Sunday, March 27: Last day of CORE. I’m all packed and my room is cleaned up. A fellow student has offered to take me to the airport later on. It has been quite a journey!
We’ve done a lot of work in the last couple of days, a lot of pieces. As we wind down, a soon-to-be-graduated Coach takes the facilitator seat and offers to do a piece with me. She had worked with me on a geneogram on the first evening, and an interesting bit of information had bolted from my mouth just as we were finishing up:
“I’ve always been terrified of dying.”
If that isn’t every coach’s idea of a riveting subject, I don’t know what is. The reasons for fearing death are endless. Yum, yummy, YUM.
So we sit across from one another in the plastic chairs, with QT, a massive former stallion, pacing in the round pen next to us. The fact that QT is to be my equine partner in this piece isn’t lost on me; I had confessed to being intimidated by him shortly after watching him stalk into his stall on Thursday evening and look me up and down as though I was his personal plaything - and maybe not in a good way.
Coach starts asking questions and we dialogue for a while. I’m awfully calm about this dying thing, smiling even. Truth is, I’m smiling because I’m hanging real tightly onto myself. I don’t want to start blubbering when we’ve barely gotten started.
A lot of things are discussed, dialogues played out, and somewhere in all of this it becomes not so much a fear of dying as a fear of the unknown, for when I look at the vast expanse that is “over there”, it is beautiful, and the love I feel from it is overwhelming. THAT is what is so scary; opening my heart to that abundance of love and accepting it.
QT whinnies and lets us know he is ready to do some one-on-one. He’s also connected, and he wants to be part of the adventure!
I get up, take a deep breath, and with Coach clearing the way (as QT is right at the gate, so eager is he to help), I move to the center of the round pen and wait. QT checks me out from a distance and then moves in. He snuffles my hair and puts his lips on my neck. I just stand there. He is huge, and the love he is giving me, just like I felt from the vast expanse, is overwhelming.
Coach asks me to become a little girl, and to move around the round pen, being the little girl. So I start to walk around, and do a little sing-song, and QT comes right along, and then I start to dance, feeling the hugeness of love expand within me, turning in circles with my arms out wide, and grinning, and inviting this big horse to join me in the fun. QT watches with a bemused expression on his face, as though he’d like to dance, but isn’t certain which of his front hooves goes around my waist. At one point, he moves from side to side, as though matching my movements.
I feel the vastness of love sending me to a more and more joyful, childlike place. I drop to my knees, little girl like, and invite QT to me. I’m tiny. He’s immense. Slowly, he walks over and brings his head down to my level. It is a sweet, sweet moment with this monumentally confident and loving horse. When I let go of worrying, and just bask in the beauty that is in all of us, it is a feeling without measure. Total JOY. Anytime I feel fear, I can go there, being in the moment, in the love, and know that no matter what, all is well.
Ahhhhhhh.
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