Reverence Equine

05/29/2026

In the grand scheme of "things we'd like our horses to have more of", confidence almost always lands high on that list. At least in my world, the vast majority of people I am working with, talking to or consulting have this in mind when they envision their goals for their horse. "I would like my horse to be more confident" is a commonly uttered sentence.

My mentor says that a horse is born with the confidence they are born with, and that you cannot make a horse more confident. I pondered that one for a while because my first instinct was "of course, you can!" After all, how then would it be possible to take a scared or worried or anxious or unprepared horse and make them not feel scared or worried or anxious or unprepared?

Confidence is internal. It's a baseline trait. It is the quiet, almost cellular conviction that I am capable, I belong here, I can do this. And like temperament, like introversion, like the timbre of your voice, you are largely born with a set point for it. Some horses could appear to walk into any room - metaphorically speaking - and feel right at home. Others are terrified of their own shadow. This is not a personal failing. It is neurology. It is wiring.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: no amount of external intervention fundamentally moves that needle. You can go to therapy, win awards, receive a standing ovation, and the deeply unconfident person will still hear the nagging voice. We have all met the objectively accomplished person who is riddled with self-doubt, and the mediocre person who radiates unearned certainty. Similarly, many of us have experienced the horse that can perform every fancy maneuver and comes with every button installed but carries an internal worry about all of it, versus the unassuming horse who may not know a whole lot but is just kind of okay about life. External results do not produce internal confidence, because confidence was never about results.

Security, however, is entirely different - and entirely external.

Security is the scaffolding built around a creature by its environment. It is what happens when an animal - human or otherwise - is given reliable resources, consistent support, clear expectations, and the repeated experience of all of these things over time. Security does not change what you feel on the inside. It changes what you are able to DO on the outside.

This is the great practical truth: we cannot give horses confidence, but we can give them security through education, through belonging, through safety, through consistent clarity - and security produces all the functional outcomes we were hoping confidence would produce.

We have spent decades telling people how to make their horses more confident, running confidence clinics, urging people to use this technique or that desensitizing tool - all of it aimed at an internal dial that largely cannot be turned. Meanwhile, the levers we CAN pull - giving horses real life skills, boundaries and clarity about our intentions in ways that encourage regulation - go underused because we misdiagnosed the problem.

Stop trying to build confidence. Build security instead. The result looks the same from the outside and that is exactly the point.

05/25/2026

I've been thinking lately about what it means to do "too much". Over the past several months, Lewis has been making some really nice progress, but these last few weeks have had me realizing I've indeed been guilty of this sin.

What comes to mind when I think of doing too much with a horse is hot, sensitive personalities. Worried creatures. Those souls that have been burdened with the weight of the world and wear it for that world to see. That weight has often been put upon them by doing "too much". Sometimes it's asking too much, sometimes it's pushing too much, sometimes it's expecting too much. There are times when it's thinking too much about oneself, and not enough about the horse. There are other times where it's seeing too much of a good thing, and getting greedy for what you haven't earned.

I've been fitting a bit into that last category as of late.

When we see things start working well - really well - it's natural to want to continue that forward progress. We don't want to perceive any loss in momentum and there are times when we can get a tad carried away; we start trying to make things happen instead of allowing them to unfold. We see the horse come 80% and we jump in to fill that final twenty. We've felt what 100% is like, and the wait grows restless roots.

The problem is, Lewis isn't the type that comes to mind when I think about what it looks like do "too much". He's whatever the opposite of hot is and yet he's not. He's deep, absorbent, his cup bottomless. He's also sensitive but in a surprisingly unassuming way: he carries it the way water carries light - visibly, but without announcing it.

What Lewis needs, above all, is room - the unhurried kind, where thoughts can stretch and presence can take shape. But if you can't offer him these things, Lewis doesn't grumble. He just retracts. He accepts fully, holds no grudge and doesn't ask questions...he'll just make himself smaller and harder to reach. This shows up physically as tension and incoordination and mentally as feeling glazed over. He leaves without leaving.

