In her debut memoir, Finding Purpose: A Life Managing the Passion, Compulsion, and Borderline Addiction Called “Horses,” eventer and Mustang advocate Chelsea Canedy takes readers behind the scenes of a high-level equestrian life and into the inner work that sustains it. Blending raw personal stories with lessons from her decade-long meditation practice and career studying equine behavior, she reflects on resilience, identity and the joy of choosing a life built on passion.

Here, you can read the first excerpt in this two-part installment from Canedy’s new book.

FINDING WILDNESS

In 2023, Tik [Maynard] had been selected to compete in Road to the Horse, a prestigious colt-starting competition in March of the following year. When we were chatting about his preparations, he mentioned that he was also interested in the Mustang Classic, a training competition that featured those preparing American Mustangs for English disciplines. Tik suggested that I should give it a go.

The more I looked into the idea, the more I liked it. The Classic was slated to be the first English-discipline version of a popular training competition called the Extreme Mustang Makeover, and competitors got a year to prepare. At the Kentucky Horse Park in September of 2024, wild horses and their rider partners would be asked to compete in a USDF Training level dressage test, jump a 2’3” show jumping course, and jump a 2’3” arena cross-country course. The top ten pairs then went head-to-head in a freestyle, vying for a piece of the $100,000 of prize money. That was more money than I’d ever had or would ever see at the kinds of events I competed in.

The combination of training skills required to succeed at such a competition were those in which I knew I excelled. So I connected with two of my clients who were excited to back the proposed adventure, Alison and Michael, and I began my search for a Mustang. It was much harder to get my hands on a competition-eligible Mustang when I lived all the way up in Maine, and it proved even more difficult when the relationship between the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the federal arm that managed wild horse adoptions, and The Mustang Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit that ran Extreme Mustang Makeover events, changed right when the adoption window for the Mustang Classic opened.

The flow of Mustangs to their usual adoption sites was altered considerably, and having never navigated that process before, I had a very hard time finding a horse. I had plans to travel to an adoption site that were scrapped because no horses were available there, and then turned to as many Mustang-related Facebook groups as I could to ask for help and direction.

A wonderful woman named Meg Magsig reached out to me via one of my posts and offered to scout a horse for me at the closest holding area to the East Coast, in Ewing, Illinois. Meg’s farm just so happened to be a few hours north of Dan James’ farm in Kentucky, where I planned to be for the Liberty Festival, so Meg and I made a plan: if she found a horse in the BLM holding pen in Ewing, she’d bring the Mustang back to her farm and put a few weeks of handling in before bringing the horse to me in Kentucky, and I would haul my new Mustang back to Maine with Ollie and Lila after the Festival ended.

The little six-year-old gray mare Meg and I chose came from the Twin Peaks Herd Management Area (HMA) in California, and had been in BLM holding pens for about a year. She had a big wide forehead and a curious expression that tracked Meg along the pen as she moved back and forth, looking at the options gathered behind the panels. She had a more petite athletic build than many Mustangs, so Meg thought she seemed more suited for English disciplines. I called her Luna because of her white coat and the little half moon snip on her nose.

Meg began working with Luna twice a day, sending me innumerable updates and videos. She was of the same slow and steady, relationship-building mindset that I was, which made her very easy to relate to and have conversations with as she began Luna’s gentling process. She described the gray mare as not the easiest—but not the hardest!—Mustang she had ever worked with. By the time she was to meet me in Kentucky, Meg admitted she had hoped to be further along than she was, but she felt confident in saying that taking her time with Luna early on would pay off in the end. I agreed with her fully and was so grateful that Luna got her start with such a caring and compassionate human.

