. For in the largest sense, it is the culture we create that determines what prevails.

One of the principles in horsemanship that seeks to understand and harmonise with the horse is to “set the horse up for success”, in other words, “make it easy for the horse to do the right thing.”

In this moment it may be wise to reflect on the following, does our equestrian sporting community create a culture that sets riders up for success? Does it make it easy for them to do the right thing?  i.e. the thing that’s in the interest of the horse’s highest good? (and the rider’s for that matter…).

Upon watching this video, whilst sad and disappointed (I still love a bit of wishful thinking), having grown up swimming in the emotional environment that pervades the competitive equestrian world, was I honestly surprised? No.

Because for every carrot given to a horse I have seen one hit, for every pat, a smack, and for every praise a whip.

And you know what…

Sometimes that person was me.

I’m not proud of it. I don’t condone it. But I do understand it.

And that understanding came from my desire for a different way, couple with learning to see clearly and hold compassionately what I was experiencing in the space between myself and my horse.

It is these two qualities – clear seeing and compassionate holding of one’s experience that clinical psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach describes as the “two wings of radical acceptance” that precede any real change.

It takes strength to look at yourself clearly and own the parts you would rather no one saw, it’s much easier to pin them on someone else (a public figure perhaps…) and be done with it, but if we’re honest it never gets to the root of the issue, does it?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes this:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

This is the heart of the issue and something I am passionate about raising awareness on so we can create relationships with our horses that we’re proud of.

Every time we shame and reject the parts we do not wish to see (whether that’s within ourselves or in another) we fracture our humanity further. We close the door on the shards of self that most need our care to reveal what we need to learn next for our return to wholeness.

7 years ago I turned towards these parts in myself, the ones that had me use force out of frustration with my horses, and you know what I found?

Untended pain. HEAPS of it.

Wounds and fears left alone to wreak havoc on my relationship with horses in the absence of care, understanding and compassion: “If I can’t get my horse to do ‘x’, I’ll be rejected”, “Once I jump at this level, then I’ll be enough”, “They’ll think I’m useless if I can’t load my horse into the box so I must get her in at any cost”.

When we leave these parts of ourselves in the dark we risk using our horses as vehicles to try and flee from our own pain. “My horse is bigger than your horse” being the classic phrase illustrating how we can so easily reduce this sentient being to a tool of the wounded human ego.

But if you’ve spent much time around horses, you’ll realise this approach doesn’t work in the long run. Because horses themselves are calling to something deeper in us all the time.

The horse is intimately in touch with a sensitivity of spirit, the transmission of which cannot be expressed through the fractured human soul yet deeply longs to.

We’ve all been hurt, and this fracturing is a natural result of that.

But spend some agenda-lass time around a horse and before long you’ll feel the broken pieces naturally starting to call to each other. It’s then the work of healing begins. It’s not always comfortable, for the healing of every past fracture holds within its wholeness the possibility of a future one. It’s a risk. It’s vulnerable.

But it’s by turning towards our vulnerability that we reclaim our sensitivity. We allow what was there all along to be restored and our relationship to the horse naturally changes. A by-product of our deeper understanding of who we really are.

On the other hand, when we try to achieve through our horses from a place of human separation we reduce them. We blunt them. Because in this state we ourselves are blunted, disconnected.

Perhaps this is what horseman Buck Brannaman was referring to when he said:

“There is a fineness in a horse that most people will never even be aware of.
But it’s there.
Every horse is born with it.
Once it’s gone though, once it’s been taken away by a human, its gone forever.
If you can’t make use of it yourself, at least leave it there for him.”

In this way we can see that the next quantum shift in horse welfare really depends on our ability to turn towards ourselves. To discover this fineness within ourselves.

The work we have to do as a collective equestrian community is to re-sensitise, by turning towards our disowned parts, tending to our wounds and integrating so we may act from wholeness.

Ironically it’s the horses that truly are the best teachers of this and it is this that Equine Facilitated Learning has to offer the equestrian community.

The question is, are we willing to surrender to a new, more sensitive way?

Can we let this video of Charlotte be the start of something that in time brings us closer to ourselves, each other and our horses?

Perhaps you can sense that the pathway to truly elevating horse welfare is not to cut Charlotte or anyone out of our hearts and wash our hands of it, but to turn towards those rejected places with a gentle curiosity and desire to understand.

In those moments when the use of blunt force feels so compelling can we pause, turn inwards and meet our vulnerability?

It is this process that brings us back to our sensitivity and restores in us what the horses most need.

It will restore beauty to our horsemanship and allow the fineness of the horse to lead the way.

We may even find it in ourselves, because even if you’ve been told it’s gone for ever. It hasn’t.

It’s still here.

Here’s to your unfolding,

Ruby