Focus - where are you putting yours?

On your future?

On you present?

On you past?

Focus is one of those things that only half of us are aware of, and even then, only half that are aware of it are half as aware as they should be - let me explain……

I have spent two and a half years training in the Parelli program with my horses. There are lots of things that we are taught to understand through Pat’s perfect little sayings, and one of them is the power of Focus. Entire training manuals and DVD’s have been devoted to it - it’s obviously a really important thing to understand for so many materials to have been brought out about it, but like so much of this program, I just didn’t get it properly until it slapped me in the face - a BFO ( Blinding Flash of the Obvious) was had in the paddock the other day.

It was a while ago that I understood how my focus on my horse could affect him.  I was trying so terribly hard to get Brodie to stand still while I played extreme friendly with him. It wasn’t working, as my frustration and my anger that he wouldn’t accept it was building my focus. I was really thinking about it and concentrating on it. Even with my back turned to him, a relaxed position in my body, and slow rhythmic slapping of the ground with my carrot stick and savvy string he was  like a cat on a hot tin roof. I was pretty perplexed about how I was going to improve this as we’d been trying to get it sorted for a very long time, and I was so unaware of where I was pointing my focus, and was under the impression that body position and rhythm were all I had to help me. It wasn’t until I had my focus distracted that I understood it was the problem.

It was whilst sharing the arena with our Parelli Partners Sandy the haflinger and Sarah his human, who were working round some barrels at the other end of the school. Sandy got his line caught round the barrel, and my attention (focus) was taken away from concentrating on the sound of Brodie tap dancing behind me, and was directed towards Sandy who was possibly going to take exception to being wrapped round a barrel. Instantly the noise behind me ceased and he stood still.

Lesson learned - I don’t have to be looking at him to have my focus on him. He could feel how heavily concentrated on  him I was. Since then I have taught myself to be genuinely focused on other things during friendly game (faking it doesn’t work!! You have to really be watching a bird in the sky/man in the garden next door/ sheep on a far off hill,  and thinking about them or your horse knows you are just viewing the object and you are still focused on them). You have to stop thinking about what reaction you want or what it might be. Now that’s easier said than done I know; when putting the Big Green Ball on his back for the first time you are very aware you may be about to get squished and you may find running through the contents of your fridge in your mind and deciding upon dinner not easy to do. But from my experience you are far less likely to get squished if you can. However, that’s still only half of the lesson.

For about the past year I have been practising this online and getting results……..online. Now I have started doing Liberty, I have had another BFO about focus when my horses kept getting worried and leaving me. One thing I had never taken into consideration was the horses focus on me. I suddenly became very aware that even when they are almost catatonic from a new learning experience, that those moments when they go all thoughtful before they lick and chew and you can hear the cogs turning, they are still utterly focused on you. They are still a prey animal, they are still ready to flee and preserve their life, and any change in your energy is going to affect them.

I finally got the concept of my phase 1 being raising my energy. I had always practised this, I had always heard how you raise your life up and ask your horse to move, I knew it, I did………or did I? I had heard it, I had watched it, I had done simulations with it, I had even spent a couple of years running through the motions of it, thinking I was doing it, but I did not know it.  This happens to me all the time - a Patism I have heard for years suddenly comes into context and has a whole new meaning “Oh that’s what that means!!” I’ll say to myself mid BFO and feel silly it took so long to be revealed to me. My only solace is that I am told the same thing happens again and again with exactly the same Patism as you go through the levels. During one of my BFO’s in Alison Jones’ presence I remember her saying to me “now you wait until you get a level 4 understanding of what that means!”

The reason the horses were leaving me was because I wasn’t recognising how focused they were on me. I had spent so much time teaching myself to turn mine off and then amplify it to get results on longer ropes that I hadn’t noticed that in close quarters, when they can leave, they are focused just as heavily on me as I am on them and my phases need to be so much lighter. In fact, all of a sudden my focus required little or no amplification at all without a rope keeping us together. For so long I had been overloading my sensitive extroverts with energy online. The importance of focus being a two way thing was lost on me until this point. I am now really looking forward to finding out how focus affects contact and ridden work in ways I think I know, but really I know I don’t  - yet!

This entry was posted on 27/08/2011 at 11:08 am and is filed under Horses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.