Monty Roberts, one of our contemporaries, has discovered a language, and he calls it Equus.

Monty began to tease out this language as a boy of thirteen lying on his stomach in the dirt of the high Nevada desert. He was watching a herd of horses through his binoculars. It was summer in 1948, and he had a mission. Two missions, actually. The first, to help round up wild mustangs and bring them back to the California rodeo where he and his family earned their living, and the second, to discover a new way for man to relate to horse.

    Although barely a teenager, Monty had already packed in years of living with horses. As an infant, his mother had held him in the crook of her arm while she sat on a horse and gave riding lessons. Since two, he had been riding his own mount. At four, he had won his first show trophy. The same year, he also began appearing in what would soon be scores of Hollywood films. He was a child stunt rider, and even donned a wig to double for Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.

      But although he had many good things in his life, there was a dark side, very dark: the cruelty of man to horse, and of man to son. His father Marty was a violent man, whose temperament was well matched to the conventional way of getting a horse to accept a rider. Over eight to ten days, he systematically beat the horse until its spirit to resist was broken. Monty found this repugnant. When he was seven, the boy made a discovery—his own improvised and gentle way of getting an untrained horse to accept bridle, saddle and rider. Full of excitement, he demonstrated his technique to his father. Roberts Sr. took his son’s experimenting as disobedience and beat him with a chain, so fiercely that Monty had to be hospitalized. After the first incident, his father beat him weekly for three years, until Monty was ten, and after that sporadically until Monty was fifteen and big enough to fight back.

With this type of background, you could say that Monty Roberts had two choices: to become a bitter and violent man himself or to become a crusader for a better way. He chose the latter.

Beginning systematically during several summers as a teenager in Nevada, and continuing over a lifetime, he has, through observation and interaction, deciphered the silent body language of the horse. He has written up his story in two books: The Man Who Listens to Horses and Shy Boy. His basic message is simple: the horse is a herd animal, comfortable in a group, and frightened when alone. If you separate him from his wild herd, he feels vulnerable, and also sees you as strange and so a threat. But if you gain his trust by learning his language, he is happy to join your herd!

By employing the horse’s language, Monty has learned how to persuade a horse to accept a human rider willingly, and quickly—in about thirty minutes. He can also teach other people to do the same. Through energetic demonstrating and teaching, his work is becoming increasingly well known. Perhaps in the near future the phrase to "break a horse" will be only a haunting echo from the past, and everyone will use his kinder expression, to "start a horse."

      I am telling you this story because I find it inspiring, and because there are many  parallels with the Feldenkrais Method. The main parallel is that they are both about learning a body language, one about horses and the other about people. In both situations, certain results can be obtained through force, at great cost; but much greater, even sometimes miraculous results can be obtained by using the correct language. Also, in both cases, time must be invested in the beginning to develop observational skills. Once this price is paid, however, subsequent results come increasingly quickly and surely.

Inspiration, if you think about it, is an old-fashioned word. At the center of it is spirit, and closely connected to that breath, and all life-giving force. The person who inspires provides a deep service. For me, and I wish for you, Monty Roberts and Moshe Feldenkrais both bring that gift.