Horses perceive the world as a tapestry of patterns, habits, contrasts and associations; a mosaic of cause and effect that guides their every move.

Their memory is not a scrapbook of sentimental reflection but a pragmatic, procedural ledger:

Do this, expect that.

They don’t dwell on yesterday’s mishaps or spin yarns about the hopes and dreams of tomorrow. For horses, existence is a river; an endless, unbroken, instinctual flow of perception and response.

The ancient wisdom, “No man steps in the same river twice,” captures their reality perfectly. Each moment is new, and yet, the horse’s keen memory and pattern-mapping prowess make them astonishingly adaptable.

This duality; brilliant recall without narrative meaning-making; allows horses to master intricate training and thrive in a human world, while remaining somewhat alien to our storytelling minds.

Unlike our horses, we have an instinctual need to extract meaning from or assign significance to our experiences. We are a “narrative species”. So it’s hard for us to understand the perspective of a creature who uses its excellent memory and pattern-recognition ability to make sense of the world… yet has no ability to (or, as Mother Nature would argue, no need to) ruminate on the meaning or implications of those experiences.

That’s just one of many reasons why horses feel so profoundly… other.

And part of what draws us to them.

I think the reason why is because, we are also capable of that type of being.

It calls to us. Beckons us. But it’s often muffled under layers of second-order analysis and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We generally don’t spend much time thinking about the part of our brain that isn’t “thinking”.

But you know as well as I do, that part is there. The subconscious. The shadow. Staying in the background, calling the shots. The real power behind the throne. It controls our behavior far more than we realize, or perhaps care to admit.

We often don’t recognize all the ways our instincts and emotions guide us. That is, unless we make a conscious effort to bring those impulses into the light of rational analysis.

But that’s hard for us. Really hard.

I’ll give a perfect example of why it’s so hard, by drawing contrasts between two types of experiences all of us have had:

Scenario #1

You have days where you feel like you’re “in the flow”… where everything just seems to work out right. You’re firing on all cylinders. Maybe you meet somebody new and you instantly feel rapport and connection with them. There’s this unspoken, effortless chemistry and the communication just flows. The conversation energizes you. And when you reflect back at the end of the day you’re like, “Dang, that was awesome! I wish every day could be like that!”

We’ve all had those days, where you just feel like you’re winning at life. Think back to the last time you felt that way. Maybe it was a particular day. Or a moment. An event. A cool conversation you had. Felt good, right? Exactly.

Now, on the flip side…

Scenario #2

Have you ever been in a situation where something just felt… OFF?

Maybe you were driving to work or doing some mundane task you do almost every single day without thinking about it. But on that PARTICULAR day you just had this odd gut feeling that something wasn’t right or wasn’t adding up? Like a jangle of foreboding was crawling up your spine?

Or maybe you were interacting with someone – from your social circle, maybe a coworker, maybe even a total stranger – they said all the right things, they looked the part, acted the part, on the surface everything was fine…

But you still had this weird gut feeling like, “Eh… something’s off. I’m not buying it.”

Or perhaps you were riding or hiking alone, and you were suddenly overcome with this sense that you were being watched. A mild but very apparent feeling of dread.

In these situations, your deeper instincts are making their presence felt. That’s your subconscious sniffing out some red flag or incongruency between what another person’s words are saying, versus what their body language and energy is broadcasting. Or picking up on some cue in the environment that you didn’t consciously notice, but that your subconscious registered and is trying to alert you about. Trying to protect you.

So, why does any of this matter?

We intuitively understand where these gut-level sensations come from, good or bad. We feel the emotional, and often physical effects. But it’s hard for us on a rational level to articulate WHY these emotions are happening.

If we try to explain them, we often say things like:

(On the positive side)

“I don’t know why, but we just hit it off. We ended up talking for hours like we’d known each other our whole lives.”

or,

(On the negative side)

“I can’t put my finger on it, but I just had this gut feeling something wasn’t right.”

Intuition and emotion are real. The feelings they create are real and often very powerful. But these feelings cannot always be easily translated into words. Rather than having a precise definition, intuition and emotion are more of an overall experience.

In fact, there is evidence that the part of our brain responsible for emotion, and the part responsible for speech and language processing, have relatively few connections. Studies have found that the pathways that connect these two regions are few in number and limited to primitive communication methods such as facial expressions and body language.

And this… this is the big “AHA”…

It’s moments like these where we experience, on a real visceral level, the kind of world our horse lives in…

24/7…

Every single day of their existence.

And this is part of what’s so challenging yet awesome about working with horses. They offer us a conduit to a more immediate, here-and-now type of being. A connection to the instinctual and subconscious.

Horses challenge us to dive past surface level analysis and narrative and reach for the instinctive, emotional, the intuitive, the reflexive. Something far older and more powerful than the analytical layer we think we exist in.

