2 weeks Ago By Candida Baker
The Australian-born trainer has attracted a huge global following for his ability to “read” the equine mind. By Candida Baker Warwick Schiller at an equestrian clinic in Bunyip, VIC. Credit: Peter Tarasiuk Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
I’m standing in a crowd of people at Warwick and Robyn Schiller’s Journey On ranch, just outside Paso Robles in California’s Central Coast region. There are a lot of well-cut jeans, western belt-buckles and colourful shirts floating around the Schillers’ barn, while outside there’s a generous display of giant pumpkins and Halloween paraphernalia. Warwick Schiller, busy taking groups on a tour around the ranch, pulls up in his buggy and suddenly his Aussie accent cuts through the air like a knife.
“Who’s up next?” says one of our most famous equestrian exports. “Roll up, roll up.” The shift in the energy is palpable.
It’s as if a firecracker’s just exploded. Schiller is here, there and everywhere, giving people a hand to get off the buggy, helping others on, laughing and chatting. He’s dressed in the same western outfit as most of the crowd, and yet with his ponytail top-knot, and that particular side-to-side gait, he couldn’t be anything but an Aussie.
The ranch is surrounded by golden rolling hills, dotted with oak trees. It seems that you can take the boy out of Young, where Schiller was born and grew up in south-western NSW, but you can’t take Young out of the boy. We’re gathering here for the opening of Schiller’s Journey On Podcast Summit, an annual event where the Schillers gather many of the podcast’s varied guests.
The podcast – which has attracted nearly 3.7 million downloads since it started in 2020 – has allowed Schiller, who seems to have a boundless curiosity about the world, to take a deep dive beyond his profession as a now world-famous horse clinician and trainer, into questions about life, death and the universe in general. Schiller, 58, had a classic Australian country childhood.
He grew up on a 485-hectare wheat and sheep farm, and his father, Ray, was a rodeo champion and bull rider. Young Warwick and his two older brothers, Steve and Andrew, took to riding like ducks to water, and soon the whole family was competing with and showing quarter horses. As Schiller describes it, his life path was mapped out.
“The idea was: school, get a job, get married, have kids and die,” he says. “That was it. I was particularly good at maths, and so I didn’t even finish year 12.
I was offered a job at the Commonwealth Bank in Young, and I was with them for seven years. I was riding and training some horses in my spare time, but my life was on what seemed like an inevitable track.” “Most people are so focused on what the horse is doing, and what they believe is going on between them and their horse, that they are unaware of what the horse needs,” says Warwick Schiller.
Credit: Jay Kolsch/Headpress What Schiller desperately wanted to do was to go to the US, to study and work with an American reining trainer. (Reining, which has become increasingly popular in Australia in the past two decades, is a western riding discipline where the riders guide the horses through a precise pattern of circles, spins and stops.) “I had no money,” Schiller recalls.
“I’d bought a Ford F100 for $5000, which had rust in it, and I’d insured it for $10,000. I said to a few of my friends that I wished I knew how to write the thing off so I could go to America – and not long after I had a car crash, and wrote it off. It was my first example of manifesting, even if it was a bit extreme.
” Schiller took the insurance money from the crash and headed for the US for a year, where he worked for NRCHA (National Reined Cow Horse Association) Hall of Famer, Don Murphy. “The day I was leaving to go back home, Don told me that he reckoned I could train horses for a living, and I could go back and work for him,” Schiller recalls. “As soon as he said it, I knew that was what I wanted to do.
” Six months later, he returned to train horses for Murphy, and to pursue his passion for reining. Five years later, Schiller was an independent reining horse trainer, becoming the NRHA (National Reining Horse Association) Reserve World Champion in 2002, with wins at all the major reining shows, later going on to represent Australia at the 2010 and 2018 World Equestrian Games (WEG). ‘Celebrating others and their accomplishments is something Warwick is good at.
’ Robyn also competed at the 2018 WEG – a high point in the couple’s competition life. By this time, they had been together 27 years. Robyn is the one person who’s seen Schiller’s evolution from mainstream horse trainer to a finely tuned master horseman with an affinity for all things spiritual.
