- WELCOME -

The bestselling novel Clan of the Horses/Hestenes klan, was published in Norway in 2010 and is out in it's fifth print. The novel is also available in German under the title "Zwischen Himmel und Erde".

In this blog you can read omitted elements from the book. You can also read about women and horses as they are described through written mythological and historical records, but more importantly you are invited to read excerpts of a completely different story: A story that women have preserved through the centuries solely by oral traditions.

In Bonnevie's enchanting story, she speaks of the pitfalls related to the common human error of trying to live up to the expectations of others - and thus losing one's innate intuition and wisdom. Bonnevie speaks of the search for your inner, true voice - and the journey of becoming who you are meant to be.

mandag 28. februar 2011

The Absence of Method



Many of the clinicians that are operative in the horse world today build their work on a given method, often one with a fixed idea of where to start, what to do next and sometimes also where to finish (reach the highest or final level) - as though there is an end to life besides death…

I haven't been blogging for a while now, due to writing, but this blog is long overdue and had to be written. The topic is an important part of the very foundation Clan of the Horses is built on: The absence of method.

Why we disregard methods in our philosophy
A method is always based on fixed ideas, thus making it incompatible with the true path of the horse – and the true path of your life. Over time, a method will never add anything to your life, but the feeling of being lost.

The fact that the majority of the methods in the horse world are based on dominance is not helping either. It is true that dominance is a language every mammal can understand. But we should always bear in mind that no one speaks this language more fluently than a human being with a fixed plan…

The greatest challenge we face in our encounter with methods is the fact that many of them seem to “work” - at first glance. And when we start to smell the scent of success, we often fail to take that important second glance that would disclose what we lose in the process. I could list dozens of major flaws related to the most popular methods in use today, and I will at some point, but for now I’ll stick to three important headlines:

1. Methods destroy initiative. The horse's own initiative - and yours.
Without an opening for initiative, the horse will at some point decide to leave everything up to you, because that is the only real choice at hand for a cooperating herd animal within a fixed system. Interestingly enough, a lot of trainers consider this to be a good thing. But this forced mental surrender is not only against a herd animal's inner nature, it also ruins the deeper qualities of the relationship we can experience with our horses. Real partnership and real friendship have the qualities of mutual trust, shared initiative and love. It is a myth that qualities like these can grow out of a method.

2. Methods disregard the opportunity to meet in the moment
Horses always live in the moment and if we listen to them they can teach us how. Instead of welcoming this tremendous gift in our busy lives, we tend to stick to our fixed plan. And as far as the ability to live in the moment goes, we often enough end up with e.g. expensive meditation lessons, provided by instructors with superficial techniques to aid us in our search for the same inner balance that the horse is offering us for free.

3. Dominance is not the natural language of the horse
Cooperation is. Horses are herd animals, whose primary instinct is to cooperate voluntarily and unreservedly for the greater good, knowing that a well functioning herd is the key to survival.
Horses understand dominance as a language, but they don’t use it for their own personal benefit, like humans do. A herd of horses consists of members who all have different tasks and they complete each other. The idea of a dominant leader is a human concept that over time will break the horse’s spirit. The fact that this is a pronounced goal within many methods should really cause some raising eyebrows. Who in their right mind would break the spirit of their human partner? Isn’t this the goal of a psychopath?

Running out of options will never create a free choice.