But…

Here’s where it gets tricky.

To step into this more primitive world and actually enjoy our time there, instead of feeling constantly frustrated or scared, we have to bring certain knowledge and skills along with us. Tools and abilities that allow us to grapple with the challenges this adventure presents.

And aside from a few gifted and lucky people, most of us are not equipped to navigate that world right out of the box.

We don’t automatically “fit in”.

We start our horsemanship journey like a clueless, unprepared tourist in a foreign country where nobody speaks our language and without any money.

In order to understand and get along better with horses, we have to acquire skills. Learn techniques. Mental frameworks. Patterns. Concepts. Mechanics.

• “Hold the reins like this.”
• “Position your body like this, and cue the horse like this.”
• “Position your leg exactly like this, with this kind of pressure, with this rhythm, to cue the horse to do this.”

Because these skills and movements don’t come naturally to us, it takes intense concentration and lots of practice to master them.

We start off rigid, awkward, and unsure.

Our feel isn’t good.

Our timing isn’t good.

This causes a dilemma.

Because the very things we need to do to conquer the learning curve are the things that disrupt the “flow” of intuitive connection between us and our horse.

It’s like watching a serious movie and then suddenly seeing a poorly-done special effect, that looks so ridiculous and obviously fake you burst out laughing. You lose your suspension of disbelief. It takes you out of the moment and breaks the emotional connection you had with the story.

Once something like that happens it’s really hard to get emotionally invested in the story again. Because your subconscious is telling you, “this is bullshit”.

That’s effectively how our horse feels in those moments of incongruency where we drop the ball and create hiccups in our training.

Except, instead of complex human emotions, the horse mainly just feels confused or disoriented.

So they start testing. Questioning. Pushing boundaries they would never have pushed if they sensed the presence of a more competent handler.

This is why so many horse owners get stuck in a loop.

They stall out at the “technical” level. The “conscious competence” level. They’re unable to move up the ladder to greater ease, intuition and flow with horses because they’re trying so damn hard and using so much brainpower to get the technique right…

They have no bandwidth left to truly master those movements and make them their own.

Riding, training, or interacting with their horse becomes a cycle of whack-a-mole, quick-fix-mentality tinkering where they’re constantly fighting old fires while unknowingly provoking new ones.

A good analogy for this steep learning curve is how my wife Amy describes the process of learning to play piano.

First, the instrument kind of “plays you” a little bit. The keyboard, how to position your fingers, the movements you need to make to produce even basic notes and chords; these all feel extremely constraining.

But if you can break through that to the next layer, you’re able to play more complex pieces of music “correctly” or “by the book”. You get the notes right, the timing… but there’s no musicality. No creative expression yet. You haven’t fully embodied your knowledge and made it your own.

That’s the next, final, and ultimate layer: true mastery. You don’t just play the instrument, you “speak through it”.

You express yourself through it.

An expression of self that isn’t selfish.

Horsemanship is like that… but HARDER!

After all, when was the last time you heard of someone getting bucked off a piano??

Still, the music analogy holds up in the sense that – just as a musician is an artist who paints with sound – a horseman is an artist who paints with movement.

Like great musicians, every expert horseman I’ve ever known has certain characteristics that make them great. A big one is that:

In the way they ride and train horses, the horse becomes an extension of them. And they become an extension of the horse.

There’s a level of awareness and moment-to-moment intuition that allows them to navigate all the little micro “judgement calls” easily, effortlessly and instantly. They don’t have to break rapport by falling back to some rigid exercise that takes the horse out of the flow.

This is the big difference between someone (professional or not) who achieves massive success and enjoyment with horses – versus – someone who ties themselves in knots over questions like:

For a rider who’s operating on intuition…

who is UNconsciously competent… SUBconsciously competent…

This is like Shohei Ohtani sizing up a flat 75 mph fastball right over the heart of the plate;

The easiest grand slam of all time.

Hitting consistent “home runs” with horses, instead of striking out constantly and feeling like a failure, requires moving beyond rote repetition into embodied fluency. A state where technique dissolves into intuition.

Think of a concert pianist: fingers fly without conscious thought, translating sheet music into emotion. Great horsemanship is identical. No deliberation, just a stream of nonverbal dialogue.

So the question is, how can a beginner or intermediate rider start tapping into that deeper level of intuition?

There’s actually FOUR big secrets to this…

• Secret #1 – Exaggerate the technical.
• Secret #2 – Merge the technical with the instinctual.
• Secret #3 – Practice like a pro.
• Secret #4 – Use mental models.

In my next email I’ll break down each one of these.

And I’ll do it in terms that are practical (not theoretical), real (not touchy-feely) and immediate (that you can implement right away).

Stay tuned.

– Jake Lundahl

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P.S.

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