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The Mustang Wilderness Journey and The current issues with Mustang Freedom · The Horsehuman Connection Matrix

• 0:01
  Hi, this is Ishi Abel with The Horse Human Connection Matrix.
• 0:06
  It has been a little while since I did a monologue podcast.
• 0:10
  In fact, until last week, it had been a while before I had published any podcast, and that is because I need to be inspired, and also because when I reach out to people for interviews, either it seems to happen quickly or sometimes the timing isn't quite right and I wait.
• 0:31
  And what I don't wanna do is produce content just for the sake of producing content.
• 0:36
  It feels more meaningful when I wait for the inspiration and the timing to be right.
• 0:42
  So I also notice that I have not asked for subscriptions.
• 0:47
  I have not asked for people to pass the podcast around and to hear from you.
• 0:53
  I would love to hear from more of you about the podcast, and comments, opinions.
• 0:59
  If anybody wants to be on the podcast, please contact me and we can have conversations about that.
• 1:05
  I prefer, uh, talking on the phone, but if you email me, we can easily set that up.
• 1:12
  So please subscribe.
• 1:14
  Please tell your friends.
• 1:15
  Please share the podcast link, even if that's just texting it to a few people so that it can grow and continue to grow.
• 1:24
  Another podcast friend of mine said,"You know what?
• 1:26
  When you don't publish episodes, aren't you letting your fans down?" And I think part of that is I don't hear from people very often, so I'm not sure who all my fans are, and like I said, I want the content to have meaning.
• 1:41
  The other thing that's happened this summer, some of you may know because we advertised it a lot on social media, is that my retreat center Some of you may not know that I have a, a retreat business.
• 1:55
  It's called In Rewilding Together, and the web address is www.rewildingtogether.net.
• 2:07
  I'll put that in the show notes.
• 2:09
  Our big trip this year was going to visit the wild mustangs in Nevada, on the California-Nevada border, what's known as the Montgomery herd just south of Mono Lake.
• 2:24
  It was an incredible journey, and the last podcast talked a little bit about the experiences of that and, uh, this one and the next podcast will also talk about it.
• 2:38
  The trip sprung out of A long-standing interest in wild mustangs and a conversation between myself and another facilitator, and we decided to overlay somatic dance and meditation in the trip.
• 2:56
  The trip also sprang out of visions that I have had.
• 3:00
  I kept repeatedly having a vision in different forms about Because I, I do equine-assisted learning.
• 3:07
  I'm not a therapist, but I do sessions, uh, private sessions, and I don't know that people know that as well.
• 3:13
  And on the new website, you can see the private sessions and the upcoming retreats and a little bit more about the philosophy and everything involved.
• 3:23
  But starting back in a podcast when I was interviewing some of the women that choreograph with horses, I remember saying,"What if we could just dance with the horses?" And I don't mean, like, at liberty,'cause that is a form of dancing with horses.
• 3:37
  Riding is a form of dancing with horses.
• 3:39
  But what I was after was something a little bit more spontaneous, a little bit more like contact improv with your own horse, or the idea came to me, what would happen if we presented dance to the wild horses?
• 3:56
  Like, if we could get close enough to have in our bodies that feeling of somatic movement, that feeling of unity, that feeling of like what if we were a herd as close as we could get to the way they are a herd, and we came into their proximity, what would happen?
• 4:15
  And, and that's what the trip was about.
• 4:18
  It was so profound that people have had a very hard time talking about it.
• 4:22
  The people that were on the trip were so moved, and it's so sacred that all of us have had a very difficult time talking to anybody that wasn't there, because there's just no way they could experience it.
• 4:35
  So this was in late June, and here we are mid-September.
• 4:40
  It's taken me this long to even take a stab at talking about it.
• 4:45
  And there was one woman on the trip who She made it into a travelogue, and y- none of it talks about the actual experience of what happened.
• 4:56
  But I think the closest she could do was to, uh, create a day by day, we did this, we saw that, we traveled here, this person was in front.
• 5:06
  Which, for her memory, you know, that's great.
• 5:09
  It helped cement it.
• 5:11
  But for me, what happened inside was so profound that those type of travelogue details fall away and don't seem to matter as much.
• 5:21
  I've been involved in equine healing since 2016, and I've talked a little bit about that, and my horses will work on people with body work where, yeah, I have a horse that actually will move your body around and do energy work and body work on people, and she loves doing it.
• 5:37
  And they also enjoy the play, the experiential exercises that are either exactly what Sharif Rudolph designed in her 28 Facilitated Equine Assisted Learning Exercises book.
