Taoism and confidence

[rhillahorse]

I've been reading the Perfect Confidence section with interest and noticed quite a bit about setting goals.

Personally, I try not to do this and follow a more Taoist approach. From a Taoist perspective, a flaw with the western world is it's focus on goals and striving for something which you have not got. Taoists see life as a flowing river and believe you should follow your natural path along the river without trying to go against it's flow.

Does this make sense?

Of course, I understand that to progress we have to sometimes put ourselves out of our comfort zone. But I have a friend who has a difficult pony who works beautifully in the school and she gets tons of pleasure from this. But she has set herself a goal of riding him to Parkhall Hills even though he is unpredictable to hack and can bronc and bolt.

I'm just wondering if sometimes we set ourselves these goals, which won't actually give us any pleasure, and could possibly be very stressful.

What do you think?

[Catrin]

Depends on the type of goal. Someone recently was telling me how unless she won the lottery she would never be able to keep her horse how she prefered to as her job would never pay enough.

My reply was to ignore the 'I need £s to do it' focus and envisage the things that she wanted to be doing, hold onto that idea and then just let the 'Cosmos', or whatever it is, deliver.

I'm don't know too much about Taoism - mostly what my son tells me - but most of these underlying beliefs are the same: don't be concerned about the past or the future, live in the now, set your expectations high and wait for the outcome. If you let life take you along like a river, you might drift off into sidings of stagnant water or spend a lifetime going round in circles in a whirlpool. If you envisage relaxing as the current of life takes you to all the places that you would like to be. That's where your river will pass by.

[rhillahorse]

catrin said:

If you envisage relaxing as the current of life takes you to all the places that you would like to be. That's where your river will pass by.

Oooh, I like that idea Catrin!

[kpick]

I would agree with you, sometimes goals are far too steep. EG, my main goal would be to ride at badminton, but there you go, VERY steep goal, and likely wont happen.
If i make goals for myself, its small things, like..cantering a nice 20 metre circle, or..yesterday for example, i was working with a friends youngster, trying to get her to take off further away from fences rather then cat leaping them.
She did it maybe 3 times, took off more comfortably, and i ended it there, a nice short educating ride for both me and the mare.