Equestrian Mythosomatic Movement

The Equus Series

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Mythosomatic Movement (the umbrella term for the body of attuned movement I have created over a period of some 25 years) is the study of subtle energy—not, if I may be blunt, in a "New Age" way, but in an animal way. Humans are living and potentially pure theaters of instinct. Mythosomatic Movement, then, is the story that subtle animal energy makes out of our unique moment of humanity: these sentient and emotional persons. To paraphrase Confucius, "No one can lie." Everything we think and do is everything we are. We cannot help but be what is simply behind our every word, thought, act and gesture. We are the sum total of this: action and thought and dream. The horse is a dream that tells us what we have forgotten. It seems to me—and to so many of us who work carefully in the equestrian world—that horses are sensation. They are indivisible from feeling, as if flesh and movement and instinct were all of the same impulse—which is the being of horse.

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Equestrian Mythosomatic Movement—The Equus Series—is a human practice of supreme attunement, a form of sensitivity training specifically designed for equestrians. To horse riders, trainers, and caretakers I teach a specific set of Mythosomatic Movements (forms) that I have developed with the intention of helping humans draw nearer to the sensorium of the horse. Heightened human sensitivity can, I believe, make humans more familiar to their horses—and humans more in touch with a sensate animal potential within themselves. Longing, I believe, rather than simplistic domination and obedience, is the profound foundation of interspecies comunication. Sensitivity is longing materialized in the body and the mind. To develop an honest body that a horse longs to be near, because of one's energetic clarity, seems to me to be the spiritual substance of interspecies communication. The Equus Series embodies that intention.

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In our nearly post-historical time, the human being calls out to the beyond-human world, the animal world, the incalculable mood and power of weather, the immensity of forces that we have only pretended to subjugate—calls out for help. We have all but ruined the natures that might have shown us a more natural human history. Horses are unapologetic beauty—their power, their tremendous fragility. They are to me emissaries of vanishing innocence and vitality. I teach Equestrian Mythosomatic Movement to help humans long for the likeness of horse. But I also teach The Equus Series to human horsepersons for the benefit of their horses. My work with Equestrian Mythosomatic Movement is with people, but it is essentially horse-centered. By teaching sensitivity training to humans, I would like above all to help restore horses' faith in humans. For horses chose domestication. We would, in the time that we have left, show them that they were right. If people would be a human species in all our sensate potential, we would learn to communicate with the horse in horseness. For we humans have exhausted our relatively brief history of force. We would sublimate force to attention and attune, as if our lives depended on it, to the inestimable sensitivity of the horse.
 

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Balance, Strength & an "Independent Seat" for Horse Riders

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Riding a horse constitutes a sacred circumstance of one subtle body communicating minutely and clearly to another subtle body, across the existential chambers of our species. To ride well is not to perform, but rather to feel and speak with one's body. Equestrian Mythosomatic Movement (The Equus Series) can help riders isolate and distribute somatic sensation, such that awareness of one's body becomes natural and instinctive, rather than performative. Communication with the horse becomes less about giving commands and more about experiencing union through the rider's somatic intelligence. This intelligence requires one to be strong and relaxed simultaneously—centered within oneself but responsive to the being of the horse.  The Equus Series of Mythosomatic Movement can be very helpful toward this end.

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For details regarding Equestrian Mythosomatic Workshops, please choose WORKSHOPS in the menu bar on this site.