Without the voice of the trainers and clinicians in my ear my riding on Jim faltered as I couldn’t ignore his signals of discomfort with the bit, the spurs, the crop and ultimately the saddle too. Was I simply inept as a rider? Perhaps. But do horses not also resist or evade competent riders who may be better adept at overruling them? They do (and it often does not go unnoticed) .
Not living up to the standards of my original equestrian dreams was disappointing, as well as confusing. Trying to avoid feeling as though it wasn’t a good idea in the first place actually kept hope alive while self-doubt rose and self-esteem fell. Could I turn things around?
Besides all the indications from the horses that they were not happy with our activities, my inability to match the alpha leader persona that horsemanship promoted back then (now many trainers admit this dominant posturing isn’t necessarily healthy or helpful, even though it still thrives in many minds) without nearly rising to anger toward my horses had me wondering if I shouldn’t have horses.
Should I give up the horses? Where would they go that they wouldn’t face what they seemed to be telling me they didn’t want? If I hadn’t been comfortable and confident to organize the sale of Robert, how could I manage to find new homes for the others too?
I decided to keep the horses and find another way to communicate, interact, and be with them. I didn’t know how to imagine that exactly. How does one walk away from the status quo? And then, what is one walking into, where does one go? It was late 2008 or early 2009 – marking four or five years into my life with horses – and my original equestrian adventure was commencing a 180° turn.
In my small circle of equestrian friends and acquaintances, I wasn’t exactly alone in questioning the standards of human-horse relations. One woman I had come to know as a friend when she had me trim her horses’ hooves for a while also had begun to wonder about whether the conventional equestrian worldview didn’t need some revision. We agreed to share what we found about alternative methods for training and riding that gave much more consideration and liberty to the horse.
The question loomed – what did that really mean – revision of the human worldview of relating to horses? More consideration for the horse? Liberty?
The search began on the internet. Liberty training was about the only way I could think to describe what I thought I was seeking. I’m sure I worded it various ways, but it’s hard to look for something when you don’t really know what it is, or whether anything like it is out there.
It was my friend who brought my attention to Nevzorov Haute Ecole (NHE). I had come across it too, though I had dismissed it because I didn’t find its dramatic and theatrical presentation attractive. My friend persuaded me to look closer. Trusting her willingness to try it, I lowered my aesthetic boundary and put a serious eye to it . The provocative offering was comprehensive, promoting a deep study of the horse and a comparative discussion about how NHE was different from the conventional equestrian offerings.
In short order my friend joined the NHE Online International Forum. She shared a short conversational exchange she had with a member there that turned our heads. I wish I could recall the conversation and alas it is lost to cyberspace as the forum no longer exists. The intrigue of NHE was a siren song.
At first look, NHE spoke from a perspective that challenged the expectations and agendas of the equestrian industrial complex held for the horse. My appetite was whetted so I also joined the forum to take my own seat at the table. Still wary, and even skeptical, I spent over a month reading everything available to me there before I introduced myself in a diary that each member created in order to interact and receive guidance on implementing the means of the School to one’s own relationships with horses.
While we made our way into this new and mysterious community we watched a documentary called Path of the Horse by Stormy May. (You can still watch it on YouTube.) The film documents her journey in search of answers to many “what if” questions about how we were using horses and of alternatives. She visited a number of horsemen and horsewomen around the world who were aiming to shine light on the horse’s sentient and intelligent nature and how humans could mercifully improve our communications with and understanding of the horse.
Eventually, I met Stormy, who was also a member of NHE and today consider her a colleague and friend. Her film is still a powerful orientation to the investigation into human-horse relations and the idea of relating to the horse in freedom.
Alexander Nevzorov was the final interview of about a half dozen in the film. And though she never said so, the order in which she presented the featured trainers reflected a gradation of more and more consideration for the horse with each successive conversation, culminating with Nevzorov, the most provocative and radical of them all – and, perhaps suggestively, the epitome of the enlightenment at that time.
My library increased with books or CD’s from nearly all of the film’s participants before Nevzorov. I wolfed them down, hungry for nourishment of the transformation of my relationships with the horses and, honestly, wondering if any produced easy results.
Taking on the dialect of each one as I experimented with the horses, opening myself to feeling if they were moving me into real new territory of human- horse relations, none of them managed to elicit the degree of change I was seeking or expecting. So I undertook the initiation of a hero’s journey in the virtual halls of the School of Nevzorov Haute Ecole in the summer of 2009 and remained active with the community until the fall of 2018.
Gaining access to Nevzorov Haute Ecole and its teachings turned out to be for me an entrance through the gateway to liberation of the highest spiritual-psychological-philosophical nature. I don’t know that the direction it took me was an intention of the School, but since the stepping stones I followed were placed plainly throughout the pages of Alexander’s* seminal book, The Horse Crucified and Risen and a smaller work called Tractate on A School Mount, there were pointers to the knowledge I sought.
That being said, by 2018, I was committed to my investigations beyond NHE and A Horse Leads Me to Water came to me as a name for my work.