Reverence Equine

Reverence Equine Quality-focused horsemanship training, thoughts and teachings for both horse and rider from Abbie Senesac Lopez. Please reach out for more info.

Lessons - in person in VT, northern NY and southern NH - and virtual, are available.

With summer now in full swing, I've been finding myself with little time - or energy - to write much.My days start early...
06/25/2025

With summer now in full swing, I've been finding myself with little time - or energy - to write much.

My days start early with a lesson or two, with my full time job taking up the bulk of the normal business day before I head back outside to work with training horses. I often get in just as the sun is going down and wake up to repeat the same cadence. There is a lot that needs doing in each 24 hour period.

And so I find myself being very aware of - and probably metaphorically beating my students with - the idea that in every moment you spend with a horse you are either teaching them to pay attention and mentally draw to you, or else teaching them to ignore what you do and mentally distance from you. We don't do on purpose: as my mentor says often, "animals are constantly consciously learning things we're unconsciously teaching them".

Every moment. I know, and I'm sorry, because there are times I wish it weren't the case, too. There are times I have found myself having to try to unteach something I unintentionally taught, and BOY is it harder to unteach the thing you don't want than it is to teach the thing you do.

You can either choose to address things when they are small and more malleable or be forced to address them when they are bigger and more rooted in habit. That decision is yours, at least initially.

The reality is life comes with its constraints, but we do get a bit of a say in whether we try and set ourselves - and the horses in our charge - up for success.

Someone asked me where the name “Reverence Equine” came from. It occurred to me that I’ve never told the story.When I ta...
06/06/2025

Someone asked me where the name “Reverence Equine” came from. It occurred to me that I’ve never told the story.

When I take a horse in training I send out weekly emails of progress. I’ve always done this. Sometimes people express how much they appreciate and look forward to them. Others acknowledge their receipt but choose not to engage further. Others still I have no idea about whether they read them at all.

Each email – to me – feels carefully crafted. It’s not just a report home: it’s a story of days’ worth of work, thousands of moments and little interactions and subtle shifts. Sometimes the shifts are less subtle. Sometimes they are in a direction we’d rather they not be. I try to always keep my accounts honest, focused and with respect for the horse’s role in the journey we’re on together. I often include details about what I’m noticing in their bodies. I’ve described the way catching them starts to feel different, how the process of getting them groomed or tacked up starts to feel less “process-y” and more dynamic. I've penned whole paragraphs about a horse's discovery of the joy of movement and the ability to do so freely and with feeling and comfort. I’ve written to owners about what it looks like for their horses to start to express themselves differently or a bit more. I’ve confirmed – as much as I feel comfortable using the term – things suspect as well as disproven or contradicted long-held beliefs. I’ve done this on both sides of the spectrum of “good news” and “bad news”.

I’ve sent horses home in ways that would make even me, the harshest of self-critics, allow for the tiniest glimmer of pride. I’ve sent horses home knowing I did the best I could but feeling a little lackluster about whether I was really able to help. I’ve sent horses home knowing this was the end of the line for them.

With each horse I’ve sent home, I’ve tried not to just send home the horse. I try to send home a glimpse of what I saw every day, in every interaction, in the hopes that maybe I can inspire the human to continue to do the work: even when it’s hard, even when it feels the opposite of rewarding, even when we fear and worry that everything we’re doing is wrong and useless and getting us nowhere. Even when we question everything we ever thought we knew about anything. Most days I work alone with nary a person around – I can’t be the only one that sometimes wishes I had a trusted ear and eye nearby to offer a little nudge or reassuring nod every once in a while.

A good friend of mine knows I do this. One day she said to me with a wry grin “you know, if you were smart you’d get those organized and learn how to take your own advice.”

Nearly every “letter to the owner” that I’ve written in the last few years now lives in a binder out in my tack trunk. When I am feeling unsure or skeptical or overwhelmed or frustrated, I open to a random page. One of the hardest things I’ve done in my life is learn how to trust myself: my gut, my intuition, my thought process, my ethos, my ability to figure it out. I used to happily heap trust in anyone and anything but myself. I could never seek answers from within, and I shied with tremendous discomfort away from my own innate capabilities and talents. I wanted desperately to grow, but to grow meant to fail and “fail” was a far worse F-word than anything even the most foul-mouthed sailor could utter.

