“Optimist: Someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it’s more like a cha-cha.”
I don't know if it's just me or if everyone can relate to the experience of life as a dance? I make progress in an area, dancing towards healing, towards integration and renewal and then (BAM!) something triggers a return back to a place I thought I had graduated from. My faith is strong, I know God has my back, and I know that life isn’t linear and we aren’t climbing the mountains of personal growth straight up, but rather we circle around, gradually climbing, sometimes coming to the same view but perhaps with a bit of a higher perspective. I also know that expansion and contraction are literally part of the laws of nature: the oceans expand and contract, the universe, our breath, our own heartbeats! If I am here again, maybe I haven’t received the entirety of the lesson, maybe there are crumbs still left behind for me to follow? And what if returning back actually reveals something new or opens a new door? When that inevitable contraction comes and old patterns or unpleasant memories resurface, it can be easy to feel confused and disoriented but lately more and more I am realizing that it really is a “cha cha” and that dance “backwards” can really be a necessary move towards the bigger choreography and plan of my life!
This cha cha shows up in my time with the horses on a daily basis. When Éowyn came to us she was extremely reactive and very very sensitive, most people probably would have called her a “difficult horse".” Traditional ways of reaching her and getting her to do things weren't working. I would be trying to get a halter on her or even just our first touch, all typical methods were completely useless. We were very much in the dance of one step forward and two steps back. I would try something and it would just be a little too much, it would push her a little too far, and we would have to go back and build trust again. It was tiny tiny little baby steps forward and back for months and months and months.
I ended up learning to work with her and positive reinforcement techniques: I would instigate the smallest amount of pressure possible, I would stand all the way across the stall and raise my arm and that in and of itself was “pressure.” The second Éowyn turned towards me, I would drop my arm and look away (this was a release of “pressure”). I don’t think most people would even consider that pressure in general but because she was so sensitive that was a lot for her. I was learning to read her ultra sensitive pressure scale and she was learning to trust.
It ended up being so good for us both in the end. It opened up new doors for me in how I was meeting our most sensitive rescues and for her, Éowyn learned to trust a human in a slow, patient, and integrated way. I’ve used the teachings I practiced with her with so many of the other horses that have come from traumatic pasts and thus have really negative neurological patterns. I’ve noticed that with horses (and with us) we sometimes have to plant and introduce a seed and sometimes that seed needs a lot of factors to germinate.
What I have been gleaning from the teachings of Éowyn is that we all develop patterns in order to survive and in order to adapt to our surroundings. Some of those patterns are mal-adaptive and unhealthy and some could potentially be simply outdated. Because we have spent so much time building those pathways, patterns, and behaviors for so long, it's like a super well paved road in our minds. When we are building a new way of being, it's like we're taking a machete to a thick forest. Wack, wack wack, cutting the edges back, pushing our way towards a new pattern of life…. and it grows right back. It’s a dance that, of course, naturally takes time, patience, and effort. Additionally, growth isn’t just a mental game– we have so many parts of us that make us whole. Like the horses, our bodies, minds, and spirit all have to be willing to metabolize something and integrate it before it can be fully accepted. Sometimes one of those elements of us isn’t fully ready and thus we have to do the cha cha, dancing our way slowly toward evolution.
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