The Posture of Push(Send) and Draw(Receive)

Gesturing is one of the most interesting facets of living creatures. The cat who waits for her dinner, striking out with one paw is recognized by her owner as requesting food. The mouse who stands on his hind legs, front 'paws' on hips and 'sounds off'(yes! I've seen it!)to a playful cat is telling it to go bother somebody else! The horse that sniffs the blacksmith's hair and licks his ear tells him he is befriended. Gesturing is part of life and a huge part of horse life. We can see horses all the time moving their heads to signal to another to move away or move back. A gesture has a visual component to it that makes it superficially understood. But gestures can be extremely subtle and complex. You can stare at a group of horses for 10 min and see nothing happening and suddenly one horse makes one tiny neck motion and the drama begins. It is as though a secret energy were passing around, stirring, and building in the seeming silence until one small movement triggers an event!
I cannot overestimate the significance of this type of interaction that we cannot see on the surface. Is it magic? Another sense? A spirit world? It is a mystery, however we look at it. The main thing to take away from this is that it is REAL! And this REAL thing can be used to tremendous advantage in the horse and rider partnership.
Without getting too far into yet another subject, might I mention the special interaction that takes place between horses trotting together in a field. Very often they will pair up as though they are driving partners being directed around by an invisible driver! They might look like little fairies waltzing in time in their pastures. You might catch a glimpse of them standing side by side in an identical or reflective posture. An image comes to mind when we see this that they are simply enjoying life and are sharing some dance time together. Some of the trotting and cantering can be exquisite.....and don't we say to ourself, "Oh, how I would love it if my horse could go like that when I ride him." Well, he can! We just need to learn how to create the elements that enable that sort of motion.
Back to the unseen world of auras or chemistries or energies between horses.....
We can begin to work with the concept of energy flow simply by walking or leading our horses. We might begin with a whip in hand and use it....no, GESTURE with it....like a railroad crossing bar. Placing it horizontally in front of the horse shows him a barrier. Very soon, especially if you are thinking this in your mind and your posture is settling down firmly into the ground, he recognizes the gesture as meaning that he needs to bring his body to a stop or halt. He knows he has a space around himself that belongs to him. He learns you have one around yourself. He later learns that your SPACE can stop HIS SPACE from moving closer!
Now try asking him to step away from you, laterally sideways. Touching the halter with the left hand on his left side, and facing the triangle of 'air' under his neck, with right hand outstretched or with whip extending from it, touch him and step into this triangle. At first he may not understand you but soon he feels the touch of the whip and guesses when your right arm is approaching. You, being careful and sensitive, back down the 'energy' of your extended right arm and he senses the energy of your space approaching his space! You are sending him on! And in a lateral direction. And without even a touch! He is easy, quiet and willing.
Try now to draw his energy toward you, receiving it and taking it backward with you. Be careful he does not rush at you with intensity. Stand with him lined up beside a wall, his right side to the wall. Face him, holding the left side of his halter with a gentle hold from your left hand. Breath down low and quiet yourself. Reach out and touch his left hind quarter with your whip extending from your right arm. Touch him like you are patting him with your fingertips and take the whip sideways and toward yourself, opening your right shoulder and torso back and to the right. It may take several attempts but soon he will learn, if you are patient, that you want him to come toward you with one part of his body. Use your mind to draw him to yourself. Stepping backward, with feet rolling naturally toe to heel, bent knees, toes turned slightly inward as you step back, shifting weight back onto the heel as you draw the horse down the longside with his quarters in. Students are mesmorized by this! It seems like magic but it is real energy exchange that is happening. Your space is drawing his space toward you. It is a physical gesture that you are making which the horse can see and feel and this transforms into an invisible energy exchange.
We will learn about this later when I attempt to describe in greater detail how to use this concept in the ridden posture to achieve results similar and even more exciting and complex. The possibilities are endless with this. All that is required is for us to step out of ourselves, develop a greater mental control over the motions of the body and the intentions of the mind, and exercise patience and openess to the incredible sensitivities of your horse. When you start to realize what can actually happen between you and the horse that requires minimal physical effort you will never again want to do things in the way you used to!