• 5:52
  And sometimes the horses just wanna be with people, and we read what happens.
• 5:58
  Um, Amanda Heldt wasn't the first person to come up with this.
• 6:02
  I believe, um, what is her name who wrote the book You Can Change Your Life?
• 6:07
  Louise Hay talks about the metaphoric parts of our body and ailments that are also traced back to Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine.
• 6:16
  You know, the idea that, like, if your left elbow hurts, that it has a meaning.
• 6:20
  So Amanda's developed a system with horses that expounds on this.
• 6:26
  I think there's even an app for it, and my horses love to do that kind of work too, especially Charlie.
• 6:31
  He'll point out things by nibbling your elbow or your left ankle or whatever part is, um, corresponds to what's going on with you, and he's never wrong.
• 6:44
  And you can look that stuff up on your phone too by just putting metaphoric or spiritual meaning of right knee pain, you know, lower back pain.
• 6:53
  And for me, it's always, there's always a degree of truth and accuracy in that, and it's worth doing.
• 6:59
  So here I'm talking about horse healing and different modalities, right?
• 7:03
  That's what I just covered.
• 7:05
  But what the question has always been for me is can wild horses help us heal, and in what way?
• 7:12
  And that's a lot of what this trip was about.
• 7:14
  It was asking these questions.
• 7:17
  And by preparing the group, and, you know, this is not stuff like I'm not a spiritual guru.
• 7:24
  I just read.
• 7:25
  And so these ideas are not my own ideas.
• 7:28
  They're just combined from things that I've come across or other spiritual traditions or famous authors like Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle and others, Pema Chödrön But the idea that we are not our thoughts, we are not our bodies, we are not even our emotional responses, we are not our experiences, we are not our family, we are not our name, we are not our work, we are not what we drive or what we wear or who our friends are.
• 8:04
  Beneath all of that, as you let all of those external things fall away, each of us has a true essence, and it's that true essence that the trip We wanted to connect with our true essence to each other so that we became more like a herd, and then we wanted to bring that as an offering to the wild horses and connect with them from that place And it was not necessarily an easy task, but it wasn't necessarily hard either.
• 8:43
  So much is accomplished with intention.
• 8:48
  So by doing some group exercises, forming some group intentions, bonding in ways that we don't normally do in our culture, we were able to accomplish this as a group.
• 9:01
  And I believe it had an awful lot to do with how close the horses came to us and the behaviors that they exhibited in front of us.
• 9:11
  And even the guide and the wrangler seemed a little surprised at the level of closeness and trust that was there.
• 9:24
  And I wanna give them a lot of credit because Ivana Crone, who is a wonderful wildlife photographer and was our guide through Rock Creek Pack Station, our partners supplying the pack horses, she's been doing this for 27 years, and Nicole started calling her the Jane Goodall of wild horses, and she truly is.
• 9:43
  She's been at this for 27 years and formed trust and relationship with this herd, which needs to be talked about because there are wild herds all over the United States that are not experiencing the kind of treatment or connection or trust that is possible, and instead they're being treated in ways that are not acceptable from my perspective.
• 10:09
  And having podcasts about what's happening with the wild horses is something that has sprung out of this trip with more passion and more intensity than before the trip for sure.
• 10:22
  And all of it feels like I hope a lot of you understand this feeling when you sit with things and you understand what your purpose is and you follow the next right thing.
• 10:36
  Something comes into your head and you don't know exactly what it's about, but you feel pulled towards it.
• 10:42
  And the more that we walk, move, act towards the things that pull us, the more we are in alignment with our purpose.
• 10:52
  And there's a bunch of goosebumps.
• 10:54
  So I hope those of you that needed to hear that hear it.
• 10:57
  Don't hesitate.
• 10:58
  Follow your intuition.
• 10:59
  Follow those pulls.
• 11:00
  That's why we're here So this trip was so much that for me between the visions that I had, I started to, to talk about this a few minutes ago with the, the circling.
• 11:11
  Like in, in the equine round pen when we're doing coaching and different modalities, I frequently would have this vision of horses encircling people and people encircling horses.
• 11:23
  And I wasn't quite sure what that was about.
• 11:27
  But the first day, well, it started even before the first day out with the horses.
• 11:32
  The night before the retreat started, we gathered everybody together the day before, the afternoon before we were to ride out, and we did some intention setting and group exercises together.
• 11:48
  And we did some animal communication to visit this herd on a shamanic journey and bring back messages.
