I've been thinking a bunch about how something might be experienced by me as totally appropriate and ok, but experienced as highly unsettling or adversive by my horse - or experienced as totally inappropriate and "bad" by me, but as sensible and reasonable and no big deal by my horse.
I've also been thinking a bunch about how I spend a lot more time thinking and talking about the 20% of my horsemanship which is on the edges - both the kooky cool experimental horsemanship, and the questionable should-I-shouldn't-I circling back to chaos horsemanship.
But in reality, probably 80% of the conversations I have with my horse are a kind of lovely gentle boring, 15% interesting weird experimental, and the last 5% ranges from hmmm-debateable to ah-shite.
And I suspect that while the outer 20% takes up much more realestate in my brain, and especially the last 5% keeps me up at night - Its probably the first 80% which is really experienced as the day to day reality by my horse.
I think my pony and I have really good conversations about boundaries. Most of those conversations have a flavour something like "ah, careful, yes like this please" and "whoopsy daisy lets try that again thank you" and "hmm not quite, remember like this". And then two seperate, singular moments of "NO. Absofuckinglutely not." One from me to Una, and another from Una to me.
And if you had asked me to predict in advance what my pony would have found offensive, compared to what my pony actually found offensive in the moment - I would have predicted wrong.
I am not quite sure where I am going with this story - except perhaps to say that as I continue to find a healthy balance between being walled off from horses and being enmeshed with horses - it becomes increasingly obvious to me that horses are horses and humans are humans, and its much more valuable for me to look clear eyed at what my horse is actually experiencing, rather than being handcuffed by my preexisting expectations of how I think a horse should experience a thing.
And to continue the conversation about boundaries and appeasement and worry and relationship - I might add that the more I look the more I see a mismatch between the situations I worry about and the situations which actually occur :D
I'll give you a couple examples. I've never owned a horse for more than a few months without developing a wildly affectionate relationship with them. I've never worked with a horse who stayed shutdown for more than a couple weeks. I've never owned a horse who stood quietly after I mounted - they all end up learning to walk off as soon as I have both feet in the stirrups. I should probably spend more time musing about point 3 not points 1 and 2 ;) ;) ;)
I don't think Una spends much time pondering what could go wrong on one far end of a spectrum while we exist at the total opposite end, and I don't think its helpful to us for me to do that either.
This is quite a freeing observation - I can just repeat the process of noticing what is actually going on, addressing just that, and then being at peace with my pony.