This sounds dramatic but it's not and that's the problem.

I spent a lot of time over the last eleven months working to give Lewis that room and helping him feel confident to step into it. He's come a long, long way: he's a kind gelding with a twinkle of mischief and a touch of madcappery, the latter two coming out more as he's arrived. Lately, though, I've been taking up too much space and I've seen the effect it's having.

Again: sounds dramatic, but it's not, and that's the problem.

Seeing things you didn't see before is both a blessing and a curse. Being unable to see leaves you unburdened and innocent of the truth. Seeing leaves you standing in front of an open window you can't close. There's an old cowboy poem about needing to be able to face "the man in the mirror". The man in the mirror is an old judge. See him long enough and he'll show you everything: what you've built, what you've cost, and how much road is left.

So that's where we are. I've seen it, I've named it, and now it's mine to carry - not as guilt, but as direction. Lewis has done his part. He's shown up, softened, let me in. The least I can do is return the favor: step back, take up less, and trust that what we've built doesn't disappear the moment I stop reaching for it. The road is long. There's no need to run.

05/22/2026

Some friends visited us this week. We were talking about one of their horses, who I have with me now for some education. He's been the focus of most my Patreon videos lately, which are anywhere from 20-35 minutes in length and delve into a whole range of topics with a running narrative from me on what is happening and how I'm approaching things.

At one point my friend turned to me and admitted something I already subconsciously knew: that the long form videos were not attention-getting enough. They were, in a few words, kind of boring.

It won't surprise anyone who knows me well, but I've been thinking about this a lot. As I've made my work more and more public it's been tempting to be more "performative" - to put out content that is zingy and catchy and action-packed. If you want clicks and views these days, the easiest method is to format your work in such a way that it will capture our ever-shortening attention spans. One of the biggest impacts of social media is our increasing desire for dopamine hits, and that doesn't tend to come by watching long videos of someone working through a process.

It also won't surprise anyone who knows me well to hear that I'm a bit of a purist. I believe that what we do signifies to others what we value and that if I'm going to be authentic with myself and in my process I need to honor those values above the temptations of increased web traffic and click stats.

I know I'm not for everyone. I believe that starting horses *should* be kind of boring at times. I believe that preparing horses - REALLY preparing them - for life with humans is a long, winding road. I don't believe 30 day c**t starts are in the best interest of the horse. Every horse is a world unto itself - a sovereign creature with its own language, its own fears, its own quiet wisdoms. To offer them something of true value, I believe that the greatest gift I can develop within myself is not commands but presence: the patience to watch and truly see, the ingenuity to find a way when the way is unclear, the steadiness to rise after being humbled, and the grace to trust that something good is unfolding even when the path ahead is not yet visible. These are not things you can drop into an online shopping cart, nor are they things you can pick up scrolling through video snippets.

The only way you can attain these things is to spend thousands upon thousands of hours doing the slow, sometimes tedious, and sometimes boring work.

The only way you can attain these things is to be willing to be wrong, uncomfortable, and uncertain - and then go out the next day and do it all again anyway.

It's okay for others not to understand. Not everyone will. Not everyone can.

(If this kind of work is valuable to you, I invite you to subscribe to my Patreon, where there's plenty of this sort of musing to go around.)

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05/15/2026

I don't tend to ride in large group clinic settings anymore but there was a time when I did. I was at one of these clinics one time in a group of well over a dozen participants. It started off as a lovely summer day but over the course of the afternoon a storm cell moved in and the clear, sunny skies turned to dark clouds and increasing wind.

At some point during the afternoon session, the storm that had been threatening to descend upon us actually did. The winds picked up and the rain came down, pelting us sideways. Luckily there was no thunder and lightening but the scene was chaotic enough without it.

A couple of people ended up coming off their horses who panicked as the energy in the environment increased and came undone once the rain started come down in droves. Others quickly dismounted, sensing the agitation growing inside their own mounts and not wanting to tempt fate. There were the few of us who stopped whatever we were doing, moved to the middle of the arena and allowed our horses to turn their haunches to the wind and rain to wait it out.