• 11:56
  And there is a poem about that that I read, but I'm gonna actually just put the poem in the, in the show notes this time I think one of the biggest parts of that poem and the group intention and things that came back were the, the message from the herd that all is well, we are well And in that sense, wild horses everywhere are ambassadors, and they are becoming m- m- better at becoming their own ambassadors about their situation and about what's going on.
• 12:28
  But I digress.
• 12:28
  I wanna go back to the circling.
• 12:31
  So while we were at the hot springs, at Benton Hot Springs, which is very close to where we took off, uh, for the, the journey, Mustang Wilderness journey That night, 85 other wild horses had come down to join the ones that normally live in the valley, increasing the herd to about 210 horses.
• 12:57
  And from what I'm told, that wasn't that, that usual.
• 12:59
  Normally, there were just about 30 horses down there.
• 13:04
  So the people were excited that we were gonna get to ride out and immediately see so many of these wild beauties So as we took this string of horses, Ivana leading us parallel to them,'cause you cannot chase them, and she's very experienced at reading the herd, reading the leads, um, some of the stallions came right up to her mount and touched noses, and she had to scare them off to stay safe The next thing that happened is the second herd of horses that had come down traveled around us to the, to the north and circled us and began to trot and then to gallop.
• 13:51
  So we were 16 people on a string of geldings from Rock Creek Pack Station, completely encircled by 210 wild horses, and the energy was so intense.
• 14:07
  There was so much expression of freedom and joy and wildness that my body could not comprehend it, and I was huffing and blowing out air because my body could not contain it.
• 14:21
  Some of the other women were crying, and people were having thoughts they shared later about, like,"Am I safe?
• 14:28
  Well, yeah, I'm safe.
• 14:28
  My horse is fine.
• 14:30
  I, I am safe, but this is such a extraordinary, extraordinary experience." No wonder it was hard to talk about, right?
• 14:41
  So after we stayed there for about 45, 50 minutes, we made our way up to the base camp, which is up the hills through high desert in the Eastern Sierra Nevada And it was a three-hour ride, which was a lot for most of us.
• 14:58
  We're not used to riding that far.
• 15:02
  And the encampment included, uh, the kitchen, which was basically three of the Costco car parking tents put together.
• 15:10
  One for the, for the kitchen, and two for the lounging, dining area, which there weren't really tables for us to utilize.
• 15:19
  There were tables with iced tea or ice water, and there were lots of ice chests stacked there with our provisions for the next few days.
• 15:27
  And there were folding chairs, folding camp chairs So we came in quietly, exhausted, moved, our minds kind of blown, and we all sat in a circle of folding chairs.
• 15:46
  I looked around and nobody was saying anything.
• 15:50
  And after about 10 minutes, I said,"Normally at this time I would have some kind of check-in, but it doesn't really feel like anybody wants to talk." And I had nods of agreement.
• 16:04
  So we sat there for another 30 minutes quietly sharing what had just happened That was the first day.
• 16:13
  It got better and more intense in a lot of, in a lot of ways between the animal communication.
• 16:20
  And each day we were able to spend about 45 to 50 minutes in very close proximity to the herd, like within 30 feet.
• 16:31
  We were able to present a spontaneous dance called flocking, where there's unity of movement, but none of it is choreographed.
• 16:41
  And the facilitators had been able to practice this before the participants came the first day And it was an offering to the mustangs.
• 16:51
  And during the dance, at this point they were a bit further away, they were probably, mm, 60, 50 to 60 yards from us.
• 17:03
  But they went into that, what I call the occipital head bob, which some people might say they're sleeping, but I see it often in a meditative state when horses are working on people, doing energy work on people.
• 17:15
  And for those of you that work in equine-assisted practices, I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about.
• 17:21
  They go into that very quiet stance, and the head just very, very gently bobs from the occipital bone.
• 17:29
  And it shocked me that wild horses would feel safe enough to all be in this state while we were presenting this unified embodiment of somatic movement to them And then afterwards, as we were leaving, we came close again.
• 17:50
  They had started to leave, and we needed to leave the same way.
• 17:54
  And we were really close, like 15, 20 feet away, and we stopped.
• 18:00
  And they had babies nursing.
• 18:02
  They were close by grazing as our mounts grazed, and we were all there together, just being together The next day we met at the watering hole, which is a narrow canyon that is dangerous for them.
• 18:16
  And there's, there was a cat the second day.
• 18:19
  There was a cat.
• 18:20
  By cat, I mean a cougar.
• 18:22
  There was a cougar through our camp.
