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has - Zen Mind Zen Horse, Spirituality Through Horses Ecole Article Fall 2011.pdf · Language became human's greatest gift but also its curse. We have all become entirely dependent

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Dr. Allan Hamilton is a Har-vard-trained brain surgeon and well-known horse trainer who has workedin equine-assisted experiential learn-ing for fifteen years.

His first book, The Scalpeland the Soul, won the 2009 NautilusSilver award for spiritual non-fictionthat changes the world "one book at atime." Previous winners include Eck-hart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and HisHoliness the Dalai Lama.

His latest book, Zen MindZen Horse, The Science and Spiritual-itv of Working with Horses (StoreyPublishing), was just released.

Dr. Hamilton holds profes-sorships at the University of Arizonaand also works as a script consultantfor the ABC TV series "Grey's Anat-omy" and "Private Practice."

This longtime LANA mem-ber raises Lipizzan horses on hisranch in Tucson, AZ and can bereached at [email protected].

Homo sapiens hasbeen around for a little more than two hundred thousandyears; the Equus species for four million. One became theuber predator of the whole planet and the other was the ulti-mate prey animal; no horns, no antlers, no special armorplating, just hoofs to kick and flee as fast as its powerfulframe could carry it. That strategy, along with the potentialfor domestication, has worked well for the horse. It learnedhow to live peacefully in large herds. It used an extensive,eloquent system of reading each other's body language andassiduously sifting through its environment for the least hintof predators. The horse learned to read the environment to"sense" it at a visceral, intuitive level. Naturally, the moretuned into his environment a horse was, the more likely hewas to survive and get his' genes into thenext generation. Over millions of years, na-ture selected for an exquisite prey animal,with senses tingling and the ability to surgeto dizzying acceleration in fractions of asecond.

Human biology, however, was amore recent, restless, and 'dynamic phe-nomenon. And one that would carry ourprimate ancestors in a radically different,almost diametrically opposed direction. Ouroriginal forebears were descended froman arboreal primate species that founditself trapped by an environmental shift(literally a change in the inclination of theearth axis) that caused the rich jungles ofAfrica to turn into arid savannas. They hadto make a leap of faith: cling in the treetopsof a shrinking, doomed jungle or abandon

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the trees altogether and launch themselves into the un-known of the grassland. Facing a world of unfamiliarterrain and dangers, this brave band of primates set offto wander the landscape, foraging and scavenging atfirst, but, eventually, learning to hunt, to make better kill-ing tools, and, later, to pursue in well coordinated andincreasingly lethal family bands and tribes. Theseunique conditions set the stage for our species evolvingto develop a new power. It would prove to be the mostpotent biological power evolution had ever unleashed onthe six billion year-old planet Earth; namely, language.

In a period of several hundred thousand years,the human brain had quadrupled in size from its nearestprimate relatives. A massive, convoluted surface on thebrain, called the neocortex, was the driving force behindthe exponential increase in brain size. An enormousamount of this structure became devoted to the develop-ment of language function.

The invention of language was critical to hu-mans being able to learn from preceding generationsand continue to improve weapons, dwellings, and meth-

ods of agriculture. Language became the tool for learning.All other species could only depend on the achingly slowprocess of evolution-it took more than thirty thousandyears for a single mutation to take place. But humans couldcontinually expand their data base using language. Insteadof having to evolve over thousands of generations to its en-vironment, a creature was born that could simply adapt to itsenvironment. The same species could thrive on a tropicalisland, the expanse of the desert, or the frigid Arctic. Yes, achimp may use a stick to dig out termites but one hundredthousand years later, it still had not invented the backhoe todig them out or created termite farms to permit industrialproduction.

Language became human's greatest gift but alsoits curse. We have all become entirely dependent on lan-guage. In fact, our neocortex became super-specialized sothat even more area could be devoted exclusively to lan-guage function. The left side of the brain was taken overby language function and so was our consciousness. Ourentire thought processes were translated into lanquaqe.We began to hear an internal voice-an incessantstream of our brain's cognitive chatter. Humans devel-oped an internalized individuality, what brain scientistAntonio Damasio, has termed "the autobiographical self."The left, dominant hemisphere of our brains developedan ego-a "me" inside that was distinct and separatefrom everything else.

As humanity began to spread out over the sur-face of the planet and populate all kinds of environ-mental niches, there were a few species that primitivehumans learned to domesticate. Starting about thirtythousand years ago in the fossil record, we begin to seethe bones begin to intermix more frequently with ourown. In every human dwelling in the archeological recordfrom five thousand years ago, they are there with us: thehorse. As the predatory human species developed moresophisticated dwelling and cultures, the horse fed us andcarried us.

