Smelling the Roses

It’s amazing how sitting in a warm dusky pasture with all your favorite ponies can change your perspective. I have had a very hectic week, well, few weeks to be exact. I have been stressing up one side and down the other, with little room to breathe. Do you ever notice how all the crap just stays with you? I knew that at the end of the week the only thing I needed was a nice relaxing ride with Lucy. Even though I was hoping that the ride itself would relax me, what I did was take into the ride all the accumulated stress over the past weeks. I knew what I needed was to relax, but what I did was “work”.

Both people and horses are constantly using their brains. People, however, have language, which tends to get things all mixed up. Horses are constantly aware of their surroundings and each other. Humans are constantly caught up in their thinking about things, creating meaning and stories about the things that they are aware of. Horses must be ever present, living in the moment, for their own survival. They are never not “smelling the roses.” Humans, however have the tendency to allow stress to make the things we enjoy doing feel like work. Today, after recognizing my horses suggestion that it was much more enjoyable to hang with your friends and munch grass than stress out, I was able to set aside my direct line thinking and do my favorite thing, lay down in the pasture in the sun, my friends grazing around me and nuzzling me. But even this didn’t really relax me for a while. Why? Because I couldn’t turn my brain off.

Our brains have many circuits, paths, wires, hardware, and software. And just like computers, they will do as they are programmed to do. They can also be reprogrammed. Stress is one of those miserable viruses that gets in our brains and eats away at the RAM. Alright, enough with the computer references, you get the idea. But how do you deal with a over productive, rarely present brain? The trick is to slow down, turn off, reboot. Call it awareness, mindfulness, meditation, or stopping to smell the roses. Pay attention!

As I sat in the pasture, what it took to relax me was simply feeling the sun..... no, really feeling it. Being present to the flight of the birds and bugs. Focusing for a moment on a single blade of grass. And as I did this, I felt my heart rate drop, and my breathing steady. I felt happier and more energetic. Awareness and mindfulness is a practice. Perhaps meditation sounds too serious to you. You can meditate any moment of any day. Take a few minutes to simply notice your breathing. Tune in to a particular noise you hear. Focus on something you love. Simply do these things, do not allow your thoughts to get in the way. Awareness is about being physically and mentally connected to a thing, without thoughts and language. It is instinctual.

As we become present to things around us, we become present to ourselves. When we become present to ourselves, we can take care of ourselves (and our herd). We then place ourselves in a position to get what we want out of life, instead of living in an unaware, stressed out, angry, confused body.