Riding is Just the Beginning, by Linda Kohanov
From the Afterward to She Who Rides Horses: A Saga of the Ancient Steppe (Book One)…
That first incredible leap of faith, that single dynamic act of connection between a human and a horse was thousands of years in the making, it’s true. But what came next took even more imagination, effort, and experimentation: merging an entire tribe with herds of powerful animals who run like the wind. Here we approach the tempestuous territory of Book Two of She Who Rides Horses.
The latest research on animal domestication suggests that unique individuals from both species jump-started a long process of cultural innovation. Horses receptive to taking this life-changing journey had to be confident, gregarious, curious, gentle, and thoughtful enough to allow certain people to approach them. These ancient equine ambassadors had to be savvy enough to distinguish among hunters stalking their next meal and those odd two-legged creatures who had something else in mind.
In a land with no fences, the first riders needed a similar combination of bravery, thoughtfulness, gentleness, and curiosity. They also had to be intensely aware, responsive, and trustworthy to get close to begin with. When Naya meets the striking red filly, we glimpse two adventurous, innovative beings reaching out to each other, tentatively sensing the promise of something wildly ambitious, something that with time, imagination, sensitivity and adaptability will change the course of history. Of course, it helped that other animals could vouch for certain members of our species. Ancestors of the horse tribes started small, joining forces with goats, sheep and cattle thousands of years before ancient equines were brought into the fold.
In She Who Rides Horses, we see Naya and her family draw on well-established pastoralist skills to engage with the chestnut filly’s herd. At the most basic level, the goats they bring with them would have broadcast a comfort with humans that reverberated far beyond their campground. What’s more, when Naya and her mother help a mare through a difficult birth, this is clearly not their first rodeo. They have helped smaller herbivores through such ordeals many times before. The attitude, the behavior, even the smell of these people would have piqued the interest of animals passing by. Not just blood, not just flesh from a recent hunt, but the scent of cow and goat’s milk would have drifted outward in all directions. When Naya and her associates drink the mare’s milk, they are taking the first curious steps to solidify a transformational process that Nature herself had promoted through eons of mammalian evolution.
In following that mysterious vision to ride, Naya has a leg up, you might say. Pastoralists already knew how to move across vast distances keeping the herds and the tribe together, always searching for greener pastures, protecting the young, the sick and the old from predators, helping females give birth, and eventually, milking them. It is, after all, a lot more dangerous to milk a goat or cow than it is to shoot it from a distance. You really have to know what you’re doing to wander up with a bucket and reach for someone’s udders. To peacefully engage in this activity on a daily basis, both human and animal have to be socialized to facilitate, negotiate and accept this kind of interaction.
A keen awareness of how to respond to the subtle nonverbal behavioral cues of a large herbivore involves a confluence of characteristics that many people consider opposites: calmness and assertiveness, power and gentleness, agility and stability. But there is a mystical element that research on animal domestication often ignores. From Africa to Mongolia, even modern pastoralists are so intertwined with their herds that many tribes consider themselves to be half-human, half horse (or cow, or reindeer). Even as cell phones make their way into tribal life, the psychology, social structure, and mythology of these people are still heavily influenced by animal behavior and perspectives. To actively blur the lines between the human and animal realms is a classic shamanic act that changes you from the inside out.
Riding between the Worlds
In his book Recovering the Soul, Dr. Larry Dossey devotes an entire chapter to human-animal relationships, paying special attention to the role shamans play in tribal societies. “Shaman” is of Russian origin, coming from saman, a word in the Tungusic dialect of Siberia designating a person who specializes in bridging the visible and invisible worlds as well as the human and animal realms. According to Dossey, this practice is based on the belief “that a kind of connective consciousness bound them together with the animal kingdom. So intimate was the sharing of the mind with the animals that shamans believed it was possible to actually become an animal.”
Dossey goes on to observe that “in the nonlocal, collective consciousness that wrapped man and animal together, it was not always the man who took the initiative in actualizing it. Sometimes the first overture was made by the animal. This is most obvious in the call of the shaman… and in his initiation... In the tradition of the Buryat shamans the tutelary animal is called the khubligan, a term that can be interpreted as ‘metamorphosis’… Thus the tutelary animal not only enables the shaman to transform himself; it is in a sense his ‘double,’ his alter ego.”
