Mirroring Emotions to Elicit Change--draft

I have been playing with the idea of matching and mirroring energy with the horse that I interact with lately and have had some very interesting results. Stormy's story is one of the examples of what happened as we developed and refined this idea. I will continue to add more chapters, about different horses and about Stormy's progression as they develop.

My ideas are a distillation of several concepts as follows:
Emotions are energy in motion (from quantum physics)
Linda P.'s idea that the more extroverted a horse is, the more we need to increase our own energy
Horses are emotional creatures, therefore very sensitive to energy and changes in energy
Harmony feels better than disharmony
Comfort is the #2 motivation for horses--after safety and before play and food.
The concept of feel
"Get with the horse, so the horse can get with you"
"It's the release that teaches"

I have many ideas about why this is working. I think that there may be several layers of understanding occurring here. So far, these ideas are as follows:

1. From quantum physics, we have the concept that energy is comprised of different wavelengths traveling at different speeds. So when we have two waves that are a similar size, they will join together to make one bigger wave. So this would increase the emotion in the individual and create harmony at that increased level. Two dis-similar waves either repel each other or cancel each other out. From the point of view of what this would feel like, I am guessing that this is when we feel dis-harmonious and it feels "icky".
   
   So a horse starts to get tense (intense with their energy), if we can increase our intensity of energy to join in with theirs, then we will start to create rapport because the horse will feel the contrast from the moment before when you weren't in harmony and now you are, so it feels better.
   
   So now we have both the horse and the human at a high, intense level of energy; which feels better than having the horse intense and the human low key. But as the horse and human stay at that level of intensity, it is going to start to get old. Then the horse will finally offer to calm (slow) his energy down some. At this point, the human matches by slowing their energy down and decreasing their intensity. So the horse is still feeling harmony, which feels good and now they are approaching a comfortable spot with their emotions and relaxation. Eventually the horse and human arrive at a relaxed, comfortable spot with their emotions and they are in harmony. This feels good to both the horse and the human (but especially the horse because they are so sensitive to this stuff).
   
   Later, after this language of energy matching has been established, the human can use it to "remind" the horse that it feels better to be calm and in harmony rather than intense and in harmony.
   
2. In some cases, the horse's motivation to use intense emotions is coming from a place of wanting to control the situation (be dominant). If this is the case, then the human matching, mirroring and not releasing until the horse calms down helps to break the pattern where the horse may have taught the human to not step out of line (the line that the horse determines) by threatening to become scary and emotional. Kind of like the toddler who has learned the science of the temper tantrum.
3. The leader in the herd determines the overall emotional state of the herd. So by matching and mirroring but then continuing to match until the horse relaxes, we are letting the horse take that leadership role temporarily, but then we are determining where the release is. So in this way, we take the leadership role through the "back door" in a way the horse doesn't even realize it is happening. By the end of the interaction the horse is feeling better because of the harmony, and they are feeling clearer about the horse to human hierarchy too, so they feel better overall.

I have had a few questions that I have been pondering as I explore this whole thing. One of them is whether this would be considered micro-managing the horse's emotions or not. I know that Pat P. says that he doesn't micro-manage a horse's emotions. But I also feel that if we don't have tools to help us calm the horse down when he needs it, then the horse ends up spending a lot of time practicing the "wrong" thing. In the past, I have tried matching and mirroring via only the physical means. This was my understanding from the parelli material. So when a horse would go RBE, then I would ask them to go further and faster than they had planned. If I saw the slightest change, I would release. But with that level of understanding and execution, what was happening was that the horse would stop when I stopped and usually drop their head and lick their lips AFTER I had stopped moving them around like a lunatic. But during all of this my energy was a pretty even keel--as in, I was doing what it took to keep them moving at high speed and doing a lot of direction changes and stuff, but I was keeping my emotions and therefore my energy in check. Over time, I observed that this technique didn't create very big changes very fast.

So then I thought about the idea that it is the release that teaches and decided that I needed to keep the horse moving until they made a change in the right direction. This worked better, but still took awhile to get the change.

Once I decided to start mirroring the horse's energy with my own energy, then I started to see big changes happen really quickly. So, because I am only using my energy to accentuate the horse's energy so that they can better notice how it feels and be more motivated to not only make a change but to also not want to "go there".