I realized the deeper definition of "fair weather rider" that day, and how it applied not only to ourselves but our horses.

I do not have an indoor or covered workspace, so the ramifications of the day's weather are very real. If it starts downpouring in the middle of a session, I can either run for cover, wait it out and keep working, or decide to pack up and try another time and calmly get my horse untacked and turned back out. I make that decision based on a few things, but my personal comfort is not one of them. There are many things I can control but the weather sure ain't one - if I don't want things to fall apart every time the wind blows the wrong way, my horses and I both need to be able to deal with that.

As circumstances would have it, I realized earlier this spring that I've set my good gelding Lewis up to learn this unintentionally. My horses live out 24/7 with access to shelter as they please but they often choose not to use it (even during storms where the squeamish part of me wishes they would). That said, we're in the process of building a new pole barn because my other gelding does not always allow Lewis to share the shed when the weather is inclement.

Because of this, Lewis has been caught in many a downpour and snowstorm, hanging out just outside of the shed. For a period of time after I brought him home I would watch him navigate this with some discomfort; he'd be unsure of which way to turn himself, shifting around, sometimes doing a bit of running about before settling in a spot that was, as I imagine, the best he could do in that moment.

Over time, though, Lewis has figured out how to find peace in the midst of chaos. In a recent downpour, I watched him locate a suitable spot, turn his bum to the rain, lower his head and lick and chew a bit before cocking a leg and settling in. It made me think back to that clinic and all those horses that panicked, not knowing what to do or how to handle the pressure the environment was placing upon them. It made me think about how sometimes, our own human desires for comfort might inadvertently limit our horses in ways that could become problematic to us down the road. Ultimately, it made me think about how important it is that we not wrap our horses in cotton wool and prevent any measure of discomfort from reaching them.

Discomfort is a catalyst for growth. It is the thing that spurns us to search and seek and find something else. If we're always within our comfort zone we never have a reason to look elsewhere. We stay unchallenged within our bubble of comfort and as soon as that bubble is burst we have no tools and no way to problem solve. This is not a way to live.

Not for us, and not for our horses.

05/13/2026

A common thing I deal with in my travels are horses with stereotypies. In this context, we're defining a stereotypie as a physical action the horse takes that is an outward manifestation of that horse's internal stress...but that specifically has no other purpose or function.

In a horse that bolts, for example - the bolting serves a specific purpose, usually as a release valve for the build-up of internal anxiety. It happens in specific instances or is triggered by certain types of handling or by riding. It is not something the horse does unless they need to.

But in a horse with a stereotypie, the behavior is repetitive and may present even if the horse doesn't otherwise appear obviously stressed. It is often absent-minded, as if the lights are on but no one is home.

I've come to understand horses with stereotypies as horses that have lost the ability to be comfortably present. They have experienced prolonged stress to a degree they not only could not escape from but failed to cope with through normal and by comparison healthier measures. At some point something broke within them mentally and they resorted to the stereotypie. It's my personal belief having worked with a lot with these horses that something neurological changes in them once they get to that point and while I've successfully reformed several of them, I know that they are susceptible to returning to those old patterns if not well managed.

My husband and I just celebrated the one year anniversary of his receiving his green card. After a seven year waiting process during which we were living with the knowledge that he was not protected from deportation during this time (and the understandable anxiety this caused), we flew down to Mexico for his visa interview. The morning of his 7AM appointment I walked down to the consulate with him at six o'clock. I was forced to leave him standing in the long lines queuing outside as family members were not allowed to wait with visa applicants, and so I made my way back to our Juarez hotel room to wait.

For nearly seven hours I sat inside that room, staring at the white cinderblock walls and watching the clock. I tried to read for a while. At some point I moved on to a series we'd be streaming but my mind was buzzing. Every half hour or so I found myself leaving the room and walking down the hall to the elevators, by which there were large glass windows facing the direction of the consulate. I would watch for a few minutes to see if I could pick out Ober walking back towards the hotel. If I had to guess, I probably did this three to four times an hour for nearly the entire seven hour period, only to return to my cinderblock walls to find another way to manage my growing anxiety.

