Pas de Cheval. 1. The Introduction

Sep 14

12 min read

A Return to the Ancient Communion Between Horse and Human

Pas de Cheval is not a new method of horsemanship. It is perhaps a remembering of something very old.

Before the horse became something to train, control, perfect, or possess, there was relationship. There was observation. There was an ancient understanding that communication did not begin with words, equipment, or technique, but with the ability of two beings to become present enough to perceive one another.

Pas de Cheval—the dance of the horse—is my name for returning to that relationship.

It begins with a simple recognition: the horse is a sovereign being.

Horses are not an object of our ambition, nor a reflection of our ability as riders; and certainly not a being whose value depends upon usefulness or obedience. The horse arrives with an intelligence, history, personality, emotional life, preferences, memories, boundaries, and unique expression entirely their own.

And so do we.

Pas de Cheval asks what becomes possible when neither is required to surrender that sovereignty in order for relationship to exist.

The answer, I believe, is attuning to this truth within us and next, communion.

The Relationship Comes First

In conventional horsemanship, we often begin with what we want the horse to do.

Pas de Cheval begins somewhere else:

Who is the horse before me?

And equally:

Who am I bringing to the horse?

Before asking for movement, we learn to listen. Before expecting presence from the horse, we become present ourselves. Before asking for trust, we consider whether we have become trustworthy.

This is why Pas de Cheval cannot be reduced to a series of exercises.

Ground work, work in hand, Liberty work, line longeing,, riding, and eventually, for some, Liberty Dance may all become expressions of it. But none of them is Pas de Cheval.

The relationship is Pas de Cheval.

The practices simply give us different places in which to discover it.

A Language Beneath Language

The horse communicates constantly.

Some of that communication is visible: movement, posture, breath, expression, tension, softness, rhythm, distance, approach, avoidance, curiosity.

But I have come to experience that there is another level of communication that becomes perceptible when we become deeply present.

It is difficult to put into words because it does not always arrive through words.

It can be felt as intuition, resonance, sensory awareness, a feeling within the body, or simply a knowing.

I think of it as a universal language—a language that belongs not only to horses, but to nature and to life itself.

The horse does not need us to learn this language.

We need to remember it.

And perhaps this is one of the horse’s greatest gifts to humanity: they continually invite us back into the state in which we can hear it.

Presence Before Technique

We cannot truly meet the horse while our mind is somewhere else.

We may appear calm while carrying fear. We may smile while carrying anger. We may perform confidence while carrying doubt. We may tell ourselves that we are listening while silently carrying an agenda.

The horse can be extraordinarily sensitive to the energetic resonance beneath what we present outwardly.

So Pas de Cheval begins with an inward practice.

We breathe.

We release yesterday.

We stop rehearsing tomorrow.

We relinquish the outcome.

We become still enough to enter the only place where the horse can actually meet us:

here.

The present moment.

I call this entering the field of presence.

It isn’t becoming empty. It is returning to our natural state beneath the accumulated noise.

And something extraordinary can happen there.

Communication becomes connection.

Connection becomes trust.

Trust deepens into relationship.

And relationship can open into communion.

Sovereignty Does Not Mean Separation

To honor the horse’s sovereignty does not mean asking nothing of the horse.

Relationship itself requires boundaries, clarity, communication, requests, and responses.

There can be direction without domination.

There can be leadership without force.

There can be boundaries without punishment.

There can be partnership without possession.

The essential difference is that the horse remains a participant in the relationship rather than merely its subject.

My invitation to the horse becomes:

I see you as a sovereign being, and I am asking you to meet me—not surrender to me.

Choice must therefore mean something.

Sometimes the horse’s answer will be yes.

Sometimes it will be no.

Sometimes it will be not yet.

Sometimes it will be something we never anticipated.

Our responsibility is to become quiet enough to hear the difference.

Two Sovereign Beings, One Dance

This is where the name Pas de Cheval becomes meaningful to me.

