Introducing Kjrsos Magazine, Volume 17:

The Kjrsos Experience ~

Letting the horse’s body be the measure.

What if the answer to every argument about training has been standing in front of us all along — on four legs?

This issue keeps returning to one place: the horse’s body. Not the sport, not the method, not the tradition.
What it is built from, what it is asked to carry, and what it can hand to a rider who learns to listen.

Inside this volume, you will learn:

• The Door That Doesn’t Ask:
  There is a way into a horse that does not wait for her yes. It has been measured in laboratories and described from the ground, and almost never spoken about from the saddle. A copper mare once showed what it means to have your no taken away — and her answer was not the one anyone would expect. Being able to open that door is one question. Whether it is ours to open is another.
• One Standard of Training:
  Every argument about training method ends the same way — unresolved. Which system, which school, which discipline. This piece says the arguments never end because every side is measuring against the wrong thing. There is one standard, and a three-month-old foal playing in a field already knows what it is.
• What Never Happens to a Foal in the Wild:
  A foal in the wild moves for miles from his very first day. A foal in a stall is still being built — out of what he is not doing. By the time anyone puts a hand on him, part of the answer has already been decided. Not by cruelty. By something far more ordinary.
• The Decisions They Make:
  A pony finding the wall for a rider who cannot see it. A mare moving herself, unasked, so a boy in a wheelchair can reach her. We say horses take care of us. Then a roan palomino named Bandit spent an entire lesson showing why that is not the whole story — and what every rider has been riding on without ever being told the terms.
• Five Questions — A Teacher’s Exercise:
  One small change to a famous experiment in child development revealed that the children had known the answer all along. What if the question you are asking is the thing hiding what your student knows? An exercise with no answer in it, and no way to get it wrong. .

Volume 17 is an invitation to stop measuring the horse against our disciplines and start measuring our work against the horse — what his body needs, what it is built from, and what it already knows. These are the questions that get left behind, and the ones we need to sit with if we hope to work honestly, in the horse’s best interest.

Before You Can Feel the Horse

Creating the Link · Step One

There is a step almost no one names — and until you take it, the moment you are longing for, when the horse's body becomes your own, can never come. It sounds like nothing. That is exactly why it is missed.

Swinging the Foreleg Forward

You have looked at this muscle a thousand times — it runs right down the front of the neck, and you may even know its name. And still you have never quite seen what it is really for.

A Teacher's Exercise ~ Five Questions

Same children. Same age. Same question. One small change in how it was asked, and correct answers jumped from 41% to 68%. The children had known all along. So what has the way you ask been hiding from you?

One Standard of Training

Every argument about how to train a horse has one thing in common. Not one of them can be settled. And the reason has nothing to do with the methods.

When The Student is Ready to Proceed

The child rides beautifully. Even though nobody really taught her anything. Then you ask for the next thing, a more advanced movement, and it is as though she cannot hear you. You might assume she isn't trying hard enough. There is another explanation, and it has nothing to do with effort.

There Must Be Places

Somewhere there is a horse who has never carried anyone. There is something available in him that is not available in any horse you have ever put your hands on. And there is almost nowhere left on earth that you can go to find out what it is.

The Questions Nobody Thought to Ask

You go looking for the research and it isn't there. Or it is there — and something in it is wrong, and it takes a long while to work out what.

The Decisions They Make

A mare in my arena declines an aid that every horse on earth is taught to obey. She is not being disobedient, and nobody taught her to do it. Once you see what she is actually doing, you will not be able to unsee it in your own horse.

The Door That Doesn't Ask

Four seconds. Four touches, too light to move a sheet of paper — and the horse they could not get to trot was collected before my seat met the saddle. There is a door into a horse that does not ask permission. Finding it was the part that frightened me.

Real School Horses ~ A Horse That Isn't Affordable

There is a horse who cannot pay for himself. Not because he is unsound, or difficult, or slow — but because of what he carries, and what it costs to keep it in him. Almost nobody keeps one any more. And what he carries cannot be learned any other way.