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More than a year ago Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling threw Vicki and myself out of his one-year schooling course, because we declined to pay him more money than we had agreed but he refused to refund our deposits for the course. Faced with the threat of legal proceedings and a deadline for the end of August this year, Hempfling has finally refunded our deposits. ‘So what?’ you may ask. On the scale of things this is hardly earth-shattering news. Still, it could be a message of hope for a growing number of people.

Acknowledgement

Deposit refund advice

The very first thing I would like to do is to publicly acknowledge this act for what it is. As some of his former students have testified, Hempfling prides himself on winning and never losing a dispute. My dispute with him has revolved around his refusal to refund our deposits. It is a dispute that has lasted since he notified us of his decision to ‘take you out of the list of participants for the One-Year Schooling’ in June 2011 and subsequently declined to refund our deposits. It is a dispute that has endured through an exchange of correspondence with Hempfling and with his German lawyer. It is a dispute that endured eight months of mediation through the European Consumer Centre. It is a dispute as part of which I have threatened to take legal action not only to secure the refund of our deposits but also the losses that we suffered and expenses which we incurred in order to move from Australia to Europe with a horse and a dog in order to attend his course, along with interest, costs and any other damages a court of law might care to grant.

It is also a dispute that I have not attempted to conceal on this blog. Consequently, Hempfling must have realised that there was a good chance that I would publish news of his supposed ‘loss’ of this dispute in this blog. As such, for Hempfling to nevertheless go ahead and refund our deposits represents a major step on his part. True, he may have acted in order to avoid a nastier alternative. Whatever the reason, the refund of our deposits represents a significant loss of face by Hempfling’s self-confessed standards. I acknowledge this and salute him for it. This is not a ‘win’ for me. It is a victory for Hempfling, the man.

Abuse

In the course of my dispute with Hempfling, he also subjected me to verbal abuse on two occasions, once on the phone and again while visiting him in his home on the island of Lyø in Denmark. Neither occurrence left any psychological marks or scars, although they were noteworthy in terms of their potential reference in any court proceedings which might have eventuated. On the second occasion though, Hempfling indirectly raised the question of what constitutes abuse.

Body awareness weekend in Bellingen, Australia

So what is abuse? I recall one of Hempfling’s current one-year schooling students telling a group of us attending a body awareness weekend which Vicki and I had organised in our home in Australia about a book that she was helping Hempfling with. She mentioned that the proofing and editing which she had volunteered to do turned out to be so much work that, had she known this at the beginning, she would not have gone along with it. Was this abuse?

Hempfling expressed his view to me of what constitutes abuse while I was visiting him. He based that view on the first occasion, when he had verbally abused me for more than an hour on the phone, because I had dared to inform him that we were delaying payment of the fee for his one-year course by the same amount of time that he had postponed the start of that course, namely, three months. On Lyø he declared that his seemingly tireless stream of four-letter words at the time could not have constituted verbal abuse, as I had put up with it and had not thrown the phone down on him.

Whether Hempfling is guilty of such abuse is irrelevant. I do not wish or intend to judge and demonise Hempfling. There is only one person who can judge Hempfling and that is the man himself. I shall leave such judgement to him. Here I am talking about my feelings at the time that I was abused, because it raises questions relating to principles of personal responsibility which Hempfling preaches on his island but has refused to practice in his dealings with me.

Responsibility

My fleeting feelings of abuse are nothing compared with what someone like Sigrid Kreile has experienced. For those of you who do not know, Sigrid Kreile is a German woman who spent some time in a sect run by a self-proclaimed German horse shaman in Catalonia, Spain, around the turn of the century. She eventually tried to leave the sect, and suffered severe mental stress and financial loss in the process. Kreile later wrote a book about her experience replacing the characters’ actual names with fictitious ones. In the book the sect leader’s name is Rolf. A number of online commentators state or suggest that Hempfling is Rolf (see here, here, here, here, here and here, for example. If you need a translation, you can try Google Translate.). Hempfling himself actually headed a ‘community’ in the same area of Spain at the same time. (Kreile’s book was first published in 2005 as Im Bannkreis des Pferdeschamanen [Under the Spell of the Horse Shaman] and you can order it here. It has since been rewritten and is available in electronic form here. The video below includes an interview with Kreile.) Kreile’s case is an excellent reference point for a discussion of responsibility in relation to abuse. The reason for this is that she bears ultimate responsibility for placing herself in a situation in which she could be abused and for initially remaining in that situation while she was abused.

