Welcome! – A Horse Leads Me to Water

I’m D.K.B. “Donna” Condrey-Miller. Welcome to A Horse Leads Me to Water, an educational resource dedicated to relating to the horse in freedom. Our relative experience belies our inalienble whole and complete nature and we feel lack, unhappiness, sorrow. Thinking fulfillment is outside ourselves, many of us are drawn to the horse as the missing piece to our puzzle.

A few of us notice that our attempt at finding our happiness in a certain way with the horse comes at his expense, interferring with his natural essence of freedom and causing suffering. To end suffering for the horse at our hands we turn our desire for happiness from gross use of the horse into desire for freedom for the horse in the role of undemanding caregiver. We feel happy by the turn, yet it is an incomplete or intermittent happiness because we still suffer at the suffering of horses at the hands of those who don’t see what we see.

A Horse Leads Me to Water holds an answer to this problem of apparently inescapable suffering. It demonstrates a transcendent perspective which oversees our relative experience in full unconditional love, or relating to the horse in freedom. Through the discipline and practice of unbound stewardship we inquire into the reality of our heart and mind to realize the shared unchanging ever present limitless essence of horse and human, bringing our relationship with the horse into the light of the total freedom, unconditional love and harmony that we didn’t know we already had.

Few people will delve this deep and fewer still may truly uderstand, but since the steps to getting there are the qualities of being there, you don’t have anything to lose.

Please, make yourself at home. Allow me to show you around –

Work with Me is where you’ll find the teaching topics and opportunites for discussion and questions. I offer objective insight on horse-human relationships helping to resolve doubts and overcome obstacles to relating in freedom, as well as hoof care art and science education. Please sign up to join my email list (see note below*) to receive updates and news right in your inbox. Can’t wait? Send me a message with a note about what you’re seeking and I’ll get back to you. *When you sign up for the email list you will recieve an email requiring you to verify your sign up. If you don’t verify, you will not receive future email from A Horse Leads Me to Water. Please add the email donna@ahorseleadsmetowater.com to your white list or contacts so it doesn’t go to your spam folder.

Additionally, I am available for panel discussions, podcasts, interviews and speaking engagements for your group. Please contact me with inquiries.

The blog is where I discuss and illustrate the principles and values embraced here including my own experience to help you in relating to the horse in freedom, gaining relative knowledge of the horse body-mind and the human body-mind. Stay inspired and motivated to hone the practicle discipline of unbound stewardship for the horse and yourself. I’d love to hear from you with comments and questions.

The Glossary is where I feature words and phrases that have technical relevance, special meaning or importance for the principles and practices of relating to the horse in freedom. Feel free to drop me a line with words and phrases you’d like to see defined and discussed.

Note well:

The information shared on this website, in the teaching offered in regard to relating to the horse in freedom and the art and science of hoof care is for educational purposes. It is not meant as a replacement for human psychological or medical treatment nor for veterenary treatment for horses.

A Horse Leads Me to Water and Relating to the Horse in Freedom accepts the horse’s perspective and nature and the fact that she acts for her own sake. The principles and values taught are intended to be instill psychologically free relationships between humans and horses. Responsible, safe and species appropriate physical conditions should be maintained and supplemented as necessary for the well being of the horse, all to the best of your ability. In the value of non-injury it is understoood that you will not subject the horse to punishment or coercion to achieve specific results.

It is well known that humans can experience therapeutic effects as well as gain insight into their personal and spiritual development in the presence of horses. However, relating to the horse in freedom and unbound stewardship holds the position and teaches on principle that these effects are not the responsibility of the horse and that humans should not directly or indirectly interact with horses with expectations that they will attain a particular special experience. The horse does not owe us anything – not healing, teaching, comfort, friendship, respect or time of day.

Use and training of horses for pleasure riding, assisted learning or therapy, breeding for sale, entertainment, any other commercial use or equestrian discipline is not condoned. The knowledge and principles for relating to the horse in freedom are not techniques meant to facilitate such uses. In fact, their effect is unreliable or negated without full commitment to a psychologically free horse.

It is understood that many (holistic) equine health and hoof care providers who share the position of A Horse Leads Me to Water and implement the principles with their own horses may be working with horses who are living within the constraints of the above mentioned conventional equestrian and commercial enterprises. This is excusable in that all horses need health and hoof care and those things in and of themselves do not support use of horses. Besides – these practitioners have opportunities to educate their human clients who may be receptive to the idea of relating to horses in freedom!

If you are just at the beginning of leaving the conventional horse world behind, or at least thinking about it, I welcome you to explore the content here. All of us started our lives with horses in the world of the equestrian-industrial complex, so you will not be judged for your past. Having a horse or even access to one is not required to benefit from the teaching here!

Turning things around to see a whole new world

When I decided to get involved with horses in the early 2000’s, becoming an equestrian was the way I had planned to reinvent myself out of a restless period of inner dissatisfaction with my life. I had romantic visions, adventurous dreams and definite expectations of my venture as a horsewoman. It didn’t occur to me that the horses would present adversity to this activity that required them. Yet, so it was.

The horses made it clear to me that they had their own ideas about their purpose in life! I couldn’t ignore the fact that the only way to my equestrian success was to deny them their freedom and suppress their self-expression which wasn’t something I could comfortably do, in spite of it being the standard of the industry. This brought me to a crossroads, questioning whether I should even have horses at all.

Simply giving up the horses like some kind of byproduct of my failed pursuits would have been to abandon them to the same suffering I was trying to eliminate for myself. Instead, I decided to find a way to relate to the horses by which they had liberty within the interaction. After a few erring experiments I was introduced to the seminal work of Alexander and Lydia Nevzorov. In the wake of their insights and frankness, my perspective on horses turned 180 degrees from where it had started and I eagerly explored an alternative culture of equanimity in horse – human relationships.

While Nevzorov Haute Ecole (NHE) seemed like an end in itself at first, I recognized that it was really only the beginning! The deep self-examination required to understand my motivation for wanting a cooperative relationship with a horse opened the gate to the sacred spiritual essence of all relationships. I had made the shift to another perspective by following the horse to his natural way of being. It was a whole new world and there I found their liberation and mine.

From the outset of my career with horses, I have devoted myself to the whole horse philosophy of the art and science of bare hoof care and management. This was both instrumental in my seeing things from the horse’s point of view and grounding as I turned away from the status quo of exploitation of horses for human ends and toward an emotionally and spiritually restorative culture of holistic relationships between non-humans and humans.

For over a decade – as a Representative of Nevzorov Haute Ecole since 2011 and now as the founder of A Horse Leads Me to Water since 2018 – I have been guiding people on this inner journey to understand the principles of relationship which embrace the true nature of the horse and engage the personal and spiritual growth of the humans who care for them.

It is my mission to share the lessons of A Horse Leads Me to Water so that freedom, peace and satisfaction for all beings prevail as the way things are and not only what we wish they would be.