We were excited when Julia came to visit. She had come to teach us her Two-Step Technique for calming the mules. Julia has an intimacy with equines that most of us will never know. From their little cabin in North Carolina, she and Bernie ride their mules to no place in particular. Often relying on the kindness of strangers for dinner and a place to stay, they ride through the woods, down multi-lane highways, and across bridges where the Highway Patrol stops traffic. She writes, “Being a little bit cold and little bit hungry” makes you appreciate life.
So, we were excited, but not hopeful when Julia came. Ours were not the battle-bred mules of cross-country rides. Rather, they were couch potatoes, bordering on being feral, not working a day in the last ten years, and not particularly interested in anyone not bringing them treats.
In her method, the key aspect is to act like a lead herd animal and to transmit to them, through a combination of “being and seeing,” that all is right with the world. Sounds simple. It’s not. Most of us have too much going on in our heads to be truly calm. Mules can hear a heartbeat more than twenty feet away, and when we pretend to be calm, we’re not fooling them.
So the key is to bring your heartbeat down on a scale of 1-10, to as low as you can go, by focusing on something in the paddock. As you do this, and this is a unique part of Julia’s process, you acknowledge what’s going on with your equine, because, as Julia points out, the process is like pouring clean water into a dirty vessel. All the debris, in this case past traumas, will come to the surface first.
She began with Raven, who fidgeted, licked, and itched just as she had predicted, letting out all the trauma before finally yawning, exaggeratedly, uncontrollably, and settling into a peaceful trance. Somehow her body now seemed longer than before. Merle too, blind in one eye, did the same, itching, licking, yawning, and settling into a trance. The whole process had taken not more than half an hour. We stopped, the five of us, two mules and three humans, a small herd, just standing there listening to the breeze.
