I am reflecting on the past year, and it still seems so surreal to me. I hardly know where to start. I've written already about the incredible impact that working with Felicity Davies has had on me, and that impact has continued and magnified.
I spent the fall enrolled in several courses, the most influential of which were Lockie Phillips' Homecoming course and the Balance Through Movement Method Nerve Release Self-Study course. I also started working with Felicity again through her Illuminate program. The epiphanies that I have experienced during the past few months have been life-changing, as you'll see below:)
I am now moving on to the next level this year. I've been accepted into the certification program for the Lazaris Nerve Release Technique, and I am expecting to pursue doing the work professionally later this year. I'm also continuing to work with Lockie through 1:1 sessions and of course, working with Felicity. There are a couple of other things in the works too, and I'm so thrilled to be able to start putting things together into a holistic picture of what horsemanship means to me.
I don't quite know where all of this leaves this blog, to be honest. I have purchased the domain www.mysticalhorsemanship.com, and I'm expecting that will go live when I'm ready to start taking clients for nerve release sessions. And I'm now on Instagram as @mystical.horsemanship. I'll be posting there regularly (like once a week) as I walk through some of the highlights of my horsemanship journey and transition to a professional voice.
It's a weird feeling to be exploring the idea of mystical (i.e. inspiring a sense of spiritual mystery, awe, and fascination) with respect to horsemanship. I have spent a long time thinking of myself as practical and logical and rational. So all the decisions that I made that didn't fit those categories felt like I was doing something wrong or crazy. When in reality, those decisions were the true parts of me struggling to be heard. It turns out that while I can be practical and logical and rational, I really want to move through life based on my intuition. When I work with horses now, I often completely discard any plan I might have had and work entirely off of feeling. I even managed to do an entire bodywork session with a friend's horse without touching him at all...and still got all the licking and chewing and yawning and relaxing that comes with physical touch. That experience was transformative for me - and possibly for the horse and his owner too!
This new direction feels very aligned and yet new and scary too. While I had wanted to work with horses professionally earlier in my life, it didn't work out. Instead, I took the path of higher education, getting undergraduate and graduate degrees, followed by a good office job. So being in a space where working with horses (and their people) is now a looming reality feels very transformative, but a little scary too as I think about the things I say and write coming from a professional perspective, instead of just little ole me writing some observations.
I am planning to leave this blog up for now as I experiment a bit with posting shorter content on IG, and then I'm expecting that I might shift the blog to my business website. I have also taken down the Journey to 100 Miles blog where I wrote about my experiences with Nimo. I may revisit some of those posts in the future, but it is time for me to move on. Nimo's spirit is still with me, though, and I can feel his guidance all the time.
I want to thank everyone who has showed up to this blog. It has always been comforting for me to learn that there are others out there who have similar experiences and thoughts. I function on my own a lot, and knowing that there are people out there like me has been very healing. I hope to continue to see you as I work my way through this transition. I expect that I still have lots of learning ahead of me, and I will continue to be a student of the horse.