I could never comprehend in even the most infinite of possibilities that the woman staring back at me in the mirror could be that trusted ear and eye.

I don’t know who I would be were it not for my lessons from horses. I don’t say that in a Black Beauty-eqsue way: there are no delusions or anthropomorphizing. I just feel - at times profoundly - deeply grateful for how the grace of horses has taught me how to offer grace to myself, even when I’ve felt woefully and completely inadequate. “Reverence” is a deep respect, to regard highly or stand in awe of. It is what I feel for my equine counterparts, and it felt to be an entirely natural and appropriate choice for the title of what has been a lifetime of trying to do better by them.

"Through no fault of their own" seems to be the starting phrase to a lot of horse sale and rehoming ads these days, spec...
05/31/2025

"Through no fault of their own" seems to be the starting phrase to a lot of horse sale and rehoming ads these days, specifically ones for horses that are older, less than sound, high maintenance or otherwise difficult to place.

It always makes me scratch my head a little bit. It also lights a small fire in me.

I have buried every horse that has come to be mine over the last 20 years. I feel pretty strongly about being the last stop for an animal that comes into my care. I also feel pretty strongly that dealing with the inevitable decisions regarding end of life for those animals is not only part of the deal, it's my responsibility as a horsewoman.

As someone who has carved out an unintentional niche working with tough horses, I get offered - more often than I'd like - horses no one else has been able to figure out and for whom I am often their last hope. I got another offer this week for such an animal. I declined. My heart is too open and soft and is marked with too many scars from horses past that I couldn't fix. I wear those scars well and with a fair amount of stoicism...but I know they're there and feel their pull more often than I care to admit.

The older I get and the more time I spend with horses, the more I feel that it is a rare thing that choosing a peaceful end for the horses in our care is the wrong decision.

Even if the horse is still rideable "for the right person".

Even if the horse is sound.

Even if the horse isn't what one might consider "old" or "aged".

Even if the horse "just needs some basic maintenance".

Even if the horse "might be perfectly suited for a different job".

Maybe so.

But the moment you release that horse into someone else's hands, all bets are off as to what happens next. I offer my horses quite a bit - at least I'd like to think so - but the most important thing I offer them is the guarantee that they will never know suffering. They will never know cruelty.

They will never face an uncertain future "through no fault of their own".

I don't focus on developing relaxation anymore. It's not that I don't find it vital to a horse's being able to function ...
05/21/2025

I don't focus on developing relaxation anymore. It's not that I don't find it vital to a horse's being able to function contentedly in a relationship with a human long term. I don't focus on relaxation because what I've learned over time is that when we focus too much on keeping the horse relaxed - when that becomes the sole objective - and when we get myopic to the point that we stop everything the second the horse falls a little bit out of regulation, we can inadvertently create horses that no longer have resilience.

For most of the people I work with, their biggest concern is safety: they want to feel secure working with their horse and they also want the horse to feel content in their job. They want their horse to get something from the exchange, and relaxation ends up becoming a major priority for them. In the human mind, if the horse is relaxed then this must mean there is some derived sense of satisfaction from the job he's doing.

The problem with this is that we end up trapping horses into spaces where when they become un-relaxed, when something in the environment stirs them, when things naturally come up that we can't control, they have no coping mechanism. They have no tools and nothing to reach for to regain homeostasis: they can fly up, but they don't know how to come back down.

So I don't go into situations with unrelaxed horses determined to bring about relaxation: I go into situations with unrelaxed horses determined to offer clarity and build resilience and confidence in the process. I want horses to understand what I'm asking. That process might sometimes draw up some tension when I have to draw a boundary or say "that won't work" to a horse that is pretty sure whatever they are doing is the ONLY thing that will work...but when a horse gets clear on something, the natural byproduct IS relaxation. Lack of understanding, fear of the unknown and not being sure about what is happening are the biggest contributors to a horse's inability to find calm. If I can introduce clarity into the situation I'm almost guaranteed that relaxation will follow, whereas if I prioritize relaxation about all else I'm depriving the horse of the ability to experience a big emotion or a big shift and then find his way back down because I'm constantly trying to build a bubble of comfort around him: a padded stall - if you will - to counteract all the things in life that could cause him to become uncomfortable.