I met Luna three days after the Liberty Festival ended, at Dan’s farm in Kentucky. Meg backed her trailer up to a tall-sided wooden round pen and let the mare unload herself. We left her to settle for a while, and then Meg took her time to catch and halter Luna so I could touch her for the first time. The Mustang’s wildness was still very much intact, and watching her navigate the human world all alone broke my heart. She was so genuine in her reactions to me and to everything around her. She hadn’t asked to be there, without her herd or her freedom. She hadn’t had a choice, and even though I knew she was better off with me than in so many other situations she might have landed in, I could not help but cry for her fate.

I had been around some amazingly well-bred horses in my life, ones with the presence of an Oscar-winning actor or Olympic athlete, but something about Luna awed me more than any of them ever had. It was her rawness. Her closeness to nature. Her trueness to herself and what she knew of the world, having really lived in it. She was the epitome of confident and “street smart,” and yet she was trapped in a space of human creation. Now it was her time to become “book smart,” and I could only hope I was up to the task of helping her.

I had never worked with a completely untouched horse before, let alone a wild horse. I learned quickly that there was a difference between a domestic-bred unhandled horse and one that had been living wild for the first six years of its life. Everything I did mattered to Luna. Every gesture, every breath, and especially every touch.

Interestingly, inanimate objects were of no concern to her—sticks, flags, pool noodles, tarps, pedestals, jumps…anything that didn’t have its own pulse was fine, as they weren’t imbued with any meaning in her life. No one had ever told Luna that those objects were scary or that they were there to make her do something. She simply sniffed them, tasted them, stomped on them or over them, and moved on.

Allowing me to touch her was a different story, though. That took a lot of time and a lot of trust-building. I chose to use positive reinforcement with the little mare, which proved to be a very useful way to bring out her curiosity and trust, and also lit up her “seeking system”—she was a problem-solver extraordinaire, and once she knew what the right answer was from my clicker signal, she was on it and she didn’t forget. We did most of our work at liberty the first couple of months, working on exposure to as many things as possible, especially since I knew that Luna would be making the journey to Florida with me in January. She would need to be trailered, stalled, and handled by multiple people on that trip, and I wanted her to be well-prepared.

I loved the blank slate aspect of working with Luna. Every new situation I encountered was a puzzle for me to solve in terms of how I would bring it to Luna as a puzzle for her to solve. I had to break things down into tiny steps and help her build understanding slowly. She would tell me if my steps were too big for her by getting frustrated and showing signs of anxiety in her expression and posture. She would find it hard to stand still, and her mouth would become very tight.

She might pin her ears and try to give me answers that were correct for other questions, but not for the new one. It was up to me to slow down and think about how to make the question simpler. I had to find a way to break down the end result I wanted into smaller bites that Luna could process. When behaviors started to trend in a direction I didn’t want, I could trace back through the work we had been doing to unwind and restart as needed. I wasn’t managing someone else’s prior mistakes and I didn’t have to wonder where her behaviors were coming from.

I knew where everything Luna believed about the human world had originated, which was simpler in many ways than trying to solve problems that had an unknown trigger or origin. As with everything in my life, I didn’t know what I didn’t know about starting a Mustang. I tried to draw upon as many of the tools I possessed that I could imagine applied to starting a horse from scratch. Everything went amazingly well…until the day it didn’t.

Luna and I had slowly progressed from desensitizing with saddle pad, surcingle, and bareback pad to working on the ground with an English saddle on, stirrups down, and girth done up. She’d never had any real worry about the girth. No “bronc” moments or explosive behavior. She watched everything I did carefully and seemed to understand that calm reactions were rewarded with food. She was a gem for the mounting and dismounting process, and though she lacked steering, she and I had done five short, successful rides at the walk in my indoor arena, with a few trot steps at the end of the last.

On our sixth ride, however, about two months into our work together, and just three days before our departure to Florida, Luna walked away from the mounting block when asked, as usual, but then picked up a little jog without my asking. I reflexively picked up the reins to slow her down, and the combination of pressures and sensations above, behind, around, and in front of her was just too much for her to reconcile.