Pferdeschamane Hempfling

As mentioned above, an abuser sometimes claims that no abuse has occurred, because the abused  person was responsible for making herself vulnerable and open to whatever happened to her. And because she did not immediately walk away from it, it could not have been abuse.

Of course, this ignores the responsibility of both the abused and abuser. In this respect it is important to realise that an abuser has as much responsibility as his prejudiced party. Although a prejudiced party may be responsible for making herself vulnerable and open to abuse, she is not responsible for that abuse. Like the abused, the abuser also has a choice. He can abuse a person but he can also decide not to. That is a choice for which he alone is responsible. If he abuses a woman who makes herself vulnerable by placing herself in a situation in which she can be abused, the fact that she does so does not excuse him from responsibility for that abuse. He is an abuser whether she puts up with it or not, and she is entitled to hold him to account for that abuse. Recognising and accepting abuse for what it is, I think, is the first important step a person takes when she rejects the role of victim and starts on the road to becoming a whole person again. Realising that the abuser – and not the abused – is responsible for his abuse is, I believe, the next step towards the abused’s rejection of her role as a victim, an essential part of the process of healing.

Hope

It is my sincere wish that those of you who read this blog and who feel that they have burnt their fingers in dealings with Hempfling will greet the news of this small victory – I wish to emphasise that it is not only ours but also that of Hempfling, the man – as a symbol of hope. You too can reject the role of victim and do something to heal yourself. I am but a small human who has simply tried to continue doing what he originally set out to do after a major setback which saw me stranded in Europe with a wife, horse and dog along with a very uncertain future. If I can do it, so can you. Here are some of the lessons that I have learned along the way.

Fear is the enemy of hope. It is something that can separate you from yourself. When dealing with someone who is so well-known, it is easy to become trapped in a vice of fear of your own making. It is easy not to realise this. Instead one can end up blaming Hempfling for one’s fear, because he is supposed to have said this, that or the other. This is nonsense. Whatever he may have said or not is entirely irrelevant. I cannot blame Hempfling for my fear. It is mine and the first step to overcoming my fear is to accept it: this is my fear and no one else’s. Only then can I deal with it because, once I accept that it is my fear, I have already found the source of the solution: the answer is in myself. (In this respect I must confess that I owe much to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, which you can order here.)

Reclaiming my birthright

Ultimately, there is absolutely nothing that a person whom I believe to be an abuser can do to me, as long as I act towards him lawfully and with honesty and integrity. By this I mean honesty and integrity not as a victim of abuse but as a fellow human being. This is an important distinction because part of my abuse may have consisted in being persuaded to enter into an agreement, which I would not have done, if I had not been the victim of such abuse. For example, I may have witnessed things that I have agreed not to reveal to anyone else, because I was wrongly led to believe that this was the right thing to do. Such an agreement to hide abuse is something I am sure I would not have agreed to do if I had been able to act with the same honesty and integrity that I would normally do as a human fully in control of myself, instead of as a victim of psychological manipulation.

Put another way, what this means is that I can stop acting like a victim and start to reclaim my birthright as a person. I am a human and, as such, I refuse to feel used, crushed, guilty, helpless and/or angry. And above all, I refuse to live in fear of my perceived abuser. Ultimately this is a journey that only I can make. It may be a difficult journey but it is also one that I need not make on my own. I am not alone. There are fellow travellers. Abuse is not unique to me or anyone else. There are others who have found themselves in a similar situation. Such people can help each other by sharing their stories of abuse but more importantly how they deal with those feelings. This is already occurring on an informal level between ourselves and several people we know. They in turn are speaking to others and so an informal network of support is slowly expanding around the world.

Keep the baby

Feeling used, crushed, guilty, helpless or afraid, can sometimes give rise to anger. I may be tempted to direct my anger against the person I view as my abuser, irrespective of whether or not I have grounds to do so. In such a situation I may find myself tempted to throw out the baby with the bath water: the person whose company I once sought – because I believed that he had much to offer – now becomes someone who is no longer capable of doing any good and even someone whom I feel should be stopped.

