Beautiful Day in Paradise

We had a great day here today, in all ways! The weather was beautiful, my horse was back to being my horse, we learned and played with a lot of great things. I promise to post pictures as soon as I can--my cord is not with me at the moment...

So brief update from the cliffhanger post from this morning...Yesterday's session was a total flunk on my part. The only good thing is that I wasn't horribly frustrated, I was just ineffective and unaware of where I was going wrong. Of course, reflection after the fact made things a whole lot clearer! Isn't that how it always works. We were supposed to play "be my shadow" yesterday, with the idea that your horse has 51% of the leadership, and you have 49%. You take over if you need to, but the idea is to shadow your horse and see the world through their eyes. You let them go where they want and observe their thresholds, etc. Josie started off pretty good, wanting to go places. She particularly wanted to follow Vegas and Kari. Where we got into trouble is that she was following them but blowing through many thresholds in the process. Remember this is a whole new world to her here! I eventually realized what was happening. This is where I dropped the ball. I should have taken some leadership back and dealt with the right brained horse that showed up. I could have given her something to do, retreated, etc. But I didn't and things just spiraled downward until neither she nor I were in a good state. How interesting. On top of it, it was raining pretty hard at this point. So I eventually put her back in her pen, fed her dinner, and we went back to our house.

Kari and I reflected on our experience later that night and realized where we had gone wrong and what we could have done differently. It was really the best way to have started the clinic, since we learned more things by having things self-destruct. A hard lesson, but an important one!

So that's enough on yesterday (Sunday). Today was the first official day of the course. I thankfully arrived to a horse that was ready to talk to me again. It helps that I am her sole purveyor of food and water!

We had great classroom sessions this morning, then a demo on prepping for liberty. This afternoon I chose to go to the falling leaf focus session. We have done a lot of falling leaf, but there is always more to learn. I learned that becoming more particular about the small things will allow us to advance pretty much everything. Isolate, separate, recombine. I became much more particular about her disengagements, with great results. Then we just explored the playground. This is such a fascinating and magical place. They pictures won't even begin to do it justice, but I will hopefully post some either tonight or tomorrow!

Savvy on!
Molly and Josie