After multiple "Divine Timing Delays," Beloved Horse Sunny launched my Cutting Horse career March 2, 2002 with Partnership, Growing Respect & Knowing Care..... Despite an unexpected fever & somewhat precarious physical state on my part, freezing temperatures & super long day / night plus muddled messaging on my part to him (ooops..... you can see it in the 1st run shown in the video!)  ~ BUT ~ We pressed on & our partnership started taking shape.....  All the efforts I had put in up to that point personally, for him & for us together mattered!!  Joint Determination & Team Work brought Success that night, despite some obstacles .....foreshadowing more Good Stuff to come.....

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I wasn't up to doing the level of Energy Work I was already accustomed to doing to help support Sunny & myself this day!  I had to TRUST that all I / we had done so far was enough & to just go for it, focus as much as we could focus, have as much fun as we could have, see what we needed to see about ourselves & learn what we could learn..... do as much as I needed to do for him & let him do what he needed to do for me.  I had waited darn near a lifetime to finally get to do this & made up my mind to approach it as competing against myself more than anything.  I took that approach each work with my trainer & made that a clear focus going forward in the show pen..... Learn SOMETHING, SOME HOW each time & intend to "compete with myself" each time to better it.  Sunny did some real heroics in our 1st run, but I botched things so much that I couldn't bring myself to include that part of the video ;-) It wasn't representative of us..... scrambled energies embarking upon our new path that we apparently had to get through & past, which is the way things are sometimes.  I still made ugly beginner type mistakes in these 2 runs but I also made some good cuts & did some good riding, that helped garner our coveted successes!  You can see by my riding in the 2nd run in parts that I'm doggedly hanging on by threads here & there, a  wonky mixture of true exhaustion & spikes of adrenaline coming through anyway to help.  (I did all the warm up & prep with Sunny myself before competing each class, behind the scenes of the 2.5 minute runs you see here..... which was a lot of work.)  We marked very respectable & happy 72's..... And were it not for the "why did I do that!?!" last second 1 point reining penalty at the end of our last run, we would have theoretically marked a 73..... which would have been fantastic.....That's cutting!  Work to keep it clean, don't take yourself out of the game with the simple stuff you can learn to master, as the big crazy stuff will likely test you & your horse..... as it should..... so you can gauge where you're at..... That's also a good life lesson I use!!

The Intuitive / Healing Energy Back Story ☆ I learned pretty darn quickly that cutting will reveal things about yourself, your personality, how you're operating, what's working well for you in your life, yourself & what's not..... Including what's hampering you, where you excel, all kinds of crazy little dynamics & energies.  It can also reveal character & lack of it in people & horses.  Lots of people don't like looking at "their stuff" & certainly don't like it thrown in their face when they thought they were going to just have fun & look good in the show pen..... But every thing we do in life is "connected" more than we think, I've learned & seen, over & over & over while on this Spiritual Path..... there are always things reflecting back to us, including messages from / via our animals.  Animals we compete with have an interesting opportunity to reflect things to us in big ways.  With Cutting, its particular complexities & the fact that it is much harder to execute than what most think, is part of why it's such an intensely great reflector, should one choose to participate in "The Learning."  This is a sport that'll make grown men wanna cry when no one is looking..... having perspective & a balanced ego are important in life & deficiencies in these areas can become glaring within the Cutting Horse purview.  I watched so many people from the very beginning of my career pitch fits, whine, argue with trainers (for all the wrong reasons) & take their ego out on their own horse, yikes!  I truly did NOT want to be that person & vowed even more to heighten my awareness.  A guy said to me once (a non-rider with a chip on his shoulder, I sensed) "Well, the horse does ALL the work & the rider JUST SITS THERE....." I replied, "You go find a trainer & a horse, take some lessons, compete at a show & get back to me on that....."  ~Silence~  Even when not actively participating, Cutting seems to reveal things about people, as many things in our lives do!  For me, some lack of self esteem (I'd been working on it, kept at it!) & levels of indecision knocked me in the practice & show pens, which I then had to tackle to new levels to do well at at all.  One thing Sunny started helping me with was Courage..... knowing new levels of it & new levels of a go for it grit, too.  Big Thanks, Sunny!!

