Tag Archives: Sarah Hollis

May6

horse dancing

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Sarah playing with her miniature horse, Chub

On Saturday  we visited Sarah Hollis of Tintagel Andalusians in Westhampton, MA.  Sarah is the owner of Escorial, the beautifully trained liberty horse that we have performed with for the past six years.  She is also the most extraordinary, visionary and talented horse person I know.

Sarah, like many of us, is at an interesting, challenging crossroads with her work, due in part to the wild economic weather of the past four years.  But here is the thing that I am seeing with myself and Sarah and a number of other friends.

The terror and the struggle has birthed a lot of new enterprise and imagination.  I launched a blog, wrote a book, made new performance work and am about to launch a new website with a host of new offerings – teaching, coaching, writing, performance.  Sarah is looking at the whole landscape of her work and digging deeper into her greatest passions:  teaching and training.  We are both looking to move in order to get ourselves closer to what will nourish us best.

Pam and I were talking to Jon Katz on Friday, and I said that I had recently gotten a blog post from Seth Godin about catastrophizing.  Over the past few years I have gotten the feeling that I am hard-wired to catastrophize.  That it is my nature  It is who I am.  Jon said that he sees this tendency in our economics and politics and personal lives as a failure of imagination.  He is absolutely right.  When i am in a state of terror, I cannot imagine or create anything.

I know this from my work with horses as well.  When a horse is afraid, they cannot learn.  They cannot do anything but flee or fight.  That is why the positive reinforcement training strategies work so beautifully.  They open space for communication, calming, relaxation, breathing.

I said earlier that the terror and struggle had birthed new enterprise.  That is not exactly right.  Before I could see my way to new creative endeavors, I had to do a lot of that calming, breathing work first. Sometimes I had to do it every minute or even every breath.  I had to use a lot of different strategies, because if yoga or walking worked one day, it might be ineffective the next.

The point is that I have figured out some ways to stay, as Abraham says, “in the vortex,” or in a state of feeling good pretty much of the time.  When the big rogue wave rises, I can duck dive and let it go by most of the time.  I feel good about that.

This week Pam and I are going out to look at some properties.  Leaning forward into whatever is to come next.  We have a tentative name for our new home:  Wild Rose Farm.  It has a feeling of something old, something growing, something blooming, something wild.  It has the feeling of home.

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Dec3

pony dances

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Escorial from Paula Josa-Jones on Vimeo.

For those of you who have not visited the RIDE site, here is a bit of what we call horse dancing. What I want to call attention to is the attunement, the listening, and the conversation between bodies. That is what has always been important to me about this work.

Escorial (aka Pony, and yes, he has his own page) is the equine performer. He is trained as a liberty horse (no restraint) by the brilliant Sarah Hollis of Tintagel Andalusians.We have worked with Pony and Sarah for nearly five years.  I think of it as the yoga of the herd.  Learning how subtle a signal is required to create a profound shift in Pony’s movement.  Rehearsals are humbling, because despite our  dancerly skills, our ability to communicate in herd-speak is always in need of improvement.  Sarah, being the alpha mare, keeps all of us in line.

Why this might be important to non-horse people: Since 87% of our communication is non-verbal, figuring out what we are communicating with our movement seems like a good idea.

For example, my horse Amadeo is majorly spooky. For a long time, I thought he might be autistic because his reactions seemed so disproportionate to what was happening around him. My godson is autistic, and I have had a similar difficulty in decoding his responses. What I finally understood is that Amadeo’a responses were precisely calibrated to his perception of the situation because he is hyper-aware of movement and the underlying emotional landscape. And in order to be around him, I had to become hyper-aware too, but not tense, not nervous. That is a very nuanced and subtle dance, requiring some deep inner and outer listening. And that is horse dancing.

When and with whom are you horse dancing?

Nov28

making peace with the predator

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My friend Michele told me a story about a lesson she took with the brilliant trainer Sarah Hollis.  Sarah was teaching her about working with horses on the ground (not riding).  Michele works at an equine rescue, and many of the horses that she handles have Issues & History.

Sarah noticed that Michele tended to slink toward the horse as she approached.  She was being a predator.  She had gotten into a habit of trying to be unobtrusive, but instead had adopted a variation on a wolf posture.

Today when I was working with Nelson, I ramped up the work a little and asked him a different question.  I removed the halter and said (in movement), “Can you move around me in a slow circle with no lead rope or halter?”  What I didn’t want was for him to spook or run. I wanted a thinking, feeling horse.  A horse that was calm enough to ask me (in movement) “Is this what you mean?” To start and stop with a subtle voice or hand signal.  Be able to repeat the movement, calmly.

That required me to ask with a “go” signal, not a “GO!” signal.  To be non-threatening in my arms, legs, spine, head, mind.  To be as thinking and feeling as I want him to be.

Nelson was perfect.  Nervous at first on the dark side, but then he totally got it.

One of my daughters is a little like Nelson.  She can smell a wolf-Mommy a mile away.  To connect with her, I have to stay open and show my hand.  No slinking or sneaking.

When and how do you feel your predator self?