16 Mar The Masterful Student #8
Let’s talk about learning. I don’t think the pulse-quickening joy of an epiphany on your horse, however small, ever goes away. That’s why I love the practice of dressage: gratifying improvement and increased connection with the horse. However, as someone who is no longer 20 years old, it seems like youth’s optimism and openness has solidified into something with edges. There is the ego, the personality, the habits, the patterns – all quite well established.
Still, one of the gifts of middle age is having spent enough time around my own personality that I am starting to see its less-than-useful characteristics. Some people say, “the horse is your mirror,” which does not mean the horse is mirroring you – the horse is its own being regardless of whether you are around or not. It has its own manner of experiencing the world.
It is more accurate to say, “The practice of riding/being with your horse holds up a mirror in which you will see your own tendencies.” When you have a practice that is essentially the same every day, you will eventually see your own role in it. As I heard Paul tell an FEI rider recently, “You have to know yourself as a rider. You must know those areas where you tend to not do enough, and when you do too much.”
The way that I view learning has changed over time. So this week, I thought I would share some mud puddles that I stepped in with all the best intentions of being a good student.
Early in my dressage studies, I diligently applied myself to classical dressage theory. I read many classical texts and thought hard about them. I went through a phase where I was thinking about theory while I was riding. That wasn’t helpful because I was pulling precious resources of attention away from my horse.
“Theory is for after riding,” my teacher would tell me. “Just ride now and talk later! You should be so focused on what is happening under you right now that you can’t think of anything else.” Riding only happens in the present moment, and I wasn’t fully aware of my body while my mind was reciting Steinbrecht. My reactions were slower and I was essentially distracting myself.
Secondly, I really thought I needed to verbally process my learning with my teacher. His response was to joke that he was going to give me a stereotypical German lesson, which went like this. “Yes. No. More. Stop that!” He was also known to say “How can you ride when you are talking so much?”
At first, I was offended. Did my mental process not matter? Wasn’t this a partnership between teacher and rider? Didn’t we need to discuss everything to make sure that I really had it right? Eventually I realized that my talking was wasting precious lesson time, and that if too many words are going out, it’s hard for information to come in. Put another way, it’s really your body that must learn to ride, so thinking and talking are only going to get you so far.
A more subtle effect was that my busy mind railroaded right over the most important thing – the delicate epiphanies and new neural pathways being formed when you finally succeed.
We riders work so hard to get our bodies to try something different, to make small but important changes in the way we influence the horse. When we get a glimpse of the right action, it can be like seeing through a frosty window or noticing something in your peripheral vision. It’s fleeting and slight, elusive to capture and hold in your body. For me it became important not to verbalize or analyze or celebrate right over the good moments and then lose their essence.
When the teacher is trying to teach you a small piece of something, it can be like holding a delicate thread while walking through a dark room. You need to work hard to stay connected to the thread, to not break it, to keep following it without losing concentration. It’s a kind of trust.
Our minds do backflips to protect our sense of self, our confidence, our beliefs about how things should go. To ride well we must put the word-based processing away while we are in the saddle and let the language of touch take over. That’s when meet the horse, and when we have a chance to circumvent our own well-entrenched habits.
