Let me introduce you this Frisian-stallion, 4 years young. After he came on this earth, he had to struggle his way to survive, suffering from a severe pneumonia.
4 years later his owners wanted him to be trained to present him on a stallion-show. They asked my daughter, as a trainer and behavior specialist for horses to prepare him for this presentation. Being a young and “green” horse, this work included ground work from the beginning and backing the horse afterwards.
When she started the training, everything went well in the beginning but when the work advanced and she started the work under the saddle, the horse showed more and more reluctance to cooperate and even refused more and more to go forward in trot. Unnecessary to say that the training became more and more tiresome and even frustrating, although the horse perfectly understood what she asked him to do. The problem had to be somewhere else and she asked me (as energetic specialist/advisor) to accompany her on one of her sessions with him.
Before she started to work with him, she granted me a moment alone with him and his whole history passed my mind. I asked him to show me why he was so reluctant to do the work she asked of him. Was it a mental problem, or psychical or may be a combination of both?
And suddenly the whole picture became clear to me: this stallion still had his energy very low. During the first weeks of his life on earth he desperately clung to this energy that he needed to survive. Everyone who knows a little bit of chakra’s (and people do more and more these days) is acquainted with the knowledge that low energy provides us of the most basic and essential ingredients to feel us safe and secure. And this stallion has not yet left this lower region. He has never encountered a situation where he could experience that life can also be fun, that it can be joyful to do something with someone else, with another human being. He fought and survived and the only confidence he knows is the confidence in himself.
The only things they ask him to do now, is to work for a certain goal, the presentation, instead of doing something for the only reason that it is fun to do.
I advised the owner to put diversity in the things he does with this beautiful creature. Without always having a reason to do what you do together. To let the horse experience that being together with a human being can be filled with pleasure and love.
Sometimes the solution is to be found in a deeper layer. It is up to us to be willing to look that little bit further in order to assure that our horse-friends also can life a happy life. We owe them that!
(And the owner took him for a swim together in the river nearby).
Esmeralda Aarts, energetic/psychologic advisor
During the training session that followed this conclusion, the horse was much more cooperative. A huge change! Just knowing where the problem comes from, understanding him, listening to him and trying to do everything to make him feel better, even if we have no idea how to do it, helps a lot to make a horse progress. And the only thing we did was talk about the problem.