I come from the world of ballet, where pas speaks of movement, steps, and dance. But Pas de Cheval has grown to mean something much larger in my life.

It is the dance of relationship.

Sometimes that dance happens without movement at all.

Sometimes it is standing quietly beside a horse.

Sometimes it is liberty.

Sometimes it is line longeing.

Sometimes it is riding.

Sometimes it is simply the moment a horse turns toward us and chooses to stay.

And for some of us, it may eventually become an actual dance with the horse through music and movement—what I call Liberty Dance.

But the deepest dance is always the same:

Two sovereign beings learning to listen to one another so completely that neither must become less for the relationship to become more.

That is the sweet spot of Pas de Cheval.

Perhaps It Is Not New at All

I sometimes think of Pas de Cheval as a new way of understanding the horse.

But the more deeply I experience it, the less certain I am that it is new.

Perhaps it is ancient.

Perhaps human beings once understood far more intuitively that we belonged within nature rather than above it.

Perhaps the separation is the newer idea.

The horse may not be teaching us something we have never known.

The horse may be helping us remember something we forgot.

That relationship does not require domination.

That communication does not always require words.

That sovereignty and communion are not opposites.

That our deepest intelligence may become available not through greater control, but through greater presence.

And that the state we are searching for—connection, healing, wholeness, belonging—may not be somewhere we have to reach at all.

It may already exist in the present moment.

Waiting beneath the noise.

The horse is already there.

Pas de Cheval is the practice of meeting them there.

Perhaps It Is We Who Have Forgotten

If the horse is already there, perhaps the deeper question is not what we need to teach the horse.

Perhaps it is:

What have we forgotten?

I have asked myself this many times because throughout my own life I have witnessed the same pattern repeated in so many places—in education, religion, medicine, government, society, organizations, communities, and even the smallest systems of governance.

Human beings create structures that are meant to serve, and somewhere along the way the relationship becomes inverted.

Leadership itself becomes inverted.

True leadership is service.

It is guardianship.

It is stewardship.

The leader is entrusted with the well-being of those they serve. Leadership does not entitle anyone to another being’s submission.

To me, the greater the responsibility entrusted to someone, the greater their obligation to become a guardian and steward of those they serve.

And when that trust is violated—when leadership crosses the boundaries of the people it was entrusted to serve—then that leadership has ceased to fulfill its purpose and should no longer hold that position.

Yet so much of modern human culture seems to have confused leadership with superiority.

Someone has more education, and suddenly they are treated as though they possess authority over someone else’s knowing.

Someone holds an office or title, and the title becomes confused with wisdom.

Someone occupies a position within government, medicine, education, religion, business, or another institution, and somehow we begin behaving as though that position elevates one human being above another.

But I don’t believe anyone is an absolute authority on life.

We need one another.

We have different experiences.

Different gifts.

Different perspectives.

Different knowledge.

Different ways of seeing.

We are meant to learn from one another.

There is an enormous difference between possessing knowledge that can help another person and believing that knowledge gives us authority over that person.

The first is service.

The second can become control.

And this pattern reaches far beyond institutions. We can reproduce it in our families, our communities, our relationships, and in the way human beings simply treat one another.

When knowing becomes self-aggrandizement, when leadership becomes power, when service becomes profit, when guardianship becomes control, and when relationship becomes dominance, something has been turned upside down.

And perhaps we have lived inside that inversion for so long that we have begun calling it normal.

But naturalized is not the same as natural.

Something can become customary without being in harmony with our nature.

Something can become socially accepted without reflecting who we truly are.

To me, a life organized around self-aggrandizement, profit, power, control, hierarchy, and domination is not our natural state.

It is an inversion of it.

And perhaps this is one reason I have always found such profound peace in nature.

Nature Remembers

When I return to the horses, the trees, the forest, the water, the earth, the birds, and the animals, I encounter another way of being.

There is individuality, but there is also relationship.

There is strength without the need for self-aggrandizement.

There is cooperation.

There is mutual support.

There are boundaries.

There is adaptation.

There is reciprocity.

