I have always protected my heart.
And if I am honest, I learned how to do it the same way many horses do.
When emotions hit hard, fear, grief, frustration, they arrive all at once, overwhelming and unmanageable. Horses feel this too. They do not ration emotion. They experience it fully, in their bodies, in their breath, in their feet.
I never learned what to do with those feelings.
So I learned to brace against them.
Horses do the same.
A young horse meets pressure he does not understand and he tightens. He locks his jaw. Sets his neck. Holds his breath. The first wall goes up quietly. Over time, those walls get reinforced. What was once softness becomes rigidity. What was once confusion becomes resistance.
From the outside, it can look like strength.
A horse that does not spook much.
A horse that does not react.
A horse that “takes pressure.”
But anyone who has spent enough time with horses knows the truth.
A braced horse is not a strong horse.
He is surviving.
I rebuilt my own walls the same way. Every time the flood came, I gathered the pieces and rebuilt stronger than before. Where there had been flexibility, I chose stone. I told myself this was discipline. Emotional control. Maturity.
But stone hearts, human or horse, do not bend.
And what does not bend eventually breaks.
The cost was not just numbness to pain. It was numbness to everything. I could still laugh, still cry, still feel compassion, but over time I lost the ability to name what lived underneath. The signals were there. I just could not hear them anymore.
This is where horsemanship becomes sacred ground.
Because horses cannot be trained through walls.
You cannot soften a horse while asking him to stay braced. You cannot ask for true balance, collection, or willingness from a body that is armored against feeling. The release, the real one, only comes when the brace dissolves.
When God found me, cracks began to appear in my heart.
I say found intentionally. I was not looking for Him. I was not searching. And yet He came anyway, patient and precise, working on a timeline far wiser than my own.
The vulnerability that followed was terrifying.
It still is.
Only now, as I make my way back, can I begin to see the patterns that have been present all along. The parallels I lived inside of before I had language for them. The truths that were being shown to me long before I understood how to receive them.
The first exhale after holding breath too long.
The lowering of the neck.
The lick and chew.
The quiet moment when the feet stop rushing and the mind comes back online.
These moments have always mattered. I simply see them differently now.
I also know this. Walls are easy to rebuild. Horses rebuild them. People do too. One good session does not undo years of protection. One breakthrough does not guarantee tomorrow’s softness.
So the work must be daily.
With my horses, I do not ask for submission. I ask for softness. I do not force the wall down. I wait for the crack. And when it comes, I honor it. I release. I breathe. I let the horse discover that openness does not mean harm.
With my own heart, I pray the same way.
Every day I ask the Lord to break my heart open.
Every day I ask Him not to let it harden again.
God did not use horses to save me.
He saved me because He is God.
But through horses, I have been given a language. A way to recognize what openness looks like. A living reminder of what happens when pressure is met with patience, when fear is met with release, when a heart is allowed to stay soft.
I believe there is a point of no return for both horses and humans. A moment when the brace becomes permanent. When the heart fossilizes into something that resembles life but no longer responds to it.
God found me before I crossed that line.
And now, as I continue this work, I carry both truths with me. That salvation belongs to God alone. And that horsemanship, done well, is one of the clearest mirrors I know for what it means to live with a heart that remains open.
That is the horsemanship I believe in.
And that is the prayer I carry into the arena every day.