(“Here was a so-called “regular “person who was able to do the same thing!”)

A professional whom I teach was re-reading my book and observed that a dominant theme was that the rider should be more positive, more assertive, and more determined to get things done. “Why,” she emailed, “do you never say things like that to me?”

“Because,” I responded (only half jokingly), “when you ride, your mind works like a runaway nuclear reactor. My job with you is to act like the control rods which modulate the reaction and prevent a total meltdown.”

It turns out that the majority of the people I see in clinics and, therefore, the people to whom Dressage Unscrambled was directed are from the first category. But even then, what makes my work interesting is that while people fall into general groupings, there are still huge individual differences from one rider to the next. Aside from physique and temperament, students also bring a wide variety of preconceptions and intellectual baggage to their riding.

I have been trying to persuade one particular woman for a very long time that she should take a little hold of her horse and invite the mare to face the contact and give in instead of politely running through her hand. It has not been that hard to do when I have ridden the horse. But when her owner tries it, it’s never the horse who “blinks first.”

Recently a second amateur has been riding the mare a few days a week and occasionally having a lesson with me. Putting her together has not been much of a problem for this second person either.

After watching her horse be ridden successfully by this new person, the mare’s owner shared with me several conclusions. Number one, she said, she always felt that when a professional got on her horse and put her together, it was always some sort of magic that was beyond the scope of normal people’s abilities. Here was a so-called “regular “person who was able to do the same thing! Perhaps it wasn’t so extraordinary. Perhaps she could just do it too…

Second, she realized that in the back of her mind she carried a sharp warning from another friend of hers – a talented but extremely intense trainer– the kind who always goes around with a black cloud hanging over her head. This trainer had once brusquely scolded her that her fixed, set hands had “stopped the horse’s back” and were ruining her. In reaction thereafter, my student (whom I had later begun to work with) had withdrawn into a very passive, conservative mode so as not to harm her horse.

Of course, I would not want her to hurt the horse either, but the nature of a gentle and generous horse is that it will permit you to experiment and even make mistakes without holding them against you.

As I told her, even if her hands did “stop the horse’s back,” five or ten minutes of correct riding would just as easily unstop it. You probably know from my past blog entries that I think mistakes are a normal part of relationships, whether between horses and people or even just between people. As long as they are not violent, egregious, or long-lasting, you simply deal with them and move on. Allowing yourself to be paralyzed by insecurity and self doubt hardly ever enhances a riding experience.

I was very glad my student decided to share these thoughts with me. I admit that there are times when “shut up and ride” is the way a lesson has to proceed, but knowing what’s going on in a rider’s mind makes it far easier to tailor a lesson to what she will understand and relate to. And, remember, this whole sequence was precipitated by her seeing how one of her peers dealt with her own horse.