There is harmonic resonance.

Nature does not require sameness in order to create harmony.

The tree does not need the river to become a tree.

The bird does not need the horse to become a bird.

The horse does not need the human to become a horse.

Each remains entirely itself while participating within something larger.

And perhaps this is what sovereignty actually looks like.

Sovereignty does not mean separation.

It means that I can remain fully what I am while honoring you as fully what you are.

It means neither of us needs to diminish the other in order to exist.

It means we can support one another without possessing one another.

We can guide without dominating.

We can learn without submitting our inner knowing.

We can lead through guardianship and stewardship.

We can follow without becoming less.

We can cooperate without surrendering ourselves.

And beneath it all is something I experience as divine guidance—the knowing within life itself.

Nature does not seem to have forgotten its relationship with that intelligence.

Perhaps we have.

The horse certainly has not.

And that makes me wonder whether the extraordinary reverence ancient peoples sometimes gave the horse was pointing toward something humanity once understood more deeply.

The Horse in Ancient Memory

Long before modern horsemanship existed, the horse was appearing in humanity’s spiritual imagination in extraordinary ways.

Not merely as transportation.

Not merely as property.

Not merely as an animal to be mastered.

Again and again, the horse appears beside images of the Divine, the cosmos, light, dawn, sovereignty, transformation, spiritual journey, and passage between worlds.

The traditions are different, and each deserves to be understood within its own culture. But the recurrence of the horse in these sacred images is remarkable.

One of the most beautiful examples occurs at the very opening of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad.

The horse is contemplated through the cosmos itself:

“The head of the horse is the dawn, its eye the sun, its vital force the air…”

The passage continues: heaven becomes the horse’s back, the sky its belly, the earth its hoof, the seasons its limbs, the stars its bones, the rivers its blood vessels, the mountains its organs, and herbs and trees its hair.

Think about the magnitude of that image.

Horse and cosmos are being contemplated together.

Dawn.

Sun.

Wind.

Heaven.

Earth.

Stars.

Rivers.

Mountains.

Trees.

Horse.

The boundaries between the individual being and the living cosmos begin to dissolve.

And then another Upanishad gives us a different image.

In the Katha Upanishad, the Self is the lord of the chariot, the body is the chariot, intelligence is the charioteer, the mind becomes the reins, and the senses are represented by the horses. The teaching uses this great chariot journey to speak about the path of the Self and ultimately the highest spiritual goal.

Once again:

Horse. Journey. Self.

And then we encounter the remarkable horse Dadhikrāvan in the Rig Veda.

One hymn calls this mighty steed “a guide for mortals.”

Another places Dadhikrāvan alongside Dawn and the Sun and asks:

“May Dadhikrās prepare the way we travel…”

so that humanity might travel the “path of Order.”

Another hymn associates this extraordinary horse with dawn, strength, light, truth, sky, and sacred cosmic order.

I find that profoundly beautiful.

The horse appears not simply as an animal carrying a human being from one physical location to another, but within humanity’s imagery of the path itself.

A guide for mortals.

A companion of dawn.

A being associated with light.

A figure appearing along the path of cosmic order.

The Sacred Horse

And this reverence was not limited to India.

In the Celtic and later Romano-Celtic world we find Epona, explicitly remembered as a goddess associated with horses. Archaeological collections preserve multiple representations of Epona as a horse goddess.

Elsewhere across the ancient world, horses appear drawing celestial chariots, accompanying gods and goddesses, associated with the sun and dawn, carrying heroes, and appearing in stories concerned with movement between earthly and otherworldly realms.

And I find myself asking:

Why?

Why, when human beings attempted to express the ineffable—to speak about the heavens, the Self, light, divinity, transformation, sovereignty, and passage between worlds—did the horse appear again and again?

Perhaps humanity has long sensed that the horse can carry more than our physical body.

Perhaps the horse can carry our awareness across a threshold.

Not because the horse gives us enlightenment.

Not because the horse gives us sovereignty.