This is a very real temptation which I recognised in myself. I nudged it from one corner of my mind to the other and dwelt on it like a cow chewing the cud. And then it struck me that I owed much to Hempfling and still do (see my post entitled *). It is my firm belief at this point in time that Hempfling does have something positive to offer some horses and some humans. There are some horses that he manages to dance with and the impact that it has on humans and how they deal with their own horses is something to be encouraged. Think in particular of that marvellous video of Hempfling dancing with the Lipizzaner stallion, Ferdinand, out in the open. True, it is has been carefully edited. True, it has been used as advertising material to entice people to attend outrageously overpriced courses which I have since come to learn from many former Hempfling students have relatively little to do with horses. Yet that video still represents another way of being with horses, which is encouraging many humans to reconsider their relationship with their equines. Ultimately, their horses also benefit.

A similar case can be made for Hempfling’s most recent book, The Horse Seeks Me. In it Hempfling rejects the conventional training methods based on force and violence along with natural horsemanship’s reliance on the psychological abuse of horses. Instead he proclaims a third way: the ‘way of the knight: being and trust’ (p. 61) as part of which ‘the person becomes the central support for the free development of the horse’ (p. 63). This is a message that I embrace and I believe that it may be one of the reasons why some people may have wanted to attend a Hempfling course. I would not want to abandon so precious a message as this. You can order The Horse Seeks Me here.

In short, I am keen to resist the temptation to engage in character assassination. This is not to say that I should therefore opt for the other extreme and accept everything that Hempfling does and says uncritically. There is a place for dispassionate appraisal. I prefer to throw out the bath water and keep the baby.

Hope too for Hempfling

You may be aware of some of the rumours circulating about Hempfling’s current one-year schooling course. I would urge you to ignore them. Of course, there are legitimate questions that can be asked. For instance, where are the horses that started out the one-year course with their owners? Where is Cody (renamed ‘Jo-Jack’ by Hempfling)? Where is Romin? Where is Esperado? Where are the others?

Similarly, we can ask legitimate questions about the humans attending Hempfling’s current one-year course. Earlier this month a one-year student reported that they were learning to groom horses with awareness, every move being a form of conscious communication with the horse. This is absolutely great! But for Week 1 surely, not Month 9?!? And where are the humans? So far we have only seen two feature briefly on the many videos that Hempfling has released about his one-year schooling course. Are they all still in the school in Denmark? Have any left? If so, how many? And why?

Below are two of the numerous videos to come out of Hempfling’s current one-year course so far. They are the only videos that feature any of the students. Presumably, they are his best students. And yet there are only two students to be seen and of all the published footage coming out of the one-year course, these students only feature for a tiny fraction of the overall time. The rest of these videos and the others that have emerged from the one-year course show Hempfling at work with a small horse. These two videos were published around mid-March, approximately six and a half months into the course.

And why too are the one-year students having to sit through a course in their tenth month, which they attended during their first month in September last year? Next week Hempfling will be repeating his Compact Schooling I course. The number of days has been reduced and the fee has been increased. Obviously, there are not enough students to meet the cap which Hempfling has placed on student numbers, so the first two days have been opened to all numbers without a cap, probably for recruitment purposes. How are the one-year students supposed to benefit from this? When they started out on this one-year course, they were promised that they would have the opportunity to take examinations for either or both of the following two qualifications: ‘Body Awareness Practitioner’ and ‘KFH Horse Practitioner’. Is this still going to be possible?

Hempfling’s one-year course was scheduled to end at the end of this month. Owing to a three-month break from April to June the course will only be entering its tenth month later this week. There will be another break at the end of September. In the two months that remain when the course resumes Hempfling will have one more opportunity to show the world that he is capable of dancing with more than just select Iberian horses and that he is also capable of teaching his students to dance with them as well. It is a small window of opportunity but one that Hempfling, with his physical and spiritual maturity coupled with his talent with horses, may be capable of seizing and turning to his students advantage and through that ultimately to his benefit and that of all the horses that he and his students may encounter in the future. He will be able to do this if he can raise his ambitions from aspiring to be a bully who is always intent on winning to becoming a trustworthy leader of horses and humans, one who is also enlightened, empathetic and empowering. There is hope in this scenario: for Hempfling, for humans and for horses. It is a hope that I sincerely wish will materialise into an achievement.

Tags: abuse, horses, humans, Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling