Riding Far, LLC

While most of my work happens here at the farm, where I'm fortunate to spend months, sometimes years, developing each horse, I always enjoy stepping outside that routine to teach clinics further afield.

Working with new horse and rider combinations over a much shorter period of time stretches me in the best way.

It challenges me to connect quickly, understand what each rider needs, and present ideas in a way that gives them clarity and a plan they can take home.

One of my favourite parts of teaching is that every clinic deepens my own understanding too. Explaining familiar ideas in different ways, answering new questions, and seeing things through someone else's experience always leaves me learning something as well.

That's one of the things I appreciate most about getting out on the road.

~ Justin

📸 Amy Rodriguez for Erin Gilmore Photography

Psych Saturday: How Safety Is Made

There is a thing we say to a frightened creature, and I have said it ten thousand times.

It's okay. You're okay. Easy now.

We say it to horses, to children, to friends in the hard hour, and to ourselves. And I have come to believe that, said by itself, it almost never works.

You cannot talk a nervous system into feeling safe. You cannot announce safety and have it be so. Safety is not a thing you declare. It is a thing you make, and you make it in a particular way that took me a long time to understand and even longer to trust.
You make it by attuning. By reading another creature closely, and then meeting them where they actually are.

Here is where most of us go wrong, and I put myself first in that line. When something in front of us is worried, our instinct is to be the opposite. To be calm at them. To hold ourselves still and serene and a little above it all, as if our steadiness might somehow rub off. It feels like the right thing to do. But a worried horse does not experience your detached calm as comfort. He experiences it as evidence that you are not with him. You are somewhere else, somewhere easy, while he is here, alone in the hard place.

So the first move is not to be calm. The first move is to meet him. To let your own attention sharpen when his does. To notice the thing he noticed. To say, with your body more than your voice, I see it too. You're not crazy. Something here is worth watching.

For just a moment, you go up to where he is. And only then, once he knows he is not alone in it, can the two of you come down together.

You have to go up to come down.

I have watched it happen a hundred times, and it still feels like a small miracle. Meet the worry, and the worry has somewhere to go. Skip past it, and it has nowhere to land but deeper in.

This meeting happens in two layers, and the first has no words at all.

The first layer is the body. Breath, posture, rhythm. Long before I have decided anything, my breathing has either joined a horse's or it hasn't. Slow yours down, and you can watch his follow a beat later, like a question answered. Speed up, brace, hold your breath the way we all do when we get scared, and you will feel him tighten to match. Two bodies in a paddock are never really separate. They are already talking beneath the level of words, in the oldest language there is. Attunement begins there, in whether I have the humility to notice what my own breathing is telling his.

The second layer is everything the first one cannot carry. When to joke and when to go quiet. When to ask for more and when to wait. When a hard thing needs to be named aloud and when it needs to be left alone for today. This is the part that never hardens into a technique, no matter how many years you put in, because it is different with every creature, and different with the same creature on a different morning. It is not a method you apply. It is a calibration you keep making, over and over, reading and adjusting, reading and adjusting, for as long as you are together.

And here is the part I most want you to keep.

Attunement is not the destination. It is the road.

We do not attune simply to attune, or connect only to feel connected. We attune so that, having met another where they are, we finally have somewhere to lead them.

Leading follows attunement.

Always in that order.

First you meet the horse, then you can guide him. First the client feels met, then the hard work becomes possible. First your child feels felt, and only then can any of your good advice get in. Try to lead before you have met, and you are simply pushing on a body that has no reason yet to follow.

I get this backward all the time, especially with the people closest to me. Someone I love is upset, and I reach straight for the fix. The reassurance, the plan, the leading. I skip the meeting because the meeting is slower, harder, and asks more of me. And it never works. It never has. The advice bounces off, and I feel unheard for offering it, while they feel unmet for receiving it. We end up farther apart than when we started.

The whole art, in the end, is patience for one small step. Do not tell them they are safe. Go find them where they are. Match them there, breath and posture and worry and all. And then, together, show them the way down.

That is how safety is made.

Not declared.

Made.

One matched breath at a time.

~ Paul

PC - Erin Gilmore Photography

𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡.

Over the next few weeks you'll find us teaching, learning, competing, and continuing to explore what helps horses and people build stronger partnerships.

If our paths cross at any of these events, we'd love for you to come and say hi.

If you're interested in joining us for 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 at the end of the month, we have 𝐧𝐨𝐧-𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐬 available if you'd like to be part of the full learning experience without bringing a horse.

𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐛𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.

This week, Dr. Pebbles Turbeville joined Dr. Paul and Justin for a conversation that covered everything from equine wellbeing and horse behaviour to the challenges of an increasingly anxious generation.

One of the themes that stayed with us was the importance of how we show up, for ourselves, for our horses, and for the people around us. It's a theme that naturally found its way into this week's intentions.

What intention will guide your week?

One of the ideas I've been sitting with this week came from research on mothers and infants. For years, the assumption was that healthy relationships were built on perfect attunement. That good parents were somehow always in sync with their children, reading every cue correctly and responding at exactly the right moment.

The research found something quite different.
Even in the healthiest relationships, parent and child were truly "in sync" only about thirty percent of the time. The majority of their interactions contained some kind of mismatch. A missed cue. A misunderstanding. A moment where they simply weren't together.

What fascinated me wasn't the disconnect itself. It was what happened afterwards.

The healthiest relationships weren't defined by perfect harmony. They were defined by their ability to find one another again. The moments of repair, rather than the moments of perfection, seemed to be where resilience was built.

As I sat with that idea, I couldn't help thinking about horses.

So much of riding can feel like the pursuit of harmony. We hope for the ride where everything feels effortless, where every aid is understood, where horse and rider move together without interruption. When that picture is disturbed, it's easy to feel that something has gone wrong.
But horses don't seem to teach us that relationships work that way.

They lose balance. We misunderstand one another. Our timing isn't quite right. Something startles them, or us. Those moments of discord are part of every relationship. The question is not whether they happen, but what happens next.

If every small rupture is followed by a return to safety, perhaps something much more important is being learned than perfect communication. Perhaps the horse is learning that uncertainty doesn't have to become danger. That a moment of confusion doesn't mean the relationship has been lost.
Maybe that is where trust is really built.

Not because we avoided every difficult moment, but because we discovered, together, that we could find our way back from them.

It makes me wonder whether this is true far beyond horses. Whether the strongest relationships in our lives are not the ones that never lose their way, but the ones that repeatedly find it again.
~ Paul

📸 Gilmore Photography