Knowing Where You Are: Maintaining Your Shape & Holding Your Sacred Ground
This is part 8 of a series of articles that explore the following questions: How can the way of the horse frame leadership and how to be successful together? What can a horse teach about executive presence? What does it mean to lead authentically?
“In dreams, mythical stories, and lore one universal symbol for the human body and its instinctual nature is the horse.” — Peter Levine
In addition to what we know about the importance of rapport and presence, our way of being can create a sense of safety, relief, grounding for the nervous system of the herd, or it can create mistrust, anxiety, and tension. One of the factors that supports safety and connection is clarity around boundaries. Respect for our boundaries and the boundaries of another lends itself to the psychological safety of the group. Knowing where our boundary is lets the herd know where we are, and from there conversations about role, responsibility, who’s leading, and who’s following can take place.
For horses and the bubbles of space, their perceptive worldview is oriented to, space is more important than touch. Respecting this space is important to them. Crowding their space with your body such as being too close to them or touching them before mutual respect and rapport have been established is like being with someone who has no boundaries physically and psychically. It’s an invasion of space to enter before invited. As a prey animal, unwelcome touch feels violating. Their bodies are their lifeline.
Clarity around one’s boundary, as a horse, is necessary for their safety and survival. It also informs how they can be together (or how they can be together moving fast to avoid a predator). When we are with horses, they are looking at us not only to see if they can be safe with us but to know where we are. They need to know where our boundary is so that they know where we are and how to be with us. The more clear we can be about ourselves — how we feel, what’s in our heart, and where our energy is going — the better of a herd member (or leader) we can be.
Presence begins in the body. Knowing your boundary begins in the body. What is your relationship with your body? Author Toko-pa Turner brings us back home to the sanctity of our flesh/meatsuits in this passage from her book, Belonging:
“The body is the first gate of belonging. The body is that home that we never leave, though some of us may try. It is the place where our soul has taken root for a lifetime. It’s only through the body’s senses that we come to know the world in which we live. It’s with our hands that we offer tenderness, our voices that speak truth, our ears that differentiate noise from music, and our feet that take a stand. It’s in the souring of our bellies that we know the wrong way and the rising of our temperature that expresses our longing and our hearts that flutter at the anticipation of newness.”
The degree to which we have separated from our body is proportionate to the degree in which we have separated from our instinct and intuition. How can we begin to find our horse body so as to be better members of the herd and our human herds? Finding our body, and finding our body in relational space to others and our environment gives us an anchor into self, as if we snap into congruence and find our own two feet.
Knowing where you are is where to start. At Reboot, we know this to be true in the polyvagal-inspired Red-Yellow-Green check-in we do and offer to clients to adopt in their organizations. We quietly ask ourselves first, “How am I doing?” before we share our states (Red, Yellow, or Green) with others in the meeting with us. Check-ins like these are just as important to horses. They need to know where you are in spatial relationship (the edge of your bubble is the edge of you in their worldview), and they need to know where you are in terms of how you are feeling (which they can also feel). Are you congruent in your feeling body? Are you really present in yourself?
Horses need sane, healthy boundaries the way a river needs two sides. They learned this from their mothers as a large part of how the herd works. Horses thrive on clear boundaries amongst themselves. The cohesiveness of their life together depends upon their ability to move their large bodies deftly around each other. In the case of a crisis, this means they can run at top speed and not trip each other up.
Everyone in the group needs clear boundaries, not confusing signals. Horses thrive on tidy assertiveness that does not take much time or energy. Bonding is stronger and gets better as soon as boundaries are cleared up. Gray areas and inconsistencies are not kind for the horse, as these fail to create a sense of psychological safety. We can insert Brene Brown’s maxim “clarity is kindness” here. (How much of this rings true for our organizations and offices as well?)
Humans have a hard time asserting boundaries or limits as if it’s unkind or hurtful in some way. We run up against our own internal beliefs about our right to be here and our right to take up space, and our right to have needs. Yet, according to the way of the horses, all of these rights are intact and part of one’s foundation of self and part of one’s sovereignty as a being in the world.
Knowing where you are and where you belong in relation to another is part of rapport. If you are sloppy with your energy, you are not helping the other being you are with. Likewise, if you try to be invisible or small, they can’t feel the truth of you. Horses see you as you really are. They know when the inner parts of you align and into congruence. They know when you’re in your body and when you’re not. When they can feel you feeling all of the you that’s alive and present, they can feel safe around you.
This doesn’t mean you have to sugarcoat yourself. It means including everything that’s alive in you — the sads, mads, joys, frustrations, fears — in your own awareness. Your ability to know and withstand the weather patterns of emotions, without losing your foundation, is the practice of presence within yourself, which translates into your presence with others as well.
From there, your reactions arise, grounded in instinct. What you need, what you want, and the truth of what’s flowing through you is clear. Boundaries help us as much as they help those around us. Horses have a way to ask each other what is welcome and what is not, and be very clear about what they do or do not want. We’ll explore that more in the next article.
