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Reverence Equine, Shrewsbury, VT (2026)

08/29/2026

I took a little time off this week to complete some projects around the homestead (and yes, I promise, this has to do with horses).

Three years ago my husband and I bought a farmhouse on a few acres. The house was built in 1842 and has had, as far as we can tell, at least three additions onto the original home. It has all the character one could want from a home of this era and we've been in the process of lovingly - sometimes amidst choice words - remodeling and restoring it to make it uniquely ours.

That is to say we've been living in a half-finished (if we're lucky) round-robin of to-do's for three years. We've built pastures and sheds and a round pen from scratch. We tore off a whole porch and rebuilt the bones just to live in them for twelve months. We've power-washed and sanded and primed and finished what we thought was going to be the way something was meant to be only to exist alongside it for a bit and decide that wasn't what it was meant to be at all, scrapping the whole thing. There isn't a single room in the whole house that is 100% done, and there is so much still to do.

I have always been drawn to dusty old things. I love antiques, I love old homes, and I love old ways and practices. It is a nostalgia I have no real right to claim, being a child of the 90's, and yet it somehow feels as familiar and beholden to me as if I had been teleported from a past time and plopped into our modern era. I grew up in builder-grade houses that were lovely and clean and convenient and modern and yet they distinctly never felt like home. I knew that when I put down some roots somewhere, it was going to be in a place with stories to tell.

This knowledge has always uncomfortably intersected with the fact that I am very bad at "living in the yuck". I am fabulous at starting and ending things, however that in between phase where the vision is still a bit blurry and you're not sure if you made the right choice fills me with a dread I've never quite been able to put words to. I can work most people under the table, but that drive comes from having always felt like to do any less than achieve 100% of what I'm capable of is not a choice but an obligation.

This feeling does not mix well with that nostalgia I referenced. It also does not mix particularly well with working with horses, especially the kind of horses I tend to work with. And I think that is exactly why it is all actually far more synergistic than I ever realized.

Old houses are a constant stop-and-go endeavor. You can have an entire plan laid out only to have it all get shredded when you open up a wall or pull some floor boards. It's a master class in dancing with a lead partner who doesn't have a clue what the next move is and is making up the whole thing as they go along. You either learn how to go with the flow or sit out entirely: there is no middle ground. Horses demand something not all that dissimilar: they offer the illusion of control until you hit a moment where there literally isn't a damn thing you can do except hold on and go with the horse, wherever that ends up being.

And there is nothing better - for someone who needs to get better about living in the middle, the yuck, the uncomfortable in-between where there's ups and downs and lefts that look like rights and a demand for pensivity and a bit of penitence - than restoring old spaces and rehabilitating experience-hardened souls. It all fits so well that one might start to question who is restoring and rehabilitating whom.

I realized that this week as I beamed at our near-finished bathroom the same way I realized it as I smiled atop a teenaged gelding who had just thought to offer an easy stride of canter. The things that are worth pursing, the things that change us in ways we don't recognize until we arrive at moments we never would have appreciated nearly as much had we not been changed to begin with...those things only come from spending time in that uncomfortable middle place. I don't have a more eloquent way to say it, I just know it's true.

There is a fascinating and terrifying power in not knowing exactly how something is going to turn out and doing it anyway. Not knowing the price of admission, I've decided I'm willing to pay it.

08/20/2026

What The Horse Can Teach Us About "Abuse"

I was raised up in the "traditional" ways of working with horses, i.e., the horse isn't allowed to say "no", because they get twenty-three hours a day to themselves and therefore they can do what I want for one hour a day.

I still hear that sentiment echoed more often than I'd like.

I then met some pretty amazing people and learned a few things and came to understand that not only can horses say "no" but when they do it's my job to figure out why that "no" might be there and then see if I can do something to help the horse feel comfortable and confident re-shaping their response.

Shortly after that, I came across some additional (and also amazing) people whose life work is to bring to light all the things that might be happening outside of our ability to see them that might lead a horse to say "no". When you work mostly with what the public calls "problem horses", figuring out the why behind a horse's "no" is literally the job, so the more resources you can tap into and the more professionals and good folk you can add to your hive mind, the better.

