I try to grab onto the thoughts, the words, the concepts, the ideas, the disagreements. More visions. So many different training programs. From classical dressage, French, Portuguese, German, rolkur, long and low, Natural Horsemanship, Horse Whisperer, ….

From VOLUME 50 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Excerpt from the Article: “Leadership, Dominance, Submission, Control and Fear”

I feel like I stand in the eye of a tornado. Here it is calm. But all around me I can see emails, words, sentences being whizzed around far above my head faster than the heart can grab them and hold on to them.

Hempfling on how …” We just killed its soul… the horse is dead. The horse’s personality and soul has been blown away.”

Then I overhear from the other side of the whirling winds, “We must be the alpha mare, the most dominant mare.” Video clips of a horse being chased around and around fly by.

We play the predator and why don’t we ask ourselves how they cannot feel like the prey?

Hempfling again, “where the horse really gives up, where you can see in the eyes of the horse that the soul is leaving now, it’s flying out like a dove out of the nest, so to speak. It’s not there anymore. The horse is dead. Now you can put the saddle on, you can do whatever you want.

“You come into the stable again and the soul is standing there beside the horse – literally you can touch the soul which is outside and you have to push the soul again back inside of the horse”.

Words fly faster.. we need to be the leader, dominance, submission.. training.

I try to grab onto the thoughts, the words, the concepts, the ideas, the disagreements.

More visions. So many different training programs.

When we spoke again, I thought, Hempfling and I, we were going to talk specifics on how to help these kind of horses. But we didn’t. And at first I was disappointed.

Instead, he spoke about how when “you impose your frame onto another being, it will always create resistance.” And perhaps most of all. how “the opposite of control is trust.” And that “the point of trust is that you can’t split it.”

The next day I could sense a central truth in the confluence of circumstances, of ideas and words in the spinning of so many ideas all around me.

Klaus gave me a very special gift and I thanked him for that. He gave me the key to understanding the one inherent flaw in the many, many training systems out there. Something that is at the heart of that which expresses the difference between two ultimately diametrically opposed approaches to living, to being and to riding and training our horses.

And in the whirling of congruent events and words, one single word merged all the others, and the word was ….. control.

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Volume 50: *Leadership, Dominance, Control and Fear