• 18:23
  There was cougar scat.
• 18:25
  One of the participants felt a cougar rub against her tent in the night.
• 18:32
  I wasn't scared.
• 18:34
  I, I live in a place where cougars are, are around and about, and so are bears and, and I know that the chances of them bothering a person are very small.
• 18:44
  But a lot of people were, were quite scared about the cat.
• 18:49
  So for these horses to come down and meet us, I mean, they heard us coming and they came down as we passed the watering hole, which is just like 10 minutes out of the camp, all the way down to meet us on the third day was extraordinary.
• 19:06
  And we were very close.
• 19:07
  In fact, my, my horse was within 10 feet.
• 19:09
  He started to, to graze into the herd, and I had to turn him.
• 19:13
  We were that close, and a couple of the stallions lay down and rolled in the tall green grass near the spring, which again, like, for them to feel safe enough in our presence when there are predators nearby to do that is just, you know, it's mind-blowing.
• 19:34
  It's absolutely mind-blowing.
• 19:37
  And it answers a lot of my questions that I went into this trip having, you know?
• 19:43
  First of all, what was this vision about horses circling?
• 19:47
  What does it feel like to be free?
• 19:49
  Like, I know the answer to that question even though I didn't have it going in, like this true freedom Which means something.
• 19:57
  When we lock up those horses, we're taking that away from them And that's not okay.
• 20:07
  You know, when we lock up people for doing something bad, our, I mean, our criminal system, the jails, we're taking people away and locking them up and taking away their freedom because they didn't follow the rules They weren't even that free to begin with because they had all these rules, and they have all, we have all these programs that control our social behavior, that control what we do and how we think when you really break it down.
• 20:32
  And it's just the way people are.
• 20:33
  It's just the hierarchy of any political system, any government, any group of humans anywhere is gonna have that.
• 20:39
  I'm not, I'm not saying I don't wanna be human, although sometimes I think it would be better to be a horse.
• 20:44
  But what I'm saying is, even when we lock up a person for breaking the rules, we're not taking them from true freedom, the freedom that these horses embody, express, live, and locking them up.
• 20:59
  We're just kind of putting them from one prison into another.
• 21:03
  And this, the, the prison-prison is a smaller prison than the system of programming that our culture puts over everybody.
• 21:14
  But it's not the same when you take absolute true freedom and you put it in a holding facility I don't even know the word for that.
• 21:24
  It's not, it, it, it's something much worse than a sin.
• 21:28
  It's an abomination And that's the perspective that I have coming away from this trip.
• 21:35
  And I keep asking the questions of what's next for these mustangs, and I've been involved in some, in some different conversations and reached out to some different 501s and 503s that are doing good work, and some that have very different opinions about what doing good work is.
• 21:52
  But I'm an outside-of-the-box thinker.
• 21:56
  And yesterday I started thinking about, you know, putting horses on private lands, and even talked to a realtor in Eastern Oregon about open range and what that means, and if you buy, you know, 640 acres and put horses on it, what does that mean, and about BLM cattle leases, and came up with this idea that I, I haven't heard It's, like, so simple.
• 22:17
  I haven't heard anybody else say it But it makes so much sense to me.
• 22:25
  Why can't BLM buy their own leases for the horses they're supposed to be taking care of in the Wild Horse and Bureau Act of 1971?
• 22:35
  Why can't we just buy those leases?
• 22:37
  It's so cheap.
• 22:39
  Like, the cattle get to graze for, like, what, I think somebody was telling me 100, a dollar, a$1.35 a month per, per cow.
• 22:50
  I, I may have that wrong, but even if it's a$1.35 a day, that's still a great deal.
• 22:57
  You can't even get a cup of coffee for that So why can't we just buy those leases and give it to the wild horses and leave them alone out there?
• 23:07
  I tell you one thing, it makes a lot more financial sense than a helicopter.
• 23:11
  Do you have any idea how much a helicopter is per hour?
• 23:17
  It's crazy, crazy expensive.
• 23:20
  Do you have any idea how much it costs to feed the horses in holding or to employ the BLM people that work at the holding facility?
• 23:28
  And if you add all of those things up, and the gelding, and the healthcare, it is unnecessary, completely unnecessary But the cattle industry apparently has a strong lobbying and has a perspective and influencing that significantly changes the science of studying what happens with horses and cattle on the range.
• 24:05
  So I've had the experience of living and managing 200 acres, and I had anywhere from 16 to 34 head of cattle.
