24/08/2026
A while ago we made our first post with Nikola Boric, he has send us a new interesting story, but first let´s introduce who he is: "Former athletics coach and entrepreneur Nikola Borić has once again stirred public attention, but this time not because of his life in the forests of Papuk, but because of his decision to leave them. The man who, more than a decade ago, abandoned urban comforts and embraced an ascetic life in nature has now announced a radical change of course. He says he has sold everything he owns and is setting off on a 3,500-kilometre journey toward the Atlantic."
Today we share his thoughts about the Bosal bridle: Broken to Be Able to Go
Why are we most afraid of the very thing that could set us free? Our complete equipment for the horses has arrived from Canada and the Netherlands. And yet there is one piece in it I value more than anything humans have invented when they decided that they had to defeat an animal in order to lead it. It is the bosal. There is no bit with us. No metal in the horse’s mouth. No suffering and no force. A bosal does not dominate a horse. It tells him: listen to me. And that is a very big difference.
You can force someone to go where you want them to go. You can break them, pull harder and harder on the reins until pain makes them give up, and then boast about how obedient they are. But that is not partnership. It is merely pathetic obedience.
The word bosal comes from the Spanish bozal, meaning muzzle or nosepiece. It is a piece of horse equipment made from natural rawhide that sits around the horse’s nose and mouth and is used to give signals about the direction you want to move in without pain or suffering. The vaqueros of Mexico and California, and many of the finest riders in America, as well as almost all Native American tribes, used it for centuries. They did not think of it as a tool for discipline. They thought of it as the beginning of a conversation. The journey from putting a bosal on a horse for the first time to having a horse that is truly your partner can, almost invisibly, take seven, eight, ten years.
Ten years to teach someone to trust you enough that you no longer need to force them. That is a long time. Today, it sounds insane. We live in a world that demands results by Friday. And here we are talking about people willing to wait a decade to find out whether trust can even be built without breaking the animal.
What the riders of the American West understood about the bosal is something they simply called feel - something a metal bit can never truly give you. When you release the reins, the horse feels it immediately, completely, without delay. There is no lingering pressure reminding him who is in charge. There is a pure moment of release. And it is that immediate freedom, rather than a constant threat, that teaches the horse to listen. We are taught that relief must be earned through suffering. With a bosal, relief comes the moment you stop fighting against what was supposed to happen anyway.
More than two thousand years ago, Xenophon wrote that a horse could never be taught anything good through force. Two thousand years before anyone invented the word partnership, a military commander already understood that strength and gentleness do not exclude each otherwit, rather that without one, the other eventually falls apart.
Greece. Mexico. The plains of Oregon. Cultures that never knew one another came to the same conclusion by looking into the eyes of the same animal. When the message remains so consistent across centuries, it is probably not a coincidence. True strength begins when you no longer need to use force. We have spent our whole lives being taught to grip harder when things do not go the way we imagined. Hold tighter. Push harder. Prove more.
Someone planted an equation inside us:
Strength = grip.
Grip = victory.
So we clenched our fists, our jaws, our reins, the people around us… as if loss were something that could be prevented by force rather than something that, in the end, always happens to those who never learned how to let go.
But maybe the whole wisdom lies in releasing your grip once. Not because you have given up, but because you are strong enough that you no longer need to break what you love most. A horse does not have to be broken in order to go with you. And neither do you have to be broken in order to move forward. There is an old school of thought that looks at everything, horses, people, even ourselves, as something that must be conquered before it will speak our language. That school was born from impatience.
But there is another line of thought, older than we might imagine which say that the task is not to break. It is to build. You do not win when you force obedience out of someone. You win when you give them a reason to choose you on their own. Pressure teaches obedience. It does not teach release. And release is not defeat. A grip is easy to recognize. It is visible. Loud. It looks like strength. Release is quiet, almost invisible, so we have mistaken it for weakness.
But the truth is the opposite. It takes more strength to release the reins than to pull them tighter. More courage to say, I don't have to control this, than to keep forcing and proving that you can. An ancient Chinese sage understood this while watching water thinking that there is nothing softer in the world, yet nothing overcomes the hard and rigid like water. It does not break a stone with a single blow. It surrounds it, day after day, until one morning the stone simply is no longer where it used to be.
We choose the blow instead of the surrounding. The battle instead of patience. And then we wonder why we lose both the battle and the thing we were fighting for. Maybe you do not have to be broken to move forward. Maybe all you need is ten years of patience, one moment of genuine release, and the courage to turn your muzzle into a conversation. Ten years, because nothing worth leading accepts a shortcut. Not a horse. Not a human being. Not the thing you are building inside yourself while you think you are building something outside of you. Ten years. And one moment. Because all that patience is waiting for exactly one second in which you finally open your hand.
Nothing has to be broken to follow you. Not the horse. Not your life. Not you.
Nikola Borić
