How has Warwick Schiller's approach evolved away from traditional natural horsemanship?

Warwick Schiller's public evolution away from his earlier natural horsemanship approach has been one of the most significant and honestly documented transformations in contemporary horsemanship, and the evolution itself — his willingness to publicly question his own previous methods, acknowledge their limitations, and move toward a different understanding of what horses need — has been as influential as the specific new approach he developed. In his earlier phase, Schiller taught a natural horsemanship approach that was substantially in the Clinton Anderson tradition — respect-focused, exercise-based, using pressure and release to develop the horse's responsiveness and the handler's control — and he was successful and credible in this tradition. The shift began when he started recognizing in his own horses and in horses he was working with signs of emotional distress that his previous framework had no language for — horses that were behaviorally compliant but emotionally shut down, horses that performed exercises correctly but showed none of the relaxation, curiosity, and connection that he increasingly felt should characterize a genuinely good horse-human relationship. His engagement with polyvagal theory, trauma-informed therapy concepts, and behavioral science gave him a scientific framework for understanding what he was observing, and his podcast and social media content became the vehicle through which he processed this evolution publicly and shared it with his audience. The specific changes in his approach include a significant reduction in the amount of pressure-based exercise work relative to connection-building and emotional regulation work, a much greater emphasis on reading and responding to the horse's emotional state rather than its behavioral compliance, and a philosophical reorientation toward the quality of the horse's experience as the primary measure of good horsemanship.