Kathleen Lindley Horse Training

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in the company of horses

From the publisher, Johnson Books/Big Earth Publishing:

When Kathleen Lindley showed up at one of Mark Rashid’s horsemanship clinics, she told him that she didn’t know who he was and didn’t really care, as long as he could fix her horse. Well, something got fixed, all right, but it wasn’t her horse. From that inauspicious beginning, Kathleen became a regular student at Mark’s clinics, and seven years later he invited her to work for fifteen months as his assistant, traveling to clinics around the country and abroad helping teach a way of horsemanship that has made him one of the most popular and successful clinicians in the world.

In the Company of Horses: A Year on the Road with Horseman Mark Rashid is not simply a chronicle of those months. It is the story of a personal odyssey, a journey that helped redefine two things that are inseparable for Kathleen—horsemanship and her life.

Kathleen has lived, dreamed, and breathed horses all her life. Her mother spent her college fund on horses, and in the end, Kathleen became a professional trainer of hunter and jumper show horses. Then, at the age of 28, her life took an unexpected turn when she had a stroke. Her recovery was difficult, but as soon as she was able, she had another horse, the one she took to Mark for fixing. And, of course, what really got “fixed” was Kathleen. From her experiences teaching with Mark while learning from him, you will understand that what helped Kathleen were the horses themselves. Mark gave her a new way to look at horses, and it changed her life. This is the story of that change, as she explores topics such as confidence, softness, breathing, consistency, simplicity, and hope.

For Kathleen, horsemanship is a practice, an art, a way of life, an abiding passion. If you feel the same way, you’ll learn alongside her, as she spends a year with a master. Like Mark, she is a teacher at heart, and she uses events from the clinics she taught with Mark and her own life experiences to encourage you to solve problems by understanding the horse’s point of view.

If you’ve read Mark’s books—and you should—you’ll empathize with Kathleen as she tries to understand and apply his way of being with horses, concepts that are so contrary to traditional thinking that they are sometimes difficult to assimilate. Whether as a companion to those books or as an introduction to a new way of thinking about horses, you’ll enjoy Kathleen’s enthusiastic account of her journey.

As Mark writes in his foreword, this is more than just a horse book. It is “a testament to one woman’s commitment to her life’s work.” It provides an inside look at the hard work, struggles, and triumphs she experienced, the long hours on the road, and the friends—both equine and human—she makes along the way. Mark describes Kathleen as a superb student and a fantastic teacher and writes that he may have learned more from her than she did from him. Whether that’s true or not, the synergy of these two people is evident in this book.

From the first chapter:

   Horses are fantastical creatures, all at once beautiful, powerful, funny, charming, and frightening. It seems sometimes that the very things we love about them are the things we begrudge them. We love them for their power, yet it scares us. We want to borrow their physical freedom, while at the same time we strive to take it away. We know they're highly intelligent, but at the same time we treat them as if they were stupid. We expect them to read our minds, then deny what they find there. We praise their sensitivity, as we seek to desensitize them. Our relationship with the horse is marked with fear, awe, love, passion, and of all things, contradiction.

It is that contradiction Kathleen Lindley seeks to reconcile in In the Company of Horses.

Photo above right: Dr. Dave Siemens, Nancy Richards, Kathleen Lindley and Mark Rashid on the Moor in Devon, England 2005

Photo above left: Kathleen and Ashcroft with Mark and Mouse at Rancho Doblado outside San Diego, California 2005

to order your copy of  "In the Company of Horses"  directly from Kathleen click here