Do What Your Horse Does If you are truly doing a Passenger Lesson, if your horse braces (neck, ribs, etc.) you should brace too. In fact, in lessons with my International Study Center students, I saw that if the horse went fast and the student did too, the horse became calmer and slower. If the horse braced his body against the rider and the rider did exactly the same thing, matched it physically, the horse calmed down.
What's normal is if the horse gets braced and faster, we try to get more relaxed and slower. This actually feels like opposition and lack of rapport to the horse, and because he is emotional it upsets him and makes it worse! Weird but true! Just when we think the life-saving thing to do is to hold back, the horse thinks the opposite! So, if we want to get on with the horse, to be in total harmony, we should do what he does. Once we create harmony, rapport, synchronicity... only then can we lead it to where we want it to go. I have to admit I never had any idea of this before. I tried to control, I tried to restrict (out of fear) but all this did was upset my horse. Given the benefit of hindsight I realize that the real deal is to be so in rapport, so part of the horse that he thinks you are part of him, and not any way in opposition... this is when you have harmony. Having harmony means the horse will not think of you as a predator (a wolf in sheep's clothing), he'll think of you as someone just like him. The Walk The walk is the easiest to sit on, and the hardest to do really fluidly! A lot of people push their pelvis forward with each stride when actually it's more of a shift of each hip as the horse moves each of his hips. This gives you a little more of a side-to-side motion rather than a back-and-forth one. The Trot The trot is the hardest for the human, and the easiest for the horse! The trot is difficult to ride unless you can free your hips up to do what your horse's hips are doing - moving independently of each other. Because our hips are usually stiff when riding, rising trot is often the easiest choice. You can practice sitting trot by trotting very slowly at first and coordinating your hip movement with your horse's hips. This makes an amazing difference! The Canter Most people when cantering tend to rock backwards with their shoulders and scoot their seat forward, polishing the saddle as they go! I used to do this terribly and some riders have an awful time with horses who kick up or won't maintain the canter, or on the other extreme, get faster and faster and very emotional. So far, every horse we've had riders try this new technique with has changed its way of moving (physically and emotionally) within minutes! Do as your horse does: each canter stride is like a little "leap" so you have to do little leaps in your body! Try doing the same thing with your arms as your horse does with his front legs, matching each stride with exactly the same timing. While it might look a bit funny at first, your body will move in a dramatically different way that is now in harmony with your horse's movement as opposed to the first scenario I described, where the horse is leaping forward and you are scooting downwards into his back. By "leaping" or "reaching" up and forward with your horse at every stride, you become weightless and very comfortable to carry. Over a relatively short time you can minimize your arm movements to where it's just your joints that move, everything from your ribs through your jaw, shoulders and arms. ___________________ Judy
