Growing up with horses at home in South East England, my Mother competing locally and breeding her own youngstock, I was blessed to be immersed in Horse energy from an early age. Sitting atop one of her Anglo Arabs, who later became one of my most intuitive teachers and allies, I believe that my nervous system was already absorbing and attuning to the magick of Horse.
Having regularly competed at Pony Club, Mounted Games and in Dressage in my childhood, teens and more formally in my early 20s, I sought out a dressage horse again after the birth of our first child, our son and the acute loss of confidence and Self-belief as a result of a disempowering birthing experience and an acute sense of isolation in my adoptive France, the birthplace of my husband and life partner, way back before I could effectively speak the language and clearly communicate my needs and desires.
We had recently moved out of the city of Lyon and we were the first of our friends to marry and to bear our first child. The company that I was working for at the time didn’t offer me the support - financially, contractually, or emotionally - that I needed in order to continue my role there and stepping out of nearly two decades of a distorted, force/ push work ethic, we moved to rural Burgundy, into a new and unknown area, in the bucolic hills of the Charolais.
At eight months old, our son was still finding his way into this world and I was worn down by life and having to hold it all together in many guises over the past decade. I reached out to a local riding centre, through which I began taking classes again with a local coach on an old school master of 23, ‘Ra’, and with whom my confidence and self-belief slowly started to rebuild. My weekly Saturday morning lessons were cherished and soon became the focus of the week for me, in terms of finding a thread, however small, back to myself.
Soon, I was ready for more and as my confidence returned along with fond memories of my childhood being immersed in horses and horse magic, I sought to find my own horse. Soon, through an invitation to a local importer/ breeder, I met ‘Karma’ (Camerlengo III), the Pure Bred Spanish horse I would soon call my own; my friend, partner and greatest ally.
We began with formal instruction, with a view to producing a dressed ride for me to take to competitions again. But, not long after we started, things started to get tense and Karma didn’t want to perform for the gallery anymore (nor for the instructor, much to her dismay!). Suggestions were batted around to put him in draw reins and to perform tighter and tighter circles, in order to bring him ‘under control’. But, he wasn’t to be deterred and began to resist, buck under pressure and the increasing spotlight. I began to draw the parallels between him and my inner self, which had been crying out to be heard!
It’s funny, because thinking back to it, it’s so obvious that he was inviting me into another world, another time, another consciousness and life experience - one that, had I continued down the same road; one that me myself had just chosen to leave in my own professional life experience, I would have ended up in the same contracted and forced experience. But, back at the time, it took great strength - and a greater trust in myself, a reconnection with my own deeper gnosis - to go against both what I had originally planned, what I knew, what my upbringing and conditioning told me - and what my instructor desired of both me and the horse.
But, in listening to this deeper feeling, this deeper gnosis; through the process of choosing something new and leaving behind these ‘old ways’ and their patterns and importance I had given them in my life was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Not only at that moment did I give my horse, Karma, a voice - to be seen, to be heard, to be honoured as having an active part in my and my family’s life - but also it tipped the scales for me. Where once I had been hard and driven and forceful and yet certainly dynamic and successful (as it is often defined in the Western culture), fighting for and retaining my place at the table at private banks and multi-nationals, I now chose to soften this gaze - to err on the side of curiosity to say, ‘sure, and what else is true…?’. I chose to tip the scales towards something greater, towards something unknown - and yet, so deeply felt and mirrored in the wild sense of freedom this horse wanted to retain in front of me. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was breaking and slowly integrating a pattern of burnout and forced overachievement - out of an original need for safety and survival - that my maternal line had been carrying for generations.
Needless to say, my riding instructor was dismayed and I had to level with a lot of childhood conditioning around what riding and horsemanship generally should look like - as well as diving deep into what might happen (to me, to the horse, to the body of horsemanship generally) should I completely drop all of the ‘norms’ as I had done - and continued to do… But, there was a new level of excitement, a new bubbling of life, of awe and of the curiosity of a child that came with it - not only that I was trying something new, but I actually had the feeling that I was creating something entirely new, a new body of work, at the same time. This feeling I recognised from my entrepreneurial experiences to date; a flurry of excitement and edgy expansion as I stood on the precipice of something new - for me and for the collective as a whole.
Of course, Karma, had an idea of what he was getting me into; his full name translating from the Medieval Latin for ‘Treasure Chest’ and his nickname, well, that speaks for itself! Soon, we were galloping through the forests bareback, with just a halter and a rope and an intention for where we were going and what I was asking him to show me. And what came back into this feedback loop. Was. Unreal.
This was a living, breathing Tarot deck - a medicinal divinatory experience, as we weaved our way between the wildflowers, herbs and trees, over the hilltops and into the four directions. He led me into more and more ahha moments, more breakthroughs and more ‘OMG, am I still sane?’ occasions of such incredible, artful synchronicity. These experiences seemed to answer the questions that were just on the tip of my tongue - sometimes not even yet fully crafted - along with the deeper enquiries that I was fully conscious that I wanted to address, like issues from my childhood and teenage years, for example.
This widening conversation was cracking my heart open more and more, inviting me into trust, into gnosis, into love… And I discovered that the more I leant in, the more I learned, the more I felt empowered, the more I dropped the old patterns of my past - and the more I forgave and integrated.
This was my route back to Self - and into something much, much greater.
This was communion (and it continues to be so today).