The Noise: On Horse Training Online and the Art of Slowing Down

There was a period, not that long ago, when I was consuming more horse training content than I was spending time with my horse. Videos before bed. Podcasts on the drive to work. Comment threads I would get pulled into at eleven o’clock at night, watching two strangers argue about whether a specific rein contact was softness or evasion.

I told myself I was learning. I probably was, a little. But I was also getting progressively more tangled.

Because here is the thing about the internet and horse training: there is so much of it, and almost all of it contradicts something else. Every clinician has a method. Every method has a following. Every following has an argument with every other following, and if you are a conscientious horse person who genuinely wants to do right by your horse, you will try to hold all of it at once. You will find the common threads. You will build a framework that honours every approach.

And then you will go out to the paddock and have no idea what to do.

I have been that person. I returned to horses after a long time away, and I thought education was the answer. In some ways it was. But at a certain point, the more I consumed, the less present I became. I was not with my horse. I was with the version of my horse that some expert would assess on camera. I was watching myself from the outside, running a checklist, trying to remember the right response before I had even fully noticed what was happening.

What pulled me out of it was not finding the right method. It was stopping, for a moment, and asking a simpler question: what is actually happening here, right now, between me and this horse?

That question did not come from a video. It came from slowing down.

I think a lot of us are hungry for that slowing down. I think we are tired, actually. Tired of the noise, tired of the debate, tired of feeling like our horsemanship is always one clinician away from being right. And I think the antidote is not better content. It is different content. Slower content. Content that is not trying to teach us a technique but is instead inviting us to pay attention.

That is why I created EquiMail.

It is a physical letter that arrives at your door once a month. Not a course. Not a program. Just a letter, written by me, exploring one theme in horsemanship from the inside out. The kind of reflection that does not fit in a video. The kind of question that does not have a comment thread. Each edition comes with a practical exercise to take back to your horse and reflection prompts to carry with you through the month.

It is slow and screen-free, and it belongs just to you and your horse.

I created it because I could not find it anywhere else. The horsemanship content I was looking for did not exist in a form I could hold in my hands. So I made it.

My hope is that it sits on your kitchen bench and waits for you. That it does not have a notification. That you read it with a cup of tea and then take it out to the paddock with a slightly different quality of attention.

If that sounds like something you have been wanting, I would love to send you one. A new letter goes out on the first of each month. You can find out more about EquiMail at equikinder.com.au/equimail.

I would love for it to land in your mailbox.