At some point I started pacing the room. It felt maddening - I'd think to try and text Ober only to remember he had been instructed not to bring his phone. I knew I needed to eat something but the thought of food made me nauseous. Nothing I had available to me could preoccupy me and keep me from my own thoughts and the spiral I was starting to enter. Why was it taking so long? When would he be back? Every noise started to make my heart rate spike: a voice in the hall, a door opening or closing, the sound of footsteps. I remember laying on the bed staring at the ceiling, attempting to count the black dots in one of the tiles. I remember thinking how this must be how people lose themselves because to be present in that moment was something I was rapidly failing to manage. I also remember thinking that this must be how a caged animal feels - no choices, no out, no understanding of when things will change, just the constant and insufferable anxiety and fear.

Ober did eventually come back - I met him coming out of the elevator on one of my desperate forays to that glass window. I don't remember much about that moment other than meeting his eyes and seeing the corners of his mouth turn upwards and knowing instantly it was all okay. That exchange broke the dam on not just the last seven hours but seven years of fear and worry. It also permanently altered something within me.

I've met other horsefolk who have stories like this - things that they experienced and couldn't help but walk away from changed. Stress is a necessary thing in life and we cannot entirely avoid it, but too much has consequences.

Sometimes we recover from those consequences. While humans can make meaning of experiences - even highly traumatic ones - horses cannot. They are designed to live entirely in the present and the presence of a stereotypie tells us that that ability has been altered. The only way that I know to help these horses find their way back to peace is to get creative in addressing that lack of presence, one moment at a time.

05/10/2026

When a horse comes to my farm, one of the biggest changes for them is how often we're having little interactions, and within those little interactions the thing I am most aware of is that no matter what we're doing, my message is consistent to the horse.

That message includes where my boundaries are and that they're always there no matter what. It also includes the fact that I am aware of their level of concern and will constantly make adjustments in response to that concern. I present myself in such a way that I am always the same "me" all the time I am around the horse, and so that horse gets a clear, predictable picture of who I am and what they can come to expect from me.

There are a lot of ways in which we need the horse to be able to handle unpredictability in life, but it seems like a lot of the time we get so preoccupied with building resilience to unpredictability that we neglect to give the horse something that IS predictable as a foundation, something they can draw comfort from when things get a bit rodeo and they need support. All nervous systems need this, including ours. There's also a tendency to get so myopically focused on the relationship and how the horse feels about us that we lose sight of the fact that all relationships have to be built on trust and trust is something that is earned over time by repeatedly showing up in a way that we demonstrate that trustworthiness. Trust cannot be bought or taken. It is something that can only be given. Very often when we get into trouble with a horse it's from having tried to take something we haven't earned.

We have to deserve the horse's trust, and we begin to do that by presenting ourselves in a way the horse can come to rely on.

(If you like this type of content you can head over to my Patreon page at www.patreon.com/ReverenceEquine for more essays, discussion and videos on breaking this and skills like it down into learnable, digestible parts.)

This is how you build confidence.

The nervous horse, the shut down horse, the apprehensive horse, the pushy horse: whatever adjective you're assigning, they all need consistency, and they need it consistently.

If you haven't earned a horse's trust it doesn't make you a bad person. This is another thing we might get preoccupied with and our own poor feelings about not being good enough for a given horse keeps us from wanting to get better. I can safely say this from experience: I was not a consistent person for my horses for a long, long time. I tried to take things I hadn't earned. I worked under the presumption that more was better. Was it an ego hit to have the horse tell me this was not working? Sure was, and a painful one at that. I felt like I couldn't go to the barn unless I have was having a fabulous day and in a wonderful mood, else I show up in a way that set my horse back.

What horses will demonstrate time and time again is their resilience to our fumbling and their willingness to try and change even when there is no reason in the world why they should believe it'll be different this time. The first step to getting this change is showing up at all.

