Your horse knows!
Everyone has a false self. Sometimes it is referred to as the ego. By ego, I don’t necessarily mean puffed-up self-centered importance. Your ego, or your false self is the part of you that gets you to the doctor when you are sick, prevents you from offending other people, learns from your mistakes, and makes plans for the future. In short, your false self is the part of you that relives the past and worries about the future. Without it we would not be human.
Your false self is “false” because it focuses on events that have happened in the past or events that may happen in the future. By definition, the false self is not focused on the present moment, which is the only moment that is real. Hence the name false self.
When we are small children, we start building our false self through experience. We make judgments about our behavior and separate it into good behavior and bad. If we decide that a behavior is good because we like it, it pleases our parents, or it results in getting what we want, we store that behavior so our false self can use it to plan future activities. If we decide a behavior is bad, we suppress it in our “shadow self” and store it so our false self can review it to avoid punishment, avoid getting hurt, avoid offending people, etc.
As we grow older, our false self has more and more experience to draw on. Eventually it consumes most of our thoughts day and night, either planning for the future, or reviewing the past to bring about good times or to avoid bad times. Most of us eventually lose touch with what’s going on right in front of us in the present moment. We don’t stop to look at a flower while we rush off to our next appointment. We don’t listen to each other as we are planning our next response. We don’t see another person’s point of view as we worry about how it affects us.
Horses don’t have a false self. They live almost entirely in the present moment. They don’t harbor complicated agendas, and they don’t spend much time mulling over their past. They don’t plan for the future, and they don’t manipulate their behavior to hide what they really think about us. This makes them both frustrating and incredible at the same time.
When we are with our horse, we may be “under the influence” of our false self, planning how we want our horse to behave, or worrying about having hurt his feelings last week. Our horse is not concerned with either of these agendas. When we are around, our horse is busy observing us from moment to moment. Horses are so good at this kind of observation, that they may see emotions and states of mind in us that we ourselves are not in touch with. They might see we are angry when we are trying to deny it. They might see we are worried about something when we are trying to “fix it” by manipulation.
Horses always mirror back to us our current state of mind and emotion. We may interpret a horse’s behavior as being contrary, stubborn, or uncooperative. The horse may simply be telling us that he doesn’t want to be around us if we won’t be honest with ourselves and be present in the relationship.
If we play with our horse, or worse, get on and ride when we are not focused on the present moment, if we relate to our horse when we are planning what we are going to serve for dinner, or worrying about what the boss said yesterday, we are asking for trouble. Horses don’t like people who bring their false self into the round pen or arena.
So, to improve our horsemanship and our relationships with our horses, we need to learn how to quiet the false self and how to be present. This is not an easy task, because, by the age of 10 or so, we have become false self experts.
Next time I will write about how to quiet the false self and become more present. Leave some comments about what you think.
