It's a Time of Feeling & Horse Time Metaphors

It’s a time of feeling

I was talking to my husband, Casey, the other day and we both agreed that it’s been hard to feel joy that lasts more than a few minutes with the heaviness of these challenging times. We agreed that we feel the pain in the world now and feel helpless to stop it. By acknowleding it in a conversation, we were able to move onto more positive feelings for our day.

Time seems hard to grasp right now. What day is it? Is it really Thursday? What month are we in, isnt this usually a time of picnics and family gatherings as we approach Mother’s Day, graduations and weddings (now postponed or cancelled) and Father’s Day just around the corner? 

Each day is a new day. Each moment is an opportunity to make the best out of the most dramatic, unknown future we have ever experienced as a whole species. 

And right behind the reality of timelessness is the fear and anxiety of what we cannot control.We cannot make any sense of what is actually happening. It’s unreal. It certainly feels worse than watching the end of the world scenarios and zombie apocolypse movies which were always too scary for me to enjoy.

Our mental faculties are inept at rationalizing our way through the pandemic, the astronomaic global unemployment rate, and the pending food shortages, no matter how many ways and means we try.

• It’s ok to feel your fears. But limit the amount of time you enterain them. 
• It’s ok to notice your passions and inspirations rise and fall, awaken and wain. 
• I find it the hardest to allow my feelings for the concerns for others. How about you? I can only tolerate short spurts of those deeper, scarier feelings. Yet, I do not dis-allow them. I acknowledge them and remind myself that I can only do the one small part that is mine to do. And if everyone does their one small part, we will find the new paradigms for surviving that we each need.

One of my favorite lessons from the Horses:

1. Horse Time. In Equine Guided Somatics™ we practice horse time throughout the day for five days in a row with different exercises. We go into ‘horse time’ as a somatic practice, which is a process of slowing down the business of our mind, slowing down the need to know, the need to qualify, quantify, compare and judge. We notice our breath, we notice what calls our attention in our physical space. We don’t rest on any one thought. We let our mind wander. 
1. If you want to practice this on your own, we suggest a limited time frame, say 15 minutes at most. 
2. You can make a conscious choice to practice this whenever you begin to feel anxious or feel a need to ‘find ground’ andget out of the hampster wheel of your rational mind. The goal is not to come out with a realization, a new idea, new task. The goal is just to be present. 
3. If you want to you can write down what you noticed in a journal, and close the journal unless it has inspired you to write something new and enlightening. 

We’d love to hear your reflections on ‘horse time’ as a metaphor for staying in the present moment.