10 Mar The Masterful Student #7
I’m training our young stallion Xander, who has been under saddle about 9 months. I adore him, he’s smart and talented. And while we are still in early days, overall he’s not been simple. When we work together there is a subtle undercurrent of, ‘who’s really in charge here?’ He vacillates between ignoring me to perfectly responsive and back again within moments. He holds back, and then he is exuberant. Thankfully, his naughtiness isn’t very sincere, and his good work feels wonderful.
Our assistant Grace has commented on how strong he is – how easily he stands on his hind legs in his field for fun, and once when he reared a little too closely to his gate (and the hot wire), he casually pivoted in the air without losing balance and slowly came back down to earth.
I have little doubt about his strong back and hind end. There is nothing wispy or immature about his build, even as a four year old. But carrying a rider changes the balance for all horses, and finding the swing in his back and the right tempo for his trot has been challenging. The winter’s work has been trying to teach him to follow my seat and let me set the balance and tempo. After months of hearing Paul say, “that’s closer!” we finally agree on the high quality trot. But consistency is elusive.
It’s important to remember that when we ride, we affect the horse, yet the horse also affects us. The horse can bounce the rider out of the saddle, can take its back away, push the rider over onto one side, quicken or slow the tempo, tip the rider’s balance forward or backward.
When a horse deviates in the gait, whether in speed or tempo or balance or uneveness, the rider must immediately be aware of it. But the rider often doesn’t recognize the deviation in the gait or the way the horse has affected their position. Sometimes the rider has to experience the mistake many times before promptly recognizing the issue.
I believe that our mistakes have to become very familar to us. We must know our mistakes so well that we begin to see them coming before they arrive. We must know exactly how they feel, and then make the crucial recategorization in our mind that this very familiar feeling is actually the wrong feeling, and this is the moment when we will try something else.
Part of what it means to ‘show up and do the work’ is understanding that one doesn’t get on their horse and practice, assuming smooth progress. It might be learning how to recognize mistakes more and more quickly. The work is not simply doing it correctly, it is sorting through what is not quite right, in the search for better. When a horse can give you ten different trots, do you know which one is the best? In all the lifting cadence of a Grand Prix horse’s passage, can you discern when your horse horse travels too narrowly or rolls from one shoulder to another in balance´?
The teacher’s role is to build the student’s awareness of crucial feelings, and to guide the rider’s brain and body on the most productive path. I don’t think it is said often enough that a huge part of learning to ride and train is sorting through all the sensations to find the ones that actually matter and are correct. There is a lot of noise and static in the act of riding, physically and emotionally.
A long time ago, a teacher said to me – you may lose a horse or lose a job, but no one can ever take away your experiences as a rider. She called it your “Book of Feels.” She meant that whenever you rode a new horse or movement and learned something, you would mentally file it away in your Book of Feels, your personal history of riding.
I have a lot of entries in my Book of Feels. Some are written in pencil and some are written in ink and underlined. Sometimes I find I’m writing an entry that I’ve written before. I’ve had stretches of time where it seemed like I had nothing to add at all. But then I meet a horse, a horse who asks a little more of me. A horse like our young stallion Xander, who sharpens the pencil and turns the page.
