The Power of the Herd (32 page)

At first, this
looks
like you're doing nothing because, after exhausting your repertoire of quick-fix solutions and habitual patterns, you're finally open to analyzing the previously ignored dynamics standing in your way: feelings, behaviors, and other, more subtle nonverbal energies, processes, and insights. Wu-wei also requires more courage than most people expect. It's actually a lot like being challenged to a sharo, only in this case, you're not being whacked with a big stick; you're being asked to stay present, endure, and think clearly through the utter confusion and humiliation of not knowing what to do next.

Yet in marshaling this acutely aware, fully engaged form of patience, you begin to notice “what
wants
to happen.” Unexpected solutions appear on the horizon of consciousness, seemingly of their own accord, creating the mystical sense of a higher intelligence taking over. And, given your previously conditioned responses, which can only function in the context of a limited world-view, it appears that something larger than your ego
is
being activated.

Artists often describe this pivotal shift as being “visited by a muse.” Lao-tzu explained it as “aligning with the Tao.” Judeo-Christian innovators characterize it as an act of “surrender” that allows them to be “guided by God.” In the influential PBS series
The Power of Myth,
Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill
Moyers discussed this same phenomenon as feeling “helped by hidden hands” or having an “invisible means of support.”

Scientists, too, hit the wall, reporting that unexpected theories emerge when they've exhausted all logical conclusions and conventional strategies, admitting a kind of defeat. People later hailed as geniuses are not necessarily smarter than their peers. They've simply broken through whatever old paradigm holds everyone else back — by sacrificing some cherished belief or acknowledging the incompleteness of some widely accepted scientific “truth,” letting new information in, and patiently waiting for an organic, subconscious integration to take place. These people may seem to give up, for days, weeks, or even years. But deep down, their drive to find a solution, their sheer fascination with the subject, never wavers.

It was my horses who taught me to relax into this irritating limbo stage between letting go of the old and envisioning the new. They also revealed that the art of wu-wei requires releasing attachment to a conventional or idealistic
outcome,
not
being detached
from the situation. Caring about the other beings involved was essential. It also helped to have faith: in myself, in humanity's as-yet-unrecognized potential, and in the benevolence and intelligence of nature. In essence I had to acknowledge that the universe operates on principles that invigorate the mind
and
the heart. If I defiantly held on to any belief system — from scientific survival-of-the-fittest notions to fundamentalist religious precepts, New Age utopianism, and the disconnected, mechanistic, nihilistic perspective characteristic of some modern atheists — I would have missed important opportunities to evolve, let alone deepen my knowledge and sheer enjoyment of life.

Let me give you an example of how a “problem horse” plunged me into a fruitful period of wu-wei, expanded my awareness, and inspired a subsequent innovation. What the heck; let me give you two or three.

As detailed in my previous books, and summarized in Guiding Principle 2, “Listen to Your Horse” (
chapter 14
), the first, most painful incident occurred with my promising young Arabian mare Tabula Rasa (from the Latin for “clean slate”). With the help of a sensitive, adventurous trainer, I had the privilege of starting this intelligent, affectionate horse from the ground up, after I let Nakia go. My first year with Rasa was sheer heaven, a dream come true, as we took long walks in the desert together on foot and, eventually, to my great satisfaction, under saddle. And then came a pivotal trail ride in August 1994: a huge black Rottweiler chased us down a deep sandy wash, permanently injuring Rasa's right back leg, which X-rays subsequently showed was already weakened by a congenital joint condition.

I was officially grounded by the universe that day, tossed off my high horse, forced to make a crucial decision. Would I cut my losses and sell Rasa as a brood mare, as most people recommended I do? Would I buy another, better, sounder horse and start over?