Modern Yakut shamans, representing the second largest native group in Siberia, wouldn’t dream of visiting the Otherworld without the aid of their horses. This animal, its image, or at times an object personifying it is present in the shaman’s preparation to enter visionary states. The shaman’s drum turns into a powerful steed during these rituals, and the leader himself often becomes a horse in episodes of trance while his assistants hold a pair of reins attached to loops sewn onto the back of his sacred robe.
Even in our technologically-based culture, living horses exhibit an ability to jump start visionary states in humans, indicating that the relationship between a shaman and his or her khubligan is not merely a metaphor. Such experiences initially take people with practical minds and advanced degrees by surprise, but the phenomenon can be reproduced reliably through equine-facilitated activities that recognize the horse as a sentient being with his or her own wisdom to share. Both Sarah Barnes and I have accessed innovative ideas and wildly creative states through mutually respectful interactions with these powerful beings. Some of the deepest insights I’ve gained and shared in my books are based on perspectives that emerged through direct connection with horses and the inspirational, sometimes dream-like states of consciousness that arise in the wake of such interactions. In Sarah’s case, the book you hold in your hands is a potent example.
Anam Cara
After establishing her own training and boarding business in the early 2000s, Sarah reached an impasse with certain horses who arrived with undisclosed injuries and issues that thwarted her competitive ambitions, and those of some of her students. Searching for a better way to work with these animals, she studied with James Shaw, a Tai Chi master who brought the insights of the internal martial arts to riding and working with horses.
“James’ focus was learning how to ride without force,” she says, “which began to open a different way of thinking about the horse-human relationship, along with starting to understand the power of the breath. I started incorporating James’ approach into my own work and became one of his recognized instructors.”
Fast forward to 2012: “I found Okotillo – Tio for short – an un-started four-year old mare with a clean slate who I hoped would finally be the right competition partner,” she remembers.
“As the Universe would have it, about six months after starting her, she had what seemed like a minor slip in the aisle and gradually over the next several months became unrideable. At this point, I nearly gave up... but decided to stick with Tio and go down another path.”
Sarah began practicing meditation, became more serious about her Qi Gong practice, and started to explore various spiritual paths. In 2013, she renamed her business Anam Cara Equestrian, a nod to her Celtic heritage, and began focusing much more on fostering relationship between her clients and their horses. Her mission statement expressed a shift that attracted increasing numbers of equestrians who were also frustrated with conventional training approaches. “At Anam Cara Equestrian, awareness, connection and balance create harmony and communion. Relationship is at the center and riding becomes a meditative art. Ride mindfully, with an open heart.”
The Wounded Healer
Around that time, Sarah and I met through LinkedIn, and she was introduced to my 2007 collaboration with artist Kim McElroy, Way of the Horse: Equine Archetypes for Self-Discovery, a book and deck of wisdom cards designed to help people access the various lessons that horses embody and teach to receptive humans. Some of the cards and accompanying essays reveal practical insights on power, relationship, leadership and personal development. Other cards explore ancient equine archetypes of healing and transformation, including the mare-headed goddess, Pegasus the winged horse, and the centaur Chiron, also known as ‘the wounded healer.’
“In those first months I constantly drew the wounded healer,” Sarah told me. “Your work showed me a way to find meaning and purpose in what I was going through with Tio. Since then, with your guidance, I've been following the lead of my horses down the path of relationship.”
In the fall of 2014, Sarah had her own encounter with the wounded healer archetype when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I experienced a very profound shamanic journey, involving a call to write, which opened a new branch of the path. I began exploring shamanic journeying as a regular practice. I am quite certain that my work with the horses, and their influence, opened me to this realm of experience/understanding, but I had no idea, yet, what form the writing was supposed to take.”
After her recovery, she attended one of my most popular seminars, Black Horse Wisdom. This workshop exercises intuition, builds creativity, explores equine archetypes of transformation, and includes guided visualization experiences and non-riding activities with horses. During a shamanic-style journey with drumming designed to help participants access a hidden talent or calling, a crucial symbol emerged. Sarah saw the vivid image of the sun and moon conjoined. The feeling associated with this initially indecipherable vision was so compelling that she decided to attend my Writing Between the Worlds workshop a few months later.
