Tenzin is the horse that changed everything for me. Many people who have had a significant transformation in their relationship with horses have a similar story. It’s quite fitting that I named him “Tenzin”, a Tibetan name which means “holder of the Dharma,” as he most certainly is a spiritual teacher, first and foremost.

Tenzin came into my life in 2018, having recently been retired from a short and unsuccessful racing career at Canterbury Downs in Minnesota. He was 5 years old at the time, and very docile and unsure of himself. He had been sitting in someone’s backyard pasture for about 6 months not doing much training, and I restarted him myself as a riding horse. I taught him the basics of jumping, cross-country, dressage, and groundwork, which all went well initially. After a kick to the face from another horse resulted in a hospital visit and a period of recovery, Tenzin pointed me in a totally new direction with my horsemanship. I discovered an entirely new world of alternative ways of relating with horses, as well as a vast set of resources for holistic healing, which we tried one by one to heal the issues resulting from the injury – bodywork, chiropractic, acupuncture, herbs, craniosacral therapy, energy work, animal communication, supplements, physical rehab methods, PEMF, homeopathics, flower essences, etc….we did it all! Eventually I learned how to use Applied Kinesiology methods (muscle testing) to check which treatments he actually wanted and needed, which significantly reduced the expense and number of things we had to continue doing.

After being pressured by the jumping trainer we were working with at the time, in 2019 I put front shoes on Tenzin because he was footsore in the arena. As time went by, he showed increasing levels of unhappiness and intolerance with the farrier visits. By 2020, he was barely able to tolerate the shoeing process at all, and the farrier put in a “hot nail” that went into the white line of his hoof, causing a major abscess. At that point I pulled the shoes, started researching natural trimming and barefoot hoofcare, and never looked back! It took a few years of working with clicker training/positive reinforcement techniques and very patient trimmers to overcome his significant trauma from that experience, but now his feet are doing amazing and have gotten even stronger since arriving in the excellent New Mexico footing. We work with Dora Hebrock now, whom we highly recommend if you are in the Santa Fe area!

Another part of Tenzin’s story is how he taught me the value of not riding. After a few years of pretty easy training and riding experiences (especially after I transitioned to bitless riding in 2019), Tenzin started to show me in myriad ways that he was no longer interested in those types of activities. He did want to continue spending time with me, doing things like liberty work, positive reinforcement training, games, long hand-walks, and lots of time just hanging out together grazing. He started helping me with determining what steps to take next in my life, and with the development of various horse-related projects. He also stepped forward as an amazing healer for other humans and participated in many sessions of energy work to help humans release trapped emotions and recover from traumas.

Once Derek came into our lives, it was clear that Tenzin wanted to primarily work with Derek moving forward, although he is still one of my primary guides and advisors. He has also been an excellent mentor for our filly, Vajra!