The second is to show up the same, day in and day out. Small things done consistently create results that massive pushes never will.

05/08/2026

I've been sitting on this for a while. The perfectionist in me has been whispering "it's not ready..." but heck, sometimes you just have to go do it and allow the rest to happen as it will.

Teaching other people has taught me more about my own horsemanship than just about anything else. I do think it is true that good teachers need to also be good students and so I've got it worked out to where I figure if I focus on the good student part, improving myself as a teacher will come on its own.

In an effort to be a better student - especially as a student that works on her own the vast majority of the time - I've implemented some ways of working that help me improve myself. Over the last few years, one of these has been videoing my sessions. With time I started narrating a little bit (again, for myself) why I was doing something or what I was thinking or feeling when something was happening so that I could go back and reflect on it later and see if things had changed or if that same sentiment still held true. My archive of videos has grown and now takes up a few thumbs drives. It didn't occur to me until a recent conversation with a student that there are a LOT of us out there, largely working on our own, trying to be better and accessing the resources we can access when we can access them, and that a lot of those people might appreciate seeing some things broken down in such a way that they can better digest it.

I have always had a love-hate relationship with the idea of monetizing my content - I write because I love to write. I teach because I love to teach. I work with horses because I am a better human for doing so. I don't NEED more fulfillment from it than that.

And yet, I spend a lot of hours each week creating content that I hope will help and speak to others. It is all unpaid, and we all have to make a living. I don't feel too abashed to ask that if you like what I do, what I have to say, and the way I approach horses and horsemanship, I sure would appreciate your support so I can continue to share this type of work.

So with that said: I now have a Patreon page, linked below:

www.patreon.com/ReverenceEquine

You may choose the free option or choose to support my content with a $5/mo subscription, with which you'll have access to additional weekly video updates and longer discussions about various horsemanship topics and breakdowns of different skills. I have another tier subscription level in the works that includes a community chat feature and responses to individual questions and requests for topics.

Hope to see you 'round.

Cheers,
Abbie

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05/05/2026

There's a horse training concept I've heard others discuss, but never in the specific terms that I've come to think of it or teach it in. I don't know if others use this particular terminology and I'm not claiming to own it - rarely is anything any one of us does truly unique or novel...someone else has been there before us. But I DO use this particular term and idea a lot as it relates to teaching people how to think about their horse's (re)education in the broader sense, so I'm going to use it here.

That idea is around what I call "critical mass".

There is a lot that goes into learning: this includes everything from learning HOW to learn, to developing focus, to the neuromuscular or "muscle memory" component, to course and fine motor skills, to skill recall. Sometimes the process of learning includes UN-learning something that is actually preventing us from adopting a skill. Sometimes the process also includes learning what NOT to do, and not just learning what TO do.

Either way, learning is not an insignificant undertaking. It's a multi-focal process that takes times, and how much time it takes depends on a number of different factors.

This is part of why I've come to appreciate how easy it really is to train a young horse that has not been buggered up and needs to do a lot of un-learning.

But I don't deal with those horses all that often, so I end up working through a LOT of un-learning in the whole learning process.

In that process, it's important to understand what it means for the horse to hit "critical mass". I was at a clinic one time where a participant asked how long she needed to do the thing the teacher told her her horse needed of her. Their response was "until he no longer needs you to do it". I know that teacher understood critical mass even though they didn't use the term. When a horse is developing a skill they will require some degree of support from the person for some period of time. How much support and how long they need it for depends on the horse: no one can predict this, although experience will allow you to get reasonably good at offering an educated guess. But, when a horse has reached the point where they have solid enough clarity, good feelings and physical development around a skill, they will cease to need as much from the person. They can "maintain", so to speak, and be able to recall that skill, replicate it elsewhere, etc. In essence, they will embody it. The skill becomes a part of them and their understanding of how things work. Periodically they may still need support, but that becomes a different conversation than the one around learning it to begin with.