Comfort IS the opposite of discomfort, but learning how to navigate discomfort - not avoiding it - is what allows the horse to find lasting peace.

Pictured: one of our mini jacks, Churro, getting more confident about water with my husband on one of our many hikes.

"I don't know how you do it" has come up a couple times in conversation recently. Someone will say to me that they don't...
05/12/2025

"I don't know how you do it" has come up a couple times in conversation recently. Someone will say to me that they don't understand how I look for the tiniest of wins, how I stay patient and focused and present and available and holding space and drawing satisfaction from the smallest of changes and the littlest of tries the horse manages to offer.

And I've thought about this a lot. Like, a LOT, a lot.

I've thought about it in the last few days but also over the course of the last few years.

When I was growing up, the world taught me to be hard. I was and am a Type A, perfectionistic, driven person, but I'm also soft and really squishy on the inside. I'm hugely empathetic and every emotion is a swell of energy that washes over the deepest cracks and crevices, leaving nothing untouched. It's easy for me to become overburdened with the struggles of others and it often gets overwhelming. I sometimes feel drowned by the loss and the tragedy and the trauma in the world. I find it too easy to see the world through others' eyes.

Only one of these sides of me is really valued by the world writ large...and it's not the soft and squishy bits. So I learned to be hard. I learned to be firm. I learned to be insistent. I learned to be all of these things that exist inside me naturally, but they need to exist in a balance. They need to exist alongside the empathy and the willingness to walk in another's shoes and feel deeply and sit and wait and just be and allow what is going to happen to happen instead of pushing for something to happen because you're on a schedule.

And so for a long time, that's how I worked with horses. I worked with that hardness and that persistence and that pressing determination that you must get this right because if you don't, it's a reflection of me. I got a lot done this way. I made some horses look really good to some people who didn't know any better, but it always felt awful. It never fulfilled in the way that I wanted it to. At some point I realized I couldn't do it that way anymore and I started to embrace my soft core. At some point I started to feel and embrace feeling - even when what I was feeling was fear or concern or inadequacy or confusion or frustration.

I allowed myself to look at things from the horse's point of view, and what I realized was that my way was not right or wrong: it was just another way. The horse's way was no more right or wrong than mine, it was just the best that they had in that moment. When I stepped away from the idea that everything the horse did was some moral decision and instead looked at things as a reflection of how the horse felt moving through the world...it was like breathing for the first time. By being able to offer the horse the gift of being seen, I was finding I was able to offer myself the same.

So I view these comments as a sign - in one of the most affirming ways I could ask for - of the recognition of this change, because I didn't use to exist in this place. I know I'm not the only one who has lived life under a hard, cool exterior because it didn't feel safe not to. I know I'm not the only one who has struggled to recognize that ALL parts of me are valid and need space to exist. I definitely know I'm not the only one who has tried to conform to a world that didn't understand me and encouraged me to adopt to a definition of "success" that I didn't actually share.

One of the hardest things about horsemanship - for me, anyway - has been walking the road of not allowing my emotions to govern my actions. So when someone says "I don't know how you do it" my response is often "me either!" and that's only partially tongue-in-cheek: I do know how, it's just not a nice, neat, manicured path. There's still bushwhacking to be done some days, but if I'm being honest...that's the real journey.

That's where you get the real change.

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. I learned recently that this quote ha...
05/05/2025

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. I learned recently that this quote has been misattributed to Aristotle when it was actually penned by Elbert Hubbard, but I digress.

I've been mulling over some rather interesting feedback after teaching a local clinic. "She kept everything so BASIC" the auditor had said, apparently followed up by another comment about wanting to ensure one gets one's money's worth in a given session.

I won't lie...it stung a bit. I was pretty pleased with all the horses in that session and the progress they'd made: some made more than others, some I couldn't offer as much individual attention to as I'd have liked and would have preferred to see them in a one on one setting. This is always the risk of teaching groups.

