Overthinker's Dilemma

One of my personal/horse goals for this year is to stop overthinking everything. As a big time overachiever with an addictive personality, that is SO HARD for me and SO BAD for my riding. You have no idea how fast I can go from "I can't catch my horse" to "my trainer just caught my horse" to "my horse hates me" to "obviously I am a bad person" to "I should get Netflix instead of horse and eat Cheetos until I die by myself in a cave".

obviously

But guess what?

That is dumb.

The reasons Courage is sometimes hard to catch are many, but none overly complicated or personal. He doesn't hate me. He isn't having some weird health crisis. He's just a horse in the spring who sometimes needs boundaries and the reason my trainer could catch him was that he thought she was feeding him, which was mildly more entertaining than the weird game he was playing with me.

bad boy halter was busted out

It's the same under saddle--if he spooks or flails or scoots or leaps, instead of going "scary-->bad-->death-->no-->sell horse-->cry", I just ignore it and keep on riding in the moment.

It makes sense (yes I'm overthinking not overthinking things. you're welcome.) because Courage is a horse. Horses live in the moment. They react. They don't think ahead or make plans. He may be kind of an asshole a lot of the time sometimes. He's not capable of conceptualizing hate or horse show plans or goals or the training pyramid, and what's more, he wouldn't care if he was capable. He's too busy living in the moment.

the moment where i bought ANOTHER halter

If I'm going to get through to him, I need to be living and breathing in that same moment. Not six jumps ahead, not crashing and burning my goals for the year, and definitely not deciding which texture of Cheetos I want to be found dead with. Also not fixating on the fact that _I_ couldn't catch him, but someone else could. It's in the past. He's not thinking about it, and if I am, I'm missing out on what's happening right now.

It all makes perfect sense, right?

humor me

It's hard because of the obsessive/type A/perfectionist thing. Instead of constantly rerunning the mental tape of Courage walking up to my trainer with his ears pricked, I take a deep breath and focus on what I am doing right now in this moment (blogging). I remember that bringing emotional baggage to the barn with me absolutely WILL sabotage my relationship with Courage. I know that if I come each day with an open mind and stay in the moment with Courage, I will get through to him and things will get better.

So yeah. Things are not all roses. Sometimes my horse is impossible.

And I am zen (usually most of the time but it's getting better I swear).

this helps zen a little

PS and yes I totally obsessed over this a lot and talked with people who know us and whose opinions I trust and YES I have a plan and NO he isn't dying (at all) or getting sold (despite a few threats).

PPS and that's not to say the cheetos option doesn't come up 1-4 times a week depending. I'm just trying to dwell on it less.

PPPS and also I'm very anti-negative-goals. In general, I say "I want to look up" instead of "Stop looking down", but in this case, I don't want to redirect the energy. I just want to kill it in it's tracks. BAM STOP NOW.