For some time I didn't ask for too many details or backstory from owners. Talking about the history on a horse is something most people are very forthcoming about and I've learned that a lot of times we filter information through our world lens to such a degree that we almost create an alternative set of facts in our own minds. This happens a lot with horses people get through slaughter or rescue pipelines: if the horse is flinch-y or watch-y on the ground, he must have been beat. If a horse is fussy with the bit, he must have been ridden in harsh headgear or by someone with heavy hands. And so on, and so forth.

In the last couple years I've started to ask for quite a bit more information: I've gotten better at being able to filter out What Feels Important, but I've also learned that sometimes folks "accidentally" provide insight: not that they were withholding anything, they just didn't think of certain things as particularly relevant to the problem at hand.

Harry Whitney has a story he tells about the term "abuse". I know I won't do it justice so I won't endeavor to re-tell it, but suffice to say it involves an interview with an equine publication in which Harry was asked to acknowledge whether some practice or another was abusive. Harry's response was that it depended on whose definition of "abuse" they were using. The overarching point was that things we feel completely normal about and even do every day - both intentionally and unintentionally - can leave a horse feeling pretty darn abused, and so when we talk about what it means to abuse a horse, we might want to think about from whose perspective we're considering the term.

This understanding of whose perspective matters is important in the grand scheme of working with horses - the "problem" ones especially - because the first place I end up starting with the vast majority of horses when there is some issue is "do they understand what I'm asking for?" And more often than not, the answer is no. This isn't always where the journey ends in the search for the root cause of the issue, but experience has taught me that if the horse doesn't understand, I need to get that resolved as a matter of top priority. To perpetually be left to live in a place where the lines shift and you're left feeling uncertain, confused and frustrated, as well as increasingly anxious because you know you don't know but you're going to be asked to respond like you do...well, I could make a strong argument that that qualifies as abuse, even if it's unintentional.

Which brings me back around to Harry's response to that journalist, and to that word.

Because if I take seriously the idea that the horse gets a vote in what "understanding" looks like, I have to take just as seriously the idea that the horse gets a vote in what "abuse" looks like. Not the textbook definition, not the version that lives in a rulebook or some group's by-laws, not even the version I've built up over years of trying to do right by horses. The horse's version. And the horse's version doesn't care how normal something feels to me, or how many other trainers do it the same way, or how long it's been done that way before I ever showed up. A horse can't read the label on a piece of equipment or a training method and decide to feel fine about it because the label says "gentle."

This is uncomfortable, I know. It's a lot easier to have a fixed definition of abuse - something with hard edges, something we can hold up next to our own practices and say "see, I don't do that, so I'm fine." But the horses I end up working with, the ones who've said "no" loud enough that somebody finally listened, keep teaching me that the line isn't fixed at all. It moves. It moves horse to horse, day to day, sometimes minute to minute. What one horse shrugs off, another horse carries around with them, feeling poorly about it, for years. What we thought was small, unremarkable pressure turns out to be the exact thing that taught a particular horse the world isn't safe. And the thing is, it doesn't HAVE to be intentional: sometimes the worst offenses from the horse's point of view are the ones where we committed an oversight or just plain didn't know.

So when I ask an owner for backstory now, I'm not just collecting facts, I'm trying to find the moments nobody thought to flag - the ones that felt too ordinary to mention - because ordinary is exactly where a horse's private definition of abuse tends to hide. Plenty of good, honest work asks a horse to sit with discomfort for a while, but it's the kind that resolves into clarity, into confidence, into a horse who understands and therefore feels safer than he did before. That's not abuse, even if it didn't feel good going in.

That said, so much of we do - sometimes without even realizing it - is leaving the horse stranded in confusion and calling it training. What we owe the horse is honesty to keep checking our work against something other than our own comfort with the method. If we're paying attention, the signs in the horse aren't subtle. It's just easy to miss when we've decided ahead of time that what we're doing couldn't possibly be the problem.

08/15/2026

I'd like to talk for a second about posture and its relationship to emotional regulation.

