This exploration can be fun and innovative for everyone. I have been exploring a way of developing a mutually consenting relationship with my horses which is workable and viable. I wanted to explore a peer based relationship instead of a traditional dominant based, hierarchichal one. By doing this, I have discovered a way of training with the horses that is dynamic and fun and a source of real 'soul food' for both of us!

My traditional horse training background has meant that there has been much to learn and much to unlearn! Old habits of pressure and coercion die hard and discovering new ideas about behaviour, learning and reinforcements opens up a whole new world of understanding and experimentation.

Motivated by a personal wish to have the capacity to explore an 'energetic dialogue through movement' I realised that this must be as two beings exercising their choice to engage with one another in play.

Trust and communication are key, along with creating a language whereby we can both understand each other's wants. For me, this has forged a whole new way of being around horses, changed daily expectations and shaped future aspirations! I thereby include and revel in the 'spirit' of the horse into each training session of mind and body and encourage the horse to shape the training.

The parameters within which I work are based upon understandable mutual communication, peer friendship, creating an entrepeneurial learner within the horse and using play. The mainstay of our work is with the use of positive reinforcement with very little, and close to no, pressure training.

Chuck Mintzlaff, the founder of Friendship Training, was the first person to come onto my personal radar who talked about the peer relationship. The special relationship that two horses develop, a herd of two, within the herd itself. It is this relationship that we should be exploiting if we want to have mutual understanding and communication with our horse rather than the much advocated hierarchichal, leadership/dominance relationship so often advocated in most natural horsemanship methods.

Understanding herd dynamics and observing behaviour, using non-violent communication principles along with energetic awareness we can also employ a huge smattering of light-heartedness!

I gave up teaching people how to ride horses as my main source of income, back in 2000 because I was just so unhappy with what I was purporting and I was frustrated by the traditional approaches of horse training that I found to be over controlling, over-dominating and in many ways, quite destructive for the horse. I knew I wanted to find a different approach then but didn't know how.

My older mare, who I had evented, was the evidence that traditional training just simply didn't provide us with the 'life-skills' of having a relationship based in trust. After injury and being turned away, I could not even lead her out of the field, such was her fear, anxiety and lack of trust in me (this is a common phenomena for horses that are turned away with a group of fellow horses; they become herd-bound and defensively aggressive at the prospect of being taken away from the group). The traditional training system, which is largely correction through dominance, aka pressure, just did not work for her or for me and the signs were all there for me to understand over time.

That very same horse has changed to become an increasingly self-possessed and confident mare who is willing to follow my lead, has strengthened her own position in the group having just been promoted from not just lead mare but leader of the whole group. It is a welcome sight to watch her lose many of her neurotic behaviours and defensive patterns and to have a horse that I can trust, commune with and play with, in safety and mutual respect.

The horse in the photo above is a young mare who comes with her own emotional baggage from the past. She has made huge progress over the last year of working with her. Currently, we are using gymnasticing exercises at liberty to bring her increasingly into her fullness of being. She may or may not be ridden in the future according to an old injury but we are certainly looking forwards to exploring dressage movements and postures to develop her at liberty and within a free choice environment.