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Rebecca and I love horses, and are lucky enough to share our lives with a few of these animals. The picture below might look ‘normal’ enough, but in reality, it’s quite odd.

It’s odd because what we’re seeing is a member of the world’s most deadly predator species sitting on the back of a prey species. This begs a question — how is it that a horse is allowing this? Consider that if a horse was attacked in the wild, it would often be attacked on the back or the back of the neck.

Something remarkable happens when an animal begins to associate with humans. And it’s the same thing that happens when humans associate with other humans. What happens is that ‘natural’ behavior is replaced by training. With the horse or with other animals, this is easy enough to see. After enough conditioning and trust-building, the natural behavior (fight and run if something is on your back) is replaced with the trained behavior (allow a human to sit on your back).

However, when we observe ourselves, it can be more difficult to distinguish ‘training’ from ‘natural’ behavior.

We enjoy thinking of ourselves as having free will and making our own decisions, but the more time we spend in meditation, observing the processes of our own mind, the more we see that our ‘decisions’ tend to be reactions based on belief systems, learned behavior, and conceptual models that we’ve learned — most of which remain unexamined in our psyches.

Of course, these learned behaviors aren’t all bad. Rajah’s training creates a situation where he and I can have a relationship — a relationship that I enjoy, and that I imagine he might enjoy as well. My own training as a human allows me to type this post and interact with people around the globe. Yet I find that my training left out some very important things that I wish would have been standard in school — how to find happiness in life, how to find peace in each unfolding moment, and how to dance with every circumstance of life. Even things as basic as positive human communication, understanding our own mind’s functioning, and how to fully enjoy a bite of ice cream are left out of most human training programs.

Imagine, for a moment, if school trained us how to be happy, how to recognize our passions, and how to make our wildest dreams come true. Imagine if each child learned to close her or his eyes and observe each motion of their minds. Imagine if we were taught how to recognize our own tendencies toward preconception and prejudice, and given tools to turn preconception into curiosity, and prejudice into love.

This is training that we have to pursue ourselves, often as adults. By the time we understand that something was missing from our education, however, we’re often so stuck in our patterns that things like peace, love, compassion, and awareness take second place to things like earning income, preserving our egos, and procrastinating.

This is rather strange, because discovering inner peace brings us more happiness than ten million dollars, and re-discovering our natural sense of curiosity brings more adventure than thirty trips to exotic destinations.

One of the most remarkable tasks we can apply ourselves to is to observe our own training. We do it simply by sitting quietly and watching our mind, learning to observe until we can bring this observation into our everyday lives. Then we can see our mind’s actions each time we conceptualize an object, each time we have a preference, each time we make a decision. What we discover in our own minds is astounding. Let the journey begin!