05/10/2025
When you sign up to love a horse, you are quite literally signing up for heartbreak in its most intense form.
You, knowing full well how it will end, choose to give a giant piece of your heart to this fragile 4-legged animal. You allow your heart to leave your body and begin existing in a realm that is fully out of your control.
It's just part of it. And we do it anyway.
Sometimes I wonder if this is why people shy away from partnership-based training methods. If the vulnerability that comes from letting down your defenses and really sitting in front of your horse and allowing the emotions to freely flow is just too much for some. If, even subconsciously, they are protecting themselves from the intensity of the connection between a horse and a human.
I know I used to. I knew my heart horse would leave me at some point, and so I put up walls and kept myself just an arm's length away. I didn't realize at the time that I was doing that, but now I know that I was. The intensity of the emotions was too scary to me, so I built up a little wall around my heart, thinking it was better that way.
It's not. I can tell you with utmost certainty now...it's not.
You have to let the wall crumble. You have to stand before this extension of your soul and let yourself FEEL. I mean really, really feel. It's a wildly uncomfortable feeling if you typically like to keep a bit of a wall between you and others, but I believe it's one of the most valuable lessons that horses can teach us.
How to feel everything. How to embrace uncertainty. How to love fully. How to experience emotion deeply.
I know it's scary. I know it's uncharted territory for many of us, especially if we've grown up in Western culture, where too many emotions are considered to be weakness. Where sensitivity is replaced with apathy.
But choosing to lean into it and embrace it, knowing how it will end? Well, that will provide you with freedom that you never knew was possible.
It will allow you to become at peace with the profound "journey of life," embracing all of the stages as they come instead of resisting the process.
Let yourself love fully. Lean into it. It's scary, but I promise you...it's so, so worth it.