What bothered me more though was idea of thumbing one's nose at "the basics". Everyone that showed up that day NEEDED to focus on "the basics" in one manner or another. Almost all of them needed quite a bit of help really focusing on their handler or rider. Each showed up displaying their need to focus on "the basics" a little bit differently, but the need was there across the board.

I always want people to feel like they got something worth their time...but I'd be remiss if I didn't also feel weary trying to convince people that foundation matters.

I'm not impressed that you're riding 4th level dressage but your horse can't be caught out at pasture and haltered without an ordeal.

I don't understand coming to a lesson wanting to work on your canter departs when your horse is jigging around the arena, unable to maintain a walk.

It's probably one of the few places in horsemanship where I am decidedly narrow-minded, not because I believe I am always right but because I believe strongly in always doing what's right by the horse. And honestly, for the vast majority of horses I see...that's going back to "the basics".

I recall a time in my own horsemanship where what I wanted was more important than what the horse needed. What I've learned, though, is that basing my time and efforts around what the horse needs IS the fastest way of getting to what I might want.

Everything built starts on a foundation of some kind. Better yours be solid and sturdy than creaky and questionable.

For every moment encapsulated in a photo where I'm doing something that looks exciting, I have four that look like this....
05/01/2025

For every moment encapsulated in a photo where I'm doing something that looks exciting, I have four that look like this.

This is where the magic happens, in my humble opinion.

This is what turns a tense horse into a relaxed one, a braced horse into a soft one, and an unsure horse into a confident one.

It all has to start somewhere: this, for me, is the fork in the road, the point at which either the horse decides to start "letting you in" and allowing you some room to influence him, or the point at which he says "no way, José."

As I've gotten a bit older and a tad less bouncy if ejected, there are things I've started to hunt for before I get on a horse. This is one of those things. If I can't walk up square, reach for him and give him a gentle rub in the blind spot right between his eyes, or run my hand over each eye and have him be perfectly content to have me do so...it tells me he's still holding onto some thoughts or concerns I'd really rather he didn't. If I'm seeing that manifest while my feet are still on the ground, those same thoughts and concerns tend to manifest 10x in the saddle.

Yes, I'm petting on him, but it's so. much. more than that. It's a willingness to connect with me in one of the most vulnerable spots the horse has: the one closest to his thoughts.

THAT, friends, is the secret sauce if there is such a thing.

As a bodyworker of nearly 14 years, I know quite a bit about scar tissue. It's a really, really common thing to encounte...
04/30/2025

As a bodyworker of nearly 14 years, I know quite a bit about scar tissue. It's a really, really common thing to encounter in both people and horses, and in my experience it tends to get under-addressed in the physical therapy and rehab world as a source of restriction, tension, discomfort and ultimately the root cause of many a dysfunction.

Scar tissue is important. It plays a significant and vital role in wound healing. However, physical scar tissue is weaker than normal skin: it's less elastic, has less oxygenation of the tissue and is actually more prone to injury than the tissues it binds together. It's also more chaotically framed, so to speak - it will never have the same kind of thoughtful scaffolding as what was there before the injury happened.

So what do we do with scar tissue? We let it do the job it needs to do, while over time minimizing its potentially negative impacts on the one who bears it.

When it comes to mental scars, however, I find there is sometimes a misguided belief that we either 1) can undo what has already been done with enough time and patience and encouragement, etc., or 2) must forever live with a horse that carries a label of traumatized, mistreated, abused, etc. The former is looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, while the latter is unfairly leaving the horse in the trappings of things he didn't ask for.

The reality is that mental scars aren't all that different from physical ones: they are necessary responses to injury, but they do not need to cause discomfort and dysfunction for the rest of the animal's life. They can be worked at, bit by bit, smoothed and eased over time. We can minimize their disruptive impacts...but that means we have to give them some direct attention, and then LISTEN to what they say to us.

In bodywork, the ability to listen to the tissue and work with it - not against it - is the single most valuable skill a bodyworker builds in practice. In horsemanship, if I had to pick one, the ability to give the horse what they need in a given moment - and no more - is at the top of the list of quickest pathways to success.

It is not my responsibility to make it so my horse can be handled by anyone.Before you get up in arms: let me explain.A ...
04/20/2025

It is not my responsibility to make it so my horse can be handled by anyone.

