The question I get the most is “Please make my pet do/not do ___”

The blank can be filled with anything: stop barking, stop jumping, quit whining, not destroy ____ (another fill in the blank), “behave” (whatever that means), etc, etc, etc.

The trouble is I can’t do that.

When you spend as many hours as I do working the horses on the long lines, it leaves you with a lot of time to think.

There are 168 hours in a week.

If you train with your pet for only one hour per week, that leaves 167 other hours that they are doing whatever it is that they do.

Playing

Sleeping

Running

Romping

Being Curious

And generally being a pet which does not involve automatically conforming to the human world.

If you are only going to spend one hour per week working with your pet, that one hour had better be of the highest quality possible to make up for the other 167 hours.

My horse, Storm, and I struggled over the years, too. Storm is 17.3 hands, which means about 6 feet tall at the shoulder. He is one-quarter Shire, one-quarter Thoroughbred, and half Percheron horse. This means he’s ¾ draft horse, with a quarter of speedy-spice, and all large and in charge. I wasn’t looking for a boss horse when I bought him, I was told the ponies pushed him around. So much for that story. He walked into my life and took over every herd he has ever been with from day one.

Our relationship was rocky from the start. He was BIG and had a habit of spooking and bolting when he didn’t like something. He is huge, and was lightning fast, and no match for wee little me. His behavior scared me. I was hoping I’d get a nice quiet laid back sweet draft horse, and what I had on my hands was 2000 pounds of dynamite with a short fuse. Not a great blend for an inexperienced horse owner.

But if there’s one thing I am, it’s stubborn, and I don’t give up easily, despite the fact that our relationship probably had more tears back then than anything else. We were stuck in this cycle of him getting scared, which would make me scared, which would make him more scared. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The Mama bird can’t flap the baby bird’s wings.

I’ve said this before, but this point got driven home again for me (again) in my lesson with Kirsten Nelsen this past weekend.

As it turned out, we started to work with B first, since she needs lots of support right now to start figuring out the ‘language’ of better movement. She’s making progress in leaps and bounds even though we are still doing work on the ground (the amount you can accomplish on the ground with a horse is probably a topic for another day).

It was HOT that morning, and walking with B was taking a toll on me as much as anything. We stopped to take a break, and realized we didn’t have a whole lot of time left in our hour together. Instead of saddling up Storm, Kristen suggested that we explore the same exercise of hand walking with Storm.

She knew his riding was going well, and wasn’t all that concerned about his progress. What we discovered was that without the support of me riding, he was still struggling a little bit to find his balance and efficient movement.

He wasn’t owning it.

Today’s blog post is brought to you by two broken muck forks.

If you want to ruin a horse person’s day, break the muck fork.

For real, there isn’t much that’s worse than a broken muck fork.

And now I’ve got two. The first one lost a tine months ago, so I ordered a second one. Two days ago, the second one broke across the top. If I keep using it, it will be wobbly, and will likely just snap in half at the first stress in bumpy ground (which is pretty much all I’ve got).

Grab the one with the missing tine, and keep working.

Except I looked down and noticed it was missing a second tine! As if one wasn’t bad enough, now there’s TWO giant gaps in the fork.

An animal communicator can be a powerful aly in your resource list for supporting your pet, and you, together. So when is a good time to work with them?

Ideally, when you and your pet begin your relationship. So the next best day is today!

The benefit to establishing a relationship with an animal communicator when nothing is going “wrong” with your pet is that it helps to establish a baseline. The animal communicator gets to know your pet, and you, and learns about what your every day “normal” life is like.

Life lately as been, well, life-ing. It’s finally a “normal” Monday for the first time in two weeks. Not that it has been bad, but it’s been busy. And that’s been challenging.

There’s been fence to put up, my parents came to town, and we took a quick getaway to the beach. So much packed into such a short amount of time, that a lot of other things have had to slide. The horses haven’t been worked in about 2 weeks between the weather and the schedule, and the cats are irritated that they haven’t gotten their usual snuggle time. Specter has been reminding me that I haven’t been taking care of myself as well as I could (nothing like your pet to insult your efforts when you thought you were at least doing ok at something).

Here’s the deal. There will always be bumpy roads.

Life is stressful, right? There's not much to be done to avoid things that are stressful. Job stress, relationship challenges, financial issues, life provides plenty of opportunities that stress us out.

As humans, we have the ability to find ways to manage our stress, for better or worse. 

Our pets are no different. Living in a human world as a pet *is* stressful. They have to conform to our routines, space, and lives, whether they like it or not.

I see so many pets displaying unhealthy levels of stress that the owners have just deemed "normal." I'm afraid that stress in our lives has become such a normal thing that we are almost incapable of seeing the stress in our pet's lives.

Do Not Be Dismayed

‘Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world.
All things break. And all things can be mended.
Not with time, as they say, but with intention.
So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally.
The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.’

L.R. Knost

Intention is everything. It is the most overlooked tool in the tool bag.

What does intention require? Focus.