When she met Schiller at a show in California in 1991, she was a legal secretary, competing in the Western Pleasure class and other events in her spare time. “I didn’t ride a reining horse until after we were married,” she says. “Like many others, I was drawn to it because of the level of horsemanship involved and that all the manoeuvres are done on a loose rein.
Reining is considered to be the ultimate obedience discipline of the horse world, but as we’ve both evolved, our aim now is to create a true partnership with a horse.” Schiller competing at the World Equestrian Games in 2018. Credit: Courtesy of Warwick Schiller In the meantime, there was a lot of life to live, including a move back to Australia for four years with their young son, Tyler.
They arrived in 2006, importing two reining stallions with them. The intention was to create a horse training and competition stable in Young. “It wasn’t great timing,” Robyn says.
“The equine influenza epidemic hit and devastated our first breeding season. I’d been a judge and a secretary on the reining circuit, and Australia had just affiliated with the US, so I had a lot of knowledge, but I was homesick. I got my previous HR consulting job back in California and made the decision to move back to my hometown of Hollister in 2010, some months ahead of Warwick and Tyler.
I loved most of our time in Australia, but I don’t think the country is always at ease with success in the same way as America. I guess it’s the tall-poppy syndrome. Celebrating others and their accomplishments is something Warwick is good at, and he’s able to do it with abandon through his podcast.
” In 2011, a year after they’d arrived back in California, Schiller began to experiment with the idea of posting free content on YouTube. To his surprise, people around the world lapped it up, enjoying Schiller’s open-minded approach to the thousands of diverse problems that can confront horse owners. These days, Schiller has 150,000 subscribers, with a staggering 34 million views for his videos, but in 2016, he was still on a relatively straightforward road to success when an unassuming little chestnut quarter horse gelding called Sherlock appeared on the scene.
There’s a theosophical saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Sherlock, bought by Robyn as a reining horse, was about to change not just Schiller’s way of training, but the family’s way of life. “I honestly thought that I could ‘read’ a horse by then,” says Schiller, “but Sherlock was something else – a talented horse, very obedient and yet shut down.
It seemed as if his anxiety was stopping him from becoming the athlete he could be, and he was just really detached. Nothing I knew seemed to work, so in the end I started to experiment.” Schiller stopped “training” Sherlock and started spending time with him, observing the horse’s most minute moves.
“I noticed that his stress indicators were far more subtle than I’d ever realised,” he says, “and I began to realise that was the case with other horses, too. Instead of looking for obedience, I began to say, ‘I see you. I hear you.
’ ” In January, when Schiller was in Australia giving one of his regular clinics at an equestrian centre in Bunyip North, Victoria, I went to watch the “I see you, I hear you” process. Eleven horses were put into four groups, then over two days Schiller worked with their owners, starting with groundwork, then moving on to ridden work. What Schiller has observed over the years is that the way humans are with their horses often reflects what’s going on for them in their world.
“Most people are so focused on what the horse is doing, and what they believe is going on between them and their horse, that they are unaware of what the horse needs,” says Schiller. “The horse is often a microcosm of what the owners believe the world is doing to them. But the great thing about horse people is that they’re passionate about getting on with their horses, and they’ll really put in the time to try and understand them.
That in turn builds up attributes and skills for them in the world – and with other relationships.” Schiller says working with Sherlock made him realise “you can’t selectively suppress emotions”. Credit: Courtesy of Warwick Schiller The horses are a colourful mix, including two pretty chestnut ponies, a few thoroughbreds, a stunning mix of a Fjord, Icelandic and quarter horse, and a big Paint horse with one brown and one blue eye, called Rooster, or Roo, which belongs to Meagan Harrison, who organises Schiller’s clinics.
Schiller says participants at his events tend to fall into two camps. “People either want to do the minimum amount of work or the maximum,” he says. “When Meagan got Roo, he was a bit of a basket case, and Meagan had her work cut out creating a relationship with him.
But what I’ve noticed here is that Roo is fine. Meagan’s done great things with him, but she’s still treating him as if he is the horse he was, rather than the horse he has evolved into, with the work they’ve done together. She needs to feel more comfortable about stretching his comfort zone.
” Harrison doesn’t disagree. “I tend to buy into Roo saying, ‘I’m a bit stressed,’ and my takeaway from the clinic was that my energy needs to come across as ‘You’re all fine, buddy,’ ” she says. “I tend to be over-aware of everything and the clinic really helped me see how far we’ve come.