Before you get up in arms: let me explain.

A horseman's pursuit is to bring forth in a horse what is already there. To polish the diamond, so to speak. It's not to be a magician and make water into wine.

Water will stay water.

When I teach a horse about how things could be with a person, I'm simultaneously feeling out what that horse needs from me in order to feel safe and confident. This isn't necessarily the same thing for every horse: remember, we're bringing forth what is already in them, not filling an empty vessel or the pages of a book. We're shaping what makes that particular horse who they are and hopefully allowing the best of them to shine through.

You might have recognized that for this to be fair, there has to be a trade-off of sorts: I am asking for quite a bit from the horse and it's only reasonable that I be prepared to offer him something worth his while in return. For every horse, that something - at its core - is safety. The horse needs to believe that he is safe enough with me to turn his attention away from the world and all of the things of concern in it and offer me his attention and his thoughts so that I might guide him.

What that LOOKS like for each horse is going to be different. This is where the human has to take some accountability and be willing to become who the horse needs them to be...not the other way around. I will not ask my horse to unreasonably fill in for me. I will not ask him to dumb himself down because I refuse to step up and try to do better. I will not ask him to tolerate rough or unfair handling. I will not ask him to ignore or tune things out to make my life easier.

I won't ask my horse to do these things for me...so I'm not going to ask that he do them for you, either.

I spent some time on the phone this weekend with a student-turned-friend as she grapples with the end of a long journey ...
04/13/2025

I spent some time on the phone this weekend with a student-turned-friend as she grapples with the end of a long journey with a horse that has shaped both her horsemanship and her humanity in ways very few things can.

"Everything happens for a reason". Those words were uttered a few times: questioningly, defiantly, with grief lacing them together.

There's a trend when it comes to healing that jumps right from pain to reframe. We skip right from wounds to the wisdom born from them. People don't want to hear about, talk about or sit with someone in that messy space in between.

About three years ago, my life blew up. Within that ugly middle period, I also made the decision to euthanize together my two geldings, one of who was only seven. To say it gutted me would be entirely understating the rawness of what I felt and the salt it rubbed in an already aching wound. There was a part of me that wasn't sure I had it in me to return to horses. I had lost so much of the joy working with horses can offer after dealing with heartbreak after heartbreak. I had convinced myself that what I had experienced - burying three personal horses within a ten year span, two before they hit double digits - was part of the cost of doing what we do with these animals. It was a veterinary friend who, with equal parts kindness and firmness, told me that my batting average with my herd was exceptionally poor. "You take on these animals because you believe you can fix them" she said, "and you're left shattered and trying to put the pieces back together when you finally realize you cannot."

This notion that I could fix unfixable things had been a constant in my life up until that point. I can safely say it is not any longer...but it's taken sitting for a long, long time in that messy middle space to get to this point. It also took several horses to teach me this lesson over and over and over, until I was ready to do the hard work myself.

Yes, it needed to happen, the same way my student-turned-friend's evolution needed to happen. Yes, I found my path, and I know she'll find hers, too. But let's not pretend once we're through to the other side and finally see the light again that we didn't just come through a storm.

I cringe a bit at the ever-romanticized notion that horses are here to be our teachers. I don't know that any horse ever enthusiastically signed up for that role, and yet it's so often what they end up doing. Sometimes it takes more than one to get a message through. Very often, they have a much greater impact on us than we could ever possibly have on them. This is the conclusion my friend has come to, and I have to agree with her: I have reached the same understanding myself.

The best way I know how to honor the horses that have taught me is to continue to be willing to exist and be present in those stormy middle spaces, whether it's with a horse, with a person or with myself. My horses didn't have a choice but to deal with me when I was probably less than worthy of them. Gratitude for their wisdom and grief over what that wisdom cost can coexist. Healing doesn't erase the pain and anguish.

It just teaches you how to carry it differently. It just teaches you how to do better.

I'd like to take a moment to talk about boundaries.A boundary is clear and reliable.A boundary does not change from one ...
04/10/2025

I'd like to take a moment to talk about boundaries.

A boundary is clear and reliable.

A boundary does not change from one moment to the next.

A boundary often provides comfort, because it decreases the "unknown" factor in a given situation or experience.

