| Featured Article - January
2006
In The Shadow of Equus Imagine A New Riding Reality
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| “The possibility of stepping into a higher
plane is quite real for everyone. It requires no force or effort or
sacrifice. It involves little more than changing our ideas about what
is normal.” — Creating Health by Deepak Chopra There’s something healthy and invigorating about New Year that generates a great sense of renewal, a moment in time when many of us pause to look at our normal lives and contemplate a new normal. It’s a time to regroup, renew, review, make new plans based on the experiences of last year, and explore ways of shifting and changing our thinking to meet the challenges and expectations of this year. The past year is gone with all its ups and downs, strengths and weaknesses, good and bad moments, wins and losses. In the ebb and flow of life, obstacles roll into our path in every shape and size. But more often than not, it’s not so much the obstacle as our attitude — the mobility of our mind — toward the problem that yields the most (or the least) rewarding solution. Setbacks in conditioning or training, or a sickness or lameness will put schooling and competing on hold. Obstacles come along to test the best laid plans and put pressure on the greatest degree of patience. But, as they say, problems are solutions in disguise and hidden within each challenge is often a valuable learning curve that propels us to better things, better ways of doing the same thing, or a better way to think about what we’re doing in the first place. In the coming focused weeks and months of conditioning and training when so much emphasis is on the technical perfection of a horse’s way of going, it’s easy to overlook subtle problems bubbling in the background. And it’s easy to forget that the point of it all, the reason many of us ride horses in the first place, is the enjoyment of the ride itself. We can get so focused on the end result we often forget to enjoy the uniqueness of each ride along the way.
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Experiencing
a new normal is sort of like Zen and the art of horse riding: Being in
the moment; riding in the moment; taking each ride for its own value
without setting our hair on fire that it’s good... better... best
compared to the last one. A ride is one moment in a lifetime of riding.
You could do the same ride five minutes later with a completely
different outcome. A change in how we experience things needs a shift of mental gears before physical changes manifest. It was Albert Einstein who said, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” This guy had a grasp on visualization before the word was trendy and with his sharp mind he wasted no time linking the dots on the New Age dictum that thoughts create reality. Sharp thinking and even sharper visualizing spurred on his tinkering with his E=mc2 formula, an equation that was recently validated with even more accuracy than Einstein’s original projections. And like the philosopher Henry David Thoreau, Einstein was in lockstep with one unscientific universal truth which Thoreau so eloquently phrased: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his own dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Two words jump out that underscore so many success stories — “dreams” and “imagine.” Working together, they can power the energy behind a new sense of normal as we define our dreams and imagine their reality. Have a wonderful New Year and an enriching riding experience in 2006. Read Margaret Evans' column "In The Shadow Of Equus" each month in The Pacific & Prairie Horse Journal
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