“Like myself, all of the participants had been to your place at least once before,” she says. “As a result, none of us arrived expecting to receive nuts-and-bolts advice about crafting the perfect essay, constructing character arcs or getting published. We knew better. What you and your equine partners offered was something much more elusive – access to another realm, a passageway leading to a mythic landscape between the worlds. Guided by the wisdom of the herd, we were invited to discover the place where stories dwell, awaiting the power of a storyteller to summon them to life.”
And that’s where She Who Rides Horses first emerged. After several days of horse activities and journeying experiences with music, I invited participants to just start writing, letting the nonverbal images and feelings that came up find a voice beyond the habits of logic and commercial concerns. Sarah’s symbol of the sun and moon conjoined began to evolve. This time, she explained, they were not conjoined but fully coexisting in the same sky.
“The sun's light did not diminish the darkness that enthroned the moon. Sun and moon were two forms of consciousness present in the same sky, moving fluidly between two realms of consciousness, bringing the ineffable into this world, finding a dynamic balance between dualities."
Pulling up a chair at one of the outdoor tables near the horse corrals, Sarah opened her laptop, clicked on a new Word document, poised her fingers over the keyboard, and with no idea of what was going to come out, started to write.
“The words flowed,” she reported afterwards. “A girl, dressed in animal hides, uncommon blue eyes scanning a distant horizon. A filly, her unusual chestnut coat as red as the girl’s own hair, lit like a flame by the rays of the setting sun. The boundless grasslands of ancient Eurasia. The first person ever to ride a horse… The temperature dropped, darkness fell, a huge orange moon rose behind the mountains east of the ranch. Eventually, I forced myself to stop writing long enough to drive my rental car back to the bed and breakfast where I was staying. Ensconced in my room, sitting up in bed absent-mindedly eating a power bar, I reviewed what had appeared on the page so far – and then I kept writing, long past my usual bedtime. By morning, I had the first chapter of She Who Rides Horses: A Tale of the Ancient Steppe.”
As Sarah read it aloud to our fellow workshop participants, tears began to flow down my cheeks. My heart skipped a beat and expanded with a potent sense of joy and recognition. “You have to keep writing,” I urged, emphatic. “I’ve been waiting for someone to tell this story. It needs to be told.”
A Feminine Talent
As a historian, Sarah had significant experience gathering research and integrating it through scholarly writing. That sun was already shining brightly in her sky. But the moon was also gathering strength in her writing, bringing intuition, creativity and the mysteries of unbridled consciousness into focus. These two forces, academic research and imaginative storytelling, continue to inform every word she writes in this tale, including why a young woman became the first rider in her tribe and why significant time spent relating to the red filly as an equal would have clinched the deal.
Certain attitudes and interactions on the ground actually make riding possible. According to research collected and interpreted in Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond by Meg Daley Olmert, simply grooming a relatively relaxed mammal releases a hormone called oxytocin in both parties (in the one who is being petted and in the one who is doing the petting). From an evolutionary perspective, the benefits are impressive—and counterintuitive for people invested in an overly harsh and predatory view of nature. As Sarah reveals in her Author’s Note, oxytocin buffers the flight or fight response in favor of a calm and connect response. It also increases learning capacity, supports faster wound healing, activates social recognition circuits, and, according to Olmert, makes people and animals “more trusting and more trustworthy.”
The hormone is released big time when a female goes into labor. It jump-starts milk production and is present in any nurturing activity between mother and child. Males also produce oxytocin when engaged in caring activities, with their own kind and with other species. Touching and grooming an animal quite literally tempers aggression and mistrust in men and women alike. But research also shows that even looking appreciatively at a dog, cat, horse, deer, goat, or other creature releases smaller amounts of oxytocin.
We are biochemically designed to connect with others, even across species lines. Early pastoral cultures experienced this firsthand. Moving from watching and admiring animals at a distance, to approaching, touching, and forming mutually supportive partnerships with certain receptive species transformed everyone involved, mentally, behaviorally, emotionally, and biochemically.
Through this mutual socialization process, early pastoralists retained, and greatly expanded, a seasoned hunter’s courage, patience, awareness and knowledge of animal behavior. Milking, assisting in birth, socializing aggressive youngsters, and caring for the young, the old, and the sick transformed stalkers into caretakers, guardians, and leaders of entire herds of animals who were faster and in some cases much larger than the human contingent.
Even now, this lifestyle changes one’s perception of an animal’s worth. Over time, pastoralists evolved to depend less on meat as they learned how to process milk into increasingly diverse products. To this day, the humans involved protect the herd with their lives, and their wealth is based on how many healthy living members of the herd graze under the tribe’s watchful gaze.