A boundary is neutral.

A boundary is NOT a demand that someone come to the table.

It is not emotional, or based in emotion, although the drawing of boundaries can initially elicit strong emotional responses from the one the boundary is being drawn for.

A boundary is not a weapon, a cajole, a nudge, a push, or in any other way a way to MAKE something we want happen.

A boundary simply is. It's up to the receiver to determine what to do next with it.

That last bit is the part I find people have the hardest time with. We want boundaries to act as something that will MAKE someone - horse or human - understand something. Boundaries set with the intention to attain a specific response are no longer boundaries but manipulation; they rob the other party of the total and complete freedom to explore their own reactions and make decisions about how to respond that are free from influence from us. They remove the ability to have authentic conversation and understanding.

When it comes to the horse, a boundary will always provide clarity. Clarity begets confidence, and confidence begets calmness.

I talk all. the. time. about having faith that when the horse is really ready to offer something, they'll do it with no ...
03/28/2025

I talk all. the. time. about having faith that when the horse is really ready to offer something, they'll do it with no hesitation and feel entirely good and settled about it, even if it bothered them something awful before. Sometimes, we just have to set up the scenario again and again and again, and give the horse as much time as they need to come to the realization that 1) we're not going to force their hand, and 2) we're going to allow them all the time in the world to think until they're ready.

The cosmic irony is that I have to also have faith in the person I'm working with and their ability and willingness to wait the horse out. It can easily be one of those scenarios where what I say sounds pretty good, but ends up feeling to the other party like a total unicorn and leads them to give up after a time, frustrated and sure that I'm making this stuff up, or feeling that they don't have the skill or the timing or the whatever-factor-x they think I must have to make this magical thing happen.

And then I get messages like this, and I am reminded of the power of all that faith and what it means to the horse.
. . . . .

This nice gelding is a stoic, do-what-he's-told type that has, by my estimate, spent most of his life doing just that: being stoic and doing what he was told to do, regardless of how he felt about it. This included getting on the trailer. His person had made some lovely changes in how she approached things and he was making really nice progress both on the ground and under saddle and then the trailering started to become a big issue. His owner recognized that he didn't feel good and after he stopped loading consistently, she started down the path of taking what felt like a huge step back, stripping away all agendas and plans and setting everything she did up so that the focus was on him engaging instead of just doing.

Sometimes when we start showing a horse that we hear them, they start getting more comfortable speaking up, I told her. "It's not about the trailer, it's about how he FEELS when he's asked to get on the trailer".

We chatted about how she could set this up: it needed to not matter WHAT he did, as long as he kept trying. For a horse that had spent his life doing what he was told, being asked to OFFER something was a major ordeal and something he needed to learn to feel confident working at again.

So for the last couple months this horse has done nothing but worked at loading, but when I say "worked", I don't mean what you see in so many of the videos of how to get a horse to load. There was no running, no lunging outside the trailer, no "making him want to be in the trailer more than outside the trailer". Just setting him up with a request to think about the inside of the trailer, over and over and over, leaving him alone when he made an effort (no matter how small) and interrupting when he tried to think elsewhere.

That's it. Where the mind is, the body will follow.

Maybe 10 times over the last couple months, with me present for only three of those, this was all that happened. Over that time period, he went from panicking when the trailer came out and being tough to catch to completely calm and even engaging with the trailer as it was set up. He went from rushing and crooked to calm and straight. This photo was from yesterday.

But for me, it wasn't the fact that he had gotten on the trailer, it was what his person said about HOW he did it. "We went out, and I just KNEW something good was going to happen today because he got on about halfway three times starting his momentum with his HIND foot, so I knew there was some confidence there...I asked him to get back on, he got to his usual spot with his front feet up on the ramp. I rubbed his shoulder...and he just walked right on, not hesitating. I didn't even ask. He just decided and went!"

"Truly magical!" she said.

And it is. In my experience, one of the first things we squelch in a horse is their willingness to think and try. When that is left intact, or starts getting built back by a conscientious handler, the stuff horses will do is nothing short of wonderous.

We all need someone to see and believe in us, especially when we aren't sure we believe in ourselves. We all need someone to have faith.

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