It's no secret that the way a horse positions their body directly correlates to the state of their nervous system. It's also a fact that staying in a heightened emotional state long enough over time can create physical habits that then take hold in the actual tissue, triggering dysfunction and potentially leading to pain, dis-ease and injury.

So we have a vested interest, as handlers and riders, to make sure our horses aren't spending long periods of time really stressed out, troubled and anxious.

This doesn't mean we wrap everyone in cotton wool. It also doesn't mean we don't potentially (and INtentionally) create situations in where our horses are a bit stressed - but within threshold - as we work towards improving their overall state of being. Learning can be stressful, and change can be even more stressful: this isn't always avoidable, so we just need to be thoughtful about it.

So when I have a horse with has postural patterns that demonstrate long term nervous system elevation, you bet I'm going to try to address both sides of that coin.

One of the places this shows up most obviously is in the horse's neck position. Elevated, braced necks with overdeveloped brachiocephalicus muscles, poor shoulder girdle development tying in to tight backs and tight polls, resulting in blocked hind ends. The mechanism that creates this over time is actually a vital part of how horses get moving away from danger quickly: the neck is an extremely dynamic and efficient way to change center of gravity and balance rapidly. The horse can throw his head up, engaging the powerful underneck muscles, swinging the entire center of gravity back to the hindquarters to access immense explosive power when the answer is "I need to move, and I need to move now".

That's GREAT in those moments where the horse's life is in danger because those moments are usually quickly transient and the horse can settle back into a more relaxed state. It's not a great system if deployed in everyday riding and handling, month after month, year after year. So if a horse lives in that place and never learns how to move in a way that supports long term soundness and nervous system health, you get a horse that is anxious, tight and muscularly imbalanced.

One of the important things to recognize is that when we talk about horses who end up developing this way, we're talking about the snowball of things that create tension for the horse. This is different than what WE interpret as creating problems for the horse. The horse gets the final say in what causes him concern; our knowledge that something isn't actually going to kill him doesn't matter because HE doesn't know that, and has no way to unless he experiences that it won't, and by virtue of that experiences the nervous system re-regulation that occurs after that stressor has been processed. Too often we dismiss the fact that to the horse, the idea that something might be a threat to his life is real, tangible and very much engrained in his nervous system. We have to show him that something is not going to be a problem, which means every new thing requires some degree of education that sees the horse through to a more and more regulated system.

One of the ways I see this show up most often under saddle is a horse's inability to walk out with intention and energy: length and softness through their axial skeleton, engagement from the hind end, and a willingness to reach down and out through the neck. A horse that only operates in an upregulated nervous system is "frozen in place" physically and literally cannot access this posture.

So I end up playing with this a lot in rehabbing these types of horses. Higher gaits don't get added until the walk can be up and downregulated with no change in the horse's posture or tension levels. When we're ready to go to a higher gait, it's not a gather-our-reins-and-ask-for-the-trot type of deal: I ask for an increase in walk tempo and energy output until the horse says "I can't possibly walk any faster, I might have to trot", to which I say "what a great idea!"

This not only makes the change in gait the horse's idea, but reduces the stress around the transition, which many of these horses struggle with because it means a sudden uptick in energy: energy to them equals anxiety, and anxiety leads to a change to poor posture which doesn't feel good to the horse and feeds back into that tension cycle.

As with so many things in horsemanship, it's all firmly in the "simple, but not easy" category: let the horse offer the change instead of asking for it outright, and the posture starts to take care of itself. The most powerful and permanent changes originate in the mind.

08/13/2026

There has never been more access to information that there is now, at this point in history. We have overwhelming resources, studies, science, data, books, webinars, research publications, websites. We have hundreds of years of our human historical experiences catalogued in numerous ways. We have thousands of years of anecdotal evidence, stories, lessons.

That phrase "with great power comes great responsibility" comes to mind. Knowledge is power, and the misapplication of that power can be incredibly damaging no matter what a particular road to hell is paved with.

