The Whole Picture
Hello, my name is Harmony Carter and I am the Equine daughter of Suzanne Carter. I am an 1100 pound Thoroughbred, grand-daughter of the famous, Secretariat. Yes! That is true. However, I never raced. Though I was born into a bloodline that created magnificent race horses, my soul mission included something more important than being a horse that humans could watch run. My human owners wanted me to race but I wound up with a knee injury during my training and so I was to be a brood mare. However, after breeding 2 champions, I lost a baby at birth and my human owner at the time could not deal with the grief so decided I should move to the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation. This was very upsetting to me. Not only did I lose my 3rd baby but I felt I was just “discarded” because my owner could not handle the loss and I was moved to another place to live.
I am calling this gift, the Whole Picture because the humans in my life failed to look at the whole picture of who I am. My original owners were sorely disappointed when I could not be a racer and gave me away. My next owners decided I could only be a brood mare but when a problem occurred, they also gave me away.
At the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, (known as TRF), they did not know what to do with me and thought, well she is a horse with a famous pedigree; maybe she can become a jumper. My knee issue came up again, and finally, they began looking at the bigger picture, that is there was something far greater I could do and be rather than just a horse who runs, jumps and makes champions. The whole picture about horses is our amazing ability to understand humans and to almost “psychically” perceive their feelings even when they are out of touch with them. Horses are here on earth for many more reasons than just to race or be ridden.
We are actually very good “therapists”, and finally there is a field emerging that lets us be co-therapists with a human therapist. This field is called, “Equine Assisted Psychotherapy”. (Ask Suzanne for more information about this).
At TRF, they decided to let me finally begin fulfilling my true soul passion, that is to help humans become more aware of their feelings and intuition, and I was to become a Therapy horse.
This is how Suzanne and I finally got united (or actually, re-united, but that is another story).
However, it took the humans at TRF a couple of years to figure this out, and in the mean time I was in deep grief about the loss of my baby and even more about the loss of my human caretaker.
The humans did not get the whole picture about horses having grief, however, and they mostly just figured I needed to spend time in a stall. This was ghastly for me. I was all alone and left in a tiny room with 4 walls. I have heard that this is how many humans deal with their own grief and this nearly killed me. However, in my determination to not die of grief, I found a way to help distract me from my pain. I developed an addiction much like a human will develop an addiction rather than deal with their own painful feelings after a loss. My addiction is called “cribbing” in the horse world. I anchor my teeth on a fence, and then breathe in deeply. Because of my huge race horse lungs, I get a rush as big as a race horse. This deep inhalation stimulates endorphins and wham I have a natural high. However, it is a serious addiction.
The tragic thing about this addiction, however, is that most humans who see me doing my addiction fail to see the whole picture.
They see me cribbing and just tell Suzanne to just give up on helping me heal this serious problem. However, my human mommy does see the whole picture: She sees me as the ONE I have come her to be and she and I are working together to help me heal this addiction. One way we heal this is to see humans with problems and as I help them, it enables me to move past this addiction.
In closing, perhaps you can see why my gift is called, THE WHOLE PICTURE. It seems that humans have failed to see all aspects of themselves and all other creatures. It seems that when someone has a problem, that person is seen as the problem rather than a person with a problem. So I invite you to be willing to start seeing the Whole Picture. It begins with a willingness to see with your heart and your mind. One reason I am so good at this is because my Grandpa Secretariat had a HUGE heart. (When he died, they looked at his physical heart and it was one of the biggest horse hearts ever!) Of course his heart helped him win races, but his “heart-genes” have been passed down to me to use this heart capacity spiritually. I invite you to start seeing the whole picture today by using your heart to see the truth.