Sunny & I had been training for some weeks. I did plenty of Energy Work to help mesh us together energetically as competitive partners, plus to ensure his physical soundness & overall well being.  I even had to work at clearing "The Pathway" via clearing others' unhelpful energies around us, for various reasons & for Protection energetically.  Sunny also received good joint supplements, etc. regularly, which I picked Intuitively, specifically for him, at each stage of the game.  Sunny was his best in some ways in our 1st run.  In my less than normal state, I neglected to let him know we were competing 3 times, which confused him a bit at first, coupled with all the people around me that night that weren't saying it but flat didn't think I'd be able to hold up & show as planned..... BUT, true to Sunny, he hung in there & supported what efforts I had in me!!  This might have been a lot to ask of him (3 runs,) yet it served as our solid foundation going forward in a way that was meant to be.  One of the take aways..... remember to communicate with your animals in important ways..... Even if you don't think you know how.  They listen & hear much more, generally, than you can imagine.  Just talk to them mind to mind & Heart to Heart or like another person!  Plus know they pick up on what's going on within your energies most all the time.  They tend to operate on the Intuitive Level just as matter of being, so "they get it," about so many more things than you might tend to think.  This night..... spurred on by the success in our 2nd run,  DETERMINED to finish STRONGLY for the night & to squeeze as much out of this opportunity as possible, I pulled it together a bit better & you can see that Sunny caught on, too, finishing stronger with me!!!!  He KNEW whatever effort HE put into it was going to be appreciated & worth it, as I stepped up my game more.  He was one of those that truly liked to go for it!  Especially if it mattered, he wanted things to count.

1 Buckle Won! Another to Come that Night!!

I had wanted to do cutting since I couldn't even remember when..... it was in the Intuitive Ethers around me & this was FINALLY my time to start diving in..... Spirit had / has made it clear, repeatedly & despite all set backs, that Cutting IS a part of MY PATH & that it matters beyond "what I could be imagining," they just now channeled to me..... This is the sort of key, life changing stuff to realize for ourselves, y'all!  Things can be catalytic in so many unexpected yet surprisingly connected ways.  Sometimes you have to hang in there long enough & well enough to end up seeing & living it.  I've also learned in many different situations that "we're not always MEANT to understand something just yet..... that there is a perspective not available just yet, that we may have things to learn, to SEE, to make things make more sense to us when they DO happen.  There IS a NATURAL FLOW to things, if we choose to allow for it, that operates things in the best ways possible for us if we let it," they just channeled to me again.  This applies to us & what we do for our animals, their own paths with us, too.....

So, participating in the cutting horse world plus the horses that has brought into my life has been & continues to be an integral part of my path forward, even when obstacles & fallow periods hit.  I've learned you NEVER really know what catalyst the smallest (or biggest) thing can turn out to be, when in the FLOW & letting it be the best it should be..... One tiny example: The trainer that ended up helping me at the beginning of my cutting career is the one who had ended up with Sunny in his barn for sale, after being passed around & not being all that particularly well thought of at the time, I gathered.  The 2nd time I tried Sunny out, we were waiting our turn for the cutting pen when Sunny dropped his head down to smell a dusty table left behind from a prior show.  He ended up blowing up a big dust cloud right up in his own face then sorta snorted in disbelief.  Chuckling to myself, I immediately heard him thinking, "I can't BELIEVE I just did that to myself!!  Did anyone see me do that?!!"  It seemed to me to be an interesting window into his personality that moment & for some nutty reason it's part of what made me realize we were meant to be together!!  Starting my cutting career with him has brought me so many gifts.  At one point while still in the beginner classes, people even started sighing or jokingly complaining to me when Sunny & I showed up!

Sunny was so Happy & Proud of Us & Our Building Partnership!  I definitely felt it & see it in him in our picture above.  I sensed he felt "lucky" somehow to be the one to get to help me, knowing this was important for me..... He understood on some level that cutting was a big thing with a big purpose for me that HE was fulfilling.  And THAT was part of HIS PURPOSE.  It often comes up with animals, mine & clients', that they want to fulfill THEIR Destiny & Sense of Purpose, tend to have issues if they're not in that space.  Sunny did his best for us at this show, all considered, & I was soooo grateful!!