The first two ingredients for the rider are calmness and concentration. We all lead busy lives with busy brains. We always need to be somewhere else. We are always planning. Our attention is constantly demanded outside ourselves. We worry and send our minds into a writhing turmoil. At times my mind feels like it could burst. My thoughts can be like a raging storm in a sea and I feel tossed about by them. At such times my horse becomes just another commitment – another test – and then I must be somewhere else.
How can I expect it to work? I want him to give me his undivided attention but I don’t give him mine. The frustration I feel leads to ever more stormy seas.
This is not a good way forward. We must learn to control ourselves. We must calm our mind, still the stormy waters and focus our attention on the inside of our self and our horse. If we can’t do this we can’t expect harmony in our training. We must do something different instead.
How can we achieve this? Constant attention. Little by little.
What helps you to feel calm? What gets in the way? For me, meditation, focus on my breathing and positive thinking have a positive impact; whilst pressure, distractions, teacher’s shouting, “friends” watching, lacking time and feeling rushed are negative. To improve our calmness and concentration we must use the things that help (the enablers) and mitigate the things that get in the way (the blockers).
Working on the enablers means that we must let go of the need to “get him round” and the temptations that this will create for a quick fix (fiddling the reins and so on). Instead, we don’t care what our horse does, within limits, as we focus on breathing and softening ourselves. Feeling where we are holding on (muscle tension) and letting go…allowing the movement into us rather than resisting it. Trot, with it’s regular 2-beat, is an ideal pace for warming both of you up in this way.
Mitigating the effect of the blockers is a skill that we need to learn. We can block physically or mentally. The physical side means that I must control my environment (for example, by riding in an indoor school with no-one else present). The mental side means that I must control myself. It is not always possible to control our environment so we must continually work on controlling ourselves.
Do you remember those “snow scene” toys you played with as a child? You shake them and the snow is everywhere, blotting out the scene in front of you. If we let go and set the toy down the snow eventually settles and things become calmer and clearer in the scene. This is what we need to do with our minds. Only when calmness has been achieved can we start to feel. It is the same for our horse.
What we are aiming for here is an easy equilibrium in our newly formed horse and rider system. It is a quiet, effortless place where horse and rider have achieved a sustainable balance. Neither horse nor rider are affecting each other negatively or positively. We are “doing nothing”.
Indicators that we have achieved this with the horse include a regular rhythm and relaxation of the horse’s frame, resulting in stretching forwards and down, and relaxed snorting. When this happens I know I am going in the right direction.
It is my belief that each time we get on our horse we have to (a) re-establish the connections and (b) get to the point of “doing nothing” with ease, before we can start to “do something”.
A calm, concentrated mind enables us to get in touch with our body. To feel areas of tension and to let go, thereby achieving a more balanced and connected posture. This is our third rider ingredient; the mind-body connection.
We expect our horses to be supple and straight but what about us? Slumping in a chair in front of our computer for eight hours a day is not great preparation for riding. The strength of connection necessary for our horse to graze, or for us to work away at our computer, are much less than for harmonious riding. Poor posture at the computer is not good for us either but the impact is less obvious than when we ride. Cause and effect are distant and cumulative and so, like the boiled frog, we often don’t notice until it is too late.
Figure 12 Before and after
We can’t have free limbs without alignment in our spine and we can’t have this without a stable pelvis and we can’t have this without core strength. And we can’t use our core strength if we have tension.
The rider must take responsibility for her own weight. She must minimise the burden of her own weight on the horse. She must come into self-carriage before her horse can. She must organise her body to achieve this and then her FULL-TIME JOB is to continually monitor and intervene when necessary to re-align and soften her self.
To do this she needs to be capable of controlling each muscle in her body and the degree of tension therein. She needs to develop a feel for how much tension is necessary, and where. What is superfluous? What is inhibiting? And release…release…release any excess.
There is a lot of talk about relaxation in the horse world. But I believe that the word is misleading as it conjures up images of lying around on a sofa or in bed. It goes without saying that we don’t want tension. We want that middle point where things are at their natural length but no more than that. Take an elastic band and just hold it at each side. That is total relaxation. Now pull the two ends until the band is tight. This is tension. Now move your fingers until the band is just straight. There is no tension – but no total relaxation either.
Relaxation is a variable. At one end of the scale we have tension and stiffness and at the other we have wobbly jelly! In the middle we have our desired state. The Alexander Technique and Pilates are two regimes that can help you to achieve this state. Both are discussed in chapter 8.
Notice that the first three ingredients (calmness, concentration and connection) only involve the rider, so we can start to work on them before we mount our horse. Once we have chosen to put ourselves on his back we have a duty to minimise the burden he carries and to establish a connection with him that enables us to achieve our purpose in riding.