We treat them like meat. As if it is the details that define them, only seeing the outside.  When reality is, they all can walk, trot and canter.  A pony mare can jump three feet from a standstill. I've seen her do it.  Turn them loose in the wild, and more than likely, someone will snap a picture, and all will agree on how beautiful they are, independent of us.

For 99.9% of the use that most of us put our horses to, almost every horse in the world can do what they need them to do.  The perfect confirmation will make no difference to what they create in the end with what they are born with. The perfect conformation won't save them from us and our riding.

And don't you wonder what you sound like when the only thing you look at, is the pieces of muscle and bone that are here?  How you make the horse a thing with no importance given to who they are inside?  What does that make us that we do this?  Horses are not things!  And maybe right now you are saying well, of course, they are not.  I know that. 

Do you? Do you really?

Do your actions portray that reality in your life?

And if it doesn't?  What does that say about us?

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The Things You Take For Granted...

I can't.

The ability to walk.

The ability to walk on grass.

The ability to stay centered and balanced against even the most minute of changes in the ground beneath my feet.

There was a time when I couldn't take any of this for granted.

I have been healthy, unhealthy and back again.

I have lost function, regained it... Sometimes only to lose it all over again.

And strangely, the greatest gift I could have ever received as a teacher was the experience of the pain that came with that. Pain that clearly identified individual muscle groups and their activity as I moved throughout the day. An ongoing personal education on which muscles were activated for different movements. Feeling triceps and biceps as arms lifted and turned, feeling hips, back, and shoulders in surprising ways. Every movement an education on muscle activation.  Information that I could use in turn to learn about the differences as you hold the reins in different ways, in the angulation of hips and knees, and so much more when up on our horses.

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Too Picky or The Case of How Important Beginnings Are

I had a friend mention her concern that I was too picky, making it hard for others to follow what we are teaching.

I had to sit and think for a while and ask myself if that was true because it didn't feel like that. Picky, yes, but...  I am allowed a but, the pickiness because of the pieces that we need to focus on as our foundation. The beginning before it all goes wrong.

A beginning that needs to be there when we get to the end. The golden thread that we can follow as it leads us to what comes next.

You will always struggle if you think each new thing that you want to do is something that you need to teach only now in this moment.

Because this never was about us teaching the horse anything.

And subconsciously, you know that. You know that the horse can do every movement without us. We see it when they play with each other, as they play with their bodies as they grow up. Foals playing with piaffe and canter sideways, able to do it all and do it well without us. Without stutters and hiccups, which we so frequently see when as humans we say to the horse I want you to do this.

Knowing that fact, when we are on their backs where does the awareness of movement for the human/horse body come from?

The secret is, to let them train us.

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I couldn't be happier. I am so thrilled!

I am wrong!

Again!!!

I love it when I am wrong.

Or at least figuring that out.

It is so deliciously delightful.

 Because it means I learned something new!

Nothing makes my day like learning I am wrong. Or maybe better said, when I learn something new! 

The two are the same thing.

It is just perspective. Making both wonderful. 

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I watched a bay horse black tail swinging cross across the arena floor.  The horse halts after endless steps taken.  And this repeats day after day after day.  The horse led to the arena door doesn't worry about picking up his feet, or his head. No need when everything is sand, not even a bush to be seen, when everything is flat, where nothing changes from one step to the next, forever and ever and ever.

This is the life he leads.

And nothing ever changes as he steps out the arena door and enters the barn where he lives through the night.  Only now, it is not sand beneath his feet but concrete and sometimes rubber.  The horse always protected, not even a stone to worry about or stumble over.

If lucky, he has daily turnout. Led outside, to walk on manicured pathways well-trod, to be turned loose in a paddock that may or may not hold grass to munch on throughout the day. 

But there is little for owners to worry about as special care is taken to make sure there is nothing here for the horse to hurt himself on.  And vet bills are expensive.

And at the end of the day, he is led back in again to concrete and to his stall and nothing ever changes.

And where his steps everything is flat.  His stall floor exhibits width but not depth.  Because, after all, no holes would ever be allowed to break this expanse of flat.   

The barn aisle exhibits width and length. Probably wide enough to allow two horses to go side by side to pass each other.  The aisle long enough to have stalls on each side. 

The horse given two dimensions to live in. He is given length and width but the other dimension is missing.

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We have the story that to advance with your horse to make him do what you want him to, you need to close every single door, but one - leaving only one open that he has to step through. This narrative taken up by many just because it sounds so logical.

In effect, you give him no choice, blocking him from every direction but one, by applying your aids a certain way and he has to do what you say. It's almost like we're trying to squirt them out in this one particular spot to make him do what we want.

As if he is a tube of toothpaste.

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For many years, Dressage by Henry Wynmalen was my bible. At the time, a mere handful of books were available on dressage in English, but it was much more than that. I found a resonance which I frequently find as soon as the concept of 'lightness' becomes the cornerstone of the work presented. A resonance that I carried with me into my work in the decades that followed when I read Wynmalen's words.

"The rassembler is an unlimited achievement, wherein the bridle, horse and rider have become absorbed into one entity; the bit possesses a limiting effect no longer, the forward impulse travels right through it, without let or hinder; actions of hands and bridle-effects have become mere messages to the horse's nerve-centre."

This became my goal. Looking for "An unlimited achievement."

Keeping the forward impulse unstoppable.

A merging between me and the powerful horse beneath me.

When I read Wynmalen, that is what I heard.

But the one statement that stayed with me always was the possibility that we could achieve what some would say was impossible that "The bit possesses a limiting effect no longer." -

I went looking for that. I wanted a horse without limitations. But more I wanted to experience a time when bridle effects had no limiting effects. I wanted to experience that.

I wanted to be 'absorbed,' to become one with my horses where "bridle-effects.. become mere messages" to the horse's nervous system.

I reread his words on rassembler and mise en main again and again. Every moment on my horse was the search for the 'unlimited achievement.'

It became my holy grail.

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