Holistic Equitation

23/11/2025

🤭😂🤭

23/11/2025

20/11/2025

We never go back to the beginning.

Although it can certainly feel like at times when we relapse, or have a return of old symptoms or patterns.

But, that feeling is just yet another fear-based, protective, learned pattern which sees the worst case scenario and despair.

The truth is though that we never go back to the beginning. We simply can’t. That place no longer exists in us because of all the work we’ve done to shift out of old patterns and heal our emotional wounds.

So, whenever you find yourself triggered, relapsing, symptoms flaring up or an old pattern resurfacing in your life, remind yourself of this: You’re NOT back at the beginning.

And then, when things settle back down again, you’ll find that you can pick-up much more easily and quickly and with less effort, because the new neural pathways are already well and truly in place. Yes, you might have got temporarily shunted back down an old track, but when we get back up, you find that you can easily step back onto the new pathways and resume your healing work.

No recovery, healing or growth is ever lost. It’s still there. And it’s often a lot stronger than we imagine, but it’s there alright and all you need to do is re-orientate yourself once more and resume the work.

You are not back at the beginning. All has not been lost. You’re not a failure and there is nothing inherently flawed about you. Quite the opposite. You are strong, capable and far more resilient than you ever thought. The proof of which is the ease with which you resume and get back on track.

Hurray!

Angela Dunning
The Horse’s Truth
www.thehorsestruth.co.uk

Image ©RABBIT RUN 11, licensed via Shutterstock. No re-use/downloading/saving of this image is permitted.

20/11/2025

“The Keeper of the Sky Path”

They say the wind once had a name,
and it spoke through the hooves of travelers.
Each step was a prayer,
each breath, a promise to the horizon.

He carries thunder not in sound
but in spirit—
a reminder that freedom
is not the absence of weight,
but the courage to move with it.

When he runs,
the earth remembers its heartbeat.
When he stops,
the stars lean closer—
listening for the song
that only the brave still sing.

18/11/2025

In the winter of 1954, a 63-year-old woman from Maine got bad news.

The doctor told her she was dying — two years to live, maybe less.
He said she should sell her things, move into a charity home, and wait for the end.

Instead, Annie Wilkins bought a horse.

His name was Tarzan, a brown Morgan gelding with kind eyes and a steady step. She loaded him with supplies, packed a bedroll, and tied a small dog named Depeche Toi (“Hurry up,” in French) to the saddle.

And then, without a map, she pointed west.

She wanted to see the Pacific Ocean before she died.
That was the dream her mother once told her about — the land of sunshine and oranges, where winter never comes.

So Annie left her frozen farm in Minot, Maine, in November snow and started riding.

⸻

She had no sponsors.
No GPS.
No cell phone.
Just faith — that America was still kind.

She slept in barns and on porches. Ate biscuits handed to her by strangers. Rode through blizzards, floods, and towns that had never seen a woman traveling alone on horseback.

Truckers pulled over to wave. Farmers gave her hay for Tarzan.
Police officers escorted her through busy highways so she wouldn’t be hit by cars.

In Kentucky, she was offered a job.
In Wyoming, a marriage proposal.
In California, fame.

But what Annie wanted most wasn’t fame. It was freedom.

⸻

By the time she reached Pacific Grove, California — 4,000 miles and 18 months later — the newspapers called her “The Last of the Saddle Tramps.”

She had crossed a country that was changing faster than anyone could imagine.
From horses to highways. From open doors to locked ones.
From neighbors to strangers.

And yet, what she found — what she proved — was that kindness wasn’t gone. It was just waiting to be asked.

⸻

When Annie finally saw the Pacific Ocean, she wept.

Not because she had beaten death.
But because she had lived — in the truest sense of the word.

She went on to write a book, Last of the Saddle Tramps.
She lived not two years, but twenty-five more, outliving every diagnosis and every doubt.

She died at nearly ninety — still believing in the goodness of people, and still remembering the sound of Tarzan’s hooves on the road to freedom.

⸻

🐴 Why her story matters now

In a world obsessed with speed, Annie reminds us that courage doesn’t come from having everything figured out.
It comes from saddling up anyway.

⸻

If you ever wonder whether there’s still good in this world, remember her:
A woman, a horse, and a dream.
And the road that carried them west.

14/11/2025

13/11/2025

10/11/2025

10/11/2025

For so long, I thought connection with horses meant making myself louder—more cues, more signals, more doing. I mistook movement for communication and activity for understanding.

But over time, I found a different path. Now, I pause and listen for whispers instead of shouts. The ear that turns towards me, the soft sigh that says “that’s enough,” or the grateful glance—all these are profound answers, if I’m quiet enough to notice.

It isn’t silence I seek with horses, but understanding: the kind that comes without force, without demands, in the shared language of being instead of doing. In those moments, trust grows—not because I spoke louder, but because I finally learned how to listen.

Maybe the greatest wisdom horses offer us isn’t in what they do, but in how they respond to our willingness to be still.

Let’s keep learning that language, together.

10/11/2025

10/11/2025

I was recently invited to the racetrack and offered a tour. I went because I didn’t want to just be angry from a distance. I wanted to understand. I didn’t want to dismiss something without seeing it for myself.

What I saw was complicated.

Many of the people there truly believe they’re doing what’s best for their horses. But good intentions don’t erase harm. You can love a horse and still be part of something that hurts them. That’s what makes this so difficult to confront, and so important to name.

I also saw stress, fatigue, fear and behaviours that told a very different story from the one people handling them believed.

Many genuinely saw tension or restlessness as excitement.

They didn’t recognize the signs of discomfort, not because they didn’t care, but because no one ever taught them to see it differently.

You walk through the racing spaces and see walls covered in photos, horses mid-stride, nostrils flared, eyes wide. And once you know what to look for, you can’t unsee it. You can match almost every image to a pain ethogram, and they would score.

When pain expressions are framed and celebrated as proof of achievement, it shows how deeply this culture has learned to see discomfort as success.

A system that hangs discomfort on the wall as a trophy is a system that cannot recognize harm even when it’s right in front of it. And we’re asking the people inside that system to open their eyes to something they’ve been taught to look away from for generations.

That’s why asking for change feels almost impossible.

There’s nothing ethical about breeding thousands of horses each year when so many already stand in kill pens and auction lines. There’s nothing ethical about glamorizing an industry where catastrophic injuries are treated as inevitable.

Because this isn’t just about the horses. It’s about people, people who have built their lives, livelihood, their identities, their sense of worth around this world. Admitting harm means questioning everything they’ve ever known.

The sport itself, the way it exists today, is built on the suffering of horses.

And it cannot be saved when the people inside it can’t see the damage being done. When suggestions for change are dismissed as outsider opinions, nothing moves forward. It’s impossible to heal a system when everyone within it believes it’s fine.

Cognitive dissonance keeps it alive.

It’s easier to defend cruelty than to admit you’ve been complicit in it.

And that’s why change is so hard. Because it asks people to unlearn everything they’ve been rewarded for believing. But this is exactly why naming harm matters and why recognizing stress behaviours and pain expressions matters.

Why we have to keep showing and discussig what others refuse to see.

Because every time someone learns to spot a pain face, or notices tension for what it really is,
a crack forms in the wall of denial that keeps this system standing. And cracks spread.

SO WE KEEP NAMING IT.

We keep pointing to it, even when it seems to fall on deaf ears, because it only takes one person willing to look in the mirror to start change from within.

We keep having these conversations with hope that people begin to see what we see. Because once you do, you can’t unsee it.