Even the Buddha Has a Bad Day

By Sara Kirkwood, Founder of Improve Equine  ·  June 2026

I am not writing this to apologize for myself, and I am not writing it to let myself off the hook. I am writing it to shine a light on something I haven’t been able to move — and to be honest about what my horses have been trying to teach me about it.

There is a version of the modern horseperson I have spent a long time feeling like I was failing to be. She is endlessly regulated. She is soft and kind and calm in every interaction, every minute she is with her horse. The consent-based training world I love so much can make it feel like that is the standard — that to truly partner with your horse, you have to zen all the way out and stay there.

But I am simply not that person.

I have a full set of emotions, I get frustrated, and when that happens I will yell. I carry a lot of shame around that, and I have carried it for a long time without being able to set it down.

Where The Shame Comes From

I don’t think the shame makes much sense without saying where it comes from even though it’s the part I’d rather not put in writing. I came up in the ask/tell/demand world of horsemanship. Threats and posturing were the outfit of the day. Making yourself bigger was expected. Using a horse’s fear as leverage was so normalized that I didn’t have a name for it as anything other than training. And I have said things to horses, in that frame of mind, that I am not proud of.

There was a day, years ago, with a horse who didn’t want to cross water. That is one of the most reasonable fears a horse can have — they can’t see the bottom of it, they can’t tell how deep it goes, and they are built from the ground up to protect their own footing. And in that moment I told him he should be more afraid of me than he was of that puddle. More afraid of me than he was of his own instinct.

If I said that to a person, people would look at me like I was a monster. If I said it to a child, it would be unforgivable. And, by my definition, that is abusive. It is not the horsewoman I want to be. I am not writing it to indict anyone else who was handed the same playbook I was — I have more than enough on my own plate without reaching for somebody else’s, and the last thing I want is for someone still standing where I once stood to read this, feel judged, and shut the door. I’m writing it because the things I’m most ashamed of seem to lose some of their grip on me when I bring them into the light and actually look at them straight on.

The Untangling

I don’t have to throw all of my fifty years with horses. I have good timing and good instincts. I can read a horse across a field and tell you what is about to happen before it happens. None of that is the abuse. That part is valuable, and I get to keep it. What I’m not doing is tearing the whole thing down to the studs and starting over. It’s more an untangling — keeping what serves, adjusting what doesn’t, and continuing in the direction I actually want to go.

The yelling is where it gets complicated, because not all of it is the old playbook… some of it is just me being a person who got frustrated. My two-year-old, Tae, will decide to deconstruct the barn down by rubbing his backside against it, and I will lose my patience and snap at him, and there is nothing strategic in that at all. It isn’t fear as a tool but more the version of a tired human at the end of a long day. I have spent an enormous amount of energy judging myself for even that — for getting angry, for getting irritated, for not being the endlessly soft person from the opening. That self-judgment, even more than the yelling itself, is the object in the way of my growth.

What My Horses Actually See

What changed how I see it happened during a lesson. My student was here for one of our last sessions, working on fascia with Lorilei — a mare who came to me with very little confidence in people, the kind of horse who goes over threshold fast and you better be paying attention when she does. While they worked, Tae started in on the barn again, and I yelled at him.

And then I stopped, because I had one of the most sensitive horses in my barn standing right there, and I wanted to know what I had just done to her. So I asked my student: what did Lorilei do? Did she flinch? Did she get upset when I raised my voice? And my student looked over at her and said no — she just lifted her head to see what was going on, and then went back to what she was doing. That was the whole of it. The most reactive horse in my barn heard me at my least regulated and decided it wasn’t worth more than a glance.

Wick shows me a quieter version of the same thing all the time. He’ll have a day where he’s feeling nonchalant and decides to revisit our agreements, and I’ll get exasperated, and he’ll push it right up until the second I actually mean it — and then he’ll put a little hustle on it, and we move on. He isn’t wounded by it. He doesn’t carry it into the next session. For him, the rupture and the repair happen almost in the same breath, and then it is simply over.

The Herd I Came From

Elsa Sinclair said something in a recent Noelle Floyd podcast and I have been chewing on it ever since.

She was talking about horses, but when I sat with it, I realized she was describing me. I was raised, in a sense, in a dysfunctional herd. Now I am trying to integrate into a healthy one — both the actual herd out in my pasture and the wider community of horse people learning to do this differently — and I am trying to build skill sets that nobody taught me the first time around. That does not happen overnight. My horses are so present that their dust up arcs are nearly instant; they have a moment, they let it go, and it’s behind them. As a person, I come with the shame, and the self-judgment in the moment, and then the part where I carry it forward and use it later as one more piece of evidence against myself. They let it go in a glance. I can hold onto it for days.

And so today I am sitting with this nugget of truth: When I yell in my barn, I am not always the most upset creature in it for very long — but I am the one who stays upset. My horses look at me having a hard moment and read it accurately. She’s pretty dysregulated right now. Okay. And then they go back to their hay. They are not afraid of me. The one still standing there an hour later, turning it over, deciding what it says about my character, is me. I am the one doing myself the most harm, because I am beating myself up for having a human moment.

Befriending Who I Am

That quote has been a touchstone for over a decade. It reads as permission to not be okay, and for that to be okay — permission to stop being in constant conflict with myself in order to feel like I am doing something about the things I want to change. It has even helped me find a sense of humor about the parts of myself that are perfectly imperfect. What she is naming is that the constant, low-grade campaign to become a better version of myself — the one where I am always a little disappointed in who I actually am — is its own kind of aggression. If there is something I genuinely want to change about how I show up in the barn, attacking myself for it has never once been effective. The only thing that I have evidence has helped is the opposite: bringing it into the light, looking at it, gathering information on it, and accepting that yes, this is part of me, this is part of where I came from, and accept it as context.

And when I can do that — when I set down both the defense and the prosecution at the same time — something loosens, and I get to ask a better question. Not “how do I make sure I never do that again,” which has the shame baked right into it, but something quieter and far more useful: when I get frustrated, how would I actually like to respond? What do I want that moment to look like the next time it comes?

People comment, sometimes, on how settled my horses are — how calm and comfortable the barn feels. That is not an accident, and it is not the conflict-free perfection from the opening either. It is consistency, pointed on purpose in a direction I chose. My horses are regulated but responsive: they still have the full range of their own feelings, but they are not frightened, or checked out, or bracing against me. I would like to meet them there. Same nervous system, same room for a bad day.