A series of compelling dreams and indescribable emotions encouraged me, against all possible logic, to keep this mare whose soulful eyes spoke more profoundly to me in silence than anyone ever had in words. I could not shake the feeling that she had something important to teach me. Still, her injury initially made it impossible for me to even lead her on walks through the desert or do the simplest ground training exercises. After some progressive therapeutic interventions, I was advised to board her on pasture for six months, cross my fingers, and let nature take its course.

We were, by that time, deeply bonded, which might easily explain my reluctance to sell her. Our mutual affection also made it impossible for me to turn her loose and walk away for half a year. At the time, however, few people respected our connection. Horses were considered unintelligent, purely instinctual beings, incapable of feeling or expressing emotion. Some local ranchers didn't even name their horses, believing these animals weren't “smart enough” to respond — a misconception Rasa, and every other horse I've ever met, disproved. Still, people continued to joke about my “thousand-pound pet.” And so for years, we basically hid out, interacting in places where the smirks of other horse owners could, for the most part, be avoided.

At the same time, I continued to boost my horse-training skills, first by apprenticing at an Arabian breeding farm where I kept Rasa in a back pasture with my former cow horse Noche and several boarders' horses. By day, I learned conventional ways of handling stallions, breeding mares, weaning foals, and training young horses. After the humans left for the day, I learned just as much by interacting with Rasa and the rest of her makeshift herd on their terms.

Because I couldn't train or ride my injured horse, I was forced to do nothing
with
her for six months, which meant I spent hours milling around the pasture with her and a half dozen other horses. There I observed all kinds of surprising behavior that completely contradicted what my trainers were teaching me about “hardwired” equine instincts and dominance hierarchies, behavior that foreshadowed my understanding of how the horse-human relationship could be used to elevate the mental, emotional, and social intelligence of both species.

For a description of the herd behavior that initially led me to entertain this possibility, see Guiding Principle 2, “Listen to Your Horse” (
chapter 14
). In fact, thinking back on the experience, I see clearly now that I conceived most
of the “Power of the Herd” Guiding Principles in that wu-wei pasture nearly twenty years ago, though it subsequently took that long to (1) bring these unconventional yet ultimately practical insights to consciousness, (2) name and define them, (3) communicate their benefits to others, (4) create reliable experiential activities that exercise these abilities in equestrians and nonequestrians alike, (5) find scientific research to validate at least some of these principles, and (6) streamline them into an equine-inspired twelve-point program for developing advanced leadership and emotional- and social-intelligence skills. (My original list included over twenty guiding principles.)

In this chapter, however, I want to emphasize that my
connection
to Rasa, my desire to be with her whether or not she would ever be “useful” as a riding horse again, took me down an unexpectedly fruitful path. I originally bought this mare to escape the pressures of modern civilization, and what I learned in being forced to give up that still-limited human agenda opened my eyes to a whole new way of being, not just with horses, but also with people.

By embracing the hidden gifts of what initially seemed a tragedy, I gained confidence in opening my mind and heart to life's unexpected lessons, and I relaxed into the Tao, feeling the current carry me toward oceans of potential.

There were two guiding principles (4 and 11) that I wouldn't have isolated had I not faced the advanced power struggles I encountered with Midnight Merlin. And yet to even get to the point where our association was productive rather than frustrating or even deadly, I needed every scrap of information, every conscious and unconscious, verbal and nonverbal, conventional and unconventional skill I had developed as a result of Rasa's injury.

Without my initial stroke of “bad luck” with this promising mare, I never would have apprenticed at the Arabian farm. I would have been out riding Rasa in the desert after work and entering horse shows on weekends, becoming fully indoctrinated in standard ways of riding and training horses for diversion, escape, financial reward, and ego gratification. While certainly not a part of my own master plan, the basic skills I developed handling stallions, mares, foals, and yearlings through conventional breeding, birthing, weaning, and training strategies were essential in even entertaining the idea of adopting Merlin five years later.