I am admittedly a bit of a purist in certain respects when it comes to my horsemanship. I don't mind saying that. Time will tell whether these sentiments get proven worthy of maintaining or whether they end up needing to shift. In the ancient framework of the Chinese system of Wu Xing - the understanding of how energy shifts, interacts and balances in the universe and therefore within us based on the five elemental system - I am heavily based in Water, and I am learning so much about how this "dictates" (for lack of a better word) how I think and operate. I LOVE information...but I also grow weary when information starts to override the wisdom that is inherent in experience and observation.

This is not a rejection of science by any means. It's a desire to allow science and tacit wisdom to exist in communion with one another. They both have their place and purpose and they both can inform the other. They do not need to be in competition. There needs to be balance in all things, and lately I've found myself desiring that balance more than almost anything else, which has interestingly led me to get a bit more pedant about my belief that balance has to take precedence in most situations. I'm feeling this way in particular about the world of behavioral science.

Years ago, the me I was then would have loved behavioral science-based training paradigms. Now, not so much. Behavioral science approaches give trainers consistent, verifiable and replicable frameworks within which to approach equine education. The emphasis on stress signals tends to produce training methods that are less coercive and/or confrontational, which certainly aligns well with creating better welfare outcomes for the horse.

It's not that I don't see this as valuable, it's that I'm watching the pendulum swing again too far in one direction and observing passionate discussion around terms like reinforcement history, classical conditioning, positive versus negative reinforcement, operant conditioning, and what it all means for the horse while completely failing to take into account the horse at the forefront of those discussions. I'm seeing these conversations pushed as the newest, best answer when in reality they are a necessary foundation, but not a sufficient one. I'm witnessing horses being treated more like an input-output system versus a highly cognitively complex animal with a rich and variable ethology. I'm watching whole groups of people tout the incredible benefits of a system without being able to also discuss the numerous ways in which - like ANY system - it can be misapplied and cause harm.

I am, as a teacher, watching in real time as clients struggle with feeling like any indication of stress in their horses, no matter how small, equals an ethical and moral failing on their part.

As that water constitution I referenced earlier, I'm also heavily aware of the flattening effect these kinds of systems have on the very real, very powerful intuitive, relational, feeling-based aspects of horsemanship: things that highly structured systems don't tend to capture well.

There is room for both, and it is indeed important that both inform the conversation of how we continue to do better with horses.

But they need to do so in balance.

Water doesn't resist the rock in the streambed - it moves around it, over it, finding the space that lets it keep flowing without losing itself. That's the balance I keep circling back to. Not a rejection of the framework, not an uncritical embrace of it either, but a willingness to let it take its shape alongside everything else that's true about the horse in front of us. Not choosing a side of the pendulum, but learning to stand still enough at its center that the swing stops mattering so much. The data will keep coming. The studies will keep refining themselves, as they should.

It's not about rejecting knowledge or picking this or that. Just more room, held open, for the things knowledge alone was never going to explain anyway.

08/10/2026

I am not a classically trained rider. I come from a world of varying disciplines over the years - hunter/jumper, dressage, working western - each one asking something different of me and of the horse beneath me. For a long time I was searching without quite knowing what for, chasing something that felt better than what I had at any given point in my riding. What I eventually came to understand was that the discipline is the icing, not the cake, and the cake is really what matters. No amount of frosting will save what was never built right underneath.

I spent years chasing a feeling I couldn't name, trying on one icing after another, looking for something that might finally feel like home in the saddle. What I've come to understand, mostly through the horses who asked the most of me, is that the feeling was never about the discipline at all. It was about whether the horse underneath me had access to his own balance, his own power, his own willingness to offer it up freely. A horse can look correct doing almost anything and still be braced, hollow, absent from himself. And a horse can be doing next to nothing - walking a slow circle, standing quietly in the middle of an arena - and be utterly, unmistakably present. This is what it means to me to allow a horse his birthright balance.