” Over the course of the clinic, Schiller teaches owners how to better read their horses’ body language. “Each horse was in a different nervous-system state, and that’s always the case,” he explains. “When it comes down to it, I work with their owners to help them regulate their horses’ nervous systems.
” I notice small amounts of magic happening as the horses begin to realise that their owners are tuning in to their needs and paying them a completely different level of attention. Schiller’s ability to focus on the horses individually and collectively is impressive. Last year, American equestrian Kansas Carradine partnered with Schiller in the Gaucho Derby, a 10-day, 500-kilometre, multi-horse race through Patagonia.
Carradine, 47, the daughter of actor David Carradine, and herself a renowned trick rider, horse trainer and now life coach, quickly noticed Schiller’s ability to connect with horses – and humans. “The race was like the world’s largest escape room,” she says. “It was like solving a giant puzzle.
Most people riding in it want to win, but Warwick never wanted to get ahead by himself. His ethos was to lift up the group around him. In the first two days, a couple of horses got caught in fences, and Warwick went back with his cutters to get them out.
It’s a measure of the man that he carries the embodiment of community and encouragement into everything he does.” These days, that’s a big “everything”. As well as his horse training, Schiller’s Journey On podcast, which initially charted the transformational growth in both his career and personal life, has evolved into a meeting place for anyone interested in metaphysics.
In the past five years, he has interviewed not only some of the world’s most famous equestrians, but also psychic astrologers, equine therapists, alternative healers, animal communicators and those with a life story embodying the triumphs and tragedies of human existence. “Journey” is a somewhat overused word these days, and yet, as Schiller’s close friend Dan Steers, from Double Dan Horsemanship, says: “Warwick’s always called what he’s on a journey, and what is different about him is that he shares that journey with the world. I first met him in 2008, when he was still based in Australia, and his horse training was quite straightforward.
Now he’s got a huge following and he’s very confident in his abilities.” Steers has a theory about the development of his friend’s success. “What Warwick shows us is unique,” he says.
“If you look at trainers like Monty Roberts or Pat Parelli, who have set up successful horsemanship businesses, they created what they marketed as a formula for success. If you were good at copying their formula, you could achieve the same result. When Warwick started he was not dissimilar, but then he became one of the first trainers to put free content on YouTube, he was one of the first to advertise on social media, definitely one of the first to have a podcast.
He’s evolved and adapted and embarked on a spiritual exploration as well. Everything’s changed, and usually that would create doubt in a consumer, but we all enjoy his authenticity, the fact that he’s prepared to put everything on show, including his doubts.” Warwick Schiller’s horse-training videos have attracted millions of views on YouTube.
Credit: PETER TARASIUK Circling back to Sherlock, what Schiller gradually unpicked was that the horse was a mirror for much of his own internal landscape. “I was a sensitive kid, living in a place where if you went to a funeral, you weren’t even supposed to cry,” he says. “I loved telling jokes to anyone who would listen, but it took working with Sherlock for me to realise that you can’t selectively suppress emotions.
If you’re a certain way all your life, you don’t know you’re depressed. It’s not that I couldn’t get out of bed, but I didn’t have a lot of energy. I lived almost entirely in my head.
I went from birth to 50 without knowing there was another way to feel, and it really makes me wonder why they don’t teach classes in emotion at school.” ‘I was suddenly in this space where people were encouraging me to open up about my life ..
. It really triggered me.’ The next horse Schiller worked with using his “I see you, I hear you” approach after Sherlock (who is now 15, and a retired member of the 14-horse herd roaming the ranch on this balmy autumn evening, bailing up the buggy for pats and treats), was a mustang called Cody, who, according to his owner, had a bolting problem.
Using his increasing abilities to sense where a horse was holding tension, Schiller worked out that what Cody actually had was a “trust” problem. Working on the tiniest amounts of pressure and release, and then by asking his owner to simply hold the lead rope and do literally nothing with the horse, Schiller was able to help Cody work out he was safe. The horse lay down and went to sleep for the two days of the clinic.
And hasn’t bolted since. But despite his successes and sold-out clinics, Schiller experienced his own breakdown – or breakthrough. While lecturing at a horse event in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2016, Schiller found himself talking about his childhood.
