Whole Horse | Slow training + Deep listening with Elsa Sinclair

The Whole Horse Podcast with Alexa Linton

In our second Whole Horse podcast of season 4, Taming Wild's Elsa Sinclair takes us on a journey into her potent year with her two stallions, and stars of her in-progress documentary Taming Wild Evolution, particularly Atlas, who has been a teacher of epic proportions and tiny ones too. Elsa shares how Freedom Based training, which she fondly refers to as the slowest training method in the world, is evolving even more, and growing in nuance and subtly, with the help of Atlas, a stallion with a deep freeze response and a big heart. It's always an honour and pleasure to have Elsa on the podcast, sharing her wisdom and the wisdom of her herd. Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

What is Freedom Based Training? Perhaps the best way to explain it is to break it down: Training is the art of developing toward an end goal. Freedom is the ability to make the right choices for you in any given situation. Freedom Based Training embraces the paradox of these two ideas – freedom and training. To do this we develop depth of relationship and width of skill in a balance, using passive leadership instead of dominant leadership.

Elsa Sinclair is a professional horse trainer and instructor who brings to the horse world a unique and powerful perspective. Gathering together awareness from a variety of equine disciplines, Elsa has an enthusiasm for developing human ~ equine partnerships to fully enjoy the process of learning and growing in the direction of their goals. Elsa draws on a long and diverse history with horses as she travels now through her latest adventure of Taming Wild. What if horses were given a choice? Would they let us ride them? Without force or tools to control and without bribes to lure them? Elsa asked the questions, embarked on a project to find out and ultimately filmed a movie about the process. What started as simple questions, birthed the movie Taming Wild, an online course for those interested in learning Freedom Based Training, and a following of people who seek their own answers in what it takes to work more collaboratively with horses.

Find out more about Elsa and her work at www.tamingwild.com.

Enjoy!