Trusting In Something Larger Than Yourself

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Every day my horses tell me about the power of trust. Whether it’s the rescue who lets me love on her after being standoffish and skittish for so long, or the senior heart horse who calls for lunch, knowing that I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure she’s cared for. The roly poly “baby” of the group (who is 12) lets me hug her and give her all the attention, just like her daddy does. And even the diva tolerates my attention and is learning that she gets fed and treats when the others do too. For those whose spiritual stories are marred by trauma, learning to trust, especially in ourselves can be difficult.

Where horse wisdom and trust really come into play is trusting that you’re doing the right thing. Growing up undiagnosed neurodivergent often means that you’re told, rightly or wrongly, that what you’re doing is wrong. Often you’re being told that because your behaviors, be they stimming or getting up from your seat too much, or whatever, are seen as the wrong behaviors in the moment even when the behavior isn’t hurting anyone. As an adult, I fear being punished for something as simple as taking five minutes to myself or needing to decompress, and obviously that’s where the trauma/cPTSD come into play.

I lean on horse wisdom. Watching the horses in the herd, there are times when an interaction between the two of them, such as the goofy gelding coming into the pen when I’m about to feed my senior heart horse, earns pinned ears and maybe a glare. But goofy gelding doesn’t worry that he’s doing the wrong thing in the moment. He’s acting on his intuition and instincts. I’m there. He might get fed, ergo, he goes into the shed. He takes the reprimand in stride. Hey, we can’t all make perfect decisions all the time. The trick isn’t to not make any decisions at all, it’s to understand that the vast majority of what we do will be the best decision we can make. And no matter what the outcome, we’re working with the best information we have at the time.

Part of the difference here is that horses live in the now. They do learn from their past mistakes, but they also learn from the things they learn in the past. I recently moved where I feed Holly, the rescue, and while she still goes and stands down where her bucket used to be, after just a few days, I can call her name, and she looks and you can see the process. My food is up here now, she realizes, and she comes toward the bucket. Often, she’s standing in the right spot, just impatient, and I take too long to get the bucket to her, so she thinks it’s going back to the old spot. It’s not. I’m just slow moving these days.

There are a lot of what would someone do memes going around, with some obvious ones come to mind. One question I’m starting to ask myself is WWHD or what would horses do? You can insert nature, wildlife, or even a specific animal in that if you want. But in asking that question, I’m aligning myself with my wild spirit, and I’m moving beyond the stories that I’ve been told, namely that everything I do is wrong, and the more I trust my self, the more I trust my horses, the less those messages have a hold on me.

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