Some mares have a knack for getting into a person’s head. A few can push mental chess games from opening move to checkmate in a single encounter. Diva is one such prodigy.
A gorgeous bay Morgan, Diva, she has been nicknamed, embodies her moniker. She packages Beyonce’s Lemonade persona in a Japanese animae wrapper—all glossy black hair and oversized eyes that gleam with reflected light—as effective as a spider’s web for catching riders unaware.
As of last week, I’d been stuck riding Diva for months. No matter what I did or didn’t do, Diva reacted to being paired with me (or with anyone, really) by chomping on the crossties, kicking at me while I groomed her, and nipping my butt as I picked her feet.
Charming.
Those behaviors and a talent for recognizing the moment my mind drifted—a perfect opportunity to implement her own agenda—made me dread finding out each week which horse I’d ride for my lesson.
But two quotes I came across recently spun my perspective 180 degrees, revealing the gift Diva offered if I was willing to accept it: She got me out of my head.
I, like many other academics and eating disorder sufferers, tend to over-intellectualize. We get lost in abstract arguments inside our heads “instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of [us] . . . what is going on inside of [us]” (Wallace 310). Most eating disorders, after all, begin with ignoring bodily signals, such as hunger pangs. Over time, an eating disorder can erase a person’s ability to detect, much less decode, her body’s signals, even when she wants to.
Intellectualizing appeals by offering a protective coating, a stiff chocolate exterior to encase our soft-serve core. It tricks us into thinking we’re shielded from the fray. But like its sweet dairy counterpart, intellectualizing in excess has a numbing effect. It drags us from the present and casts us as spectators who comment on life instead of experiencing it, who look down from the pressbox instead of playing on the field. Academic and writer David Foster Wallace, whom I quoted above, warned how easily intellectualizing can become our default. And he knew of what he spoke. He succumbed to its numbing effect, committing suicide in 2008.
Centuries before Wallace talked about intellectualizing at a college commencement ceremony, Buddhist monks recognized its peril: It impeded enlightenment. To combat its distraction, they developed Zen Koan, riddles or “paradoxical inquiries to jolt their disciples out of the habitual thought processes of reason into states of sudden intuitive understanding” (Kohanov 59). Zen Koan cracked open disciples’ outer shells, brought their attention back to the present and its capacity for connecting them to them to creation. In other words, Zen Koan got disciples out of their heads.
Of course my mind scooped up ice cream when seeking a metaphor for intellectualizing. A teenage desire to subsist on intellect alone, to whittle my body away to nearly nothing, blossomed into an obsession with mind over matter. Goodbye and good riddance to the body’s pesky demands, its confusing urges! Intellect kept everything tidy, manageable, tucked into categories and defined by sharp black lines.
But my body proved a formidable foe. The further I pushed its deprivation, the harder it snapped back. I descended into a pendulum of starving and binging.
To heal, I had to get out of my head.
Therapy via The Emily Program helped, but horses proved a surprisingly effective Zen Koan. Linda Kohanov, author of The Tao of Equus, explains that the most basic challenges riders face “stem from the fact that a horse’s natural reaction to stimulus is often exactly opposite how human beings are conditioned to respond” (69). Like Buddhist riddles, horses jolt people out of their heads and put them back in their bodies.
That’s certainly true of Diva. She forces me to stay in the moment—if for no other reason than to prevent her from misbehaving in dangerous ways. More constructively, she compels me to remain conscious, in the moment, aware of what she’s doing, what I’m doing, and how our actions mesh.
Horses communicate with their bodies: nuzzling, nodding, nudging, nipping, and, when required, kicking. The tilt of an ear, the twitch of a flank, the swish of a tail—each speaks volumes. To “hear” what it says, I have to be paying attention.
To interact with horses, I have to learn their language; to ride, I have to speak it. On horseback, I communicate intent through my core, my seat, my lower leg. Reins telegraph messages from the horse’s mouth to my fingers, and vice versa.
Harnessing the power of a 1000-pound animal draws my focus from how my body looks to what it can do.
Jumping fences on horseback offers a rush of pleasure that to replicate, requires caring for my body. It turns obsessing about my body’s size and shape to maintaining its strength and stamina. It changes food from stressor to resource: protein that builds muscle, iron that forms red blood cells, fat that fuels my brain.
Diva isn’t just teaching me how to ride, she’s teaching me how to live.