Day Six - Emotional Roller Coaster

When we started this course, John Barr warned us that we would probably experience some emotional ups and downs and that we could learn a lot about ourselves as a result. Well, today I had my first experience with an emotional down, but it didn't come as a result of anything I was doing with Sonny. On Sunday I lost my debit card. I am pretty sure it happened when I went to Starbucks to purchase a New York Times. I didn't discover that the card was missing until quite late in the evening and when I called Starbucks they couldn't find the card.
So Monday got off to a bad start. I had stewed about the lost card all evening, not slept well and then had to take a half hour out of my time with Sonny to call the bank, cancel the card and arrange to get a new card sent to the Parelli Center. I was so frustrated by the entire situation that I felt near to tears and when I went into Sonny's pen to get him for our morning work, he actually turned his back to me and wouldn't look at me. That really took me up short.
Parelli teaches us that we need to be mentally, emotionally and physically fit when we work with our horses but Sonny had just told me that I wasn't really emotionally fit to be with him at the moment. I stood at the door of his pen fighting tears and telling myself that I was being foolish. I knew I needed to calm myself down before even trying to do anything with Sonny. I stood at door for a few minutes, took more than a few deep breath trying to release the tension for my body and waited for Sonny to look at me. Eventually he turned his head and looked, allowing me to draw him over to the door of the pen. I put his halter on and we headed out to the lower playground.
There were several focus stations I wanted to attend but they were all on the upper playground and given our late start, I thought it was more important to get to the closest playground and start playing. Over the weekend Sonny and I had a couple of great sessions so I expected that thing would go smoothly but I was still holding some tension and Sonny was mirroring me. I asked him to side pass over to a gate and stand. We had been working on this and making great progress but today after Sonny side passed over to the gate I could that he wasn't at all relaxed. His head was up, he was staring straight ahead, he wasn't blinking and probably most telling he was so tight in his mouth it looked almost painful to me. I knew I needed to wait for him to relax so I did. It took a full three minutes before he turned him head and looked at me.
Our session on the playground went OK and I was beginning to feel a little better. I had stopped by the classroom earlier in the morning to check the time for our next session and was watching pacing our session so I could get Sonny back to his pen and me to the next session with time to spare. I thought the next session was scheduled for 11:25 in the classroom so at 11:00, I took Sonny back to his pen, grabbed my notebook and headed for the classroom but when I got to the courtyard, I saw our entire class gathered around John Barr at the seat builders. It turned out that instead of starting at 11:25, the session had actually begun at 11:00 and I had missed John's entire explanation of what we were going to do next. I hate being late to anything and I hate being unprepared and I could just feel all of that emotion that I had worked so hard to eliminate all morning come flooding back.
The seat builders are apparatus that look a little bit like mechanical bulls. The exercise we were about to do would have one student sitting on the seat builder while two other students moved it up and down to simulate the movement of a horse. The riding student has to find and stay on her balance point in order to stay in harmony with the movement. To get on to the seat builder, it is necessary to mount by jumping from the ground. I took one look at the first riding jumping up and immediately thought to myself, with my bad knees I will never get onto that thing!
Now I was not only emotionally unfit, I was getting mentally unfit. The self talk that was running through my head was full of "never" and "can't". I sat down on a log to watch others go through the exercise and all I could think of was "how can I get out of doing this?"
About that time, McKenzie's mom came over, sat down next to me and asked me how I was doing. Apparently having a mom to talk to was just what I needed. I told her the whole sad story and admitted that I was worried about getting on the horse and feeling foolish in front of the group. Like any good mom, she empathized with me and gave me a chance to talk myself into doing the right thing. I thanked her, got up and joined the group. I quietly told Marion, who was the instructor that I was worried I wouldn't be able to get up on the seat builder from the ground.
"No problem," said Marion. "We have a mounting block right here and we can help you. Don't worry about it."
When my turn came, I got up on the mounting block and was easily able to get up on the seat builder. I did feel a little embarrassed that I was the only one in the group who needed the mounting block but I focused on finding my balance point and feeing the motion of the seat builder. In the end, I did fine and I felt a real sense of accomplishment in having pushed past my emotional baggage.
Things continued to improve after that. John and Beran led us in a number of simulations to understand both the motion of the horse and our use of the reins. The best simulation was "conga horse", a three person exercise where one person is the horse's front end, one is the rider and the third is the horses back end. The idea of the simulation was to get us to understand what our horse was experiencing when we used a direct or an indirect rein and it was amazing to me how easy it was to experience this in the simulation. There was a lot of laughing during this simulation and our three person "conga horse" was definitely having a good time.
Following this simulation, Kathy Barr talked to us about horse posture and saddling. Using John's horse, she showed us how to identify over and under developed muscle areas. She also showed us how to determine if a saddle was level, how to use a tube of chapstick to determine where the balance point actually was on the saddle and how shims could be added so we would be sitting on an appropriate balance point. Finally we were sent off to work with our own horses.
I returned to Sonny's pen in a much better state of mind. Rather than rushing into riding, I spent friendly time grooming Sonny and then determining if I had his saddle shimmed correctly. I learned that I probably need to add a shim or two to level my saddle appropriately. By the time I was done, I think I had recovered much of my lost emotional fitness.
All-in-all, it was quite a day. I learned that I certainly could recognize my own emotional unfitness. But more than that, despite some negative self talk, I learned I could center myself and recover my emotional fitness. Hopefully this is a lesson I can take into the next time I get upset or frustrated over something.