• 24:13
  I had anywhere from two to 10 horses, and I had anywhere from 16 to 25 goats at any given time during a seven-year period.
• 24:28
  And sometimes those numbers were at the highest.
• 24:31
  There were 34 head of cattle, there were 25 head of goats, and there were seven or eight horses.
• 24:37
  And you know what?
• 24:37
  I never fed anybody, not once.
• 24:41
  We never had any problems, not once So I'm just very much always of the mind of if we just leave nature alone, it's gonna take care of itself.
• 24:53
  Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors.
• 24:56
  Everybody loves Barbara Kingsolver, raise your hand.
• 24:58
  Like, she's pretty amazing, right?
• 25:02
  So I'm forgetting which book it was.
• 25:04
  It's the one about the forest employees that study, coyotes, I think.
• 25:10
  And she points out that they don't reproduce if there's not enough prey.
• 25:15
  Only one or two of them will actually reproduce the whole pack will not reproduce if there's not enough prey.
• 25:23
  And I know from college classes and studying starvation, like, you know, I'm 63, so growing up there was always, you know, if you didn't finish the food on your plate, it was always,"You better finish that.
• 25:35
  There's starving children in Ethiopia." Like that had anything to do with anything.
• 25:38
  But the starving people in Ethiopia or other parts of the world, the untouchables in India, if they don't get enough food, their reproductive Systems shut down and they don't have babies.
• 25:55
  There was a cycle in Ethiopia of feeding, like, you know, Americans go in there with these do gooding programs and we feed them just enough to get their reproductive cycles going again and then they have more babies and then there's more famine and then there's twice as many people to feed.
• 26:10
  Nature has a way of taking care of this stuff So the idea that we need to sterilize wild horses, that we need to prevent them from starving on the range, and that we need to interfere and round them up, like, that's all bullshit.
• 26:29
  It's all absolute bullshit.
• 26:30
  Just leave them alone.
• 26:31
  It will be fine.
• 26:33
  If we ever get to the point where the wild horses are interfering with the traffic jams in LA, okay, we could do something about it then, or maybe before it gets to that point, but we're not there.
• 26:47
  That's not what's happening.
• 26:49
  And more and more people are waking up and paying attention.
• 26:52
  Thank God for that article in The New York Times exposing what really happens.
• 26:59
  I've been at livestock auctions.
• 27:02
  Everybody knows who the meat buyer is.
• 27:05
  Luckily, they shut that stuff down near me, but at least the guy that drove the truck here in the middle Oregon to the border gave his phone number out to key people, and if somebody who was at that auction changed their mind about a horse, he would pull over, take that horse off, and sell it for what he bought it for, because he didn't really wanna see this happen.
• 27:33
  And I'm not saying that every single horse needs to be saved.
• 27:41
  Like, it's tragic that horses end up in rescues, and it is tragic that horses are mistreated, and that people don't understand how to handle them or what to do, and they get to a point, and they give up on the animals.
• 27:54
  And it's tragic that sometimes horses have really bad genetics, and they have problems where they're not gonna survive.
• 28:02
  Like, they have really bad teeth.
• 28:04
  I saw a mustang that she had bad hooves, and she had bad teeth, and she would have never survived, but somebody saved her.
• 28:09
  And anyway, my point being, horses are expensive to cremate, to euthanize.
• 28:18
  Even if you have a strong enough head over heart to be able to take one out and shoot it and put it out of its misery, then what do you do with the body?
• 28:27
  Like, we have laws about that and how, how animal carcasses need to be treated.
• 28:32
  So in some cases, because our system fails, y- maybe those trucks are an answer for a few, but they're certainly not an answer for the wild mustangs that are living in freedom and are a symbol of American freedom Are we going to allow Our symbol of freedom to be put in encampments?
• 28:57
  Because if we are, what's gonna happen to us symbolically?
• 29:02
  I don't wanna know the answer to that question We all deserve a reasonable outcome.
• 29:09
  We all deserve as much freedom as we can have.
• 29:18
  Anyway, I wanted to be able to tell you about the Mustang Wilderness journey, just wanted to try and share it, and I wanna tell you about Rewilding Together Retreat Center, and that there are personal curated guides to slowing down and reconnecting with ourselves, reconnecting with each other, and reconnecting with our environment.
• 29:45
  There are retreats coming up that will do the same.
• 29:49
  A lot of them will have focuses like a couples focus, a mustang focus.
• 29:56
  So check out the new website and stay tuned for more podcasts, and please subscribe and share with your friends.
• 30:05
  Thanks so much for listening