Your focus is the single most impactful determination of your success, no matter what the goal is.

This week on the Riding in the Weeds Podcast, Tash and I are talking about perception. Both of us were in awe of the photos of the Aurora that were inundating social media this week, and I’m jealous because I didn’t get to see it. But what is true is that the photos that are flooding the interwebs aren’t actually what the naked eye saw of the Northern Lights, either.

What we are able to perceive is not actually reality. Often times, what we are aware of is only a small fraction of the available information that exists, similar to the way that the camera can capture so much more color in the northern lights.

Our animals are able to perceive a much wider range of information coming to them than we can. Not only are their senses heightened so they can smell and hear better than we can, but their connection to the universal energy is so much stronger than ours. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t train ourselves to be much more sensitive to that either.

Beauty, affectionately “B” for short, has been with me now for a month, she’s a foster from the GAIT rescue, and now that she’s settled in we’re beginning to start doing a little work. I’m discovering there’s some holes in her training, which is not all that surprising given her questionable past.

After a little bit of guidance from my trainer in my lesson, I was reminded that sometimes “training” doesn’t look like you expect it to.

B showed me very quickly that she did not trust me (people in general, I’m sure) on her right side. It is important to me that a horse be able to do things equally from both sides when I am working so that I can be effective helping them to work on their balance. So standing on her right side while she grazes, and grooming her is training. The fact that she is able to relax enough to eat while I worked on trying to get her thick winter coat off of her is the work that is most important right now. In my lesson earlier in the week, I would not have been able to do this at all.

At the risk of being a broken record, I’m gonna talk about this again. And, I will probably talk about it a lot more, because it’s the single key that unlocks everything else.

Tapping into source energy is the answer to all of your questions.

This week on the Riding in the Weeds podcast, Tash and I are talking about starting exactly where you are. I love Tash’s example of not slashing the other 3 tires on the car just because you got a flat.

How often do we actually do that, though? We get discouraged because something isn’t like we expect it to be, and then that’s the last time we make any attempts at that, thank you very much.

What if each day we could simply begin where we are?

It’s been a wild ride lately, hasn’t it? There isn’t one person that I’ve talked to in the past couple of weeks that isn’t going through something. Struggling with something. Job struggles, family struggles, health struggles, stress struggles. You name it, someone that I know of is going through it.

So how are you caring for yourself? This is one lesson that our pets are constantly modeling for us, and we frequently overlook.

The cat naps when it needs to.

The dog plays when it needs to.

The cat grooms when it feels right.

The horse eats when it feels right.

I can’t fix your dog …or cat, or horse…

Well, aren’t you an animal communicator? Just walk to them!

It’s not uncommon for clients to come to me with an issue with their pet, and want me to “fix” the problem so it goes away.

Stop the barking

Stop clawing on the furniture

Stop running away

There’s not much that is more triggering than when our pet (or child) behaves in a way that makes our life harder.

I get it, I wish I could wave a magic wand and change things about my animals, too.

Have you ever had a moment where you knew something intuitively?

You don’t know how you knew, but you just knew it.

Did you know you can learn to have more of those moments?

Intuition is just like a muscle - there are things that can be done intentionally to build up that muscle.

There’s been a reoccurring theme that’s come to my attention recently, and whenever that happens I figure that it’s not only me that needs the message.

How tuned in are you?

We are made of energy. Every atom in our body is vibrating. Every atom everywhere is vibrating. And all those vibrations are connected. We’re all made up of the same stuff, no matter what shape or form that stuff takes.

Things have been hard. Not going to lie. Getting this little farm rehabbed and functioning is a challenging project on a good day. Throw on top of that 20” of rain between mid-November and mid-January, and rain pretty much ever weekend since then and it’s a recipe for what feels like a disaster in the moment.

I almost broke yesterday. I needed another round bale for the horses, on the heels of over an inch of rain that fell on the completely saturated ground on Saturday. But they needed hay, and I couldn’t keep tossing small bales out. It was windy, gusts up to 40mph, and cold. And then there were snow squalls that started to get kicked up (that was not in my bingo card for the day). And while attempting to drop the round bale over the fence (can’t go through the pasture, see aforementioned mud situation), the wind almost blew the tractor over.

Love is a fickle thing. We think we know it, and while we aren’t wrong, I would like to suggest that we know an aspect of love.

A very dear friend is going through the decline of her beloved dog. While connecting in with her elderly dog and along with her former dogs, they showed me something so profound.

Each one of them brought forward a different aspect of love.

“The only way out is through” - Robert Frost

He’s likely not the first one to have said this, and others have echoed his wisdom. In fact NIN has a song by nearly the same title.

This is the thing about achieving results with our pets (and everywhere in life…): the only way to accomplish anything is by putting in the time and effort.

Want to take your dog or cat traveling?

Want to enjoy calm trail rides with your horse?

Want to have stress free vet visits with your pets?

Want to be able to enjoy taking off-leash walks with a dog who sticks by your side?

The answer to all of these is a million baby steps from where ever you are to where you want to be.