When I go to work with troubled horses, I'm aware that the process of getting that horse to hit critical mass is typically a much longer road than a horse that has no trouble. Some of this is just reality: when you've had poor experiences, you have to go through the process of un-learning all the ways you've adapted to deal with the fallout from those poor experiences and this can be a lengthy venture. Nervous systems don't like to change when you're dealing with safety and even if those adaptations are poor mechanisms for compensation the nervous system still recognizes it's better than the unknown.

However, some of this is also practical: the support the horse requires from me during periods of un-learning and then rebuilding is significantly more BECAUSE of the presence of those poor experiences. I'm essentially asking the horse to go on a whole journey of nervous system recalibration. That's a big deal.

A lot of this process is a test of faith, and this is why critical mass is so important: at some point the hope is that the horse will reach a juncture where everything he's experienced takes root and it can be tough sometimes to see where progress might be starting to gain momentum. It can be, to be blunt, a slog. It's like turning on the tap to fill a glass with water but not being able to see how full the glass is getting. All you really know sometimes is that it's fuller than it was and that we still have more to go.

The thing I find so beautiful about critical mass is that unlike the term seems to imply, it's not a big thing. There are no fireworks or big explosions or neon signs flashing to tell you you've arrived. It's coming out to get a horse that previously struggled to be caught and having them walk up to you to be haltered. It's asking for a transition that used to be a struggle and having the horse just show up underneath you. It's asking a horse a question that has scared him something awful for some time and having him respond "yeah, I can be okay with that".

It's not a big thing, which is exactly what makes it a big deal.

04/27/2026

The last two years I've been able to take horses in for training at my farm. The way my set-up is laid out, my round pen is in the middle of a small track system flanked by grazing fields and all members of my herd can audit - as I like to say - when I'm working with a horse in the round pen.

When I get a new horse for training for that first week or so I'll shut everyone off from the track when I take the new horse out. It's largely for practical reasons: I don't know this animal, they don't know me, and most of the time they are coming to me because they need some help in the "understanding humans can be helpful/are important" department. So I need time to foster that without too much interruption.

But pretty quickly, I start leaving everyone as they are when I bring that horse out for work. I also do this with members of my herd: I tie, groom, trim, bath and tack up within a space the entire group shares.

This evolved with some intentionality on my part. Co-regulation is a serious and wholly-underutilized tool. I need my horses to know how to be around other horses who are doing other horse things while not getting emotionally involved in those other things. I need them not to experience a rise in tension every time a horse approaches us when we're doing something together. I need them to be able to step seamlessly back and forth from with the herd to with me and sometimes with me WHILE they are in the herd.

Co-regulation is like a duet of the nervous systems: a mutual and generally subconscious process where one nervous system influences another. It works bi-directionally to stimulate in times of concern, play and elevation as well as to calm and de-escalate back into a parasympathetic state. A horse with good emotional regulation and a wide emotional range is a valuable asset. Both of my geldings fit into this category and a large part of that is because I've made an effort to develop that in them. While Whiskey is not sound for regular work, Lewis will be a horse that - once more educated under saddle - I'll use to work other horses off of.

For the time being, they both offer their services in other ways. They have hay and some spring grass and everything else they might want at their disposal and yet day after day they come to "audit" outside the pen.

Eventually I'll start allowing a horse loose in the pen while I'm working with someone else. It's an excellent way to work on things both animals might need, or I can use a dependable and experienced horse in this department to ease the worries of the other horse. I can move both horses around together at once, allowing both to work on "being with me" mentally while sharing a space and moving around together physically.

Do these practices carry risks? Yes, they do.

But so does NOT doing these things. I've seen more problems arise from the latter than the former. Unfortunately, our standardized ways of keeping horses often not only prevent us from giving our horses this sort of education but actually discourage it. It rarely gets included in horsemanship instruction despite its immense value. It seems to swing these days between being a trendy, en vogue practice and being a lost artform.

I've never been one for trends. I have learned, however, that some of the old ways become such because trends take their place, especially trends that promise a quicker path to the same results...and we all know how that usually works out.