Chevalia, The Way of the Horse, Book One, Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Horses and the Intelligence of Presence

Presence is the first doorway, but what happens within that presence is where the relationship becomes transformative.

Anyone who spends enough time with horses begins to notice how acutely they respond to what is happening around them. They perceive tension and relaxation, confidence and uncertainty, movement and intention. Their survival as prey animals has always depended upon extraordinary sensitivity to their environment, the herd, and subtle changes occurring within both.

Living among horses, however, led me to understand this sensitivity in a more personal way.

A horse may respond to something within us that we ourselves have not yet acknowledged.

We can approach appearing calm while carrying anxiety beneath the surface. We can speak gently while inwardly frustrated. We can present confidence while privately doubting ourselves.

The horse is not concerned with the version of ourselves we intend to present. It responds to what is actually there.

This became one of the most important distinctions the horses taught me: the difference between performance and presence.

Much of what we call identity is constructed over time. We learn who we are expected to be and begin performing versions of ourselves shaped by family, culture, experience, memory, fear, ambition, approval, rejection, and survival.

We become the capable one, the strong one, the successful one, the victim, the authority, the caretaker, the rebel, the one who knows.

Our roles may be real and necessary. I am a mother, for example. That relationship is real. But no title can contain the totality of what we are.

The difficulty begins when the role becomes the identity and the identity becomes something we must continually defend.

Carl Jung used the word persona to describe the face we present to the world. The persona has a purpose, but beneath it lies a far more complex inner life.

Horses have an extraordinary way of bringing us into contact with that inner life.

A horse does not care about our profession, social standing, accomplishments, possessions, influence, reputation, or the story we tell about ourselves. None of these things establishes relationship with a horse.

What matters is what enters the space between us.

Are we present? Are we listening? Are we afraid, demanding, or distracted? Are we trying to control the outcome? Are we pretending to be certain when we are uncertain?

A horse may reveal the answer before we have admitted it to ourselves.

This does not mean that every movement or behavior of a horse should be interpreted as a psychological message about the human nearby. Horses have their own histories, preferences, physical sensations, fears, relationships, personalities, and choices.

They are not mirrors created for our self-development. They are sovereign beings.

But precisely because they are sovereign, relationship with them requires something real from us.

When a horse resists, withdraws, becomes tense, moves away, pushes through a boundary, or simply refuses the interaction we expected, the easiest response is to make the horse wrong.

The more difficult response is to become curious about what is happening, what the horse is experiencing, what we are bringing into the moment, and what we may be failing to hear.

Sometimes the answer belongs to the horse. Sometimes it belongs to us. Often relationship requires listening carefully enough to discover the difference.

This is where attunement becomes more important than technique.

Technique has its place. Knowledge matters. Skill matters, and safety matters profoundly when working with an animal of such size and power.

Yet technique without awareness can become mechanical, and authority without relationship can easily become domination.

The horse has continually asked something more of me: authenticity.

When there is dissonance between what we project and what is actually occurring within us, the horse may feel the instability of that contradiction. When the performance falls away, the relationship changes.

We are no longer asking the horse to respond to an image. We are allowing ourselves to be met.

There is enormous vulnerability in that, but there is also freedom.

We spend so much of human life managing how we are perceived. We explain ourselves, defend ourselves, compare ourselves, improve our image, acquire identities, and search for validation from one another.

The horse stands outside much of this constructed world.

You cannot impress a horse with a résumé, purchase authenticity, persuade a horse through social status, or explain away an incoherence the horse is already sensing.

The encounter becomes wonderfully simple: two living beings are meeting.

When that meeting becomes quiet enough, another quality can emerge: resonance.

I call this the Field of Presence.

It is something I came to know through direct experience, first and most profoundly through the horses. Within this field there is an energetic resonance that can be felt. I experience it as light—not simply light as something seen, but as a living Source power, luminous and intelligent, moving through and connecting life.

The Field of Presence is always here, but the noise of the mind can make it difficult to perceive. When that noise quiets, we become more receptive to what is already present.

This is where I have experienced energy moving between living beings. It is where healing can occur, where intuitive knowing arises, and where understanding sometimes comes without the ordinary process of thinking. At times, knowledge has arrived so completely and immediately that I have come to call these experiences downloads. There is a sense of receiving rather than constructing the answer.

