12/06/2026
Leave your emotions at the gate- or should you?
Years ago, before I struck out on my own, a very skilled horseman taught me to "leave your emotions at the gate". What this means is that when you interact with your horse, your emotional state should be in neutral. Whether you had a bad day at work, a fight with your spouse or some t**t pulled out in front of you at the roundabout then flipped you off like it was your fault- the moment you enter the pasture, you need to let those feelings go and focus on the present. This is sound advice, honestly. Much noise is made about how important the release part of pressure and release is, yet the way we apply the pressure part is equally important and the way we feel is directly linked to the way we apply that pressure. Someone who is nervous will apply pressure hesitantly without clear intention. Someone who is irritated will be too fast and erratic. Someone who is distracted might apply pressure in the wrong place all together! All of these inaccurate ways to apply pressure create communication issues and leave horses confused. So on the whole, this advice to leave your emotions at the gate rings true and is good advice to follow.
This begs the question: why now, after years of leaving my emotions at the gate and applying well timed, well placed and free of personal affront pressure, am I questioning this concept? Well, when I first learned it I had horrible social and performance anxiety. "Leaving it at the gate" enabled me to install an on/off switch on my anxiety. I applied this concept to every part of life and it opened so many doors for me, making me a better and more functional person both in and out of the roundpen. Anxious about passing my driving test? Leave it at the gate. Angry at randoms leaving stupid comments? Leave it at the gate. Nervous about teaching a clinic full of strangers in a different country? Leave it at the gate. It felt like I'd found a loophole where I wasn't controlled by heightened emotions anymore. I could essentially choose how I wanted to feel in any given situation, making me emotionally invincible and life had never been better.
Then came stage 3 breast cancer and all of the worries that come with it. Still, I knew what to do- just leave them at the gate! I worried about death a grand total of once and never lost sleep over the idea of losing my breasts. I had this. I'd sit tight, not give anything anymore attention than it needed then carry on as if nothing happened. Then, as treatment progressed, the worries were no longer just ideas- they became tangible. They became real, physical things that hurt me and they began to pile up. Another scan. Another needle. Another surgery followed by another God knows how many weeks recovery. Leave it all at the gate... right? Li Fraumeni Sydrome diagnosis came around, along with it the sobering reality that this would in all likelihood not be my last dance with cancer, breast or any other kind. There'd be no "5 years and you're free of hospitals"- I'd be an oncology patient for the rest of my life. Sepsis took me on another go of circling the drain and left me disfigured because my breast reconstruction had to be taken away in order to save me. Two of the beloved dogs and cats who had gotten me through all of this died within months of each other, swiftly followed by my favorite ranch horse. My dad suffered 2 strokes on the other side of the ocean, leaving him permanently disabled. At that point, that gate I was leaving everything at had better be the tallest, strongest, iron wrought with spikes and barbed wire gate anyone had ever manufactured- it needed multiple access codes, enough electricity to knock out several bulls and pass the security test for use in Russias Black Dolphin gulag. It's OK to leave everything at the gate if you're eventually coming back and dealing with it. Trouble was, I never did. I didn't get a chance to process one crisis before another one would appear, like waves of catastrophe on a sea of uncertainty- and that gate I'd been leaving everything at had never been built to hold back an ocean.
I didn't discover I hadn't been processing any of this until fairly recently. I would be working with a horse and find myself being impatient. Irritable. Distracted. I was no longer this centered sage who had the patience of Job and the serenity of Buddha himself. I didn't understand what had happened- why didn't leaving it at the gate work anymore? I did some soul searching and realised that the gate had crumbled under the weight behind it a long time ago. Now when I stood in the roundpen, all my insecurities and traumas were standing right alongside me. When I saw this, I first tried to get around it by doing my job regardless of how I was feeling but of course this didn't work. I was trying to give cues like the Lysette of old, when the nervous system of the new Lysette resembled someone who'd just made it to civilization on a raft of turtle corpses after being shipwrecked on an island inhabited only by cannibals and poisonous jungles for 3 years! My cues were too sharp, my vibe too edgy and I kept moving the goalposts. Horses didn't stand still for me, they wouldn't go past things on the trail, riding a smooth transition required as much concentration as doing a full Working Equitation pattern; I couldn't leave my problems at the gate anymore, but it seemed I couldn't work alongside them either. What now?
As horse professionals, we typically don't have the luxury of doing what feels right for us at the time. There are goals to tick off, clients to take into account, money exchanged; we have to get the job done. However, I've hit a point where I simply can't get the job done. So I'm doing what I should have done a long time ago: I'm doing what I feel I should be doing, not what I THINK I should be doing. My rational brain says I have two new horses to get started with, Faes canter work is embarassing, Khalif needs to start arena work and look at Jamie... my feeling on the other hand, is that I just need to spend quality time with my own two boys, Bruno and Branco. I need to get back into the liberty work that the three of us enjoy so much. I need to take them swimming in the river and making them look pretty. With Bruno in particular, I need to take him on the trail without long legged horses behind us stressing me by pressuring Bruno to walk faster than he's comfortable while being too much of a p***y to just go in front of him. In short, I need time with horses I chose and horses that don't require me to leave anything at the gate. Bruno has physically carried me for the last 14 years, both when was I was a Gung ho 22yo and a frail cancer patient; Branco arrived as a foal just 2 weeks before my cancer diagnosis and taught himself to walk slowly next to me on days where I couldn't keep up. Neither of them require me to be 'perfect', they just require me to be present and that's definitely something I also need right now. Leave your emotions at the gate but don't forget to pick them up when you're finished!