Tempo

This term gets its own blog title because I need to create a fuller description that suits my purpose and goal of extraordinary dance which must have 'ease' as its distinguishing characteristic. Tempo, speed of the hoof beats, is easy to understand when you compare 2 horses of very different size. One will have a speedier regularity of footsteps than the other. That's it! Tempo in a nutshell! Not so fast. We have to work with tempo. How do we manage this? Simple! We don't! We let the horse manage it. What we do is help hold him to his own task of self-management. We help him keep his 'tick-tock' crisp, clear and regular. This takes away all the pressure of finding the 'right' tempo. We let the horse find that for himself.
Have you ever gone jogging with a friend who is either not at your level of fitness or who is of a different build? If you have you will know that it's not fun. One of the two of you is going to wear out before the other. Why? Because you each resonate in a way specific to your mass, shape, and fitness. Each horse does this too. If your horse is jogging along at a beat that is not in sync with these elements which are specific to him, he is going to wear out prematurely.
If you jog on your own, you will learn that you have to get into your own specific regularity of rhythm and a tempo that is unique to you in order to sustain the continuum of the jog. Soon you will start to feel comfortable with yourself and can endure.
This is how we want to train for dance with the horse---to let the horse find his tempo which we adjust to and help him maintain. Increasing the tempo(which remember is unique to him) adds stress which complicates the body's ability to carry the rider with ease as well as limits the body's ability to expand its energy to express itself in lift, volume and flexibility. These latter qualities require a certain kind of body tension to achieve. Without the ease of tempo we detract from the energy reserves the horse needs to improve other aspects of his motion. We create additional and unnecessary tensions that only impede flow of energy.
So----if the horse settles into a tempo that he feels very easy with but WE don't particularly like because it seems too lifeless or slow, then we have to do some rethinking and not just react by assuming we must push the horse on faster. This is a big mistake! This is how 'ego' gets in our way of success. Only the slower, natural tempo is going to serve us optimally in the exceptional dance we are after.
Rather than asking the horse to push on, we ask him to magnify the quality of his steps in the tempo he chooses. Tempo is speed of the HOOF BEATS not speed of the HORSE!

Balance, Half-Halt, Forwardness, Rhythm

And there will be many more......terms which are tossed about with flippant meanings that do not make sense to me sometimes. They are the lions & tigers & bears of riding which haunt me into the night. I need not strive to re-invent dressage but to understand it. On first observation these terms are not terribly obscure, but if I think about them for a while my head starts to spin. In order to describe how to develop feel through 'energetics' I will need to convey my own working definition of some things.
I'll start with 'balance'. I need to think of balance qualitatively. I cannot bring myself to say, "this horse is balanced" or "that horse is not balanced". To me a horse is balanced if he is standing on all 4 feet. He is not balanced if he is flat out on the ground! I can only comfortably talk about balance by saying phrases such as "that horse is well balanced" or "this horse is poorly balanced" or "let's improve the balance" or "optimal balance" or "bring him into a better(or new) balance" or "change the balance(thinking qualitatively)" or even "shift the balance".
I can sum up my difficulty with the term 'half-halt' by recalling what Francois LeMaire says about the term. If a half-halt is to be used to re-balance a horse we are in a lot of trouble if we keep needing to use it so frequently! I feel more comfortable describing targeted, specifically designed 'holds', 'retards', or 'shifts'. The dynamics of a moving horse are way too complex to throw a blanket term like 'half-halt' at.
Moving along to the term 'forwardness' or 'forward'. I just sighed when typing it!! Loosely, I would guess one wants the horse to move in a 'plus' or 'positive' direction, i.e. forward. What if you want to step backward? The whole issue for me is cleared up if I can just describe the term like this: the horse needs to be poised(or ready and willing) to move when asked. The degree with which he responds is his 'sparkiness' to my request. If he MOVES, I am satisfied! If he moves sluggishly, then he needs to be 'sensitized' to my request not be made to go more forward!
'Rhythm' is my next problem term. Rhythm is from the Latin 'rhythmus' meaning 'to flow'. So rhythmic might mean 'flowing'. It is also an ordered recurrent alteration of strong and weak elements in the flow of sound(Webster). Additionally, it is defined as the aspect of music comprising all the elements(as accent, meter and tempo) that relate to forward movement(Webster) and a characteristic rhythmic pattern(walk, trot, canter, gallop) and movement marked by the regular recurrence or natural flow of related elements(Webster).
Rhythm is a term rich in meaning but to develop feel in riding we need to be more specific in the way we use the term. We will not be able to understand 'energy flow' in a qualititative and quantitative sense unless we break this term down for clarity purposes. I will refer to rhythm as the metered beat----walk being 4-beat, trot 2-beat, canter 3(or4)-beat. We can further describe the regularity of those beats in terms of how evenly the footsteps touch the ground. The tempo is the speed of the beat of those footsteps and not the speed of the horse(I'll just call that fast or slow or somewhere in between). Tempo is characterized by the regularity of longitudinal flow of energy. And cadence is the expressiveness or emotion of the beat and is characterized by the vertical lift of the leg and vertical flow of the energy.
So the beats of the hooves are strung together in a regular rhythm of longitudinal and vertical flow which can be shaped into expressive dance.

