The Power of Softness

‘Softness is what emerges when we don’t need defenses.’

Lasell Jaretzki Bartlett, in

A Journey to Softness, by Mark Rashid

I keep bumping up against this concept of ‘softness’ in my horse life.  Mark Rashid is a well-known horsemanship clinician from Colorado who has spent his life trying to find what softness is in connection with his horses.  He says that this is a journey, a lifelong journey, and that we will not find it with our horses until we find it in ourselves and in all aspects of what we do.   I happened to re-read his book this spring after I had spent four days at a Josh Nichol Relational Horsemanship clinic with my dressage horse, Faraona.  Josh says that “the correct response to pressure is to soften”, meaning that when we apply pressure to the horse, we want them to soften, not resist.  Both of these great horsemen emphasis the importance of softness. So how do we find this elusive softness?  And - how do we apply pressure in a way that encourages softness in others?

To make it even more confusing, Rashid talks about ‘powerful softness’, which on the surface seems like an oxymoron.  How can we find power and softness at the same time?  He goes on to tell a story about helping a friend round up some horses that were out on pasture.  They were looking for a recently bought mare that his friend suspected was pregnant.  Sure enough, when they rode their horses to where the group of pastured horses were, there was a mare with a newborn foal.  They needed to bring this mare and foal out of a valley, up to a mesa where there was a catch pen, a distance of over a mile.  But as they neared the mare, they could see that a big mustang-looking gelding appeared to want to get at the foal.  They could see that the foal was exhausted from his mother moving him to get away from the big gelding.

Rashid managed to ease the mare and foal up the path while his friend worked at keeping the gelding back, repeatedly chasing him back down into the valley.  Finally, Rashid got the mare and foal up and into the catch pen, where the foal immediately lay down to sleep.  Suddenly, the gelding appeared, with the other cowboy chasing him, trying to rope him.  This failed and the gelding jumped the gate into the pen and made a beeline towards the mare and foal. I’ll let Rashid tell this part in his words:

At this point, something quite extraordinary happened.  As the gelding closed in on the mare, I watched her wheel her hindquarters toward him and kick him square in the chest, causing him to recoil a good fifteen feet.  While the force the mare put into that kick was quite astounding, creating a shockwave I could feel from my position some thirty feet away, what was even more remarkable was something the mare did with her baby at the same time.

At the very moment she laid that powerful kick into the gelding’s chest, the mare had also used her nose to ever-so-gently move her exhausted baby away from danger.  It was an amazing feat of total body control.  While her hindquarters seemed to harness all the strength of her body and hit the gelding with an accuracy and speed the like of which I have seldom seen, her front end was as soft as butter, guiding her foal to a safer place while barely touching him.[1]

Power and softness at the same time, in different parts of the mare’s body.  This story was the inspiration for Rashid’s journey to softness, and the book that bears that name.

But as Bartlett says in the quote above, we won’t find softness until we can feel safe and let down our defenses.  As I keep finding over and over again, what is true in my horse life is also true in all aspects of my daily life. 

There was no softness in my growing up on our farm, just lots of yelling and hitting – both animals and kids.  So I grew defensive, resistant and tough.  I even played piano with a lot of force.  It was my way of letting out all the frustration and anger that accumulated.  My only soft spot was my cat Tinkerbell.  That cat let me pack him around, dress him up in doll clothes, and he rode in the basket of my bike.  His purring was the only softness I experienced.  I was as gentle as I knew how to be when I crouched down beside the cows to milk them because to be rough with them would result in getting kicked.  But looking back at that now, I was far from soft.  It has been my horses who have been my teachers, just as they have been Mark Rashid’s and Josh Nichol’s teachers. And, as Rashid says, I could not find softness with my horses until I could find it within myself.  I needed to let down my defenses.  I needed to address the trauma of my upbringing.

Towards the end of Rashid’s book is a chapter written by his wife Crissi called ‘Opening to Softness’.  She writes:

We are so focused, to the point of inflexibility at times, on getting the horse to do something we think important that we lose sight of how the horse feels about what they are doing.

What I would like to offer is that if we were to place how our horses feel (achieving a calm, soft, state of being) during any given interaction above what we can get our horses to do, horsemanship would look very different.  Who knows – we might look different, too.[2]

I won’t get into my own trauma other than to say that I have done, and continue to do, my healing work.  In doing so, I am slowly turning into the archetype of the wounded healer.  The more I do my own work and explore what is possible, the more I am able to help my clients heal from their own trauma.  The thing about trauma is that it makes you feel tight and constricted inside, perhaps to the point where you lose any felt-sense of your body.  The somatic, body-based work that I do helps clients reconnect with their body and slowly create a sense of expansion and aliveness inside themselves as the stored trauma energy is released.  Only then is softness a possibility.

I also see another place where the idea of softness is so very important.  Lately, I have had a handful of parents contact me to work with their child and their child’s anxiety.  But when I listen to the parents tell their story during our initial phone call, I invariably tell the parent that I would like to work with them first, before I see their child.  All of the parents so far have agreed to this.  And as we delve into the parent’s life and begin to work through their own overwhelming experiences, their children’s anxiety lessens remarkably.  So far, when I work with the parents first, I have not needed to work directly with their children.  When the parents can do their own work, it passes down to their children.  These parents are amazed at the change in their children when they themselves begin to understand, deal with, and heal their own trauma.  I can also use this opportunity to teach the parents about regulation of the nervous system, and they can help to co-regulate their child once they can regulate themselves.

Now, I will say that this may not be possible in all cases.  For example, in children who have suffered pre- or peri-natal trauma, I need to work directly with the child.  The difference is that this is the child’s own trauma, not the parent’s anxiety that the child has taken on. It is important to understand that infants and young children can’t separate what their emotion is from what is their parent’s (especially their mother’s emotions).  In all cases, though, we cannot view the child in isolation.  It is a family system and the healing happens in the family system.  God bless those brave therapists who work in family systems therapy.  I just wish more families had access to that kind of help.

I encourage you now to go back and read the paragraphs that Crissi wrote above, only this time substitute the word ‘child’ for the word ‘horse.’  We can’t expect a child to respond with ‘the correct response to pressure is to soften’ if we can’t find softness in ourselves.

I practice this every day with my horses.  When I feed them their ration, I halter them and tie them individually to their own spot at the fence.  When they are done, I take them, one by one, and lead them out to where the hay piles are.  I have started asking them to soften as I take off their halters.  Of course, they want to get straight to the hay so they want to push thru me as I take off their halter.  I pause them with the lightest pressure I can and ask them to soften.  As soon as they soften, I let the halter go.  Every day, I can ask with less pressure and they respond sooner and softer.  They understand what I am asking.  I am being fair and they get their hay as soon as they soften.  That is where the power is for me.  I am not muscling my horse to stay with me, I am asking with the least amount of pressure, and they don’t resist.  Can you imagine that happening with your children when you ask something of them?  If you don’t think you can do it, I have four horses with which you can practice.  Just contact me to begin your own journey to softness.

[1] Rashid, Mark.  A Journey to Softness: In Search of Feel and Connection with the Horse.  Trafalgar Square, 2016. Page 6-7.

[2] Ibid, page 151.