There is a folk tale that tells of a time when hu-man beings lived in harmony with all the animals. Gradu-ally, as human language set in, human beings set them-selves apart from the other animals and began to huntthem-so far, a pretty accurate summation. As the storygoes, the animals went to the Creator to complain aboutthe predatory ways of man and the Creator made a greatearthquake come that would split the world in two, for-ever separating the humans from the rest of the animals.As the split opened up, the human beings were suddenlyafraid to be leftall alone andbegged some-any-of the ani-mals to forgivethem and joinwith them. Atthe last moment,the horsejumped acrossthe gap to standwith the hu-mans. Some ofthe first re-corded art inhistory, the cavedrawings in La-caux, France,believed to bethirty thousandyears old, werededicated tocelebrating the .3f, ••..f./exander the Great and Bucepha/us

horse.

stuff of legend, from Perseus and Pegasus, to Gandalf andShadowfax. And horses are almost synonymous with theirmasters out of the pages of history, from Alexander'sBucephalus, who carried the Macedonian king fromGreece to the farthest reaches of Pakistan, to Napoleon'slegendary Arabian mount Marengo. Napoleon's horse wasconsidered such an integral part of his charismatic image

So a profound-almost mythological-relationshiphas arisen between humans and horses. Horses are the

as a military commander that when the Emperor wasforced to surrender after the battle of Waterloo and spendthe rest of his life exiled on the island of St. Helene, hishorse was taken by his English captors to live on Britishsoil till the end of his days. When Marengo died, his skele-ton was put on display (and is to this day) in the NationalWar Museum as a reminder of the British victory over Na-poleon. In fact, one of his hoofs was made into a snuff boxas a memento by an officer of the Grenadier Guards tocelebrate their stand at Waterloo against Napoleon'sfamed and, until then, undefeated French Imperial Guard.

So why is it that humans identify so much withhorses? Why do Alexander's and Napoleon's horses seemimbued with the conquering vision of their riders? I think itcomes back to language. As a neurosurgeon and a horsetrainer, I am always impressed how the non-verbal natureof horses forces us to quiet our inner voice. We cannot uselanguage for encouragement, like we might for a dog."Here, boy! Here, boy!" will not entice a horse over a jump.We must build up the horse with our intention. We bringour enerqy to surge into his gait as he collects himself be-fore the jump and then, almost viscerally, we seem to feela release and then take flight with the horse as helaunches himself so adroitly into the air. 5

The horse seems to simply take a short cutaround our language, our inner voice, which is constantlydistracting us from connecting with the world around us.When free of language, we can relate directly, viscerallywith the horse. We do not need to understand how thehorse knows what we want, we need to feel it. Horses

. teach us that what we access by feeling is just as valid aswhat we know by reasoning.

Consider this: when we wish, as human beings,to reach a state of spiritual connection, what do we do? Ina place of worship, we might close our eyes and chant aprayer over and over. It might be a mantra that keeps usfocused on the repetition of the sounds as a way of pull-ing our minds away from our inner voice. Or it could be

.beatinq on a drum, handling beads, turning a prayerwheel. Or we might just meditate, focusing our attentionon a flame or closing our eyes and concentrating on ourbreathing. Why go to all this trouble? Because access toa spiritually connected state of mind requires us to takethe left hemisphere, with its sense of isolated self andego, "off line." The trick to developing a sense of spiritualconnection is to lose the sense of self. And that is pre-cisely what horses are best at doing.

So the next time you go out to your barn or takeyour horse out of his stall, remember: this is a masterspecies in its own right. It calls on us to partner with himat an emotional and intuitive level--beyond the reach ofour ego and the lies we tell ourselves to feed it. He seeksto guide us to join him in his world, beyond language, andbeyond the constraints of our own species' evolution.

Z f N\1 I I I D-- .••...ZENH 0 R E ", ••••••••• _,,_" •••••••• 11 __ "*_ _,....., ~-

AII~" , HAMILl""'. ""•. ' • t

•••••••• <l •• ·\if1"' ••••.• d ••• lI •••~ •..•._t_"I0-._

Dr. Hamilton's books are availablethrough the LANA Store at

www.Lipizzan.org/store.html

LANA Members receive a 10% discount

from the Lancashire Telegraph, Greet Britain

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The 140th Great Harwood Agricultural Show, May26, will be moving to a new and larger show grounds.Great Harwood is a small town in the Hyndburn district ofLancashire, England, 4 112miles north east of Blackburn.To highlight the last show at the traditional site, specialevents and exhibitions are scheduled.

These special events include:

• ferret racing,

• a Romany fortune teller,

• archery contests,

and ...

• a demonstration of Show-jumping from the Spanish Rid-ing School, with riders wearing traditional Spanish fla-menco costume, on horses of Andalucian origin.