It isn't something you install. It's something every horse is born owning, and most are simply never shown how to find it, or are talked out of it somewhere along the way by hands that meant well but asked for shape instead of substance. Watching a horse begin to find it on his own never stops feeling like witnessing something sacred. Uphill balance isn't only a nicer way of moving through space - it's the quiet, unmistakable difference between a horse who is enduring you and a horse who is meeting you. After years spent with horses who carried real trouble in them, I've come to believe a horse cannot step into this kind of balance until he feels safe enough to risk it. Balance, in the end, is an act of trust before it is ever an act of movement.

I don't think I would know how to see any of this so clearly if it weren't for the horses who carried more, who took longer, who taught me not because I chose the lesson but because I had no choice but to learn it. And still, some days, I hardly know how to hold what I'm watching - that what a horse can offer, when you simply lead him back to what was always already his, is nothing short of brilliant.

08/06/2026

Where do we draw the line between constructive debate and hypercritical nitpicking?

How do we - those of us who write, teach and share thoughts and experience on the things that drive us to do what we do with horses every day - share what we know without being lynched in the court of public opinion for every differing viewpoint?

Why do horses - their care, keeping and training - seem to bring out the worst in us on so many fronts?

I watch this play out all the time amongst groups I am either a part of or familiar with, as well as some I keep my distance from. I'm watching it unfold on the topic of turnout as we speak, actually, and it's gotten me thinking. I try to do a lot more sideline spectating than participating these days: it's a drain on one's energy to be constantly in the fray and the older I get, the less interested I am in fighting people whose motivations are anything other than curiosity and a desire to know better and then do better. I have my own ego to keep in check: I don't need to be quarreling with anyone else's, too.

A little while back I wrote a piece about some things much of the horse world considers "normal" that I find to be a fast track to getting hurt. One of these things was horses who move off during the getting-on process. The image that accompanied that post was me working on mounting with a young horse. Among the many comments was someone who felt that "the person" (i.e., me) in the photo clearly didn't know what they were doing, as anyone who gets on a young horse like that is an idiot.

(Well, tell me how you really feel, why don't you.)

Fast forward a bit and another piece on mounting horses appeared on my feed with visuals comparing "correct" mounting versus "incorrect" mounting technique. The "correct" version" involved bending the horse with the inside rein in case they decided to walk off, because this was a common thing in that writer's experience, and bending the horse kept the horse's thoughts (and thus feet) present.

In that person's experience, the way I set my horses up to get on is wrong and dangerous. In my experience, not getting a horse to the point where I can mount up - taking as much time as I might need - whilst the horse remains engaged and present on a totally slack rein without my needing to maintain his captive attention, is wrong and dangerous.

Can two different sets of experiences and the practices those experiences lead one to take up both be right? I'd argue yes.

Can two ways of doing something that are both rooted in experience be in conflict with one another? Sure they can.

Is there lots of grey area in most practices and most belief systems? You bet.

Are most of us just out here doing the best we can with what we understand today? I'd like to think so.

So where does that leave us?

I think it leaves us right where we started: with two people, both of whom have put in the hours, the falls and the near-misses, arriving at different answers to the same question. And I think that's allowed to just... be true. Horsemanship isn't math. There's no proof at the bottom of the page that tells us who carries the red pen and who gets marked wrong. There's only what worked, for this horse, in this moment, in this rider's hands - and the humility to admit that "worked" doesn't mean "the only thing that could have worked."

That humility is the piece I think we keep losing. Not the willingness to have an opinion - we should have opinions, strong ones, earned through skin in the game - but the willingness to hold that opinion loosely enough to let someone else's sit next to it without needing to stamp it out. Disagreement isn't the enemy here. I actually think disagreement, done well, is one of the more generous things we can offer each other: it says I care enough about this to tell you what I really think, and I trust you enough to handle it. What we're drowning in isn't disagreement. It's contempt and ego wearing disagreement's clothes.

There's a tell, I've noticed, that separates the two. Constructive disagreement talks about the idea. Contempt talks about the person. "I mount differently, and here's why" is a conversation. "Anyone who mounts like that is an idiot" is a verdict, and it was handed down without anyone asking that stranger to be a judge. The comment on my photo wasn't really about my young horse's feet or thoughts, or mine for that matter. It was about a need to be right in public at someone else's expense, which is a very different appetite than the one that draws most of us to this animal in the first place.