The discovery of oxytocin in the early 20th century, and research on its possible role in human-animal domestication in the early 21st century, offers yet another twist to this prehistoric tale. It is she who rides, and she who accepts a rider. Both sexes produce oxytocin, it’s true, but in women estrogen enhances the power of this potent bonding agent. Testosterone, which men produce at high levels under stress, seems to reduce oxytocin’s effects. In the chemistry of connection, then, women have a marked evolutionary advantage, making a strong case for the pivotal roles that females, human and animal, played in forging the interspecies bonds that encouraged herds and tribes to join forces.
Archetypes of Transformation
Yet there is a deeper story intertwined with the solid historical, anthropological, and scientific research informing the multi-volume plot of She Who Rides Horses, a story that is simultaneously personal and archetypal. In fact, this pattern is almost universal in the lives of 21st-century men and women who feel the call to ride. A sense of unbridled fascination with these magnificent animals moves certain people in mysterious ways that others witness only superficially. In many of us, the urge to be with horses feels like a visceral need and a spiritual pursuit, but all too quickly, the culture of modern horsemanship herds us toward competition and other commercial equestrian endeavors that tend to objectify both horse and rider—and encourage disconnected, ego-driven interactions as a result. Though we feel the magic in the beginning, we all too often lose it along the way. Sarah and I—and far too many of our students and colleagues—have direct experience with this dilemma.
Riding is not as easy as it looks, and each horse demands something different. No single training approach works for everyone for one simple reason: each horse and human involved is an individual with different strengths, challenges, and learning styles. Many times, I’ve found that certain sequences of progressive training activities need to be modified and re-ordered for different horse-rider teams. For instance, even though many horses respond well to a technique emphasizing a series of steps numbered 1 to 7, it may actually be easier for some horses to perform step 5 first, then steps 2, 3 and 4, then, finally master step 1, before jumping back to steps 6 and 7. Along the way, I may develop a few new techniques to address special needs, adding to a growing vocabulary of interventions that responsive equestrians invariably acquire over time.
Whenever trainers encounter a ‘problem horse,’ and break through with new solutions to unexpected blocks, the lexicon of horse-human interactions expands. I often encounter people who complain that a horse ‘isn’t cooperating’ with a particular method. Invariably, I encourage them to adopt a more responsive, imaginative approach—or find a good home for the animal in question and buy a motorcycle that doesn’t have inconvenient thoughts and feelings of its own.
Through the vehicle of historically-based fiction, Sarah Barnes successfully depicts issues, challenges, and breakthroughs that 21st-century equestrians still encounter. But the wisdom revealed through Naya’s adventure is not just for horse lovers. As we will see in Book Two, Naya’s free spirit will soon enough be corralled by tribal leaders who see the potential of her innovative relationship with the red filly’s herd and intend to capitalize upon it.
Opportunists are the quickest to recognize an innovator’s brilliance. Then they try to control it, to channel it in ways that enhance their own wealth and social standing. In Book Two of She Who Rides Horses, shrewd, calculating elders, and one particularly ambitious, charismatic young man, will strive to possess Naya and the horse she rode in on, while looking for short cuts and fast tracks to achieving a lucrative, paradigm-shifting acquisition of horsepower.
In their myths and songs and artwork, equestrian-based cultures around the world depict the horse as a sacred gift from the gods. Yet like the discovery of fire, the power these animals embody is anything but benign: It can be used for benevolent, life-enhancing purposes and selfish, ego-driven ambitions. All too often, there is no middle ground. The horses themselves may be in a state of equanimity regarding human affairs, but history confirms that malevolent factions were quick to weaponize these graceful, fleet-footed beings, subjugating entire multi-species populations in the name of conquest. This strange, uniquely human impulse, this over-active sense of entitlement truly ran amok when horses entered the picture. In She Who Rides Horses, Naya is the first human to be caught in the middle of a struggle between those who feel a connection to and respect for horses and those who seek to dominate the earth and all its creatures with aggressive abandon.
Exactly how will Naya be roped into serving others’ ambitions? Will she sublimate her sensitivity and risk losing her vision in the process? How will she recover her power, compassion, and calling? How will she finally discover the red filly’s heart’s desire, and win back her own soul in the process? Stayed tuned for the rest of the series.
Riding is just the beginning.