Kansas Carradine has a conversation with Gretel at the Byron Bay Equestrian Centre.
“The next frontier is of a spiritual nature. Our success is no longer defined by our accumulation of material goods, but by being in service to a worthy cause.”
Ariana Strozzi
It’s a wonderful thing in life that we can know, or believe we know, a lot about something, and still find that there is plenty more to learn.
Last Sunday I had the opportunity to attend a clinic given by one of the Cavalia riders, Kansas Carradine, at the Byron Bay Equestrian centre. If you haven’t yet caught up with Cavalia, think Cirque du Soleil with horses…
Carradine, who grew up in Hollywood (her father was David Carradine) has been involved with Cavalia and with trick riding for many years, but on the side she has been discovering a whole new area – Equine Guided Education.
After studying with Ariana Strozzi of Skyhorse Ranch in the US for some years, Carradine is now teaching this most gentle and yet revealing of horse practices.
I thought horse-whispering and natural horsemanship were already a world away from most of the accepted practices we learn on how to interact with horses, but Equine Guided Education takes it a step further – with absolutely no riding involved, and with the horses at liberty in an arena, the session quickly becomes more about what the horses show us about ourselves, than what we might traditionally consider we should show the horses!
With four horses at liberty, there was bound to be a bit of non-verbal discussion, and one mare, Gretel, and her follower, Lucy, quickly established themselves as the leaders. Another mare, Belle, and a gelding, Brierley, seemed, at first, to be much more on the outside, and yet, as the day progressed, the seemingly disinterested Brierley connected to those of us in the group in an absolutely magical way as he went quietly from one person to the other, choosing to stand by us, and in a couple of instances, to offer healing.
Tesse Ferguson, Manager of the Byron Bay Equestrian Centre, with her girls, Gretel and Lucy.
It was surprising too, to see this most submissive horse, firmly suggest to the other horses that when he was with the humans they were not to come near.
We were asked continually to think about ourselves, how did we react being in a group of horses? Could we imagine being a horse? What issues did the different horses behaviour bring up for us?
It was a day full of surprises and revelations. Some of the ideas that Carradine brought to our attention intrigued me. She talked of how important it is to horses – and of course for ourselves – that our inside and outside landscape must match, that we must, as she put it, be congruent. She asked as us to look at where our attention was drawn, which horses we were drawn to and why.
At one point three of us role-played being one horse, and were asked to silently move amongst the horses, as if we were a horse, which was an extraordinary spatial experience – particularly when we were sawn in half by a horse coming between us!
To truly try and put oneself into a horse’s hooves is to begin to understand their immense sensitivity to their environment – and to us.
Brierley initiates communication…Photography for this article by Candida Baker
Candida Baker 