Drumming for Horses

This post is from Pam Jeffers. Please visit her site

http://www.naturalfreedomohio.com

My husband had attended a spiritual and renewal retreat for his own
personal growth. This retreat offered an element of making your own
drum. Upon his return from the retreat, he had come out to the barn to
share. We often mix our interests, as his first love is not the horses
as it is for me. Anyway, he was sitting in the aisle intently drumming.
On our farm, I try to offer the horses as many choices as possible, one
of them being the choice to come into a stall in the morning or evening
depending on the time of year, and the choice to leave and go back out
into the 70 acre field. On this day, as every other day, I closed the
front barn doors and opened the back doors that lead to the field. My
husband continued to drum and was obviously in his own world, enjoying
his new drum. I was dumbfounded as to what happened next. The horses
literally created a line in the aisleway, each horse, in turn, stopping
by my husband for approx. 30 sec. each, then moved on, but not out into
the field. They entered a stall until there was space to re-enter the
line, circling through for several rotations before proceeding to the
field.

As you can imagine, this led to some very interesting conversations
among the two of us. Conversation about why they had this reaction. At
first we thought it was the rhythm, however after other drumming times
with them we have since come to the conclusion that it is not this, but
rather the inner state of being of the person that is drumming. We have
played around with various different scenarios with our own family, not
clients. We have been out in the field with the herd and passed the
drum around with each of our family members given a chance to explore.
Depending on the person drumming, different horses have left the herd to
join us in our family “drumming circle.”

The last time we played around with the drum and the horses my husband
had had a rough day. He was sitting in the same place as usual, but
you could tell he was forcing the drumming, not flowing as usual. The
horses were unusually restless. the horse I was grooming started to
become fidgetty in the cross ties, the one boarded horse in the barn was
cribbing, one was pawing on the stall doors and another was circling. I
remember thinking they are trying to tell me they are ready to go out
and I started finishing up with the horse I was grooming. All of a
sudden, there was a shift in the barn and all the horses activity
stopped. The heads went low, soft eyes, udder silence… I looked over
and paid more attention to the drumming and it sounded different. My
husbanded noted later that he had a hard time getting into the drumming,
that he was forcing it and drumming from his head, not his heart in the
beginning, but finally got there later.

Our conlusion: It does not matter what rhythm, whether it is soft or
loud, fast or slow, etc. The horses reactions have shown us, once
again, our inner state of being on any given moment. This has led us
to have a better understanding on the effects of the various states of
consciousness on ourselves, others and our surroundings.

Has anyone else had similiar experiences?

Peace,

Pam Jeffers
Natural Freedom LLC