Of course, I was in my indoor, as my round pen was outside, frozen solid, so Luna had a wide-open runway to pick up steam and buck. About eight seconds in, I did my best lawn dart impression over her head and into the dirt. My helmet did an excellent job of protecting my noggin but also came down on the bridge of my nose and broke it. I was incredibly lucky that it was the only damage done, as unpleasant as it was.

When I hit the ground, I saw my left contact lens pop out of my eye and into the dirt in front of me. And then I saw blood gushing from my nose. My very first thought when I got up, swearing to myself and trying to stop the bleeding, was, But it was going so well! I was heartbroken that things had taken this turn with Luna, and I felt like an absolute idiot for letting it happen. I had clearly missed steps in my process with Luna, and I was frustrated with myself for not even knowing what they were. I felt like I had been reading Luna well every day and that we had been making slow but appropriate gains in the right direction. Now it felt like there was a major setback, not only because I was injured, but because I didn’t know what I needed to do to help Luna understand a rider without fear.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall, first at the emergency room and then back at home, I was also embarrassed. My face was a mess, and my confidence was once again shot. Half my thoughts were telling me that I was clearly not up to the task at hand, and the other half were reminding me that this was my first time ever starting a Mustang, and to cut myself a little slack.

When I reached out to people I trusted who I knew had experience starting Mustangs, they universally told me that this kind of thing happened to everyone at some point. I am so fortunate that my personal learning journey has connected me with amazing horse trainers in the worlds of eventing, dressage, reining, cutting, Mustang and colt-starting, positive reinforcement, and liberty work. Even though I know it is literally impossible for any one person to hold all the knowledge that these combined individuals carry, sometimes I have a hard time admitting that there are things I still can’t figure out myself if I just try hard enough.

Reaching out when things go wrong isn’t always easy for me. I once read a Facebook post by classical dressage trainer Amy Skinner, in which she wrote, “As I tell my students often, I am critiquing the technique, not you as a person. So listen well, but don’t smear it all over your heart because if you fail, it’s a moment in time, not who you are as a person.”

I had to remind myself of this message over and over again. Making a mistake or not knowing something didn’t make me “bad” and there was no endpoint to the accumulation of knowledge that made anyone “good.” It was all just learning, not a determination of self-worth.

The drive down to Florida three days after my fall was externally very uneventful, but internally very stressful. I did not want to be seen in public with my face as messed up as it was—two black eyes, a big cut across the bridge of my nose, and large scrapes in other places. I looked like a real mess, and I could feel myself retreating inward and hiding a little more every time someone noticed my condition or reacted to it. I wanted to crawl under a rock until I looked like me again. I recognized in that experience how much weight a person’s appearance has, and how much I rely on mine when navigating the world. I rather liked my face, and people had told me that I was attractive throughout my life, so when that changed, even temporarily, it left me reeling.

There were moments I could see the humor in my circumstance and would try to make up a good story about it, or when I could joke that any scars the ordeal left me with would be a reflection of my life story and only add character. But there were more times when my inner insecure teenage ruled me, and I would shrink away from being seen. The experience left me knowing I had some real internal work to do if I ever hoped to enjoy my life as my appearance inevitably changed with time.

NOTE: Reprinted from Finding Purpose: A Life Managing the Passion, Compulsion, and Borderline Addiction Called Horses by Chelsea Canedy by permission of Trafalgar Square Books

You can purchase a copy of Chelsea Canedy’s new memoir here.

About Chelsea Canedy

Chelsea Canedy stands apart as a competitive rider who combines traditional training with natural horsemanship, groundwork, liberty work, and R+ methods. Her background in social service and psychology informs her unique approach, blending mindfulness and communication with equine training. She has appeared on leading equestrian podcasts and is a frequent clinician and presenter at festivals and expos nationwide.

Chelsea and her family live in Wales, Maine, where they run Unexpected Farm, a historic property devoted to horses and community. She also winters in Ocala, Florida. Learn more here.