Then, at a dinner that night, a therapist who had attended his presentation asked him to join some friends for a drink. “I was suddenly in this space where people were encouraging me to open up about my life, and asking me personal questions,” Schiller recalls. “It really triggered me.
It was as if my entire space/time continuum seemed to tilt as I suddenly realised how shut-down I’d been, and how often I’d been emotionally detached from my life. I burst out crying, left there, called Robyn, and said to her, ‘I’ve had it all wrong, I’m a different person.’ I suddenly thought I had all the answers to the universe.
” Life, however, isn’t quite as simple as that. There were a few rocky moments when Schiller tried to understand how his emotional detachment had been affecting his life and marriage. But gradually, as he became more at ease with showing his emotions, an alignment began between the public and private man.
As that happened, the family business began to grow exponentially, with both Robyn and Tyler, now 28, involved in the new pathways, including with Schiller’s first book, The Principles of Training: Understanding the Relationship Between You and Your Horse and Why Effective Training Works , which shot to No. 1 on Amazon in its category within weeks. As Schiller explored numerous therapies and healing modalities (including ice baths, something he and Robyn undertake at least three times a week), he met Jane Pike, the New Zealand-based creator of the Confident Rider program, at a horse expo in Taupo.
“We had stands next to each other,” Pike says, “so we ended up sharing stories and developed a friendship. My work at the time had a specific focus on confidence and anxiety, and Warwick was interested in the approach I take. In terms of his change in focus over the last few years, towards a more relationship-based approach, he followed his heart and what felt right – which is always the correct thing to do.
That said, he was, and is, an incredibly accomplished horseman, and had a lot to lose, being already so established, by pivoting away from what he had always taught. But what I observe is that he’s now bringing his intuitive and creative self into his way of being with horses, and with their humans.” The sympathetic nervous system works in the same way for all mammals, explains Pike.
“Every mammal goes through the same flight/fight responses, and the state they are in is observable in the body. Warwick, through his own experience, understands the importance of addressing things from the level of the nervous system, and that allows him to bring both compassion and strategic thought to his training.” Humans, however, are only human.
When Schiller was due to open the second day of the Paso Robles summit, he was nowhere to be found, so Robyn took to the stage, summoning him in no uncertain terms. “I’d like to thank my wife for micromanaging me,” announced Schiller. The audience laughed, mainly in recognition of the fact that if it wasn’t for Robyn, the summit wouldn’t have happened.
Schiller with family members Robyn, Tyler and Nicole. Credit: Courtesy of Warwick Schiller “The hardest job I’ve ever had is managing Warwick,” Robyn says. “These days I’ve passed that over to Tyler.
He can be more directive with his father, and Warwick listens to him. I’m now more a liaison person rather than the main support for everything.” There’s that word again: “everything”.
There truly are very few people who have the ambition – and ability – to create what is beginning to resemble a small empire. Not that it was a planned expansion. “Our marketing strategy was always to fly by the seat of our pants,” says Robyn.
“Warwick began to shift into more alternative work with the horses in 2017. It was the change he needed, and we just figured it out as we went along. But as we’ve expanded, it has allowed all of us to be involved in different ways.
Nicole, Tyler’s partner, is a yoga teacher, and so now we’re running retreats which include yoga and sound baths.” Watching Schiller at work with a horse, or on stage at the summit, it appears that he’s working strongly from his intuition, although he disagrees. “I don’t think I use intuition,” he says.
“My strength has always lain in mathematical reasoning. Understanding the people and horse problems I’m presented with is like a massive equation. Sometimes the answer doesn’t come straight away, but if I keep on analysing, then suddenly it becomes crystal clear.
” But as Einstein said: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” Watching Schiller’s ability to open up to the “everything” is an affirmation that it’s possible for all of us. Dan Steers believes that, ultimately, Schiller going public about his own trauma, depression and doubts is what has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers to his methods.
“One of the reasons so many people love him is that he’s relatable,” says Steers. “We can all see a bit of ourselves in Warwick. He didn’t foresee this level of success – he was just trying to find a way make his business work.
Now he’s found his niche, and in finding it, he’s found himself.” To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald , The Age and Brisbane Times ..
