Linda Kohanov > Quotes

“take a deep breath. Keep your body fully in the present and your mind in the recent future. Don't let the past get in your way.”
― Linda Kohanov, The Tao of Equus: A Woman's Journey of Healing and Transformation through the Way of the Horse

“USE EMOTIONS AS INFORMATION. Horses use emotion as information to engage surprisingly agile responses to environmental stimuli and relationship challenges:

(a) Feel the emotion in its purest form
(b) Get the message behind the emotion
(c) Change something in response to the message
(d) Go back to grazing. In other words, let the emotion go, and either get back on task or relax, so you can enjoy life fully. Horses don’t hang on to the story, endlessly ruminating over the details of uncomfortable situations

-- from an October 30, 2013 article on the Intelligent Optimist magazine”
― Linda Kohanov, The Power of the Herd: A Nonpredatory Approach to Social Intelligence, Leadership, and Innovation

“Most people know who Pegasus is, for instance, but few realize that he was born from the blood of snake-headed Medusa immediately after she was slain by Perseus. The luminous winged stallion of the Greeks emerged from the life force of womanly wisdom in its darkest, most disturbing aspect,”
― Linda Kohanov, The Tao of Equus: A Woman's Journey of Healing and Transformation through the Way of the Horse

“Even mortal horses can lead people to secret springs of lost knowledge, and they’re fully capable of carrying the living dead, those lobotomized by the current paradigm, to a hidden realm of emotional and creative vitality, a kingdom that is indeed within us all.”
― Linda Kohanov, The Tao of Equus: A Woman's Journey of Healing and Transformation through the Way of the Horse

“As Jay Griffiths observes in her book Wild, René Descartes and the rationalists of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cultivated “a hatred of ‘enthusiasm,’ for its emotional, wild surges of knowing were too natural, too bodily, too animal. Rationalism demanded superiority to, and separation from, nature and nature’s ways of knowing.”
― Linda Kohanov, The Power of the Herd: A Nonpredatory Approach to Social Intelligence, Leadership, and Innovation

“Interestingly enough, creative geniuses seem to think a lot more like horses do. These people also spend a rather large amount of time engaging in that favorite equine pastime: doing nothing. In his book Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius, John Briggs gathers numerous studies illustrating how artists and inventors keep their thoughts pulsating in a field of nuance associated with the limbic system. In order to accomplish this feat against the influence of cultural conditioning, they tend to be outsiders who have trouble fitting into polite society. Many creative geniuses don’t do well in school and don’t speak until they’re older, thus increasing their awareness of nonverbal feelings, sensations, and body language cues. Einstein is a classic example. Like Kathleen Barry Ingram, he also failed his college entrance exams. As expected, these sensitive, often highly empathic people feel extremely uncomfortable around incongruent members of their own species, and tend to distance themselves from the cultural mainstream. Through their refusal to fit into a system focusing on outside authority, suppressed emotion, and secondhand thought, creative geniuses retain and enhance their ability to activate the entire brain. Information flows freely, strengthening pathways between the various brain functions. The tendency to separate thought from emotion, memory, and sensation is lessened. This gives birth to a powerful nonlinear process, a flood of sensations and images interacting with high-level thought functions and aspects of memory too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. These elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Researchers emphasize that the entire process is so rapid the conscious mind barely registers that it is happening, let alone what is happening. Now a person — or a horse for that matter — can theoretically operate at this level his entire life and never receive recognition for the rich and innovative insights resulting from this process. Those called creative geniuses continuously struggle with the task of communicating their revelations to the world through the most amenable form of expression — music, visual art, poetry, mathematics. Their talent for innovation, however, stems from an ability to continually engage and process a complex, interconnected, nonlinear series of insights. Briggs also found that creative geniuses spend a large of amount of time “doing nothing,” alternating episodes of intense concentration on a project with periods of what he calls “creative indolence.” Albert Einstein once remarked that some of his greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while shaving that he was prone to cut himself with surprise.”
― Linda Kohanov, The Tao of Equus: A Woman's Journey of Healing and Transformation through the Way of the Horse

“the suppression of self-interested emotion actually inhibits true connection. Peace, love, and compassion can create social disharmony when worn like masks to cover unresolved anger, fear, sadness, and depression.”
― Linda Kohanov, Riding Between the Worlds: Expanding Our Potential Through the Way of the Horse