Reclaiming the Feminine in Horsemanship

I’ve been watching a lot of training and horsemanship videos on YouTube recently. There’s a smorgasbord of styles online as you would expect, but something that keeps getting repeated in almost all natural horsemanship and mustang videos is the idea of “dominance”. This doesn’t surprise me - the language of “dominance” is used all the time in the equestrian realm, often as a more palatable replacement for the word “obedience”. “Dominance” is not something I think about when training horses. Setting boundaries is important, but most often I find the idea of “dominance” being used as a way to justify our harsh treatment and unyielding power over the horse.

Still, I like to watch these videos from time to time to feel out the culture and know what people are trying out these days; I don’t want to forget to mention that I see so many compassionate people out there making passionate videos about their horse! That’s so lovely and honestly just really fun to see.

But this time around, seeing the mentality of dominance and obedience in these videos, it reminded me of being a young girl, and the pressure I felt to “man up” in this world in order to be taken seriously. 

I remember being young and seeing how the boys in my grade were treated - I remember how they were allowed to do cool things and be interesting people instead of pretty objects - I remember how they were taken seriously and their voice respected by the adult men in my life -
And I decided that I wanted to be like that.

I wanted to be respected, and heard, and valued as a human, not written off as an “emotional” girl, so I decided I would do it like the boys.
I would prove to everyone how logical I was, I would be tough and thick skinned and keep my emotional ”under control”, I would “win my respect” with the boys by embracing all the ”traditionally masculine traits” that society embraces and denying the traits that are perceived as “weak”.
And it worked, I was respected like the boys, was able to do cool things, had a voice.
But later, as I grew older, I realized this denial of my other traits came at a price. 
By trying “make it in a mans world” by being ”as good as the boys”, I was sacrificing crucial parts of myself, cutting myself up metaphorically, and disowning parts of my being - and that sort of rejection of the self hurts the soul. I was internally, as we have done collectively, disowning, devaluing, and rejecting the feminine.
And this act cost me, and costs society, greatly.

Instead of embracing my feminine power, I cast it aside to fit into the values of our dominance driven society, and this harmed me as well as the amazing potential and strength the feminine has to offer.
At some point, I decided to embrace the Feminine once more and make myself whole, and in doing so, I found more strength, love, gentleness, and power than I’d ever imagined.
And it’s funny because as I have been watching these training videos, I have seen so many incredible young woman trying to “make it” and get respect in a “mans world”. I’ve seen them step up to the plate and be tough, capable, and skilled - often having to prove themselves 2x harder just to get the same amount of respect. But they do it, and they are incredible.

But I also see in the equestrian culture at large, a complete devaluation of “traditionally feminine” traits. People being mocked for being “too soft”, people being condescendingly laughed at for seeking to understand and communicate, people acting tough so not to be seen as weak.

And all of this limits the communication and partnership we can build with a horse, not to mention limits the wholeness of the “self”. Because we all have these traits in us - male and female - and they are crucial. They are powerful. They are to be celebrated!

But in a culture that only values the hard and the harsh, everyone is chained up, and no one is free to be themselves.

I believe embracing the feminine helps everyone, and in the horse world, everyone (horse and human alike) benefits from gentleness, understanding, communication, compassion, emotional awareness, and empathy. 
The mission isn’t to fit into a “mans world” to get respect - the mission is to value the feminine enough so she’s respected. 
So that she is valued.
The wild feminine in all of us - she’s powerful - and the more we can embrace her, the better we will all be.

So lets be soft unapologetically! It’s time to embrace the gentle - time to embrace the emotional, the kind, the understanding. Really, the horse world needs it. And the more we are unapologetically soft, the more we claim our power.