Commitment

Quite apart from the emotional aspect, commitment is rich in meaning. To commit is to follow through. In riding we must carefully choose an intent and commit to it. On the surface it would seem easy to understand that without commitment a horse might not take our request seriously. But what if we looked at commitment as involving energy flow? Could it possibly be that the horse might not feel our intention? Could it be that commitment is somehow connected with us physiologically through how the energy of intent flows through us to the horse?
Think about the golfer swinging a club or the baseball player up at bat. What guarantee do these people have that the next move they make will produce the outcome they had hoped for? The answer lies in their commitment(or follow through) of intent.

What Makes Good Dance With a Partner?

A mutual feel for the music. For what music? For the music that is you and your horse as one. If we think of our horse as an instrument and ourselves as one, we can imagine that when the two are combined a new instrument is created. Simply by adding our weight and awkwardness we encumber the horse enough that he doesn't quite resonate the same as he did without us. Similarly, man without his horse becomes another man once mounted. Both horse and rider will need to discover their new beings in the relationship of partnership. Still, the horse knows he is a horse, and man, a man. Through partnership though, he adapts, remolds, reshapes.
Control and domination destroy the beauty of partnership. A great partnership is about leading and following in a way where togetherness remains.
Music with a horse goes beyond the resonating instruments and translates into music of motion where footsteps are the beat, posture accentuates the cadence and the melody is a sweet mutual cooperation that sings of joy and freedom.
One of my favorite dance partnerships is the iceskating pair Gordeeva and Grinkov. There was something about these two worth studying. Grinkov was large and strong but gentle and humble. The petite little Gordeeva was light and elegant in every way but with an energy of joy that brought real foundation to her small form. Together they were magic. The ways in which they interacted in dance was seamless and flawless because they shared. Sharing is giving and taking and when sharing happens in a regularity as in dance, the vision of the partnership is exquisite. To dance well, there needs to be a leader and follower. The follower is totally committed to this job of following for the sake of the partnership. The leader leads the follower securely, in a completely trustworthy manner, into his proper place in the dance. But in this partnership of Gordeeva and Grinkov, leader and follower switched places many times. It was a revolving union of individual roles. Sometimes the strong Grinkov would lead but then would hand the leadership baton over to the small Gordeeva for her to lead him for a while until she passed the baton back to him. It was breathtaking to watch this.
Our partnership with the horse could achieve this sort of greatness. The question is how much do we want this? How much of ourselves might we need to give up to have it? How patient must we be?

