Updates updates!

I know I haven't kept up with blogging very well, but I have been out with Gingy almost every day for the last few weeks.  That's part of the reason that I haven't been blogging much, I been spending so much time down at the horses hehe. 

Over the last few weeks I've gone through a rather tough time.  I saw a tee-shirt in a magazine the other day that said, "my therapist lives in a barn."  That is so true.  Gingy in his own way has been helping me to work through some things that I've always struggled with, such as the fact that I am good and bad.   You wouldn't think that being able to accept one's human-ness would be so hard, but I'm convinced that that is the thing I struggle with the most.  I always see myself as perfect or worthless and nothing in between.  When I can't do something to my satisfaction, feelings of worthlessness come over me and I get really down on myself.  The problem is that I don't often do things to my satisfaction because I have a high standard for myself and a low standard for everyone else.  Since I expect a lot more out of myself than I expect of anyone else it always makes me feel like I just don't measure up when in truth it's just that I don't measure up to "my" expections.  It's good to have goals and it's good to push yourself sometimes, but you have to be fair with yourself and not go off of a picture that is out of perspective.  These are the things that are finally sinking into me.  The thing is that as I was working through all of this, I was also working with Gingy and he was the one that helped me the most to break the negative patterns I had set with myself.  Almost every time I came down to work with him he would test and challenge me from the beginning to the end of the session.  Up to this point I have usually tended to go into my patterns of negative thinking when Gingy is testing me like that, but I finally made a stand this week and chose not to do that.  Instead of telling myself, "you're worthless and incapable and your ruining Gingy."  I told myself(and Gingy), "we can do this, I'm not worthless, I know what to do, I'm not ruining Gingy we're learning together."  It was painfully hard to tell myself positive things instead of the negative things I was used to believing, but now that I have done it successfully several times the positive thinking is beginning to become a pattern for me.  Of course there will be more tough times to go through, but for now I am enjoying fully the feeling of conquering my inner challenges.

As to what Gingy and I have actually been working on, most of it has been riding stuff.  We've done so much liberty and online over the last few months that I thought it would be good to work on some riding.  Gingy was pretty rusty and that was the main reason that he was so helpful as my "therapist" because it was pretty frustrating most of the time trying to remind him of what he had learned at Trevor's last year.  His lateral flexion or neck-bending was almost non-existent so we had to work on that quite a bit and he was pretty difficult about bending when we were riding on a circle.  I'm happy to say that we have worked through those two things and he is now a lot softer. 

Well, stay tuned for more consistent updates in the future!