I keep coming back to the fact that horses are honest in a way people often aren't. They don't perform their opinions for an audience. They tell you what's true right now, in their body, and they don't care who's watching. Maybe that's part of why we behave so badly around them online - because the work itself asks for so much humility, so much getting-it-wrong-until-you-get-it-less-wrong, and that's an uncomfortable feeling to sit with in public. It's easier to armor up with certainty and go looking for someone to correct than to say, out loud, "I'm still figuring this out too."

So here's where I've landed, at least for today, watching this latest round play out from the sidelines: I'm going to keep writing what I've learned, the way I've learned it, from the horses I've learned it from. I'm going to expect that some of it will land wrong for people whose horses taught them something different, and I'm going to try to remember that their horses were allowed to teach them that. I'll defend my reasoning. I won't defend my ego. And when I see someone else doing the same - showing their work instead of throwing punches - I'm going to go out of my way to say so, because that's the kind of conversation that actually makes any of us better horsepeople. The other kind just makes us tired.

The horse doesn't care who wins the comment section. Neither, most days, do I.

08/03/2026

It is my personal belief that every horse should be able to fully function in what I call "the neutral space".

The neutral space is as much as mindset as it is a holistic posture. It is the horse's ability to accept and participate in what is being asked, promptly and calmly, without an increase in concern or a need to compensate either physically or mentally.

This means I should be able to approach, halter, lead, tie, groom, tack up and mount with no increase in the horse's level of physical or mental tension. I should also be able to - on a slack rein - walk off, trot, take a lope/canter departure, downshift to any of these gaits as well as halt, pick up on a single rein, turn, back up or take a few steps laterally and not cause a swing in worry. My horse should be able to carry me through all this in balance - no more weight on his front end than his hind end - like a table postured perfectly over all four legs, with the head and neck relaxed and at about wither level.

Neutral space embodies both what the horse is experiencing mentally as well as in his body when there is a change of energy or a request made of him, with the understanding that you can't entirely tease the two apart. If there is a rise in concern when asked to do something, the body is going to mirror this tenser mental state. Likewise for the inverse. The physical manifestation of concern can also be present long after the event that incited it has ended, so physical postures can become habit after prolonged stress or repeated uncomfortable events or instances in which the horse failed to gain clarity.

Most horses, in my experience, cannot operate in the way I've described: the vast majority of horses I see develop varying amounts of concern within any or all of these activities. It is a bit ironic to me, then, that I consider a horse that can operate in this space to be truly deserving of the label of "broke" (and if you don't like that terminology, as I know many do not, then insert whatever word you use...I'm using it here to describe a horse that at a foundational level is calm, educated and suitable for just about whatever you might want to do).

Simply put, the inability to operate in this neutral space indicates holes in a horse's foundation, and yet many, many horses spend their entire lives working around these holes.

In all of this, there is a lot of weight being carried by the word "should". As my mentor Harry Whitney says, "I don't know much about what a horse 'should' know, I just know what he does know and what he doesn't know." I use the word "should" to indicate the ideal scenario, the composition of things that tells me this horse truly understands and feels pretty alright about what they're asked to do. Any one of these things could be problematic for a given horse and at that point it is no longer "well, he SHOULD know this", it is "why is he struggling with this?" The "why" could be one of a hundred different reasons, all equally valid from the horse's perspective, and it is our job to figure out the why and help the horse move past it, if possible.

Despite it being the exception and not the rule (at least in my experience) this is the minimum I am working towards. Nothing else beyond this matters much if the horse cannot access this neutral space. I'd even take this a step further and say I am not just looking for my horses to be able to access it but live there most of the time before I start asking for more - more engagement, more lift, more energy, more power.

The neutral space isn't flashy. It won't win you a class or impress anyone scrolling past a video. But it's the ground everything else gets built on, and skipping past it just means paying for it later, usually at a worse time and a higher price. Give me a horse who lives here first, and we'll figure out the rest together.

Pictured: a nice Morgan gelding who is learning to live in the neutral space

Reverence Equine

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