A Few Considerations

I like to think about learning in a spiral. We learn basics at the bottom of the spiral and as we grow in the learning and move up 'a rung', we learn a little more about each of those same basics so that the basics gain in dimension.
Our first lessons on a horse may be about sitting with the ear, shoulder, hip and heel in alignment, how to steer and ask with the legs. This is normal. Over time, we get more proficient at holding this alignment and in the steadiness of hands and legs. Still over more time, we learn more of the 'whens' to use hand or leg and aiding develops greater specificity and complexity.
Something else happens as we spiral upward in learning. Our focus becomes less and less on what our body parts are doing and is directed more at what the horse is doing. In some interesting way, I liken this to a sort of 'maturity' on the horse. Without some view into how this 'maturity' affects our riding, we might never realize that the highest levels of understanding and communication with the horse are going to require much greater self-control, especially control of the mind.
It is more than 'mental focus' that we're after though. It is a higher level of selflessness, a diminution of ego, that puts us into a state of being where we can partner with the horse the best. We will need to give ourselves over to the horse, over to the partnership. At this point the mind is so emptied of the clutter of concern about the self that it can direct the body with speed, accuracy and clarity as the body relates to the horse in the partnership.
Adjustments in posture and influence need to come with such speed that they are almost imperceptible. Practice of the Tai Chi form is very helpful in this area. Qi Kong exercises, meditation and even prayer can develop this special mind control.
Breath control and lung fitness are important as well. Why is this? Apart from the fact that riding can provide a mild form of aerobic exercise, requiring regular full breathing and stamina, the quality of riding I have in mind demands a working understanding of 'energy flow'. 'Energy flow' is related to breathing in many special ways. Tai Chi is good for teaching breath control as it relates to, enables and influences motion and energy flow.
Body control for the dance between horse and rider is less about strength and more about muscle tone. Developing strong muscles may be a disadvantage in terms of energy flow and finesse. Muscle bulk is excellent for lifting but can 'trap' energy that needs to move around....or stir....within the body.
For those who have poor muscle tone, the ability to create tone as required is sufficient. Either way, be it a well toned body or poorly toned one, both will need to be able to alter the tone in specific areas to create minute signals to the horse and to move energy(or chi).

An Approach

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching riding is in the introduction of a subject. If I only cared about the mechanics of riding there would be no problem. Because my goals are always beyond the mechanics, I have to carefully set the stage for these goals so the object is not missed. I'll use whatever resources I can or need to create a vision for the rider of where we are going with a subject. Imagery, comparisons, targeted exercises and even stories can achieve this. Another resource is through questions for the rider, not all of which need to be answered right away. Education is from the Latin 'educo' which means 'to lead out'. My job as a teacher is to lead out of my students what is already part of them. It starts them thinking more on their own and this thinking produces feelings which which will develop their riding.
Education is the same for the horse. We don't 'put the moves' on him or really teach him anything. Instead, we lead out of him what he already knows how to do! Approaching the riding this way is better for reaching the goals I have in mind.

Harmony of Purpose

This is a collection of my thoughts on riding and relating to horses. I am setting out to explore my purpose with the horse as a partner, especially in a riding relationship that creates beautiful dance. The quality of the dance has been a focus of my attention for many years and so experiences have been gained and thoughts gathered and continue to gather which are shaping a better understanding of how to achieve not just dance but exceptional dance.

In this place I will honor my students and the challenges of their learning experiences as they strive to understand a new communication that produces ease in the riding and exceptional beauty through a learning mode that is as unusual as it is gratifying. I will introduce new ideas as they come to me and will seek to explain as much as I am able to of what I have discovered thus far.

It is my hope that the reason for riding will change for some, the experience will become enriched for others, and a new path will unfold itself for everyone as this collection of thoughts falls naturally into a harmonious combination of intentions and reveals a new purpose and a new possibility in the ridden relationship with the horse. Developing artistry is at the heart of this quest as it breathes new freedom into the horse and seeks to restore his natural beauty and joy.

Thought begets feel and so I welcome comments from anyone who is interested in contributing along these lines in a positive light and who wishes to join my journey.