And certainly not because we should replace one human authority with another authority called the horse.

Quite the opposite.

The horse brings us back to direct experience.

The horse brings us into the present.

And there, we begin remembering for ourselves.

The Horse Does Not Need Our Submission

Perhaps this is where the ancient reverence for the horse becomes especially meaningful to Pas de Cheval.

Reverence changes relationship.

If I believe the horse exists beneath me, my first impulse may be to ask:

How do I make this being do what I want?

But when I stand before another being with reverence, the question changes:

Who are you?

What can I learn from you?

What can we discover together?

How can I become worthy of your trust?

And perhaps most importantly:

How can we meet without either of us surrendering who we are?

That is not weakness.

That is not the absence of leadership.

It is a completely different understanding of leadership.

Leadership becomes service.

Leadership becomes guardianship.

Leadership becomes stewardship.

When a horse is entrusted to my care, that does not make me their ruler.

It makes me responsible for their well-being.

The same should be true whenever another life is entrusted to us.

That is the leadership I see reflected in the relationship I want with my horses.

Not:

You are beneath me, therefore you must obey me.

But:

I have accepted responsibility for your well-being, therefore I must become worthy of your trust.

That is a very different kind of power.

Perhaps it isn’t power at all.

Perhaps it is responsibility.

Returning to the Field of Presence

And this brings me back to where Pas de Cheval began.

Not with technique.

Not with equipment.

Not with obedience.

Not with dominance.

With relationship.

The horse is a sovereign being.

And so am I.

Neither of us needs to surrender that sovereignty for communion to become possible.

In fact, perhaps true communion is possible precisely because neither one of us does.

This is why presence comes before technique.

It is why I have begun thinking of this practice not as zeroing out, but as Entering the Field of Presence.

The Field is the present moment.

The place beneath yesterday and tomorrow.

Beneath expectation.

Beneath judgment.

Beneath the need to control an outcome.

It is the open place of possibility in which horse and human can actually discover one another.

The word Field carries another beautiful resonance for me as well. Lynne McTaggart has written about The Field in connection with the zero-point field—an underlying field of connection and possibility. That language has always resonated with my own experience.

And, of course, there is the simplest meaning of all:

A field is where horses live.

An open field.

Nothing confined.

Nothing predetermined.

Room to move.

Room to listen.

Room to discover.

Room to choose.

Room for another being.

Before I ask the horse to meet me, I enter the Field of Presence.

And perhaps that is also what nature continually invites us to do.

Pas de Cheval — The Dance of Remembrance

So perhaps Pas de Cheval is not really about creating something new.

Perhaps it is about returning to what is natural.

To relationship without possession.

Leadership as guardianship.

Stewardship rather than domination.

Individuality without separation.

Strength without force.

Communication beyond words.

Mutual respect.

Cooperation.

Harmonic resonance.

Sovereignty within communion.

And reverence for life.

The horse does not need to teach us a new doctrine.

The horse does not ask us to exchange one authority for another.

The horse simply embodies what they are.

And when we become quiet enough to stand beside that authenticity without attempting to dominate it, something within us can begin to recognize itself.

Perhaps that is why these magnificent beings have appeared beside humanity for thousands of years—in our lives, our art, our sacred stories, our images of the cosmos, and our journeys toward the Divine.

Perhaps the ancients were recognizing something that we are being invited to remember.

The horse is sovereign.

Nature is sovereign.

And so are we.

Not sovereign over one another.

Sovereign with one another.

Different expressions of life capable of meeting in harmony without becoming less than what we are.

And perhaps this is the deepest meaning of the dance.

Pas de Cheval begins with two beings.

Horse and human.

Neither above.

Neither beneath.

Neither required to disappear into the other.

Both listening.

Both present.

Both fully themselves.

Until communication becomes connection.

Connection becomes relationship.

Relationship becomes communion.

And somewhere within that communion, we remember that we were never separate from nature, from life, or from the Divine in the first place.

The horse does not give us our sovereignty.

The horse helps us remember it.