This is also where I have experienced Divine or Supreme Intelligence, not as something distant from life, but as an intelligence flowing through it.

The horses brought me into this field again and again. They showed me that when expectation, performance, and the need to control become quiet, perception changes. Communication becomes subtler. Energy becomes more perceptible. Something can be known before the mind has found words for it.

There is something essential, however, about the Field of Presence that I do not want to lose beneath descriptions of extraordinary experiences.

It cannot be approached with expectation.

If we enter the present moment hoping to receive a revelation, a healing, a download, or an experience like the one I had with Stary, we have already placed a condition upon the moment. We are waiting for something other than what is here.

Expectation becomes another form of noise.

Some of my most profound experiences within the Field of Presence have come during periods of tremendous grief and loss. Yet grief itself is not the doorway. A person can be grieving and remain caught within fear, resistance, anger, memory, and the desperate wish for reality to be different.

What I am speaking of is something that has occasionally happened within grief when I could no longer hold myself against what had happened.

There came a point when I simply surrendered.

The mind stopped searching. There was nothing left to solve, bargain with, control, or understand. For a moment, everything became completely still, and I became empty.

Without trying to enter the present moment, I had surrendered completely into it.

Some of the most profound experiences of my life have arisen from that emptiness.

There have been moments when what I can only describe as Divine Source energy has filled every aspect of my being. I have experienced it as energetic light, immense in its power and yet carrying an extraordinary stillness.

And then something happens that words can barely approach.

The experience is beyond exhilaration. My entire being enters a state that the Vedic traditions have described as bliss. I do not mean happiness, pleasure, relief, or even the emotional exhilaration we ordinarily associate with joy. It is something altogether different, a state so complete that there is no part of me standing outside of it trying to understand what is happening.

Within that state, I know.

The reality I had been perceiving through grief suddenly reveals itself as only one part of something immeasurably larger and more beautiful. The passage of time, the apparent finality of physical loss, and even the boundaries of the body no longer feel like the limits of existence.

There is something beyond them.

Beyond time.

Beyond space.

Beyond the dimensions through which we ordinarily perceive ourselves and one another.

The bodies through which we move in this life begin to feel more like temporary expressions of something that is not temporary at all. Beneath them is something eternal, whole, and untouched by the separation I had believed grief was showing me.

And within that knowing, love is not lost.

This may be one of the most difficult aspects of the experience to convey. The beings we love do not suddenly become unimportant because we glimpse something beyond physical existence. The opposite occurs. Love becomes larger.

For that moment, I know that I am complete and whole, and that the deep love connecting me with those I love is not made complete by physical proximity and cannot be made incomplete by physical absence.

The grief transforms within that knowing.

There is nothing I have to tell myself to believe. There is no affirmation to repeat and no philosophy to accept. The experience itself carries its own certainty.

A greater reality becomes perceptible.

And it is beautiful beyond anything I know how to describe.

When the intensity of such an experience recedes, I remain human. I may still miss the physical presence of the being I love. I may still cry. Love continues to feel absent within the world of form.

But I cannot entirely return to the perception I held before.

Something has been revealed.

This is why I have come to trust that there is a Divine Intelligence within the Field of Presence that knows precisely who we are and what we are capable of receiving in any given moment. It knows how much light, how much guidance, how much revelation, and how much remembrance we are ready to hold.

I do not believe we control that timing.

Sometimes the light comes with overwhelming power. Sometimes it is almost imperceptible.

As I have lived more consciously within the Field of Presence, it has often become beautifully simple and natural. There may be no extraordinary sensation and no revelation. There may simply be the horse, the earth, a tree moving in the wind, my breath, and an unmistakable quietness within the moment.

Nothing spectacular needs to happen.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of living this way is that we are never alone.

There is a sense of being known. I do not mean watched, judged, rewarded, or singled out. I mean known as part of the living whole.

There is an intelligence within life that knows exactly where we are, even when we do not. It does not always give us an answer. It does not always remove difficulty or loss. Sometimes it gives nothing that the mind would recognize as a message at all.

