Transformation – Commentary by Hans Michael Schoebinger

"Few people, who fulfill their wish for a horse of their own, suspect that a horse not only costs time and money (…) few suspect that the horse will transform them into different people."

ULRIKE DIETMANN

So not expecting anything else but another entertaining hobby, I decided to start riding at the, for a beginner, rather old age of twenty-eight. Twenty-three years later I know that I have become a very different person than I was at the time when I started. And I know that it is the horse that was and continues to be the linchpin for that change.

And the change feels just great. From a tight ass money-driven founder of a soon booming software company I turned into a not so money-driven founder of an old, definitely not booming software company whose single employee is me and who spends most of his time working as a temporary worker in the non-core workforce of a medium sized corporation.
“Great, huh?”, you may ask.
“Yes, great indeed.” I answer and my thanks goes to the horse for being able to wholeheartedly come up with that answer.

Interestingly, I have little talent for riding. Being clumsy by nature I encountered many difficulties from the get-go:
“Your legs are dangling like a pair of sausages”, one of my first riding-instructors would comment on this state of affairs. 

Had I had talent, had everything worked fine, I would certainly have had less impetus to adapt and to start looking for and implementing changes that I deemed necessary to improve the situation.

First I tried to adapt my riding. I tried to harden the “sausages” and turned to many a brute force approach my riding instructors suggested to me. Fortunately to no avail as over the years it became ever clearer that I was a hopeless case in that regard. So I did not have to go down that route forever.

To make the long story short, I did continue to look for better ways and slowly but surely turned from pupil to student, sceptic, dissident and nowadays to “traitor”, the title I am referred to in my former riding community, as one of my riding instructors of old told me lately. I took it as a compliment, for I feel so much better now, for change for the better I did, once I had turned my fullest attention inwards.

“The goal of becoming a horseman has much less to do with tools and aids than it does with the refinement of self” , as one of my most valued teachers, Mark Rashid, put it.

This commentary is presented as part of  The Inner Rider course and contains some of the most profound statements I heard from Mark and other people of significance along my long and winding road to the happy horse person I am today. I hope these statements and their discussion prove as valuable to you as they have to me in refining your relationship with yourself and your horse.

Last but not least I have learned from Wayne Dyer that it is very useful to supply a few lines of instructions on how to apply these statements for everyday use at the end of each topic. So here we go for Lesson 1:

Practical Application
Do not be too careful what you wish for, as more importantly, if what you have wished for turns out to be different from what you expected, embrace it wholeheartedly. Only that way all its opportunities can be leveraged by you. This applies to little things, too – an organizational change in your company that transforms your workplace in an unforeseen way or a person or a horse being different from what you thought she was.

Actively pursue change. Keep looking for ways to improve. This way you will cope with and keep up with your higher standards and expectations.

If you are the occasional rider who rents horses when on vacation or sometimes gets to ride the horse of a friend, after careful consideration – “time and money”, mind you (!!) as Ulrike Dietmann mentions as well – by all means get a horse of your own. And if possible, as a second step, live next door to her. It makes a lot of difference whether you are confronted with four-legged psychotherapists only occasionally or kept under their 24/7 supervision.

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Learning Path

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Video 48 Min  + 2 Min read to complete

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Video 48 Min  + 2 Min read to complete

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent eu orci faucibus orci malesuada semper eget non tellus. Cras sed dignissim purus. Mauris varius neque leo, eu pellentesque justo venenatis et. Sed ultricies risus non turpis tempus, nec  nulla suscipit. In comdo urna eu turpis accumsan, et viverra mauris fringillaCras interdum 

Video 48 Min  + 2 Min read to complete

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Video 48 Min  + 2 Min read to complete

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