The Moment That Changed Everything
By Eva Jones and Calissa
There is often a moment (or two or three) throughout our lives where everything changes all at once. A moment that stands our profoundly for me was at a gathering my friends and I had for a dear friend, a mother of three young children, who was battling cancer for the second time. This time, it had spread to her spine, her brain, and eventually her liver. After ten years of fighting, my sweet friend was exhausted, and we as a collective were determined to do everything we could to support her. As friends, as mothers, we felt her pain as if it were our own.
We all decided to celebrate her life while she was still with us. We created a beautiful ceremony and each made silver necklaces, engraved with the four directions and the four elements which we deemed as a symbol of strength, balance, and connection. We blessed these necklaces together, standing in a circle, each of us offering a word, an intention, a message from the heart. When it was my friend’s turn to speak, she said a single word: Surrender.
I remember feeling a wave of shock and frustration and honestly even anger when I heard that word. To me, surrender meant giving up. It felt like she was admitting defeat, letting go of the fight. That word stayed with me. It lingered long after that day, though I didn’t yet understand why.
My dear friend passed away. And as I grieved, I noticed the word surrender continued to echo in my thoughts, waiting patiently for me to understand its true meaning. It felt almost as if she were there beside me, knowing this word was a key I needed to unlock a part of my life. I didn’t know then that her word would eventually become the foundation of how I work with horses and how I move through my life.
It wasn’t until a few years later in 2019, when I was deep in my Liberty training with Carolyn Resnick, that surrender took on new meaning for me. At the time, I was fixated on progress, on moving as quickly as possible through the seven rituals of her method, eager to reach the final stage: dancing with my horse. I wanted results, and I wanted them fast. But no matter how hard I worked, I was met with resistance.
The first ritual Carolyn Resnick teaches, Sharing Territory, required nothing more than sitting in the pasture with the horse. Being still, doing nothing. It felt too simple, too slow and so I resisted it. I wanted to do something, to feel like I was making progress, so I kept pushing forward, trying to get to the next step.
And then life stepped in to teach me what I refused to learn.
I left for a two-week trip to Spain to visit my family and when I returned, it felt as though all my work with my horse had vanished. My mare, Chulita acted as if we had never trained at all, like I was a stranger. I was frustrated, exhausted, and felt like a failure. It was as if time had erased effort, asking something different of me than persistence alone.
I tried everything. I worked with different techniques, different approaches, but nothing worked. Every effort met resistance. Finally, out of desperation, I surrendered. I grabbed a chair, walked out to the pasture where my mare was, and sat.
In that moment, it felt as though my horse understood something I hadn’t yet fully grasped, that surrender was not the end, but the beginning. In the stillness, Chulita met me differently, as if she had been waiting for me to arrive in this way. In that quiet moment, it felt as though my horse, like my friend before her, was guiding me toward a truth I could no longer avoid.
And then, something shifted.
For the first time in months, I felt a sense of accomplishment wash over me. I wasn’t fighting or forcing. I was simply there, present in the moment. As I sat in stillness, a profound sense of peace settled in.
When I left that day, I didn’t feel frustrated or defeated, I actually and almost surprisingly felt fulfilled, even excited. I wanted to keep coming back. And when I did, I noticed something different. My horse, who was once distant and resistant, began to approach me with curiosity. Chulita wanted to be with me, not because I was asking, but because I had finally learned how to simply be present, to meet her in her space with no preconceived agenda.
As I continued to come back to the chair, I realized that surrender wasn’t passive, but directional. In the world of horses, as in life, we are conditioned to focus on what isn’t working, on identifying what’s “broken,” what isn’t meeting our expectations. The entire industry is built on finding problems, on fixing, correcting, improving.
But Carolyn Resnick’s method, and that simple act of sitting in a chair, taught me something radically different:
Focus on what works.
When you shift your attention to what is already working, you begin building from a place of strength. The struggles, the gaps, the so-called problems start to dissolve on their own. You stop chasing perfection and begin appreciating the quiet intelligence of the present moment.
I am learning that to surrender is not a form of weakness. It is the gateway to clarity. And through that clarity, trust begins to grow. The more we trust, the more freedom we find. Eventually, the act of trusting itself becomes freedom, and from that place, joy naturally follows.
Looking back, even though shock and anger arose when my dear friend chose surrenderas her word from the heart, I now feel deeply grateful. What my friend had known, my horse was now teaching me. The journey of surrender began the moment I sat in the pasture and let go!