Yet its quietness does not mean its absence.

This is something the horses have helped me understand.

They do not require every moment to become extraordinary. They can stand quietly within life without asking life to prove itself to them. They remain attentive to what is here.

Living among them taught me to become receptive in much the same way.

Sometimes there is simply the horse, the earth, the breath, and the moment exactly as it is.

At other times the Field of Presence opens with extraordinary clarity, and I have felt its energy and power as something luminous and alive, moving through the horse, through me, through trees and the living world around us.

Both belong to the same field.

The extraordinary experience is no more sacred than the quiet one.

What matters is our willingness to become empty of expectation and available to what is here.

This is the Field of Presence as I have come to know it.

When I am fully present with a horse, I am no longer simply observing another being. I am participating in an encounter. The horse remains entirely itself and I remain myself, yet the separation between us no longer feels absolute.

This is where the ancient words Tat Tvam Asi—Thou art That—became meaningful to me.

The words did not create the experience. They recognized it.

The same life that moves through the horse moves through me. The same earth holds us. The same air enters our bodies. We exist as distinct beings and yet participate within a greater whole from which neither of us is separate.

This is why sovereignty and communion are not opposites.

True communion does not require the loss of individuality. In fact, I have come to believe that sovereignty may be what makes genuine communion possible.

If I must dominate the horse, there is no true meeting. If the horse must surrender its entire being to my will, there is no true meeting. If I approach only through what I want from the horse, I may achieve compliance, but compliance and communion are not the same thing.

Two beings can remain wholly themselves and still enter a relationship.

This changed the way I understood horses, but it also began changing the way I understood life.

Presence became more than stillness. It became the place where pretense could fall away.

The horse could reflect incoherence, certainly, but over time I discovered that reflection was only part of the relationship. There were also moments when the horse was no longer reflecting something back to me. The horse was simply meeting me.

Those moments have a different quality. There is no struggle to make something happen. The urgency disappears. Neither being is performing for the other. Attention becomes mutual, and the relationship enters resonance.

We can create conditions that make this kind of communion possible. We can become present, listen, respect boundaries, release expectation, and become receptive. But we cannot manufacture the encounter.

We allow it to be what it is.

This is also why I have become less interested in making horses conform to a philosophy about horses.

I want to know the horse who is actually in front of me.

Every horse is an individual.

Each carries a history, temperament, sensitivity, way of communicating, and manner of meeting the world that belongs uniquely to that being. No method can replace attention to the individual.

Presence means that yesterday's horse cannot be imposed upon today's horse. Yesterday's interaction cannot dictate today's encounter. What worked with one horse cannot simply be demanded of another.

The relationship remains alive because both beings remain alive within it.

This is why the horse became more than a mirror for me. The horse became a companion in awareness.

Years later, I would encounter ancient teachings that gave me ways to contemplate what I had experienced. The Taoist sages described nature as living in accordance with the Tao, the underlying Way of existence. The Upanishads explored the recognition that the deepest Self is not separate from the ultimate ground of reality. Plotinus wrote of a living unity from which multiplicity arises.

Different traditions used different languages, symbols, and philosophical structures. They do not need to be collapsed into one system for their resonances to be meaningful.

What moved me was discovering that humanity had been asking these questions for a very long time.

What is the relationship between the individual and the whole? What lies beneath the identity we construct? Can consciousness be understood only through thought? What happens when thought becomes quiet? What does nature know that civilization has taught us to overlook?

Living among horses made those questions impossible for me to leave in books.

They became lived questions, carried into the pasture, into my body, into relationships, and into the choices I made about how another being should be approached, listened to, cared for, and respected.

The longer I lived among horses, the more I began to understand that presence was opening questions far beyond horsemanship.

If the identities we defend are not the whole of who we are, what lies beneath them? If consciousness can observe thought, is consciousness the same thing as thought? If the boundary between self and world can soften without either disappearing, what does that tell us about the nature of separation?

And if animals and the living world participate in forms of awareness we have barely begun to understand, what else have we mistaken for silence simply because we have forgotten how to listen?

Once the horse reveals the difference between the person we perform and the being beneath the performance, another question becomes unavoidable:

How much of the world we call reality has been constructed in the same way?