Man has developed through evolution using his body, thoughts and emotions. We understand the importance of nursing and caring for our body by following a healthy diet and exercising. We have managed to develop our mental capacities through education by attending schools and universities. However, we have neglected to learn about our emotions and how to develop them. Instead emotions, such as anxiety and fear, overwhelm us, or love makes us jealous and possessive and our emotions are impossible to control and they occur randomly.
However, emotions do not occur randomly, they always appear for a reason and with a message. They are – like our thoughts – a sound and highly evolutionarily important tool that enable us to survive physically and thrive socially.
A person’s emotions rank on a scale from being only weakly developed to being very well-developed and well-functioning. If you take the emotion “courage” in its undeveloped form, it is a question of daring to overcome fear and engaging in some sort of activity. But the emotion “courage” in its well- developed form, transforms into secure knowledge where all barriers are removed and you just DO whatever you think should be done. When you master all the other emotions, the emotion “courage” makes itself redundant and becomes an emotion where you DO something in accordance with your convictions.
On this scale, all emotions have an undeveloped form where they appear out of our control and often are a nuisance to us and our surroundings, and in the other end, a developed form where we consciously and controlled can use them as a tool in our communication and actions.
When you want to learn about your emotions and develop them, a perfect way is to work with horses and to try and connect with them. Horses and other animals use emotions to communicate and not their mental properties like we humans do. It is evident that communication with animals cannot be compared to verbal communication between humans. Instead, it can be compared to the non-verbal language we speak parallel to our verbal spoken language. This non-verbal language consists of our underlying opinions and intentions and is influenced by our emotions. By learning to connect with horses, you learn about all the signals you send out and thus the non-verbal language you speak. You can tell the horse whatever you want, it will always respond to your non-verbal language.
Communicating with horses is actually quite simple – it is all about connecting, and the rest happens by itself. You set up with a free-range horse in a restricted area, and from a distance of approximately 5-10 meters, you seek to connect with the horse. The connection is achieved when the horse directs its ears towards you and through its body language, directs its attention towards you. To achieve this connection, the person must dare to feel the emotions that arise in the moment, and not do any thinking at all. By simply feeling the emotions, whether it is sadness, love, need, etc., the horse will mirror the emotional states as well as empathise with them. Horses are never prejudice and have no problems with coping with emotions like humans can have. When you connect with a horse, you go into a state of absolute BEING in all that is. Firstly, this is a step towards understanding how many active emotions we humans have every moment of the day, and secondly, towards learning to work with developing and managing these emotions.