Some Things Come into Sharper Focus - and Mark Rashid's New Book

I've been attending clinics with Mark Rashid, either as an auditor or a rider, for more than 10 years now.  And slowly, with his guidance, my horsemanship has been improving.  Horsemanship is a never-ending journey, one where you never are done learning and experimenting and changing how you approach what you do with horses.  Mark says this is true for him too, even though he's assuredly a master.  And I've seen it in action - he tries new things and has new ways of explaining things.  Mark also has no "system" or one-method-fits-all-horses way of going about things, but instead works to give you the tools to take your own journey with horses.

Mark Rashid's new book (actually books as there's also a book of quotations his students have collected) and DVD set just came out, and I've read the book (once - I'm about to start going back through it again it's chock-full of extraordinary stuff) but haven't viewed the DVD yet.  I think it's one of his best books ever.  It's a series of stories that explain how he came to his current views of horses and how to work with them, and a distillation of his philosophy.  Now, I've heard a lot of his thinking over the years but some of the concepts take a while to sink in and are best learned in the context of an actual situation you're facing with a horse.  Many of the concepts can seem almost abstract or even "mystical" in themselves, but when you hear the concept in the context of a real story, you can almost see it in your mind, and for me at least, it becomes concrete.

Several of the stories were total eye-openers for me in the context of what Red and I have been working on.  I knew the concepts already and could have repeated them to you, but reading them again in the context of Mark's stories and distillation of the concepts really changed how I was approaching working with Red.  The story about the mare who pulled back while loading into a trailer . . .

More later about this and the work Red and I have been doing . . .