My motivation was, like my original quest to buy a horse, conventional and somewhat superficial. As a registered black Arabian stallion, Merlin was the perfect mate for Rasa, who was also a registered black Arabian. On paper,
they couldn't have been a better match. Among experienced stallion handlers, Merlin's value as a sire alone generated support for my little project. The timing was also right in terms of my own skill and interest levels. Even after Rasa's six-month convalescence, I was never able to ride her to any significant degree, though we were learning to dance together through modified ground training exercises that could easily continue through pregnancy and childbirth. By the time we met Merlin in 1999, Rasa and I had developed a profoundly satisfying, continually educational, nonriding relationship that changed my life in other areas, and I was beginning to teach some of these skills to people intrigued by the idea of working with horses to enhance their own personal and professional growth.

Perhaps most important of all, I was immensely more experienced in navigating the unknown. A whole “new,” previously invisible world had been made visible to me through my unconventional association with Rasa. Understanding how horses use emotion as information; how our bodies act as tuners, receivers, and amplifiers for nonverbal signals; how feelings, sensations, heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing are contagious was essential to my ability to stay safe with Merlin. As was the idea of wu-wei, not doing, not striving, but waiting patiently, mindfully for a new solution to emerge seemingly of its own accord.

When I began working with Merlin, I quickly saw that forcing the stallion back into activities he associated with his abusive trainer could easily end in serious injury for us both. More frustrating was the fact that gentler, more progressive therapies, such as equine massage, acupuncture, and T-Touches (a somatic training and rehabilitation technique developed by the horse trainer Linda Tellington-Jones) were completely useless to me as well for one surprising, incredibly irritating reason: touching Merlin was the most dangerous thing you could do to him, the thing that repulsed him the most.

As a result, I plunged into a whole new episode of wu-wei that taught me something much stranger than I could have imagined had the stallion been amenable to a nice, oxytocin-boosting massage. In the process, I learned several unexpected skills useful to trauma survivors and their family members, most especially soldiers coming back from war.

There's a disturbing scene in the film
Buck,
a widely watched 2011 documentary on the author and horse trainer Buck Brannaman, who consulted with Robert Redford during the making of
The Horse Whisperer.
Near the end of the film, a
young woman brings her three-year-old colt to a clinic hoping Buck can alter the animal's intensely aggressive behavior. The flashy palomino stallion hadn't been abused. Rather, his increasingly dangerous antics arose from a series of hardships related to his mother dying in childbirth, possible oxygen deprivation as the owner pulled him from the mare's womb, the need to bottle-feed the orphaned foal, and an apparently unrelated back injury that took the woman herself out of commission for months during a crucial early training stage when she could have taught the horse some lifesaving manners. (However, it also appeared that even if she had been physically capable of working with the horse at that time, the woman wouldn't have known how to teach these skills to her special-needs horse.)

Judging from his behavior on-screen, the horse didn't show any signs of brain damage from oxygen deprivation. He was alert and responsive. The challenges seemed related to a different kind of developmental issue: Bottle-fed colts treat humans as their peers and elders, which is endearing for the first few months. When testosterone kicks in at age two, however, this association becomes increasingly problematic as the colt begins to challenge people with the same outlandish power plays you see mustangs engage in with each other. In the wild, a crucial adolescent socialization process takes place, managed by older, more experienced mares and stallions, who can easily handle a kick, bite, or charge that would kill the average human being.

The plot thickened when the woman mentioned that she had
eighteen
stallions at home, and that she'd turned the colt out with some of these other males at times, perhaps hoping to create a “bachelor band” experience for her orphaned colt while she was convalescing. However, in domesticated horses — who haven't been properly socialized by
generations
of seasoned
equine
leaders — this can result in ganglike behavior among stallions. Imagine encountering a group of
thousand-pound
Crips or Bloods racing toward you at thirty-five miles an hour, rearing ten feet up in the air, striking at you with hooves as hard as brass knuckles, then mule-kicking you down the street after taking all your money. It's easy to understand why Buck initially conveyed shock, then fear for the woman's safety.