(“Take that student, turn her upside down, and shake her violently like Mitt Romney’s Etch a Sketch.”)

Dressage instructors have lots of unfulfilled wishes—some involve creature comforts. If only the ring were heated . . . . or air conditioned. Some involve being spirited away to a tropical isle (or wherever). Most involve finding whatever would make their lesson with a particularly difficult student “click,” unleashing the floodgates of comprehension and carrying pupil, horse, and teacher for a dizzying ride to The Place Where Louie Dwells or to Disney World or to some other place of equally inestimable beauty and inner peace.

Not infrequently with a student who enters your arena (or you life) with massive amounts of intellectual baggage, you just wish you could turn back the clock. To eradicate the former horse or past teacher responsible for her scrambled brains and damaged psyche, you want to take that student, turn her upside down, and shake her violently like Mitt Romney’s Etch a Sketch.

This approach isn’t usually practical, so the best alternative is to try to convince said student to leave her wackiness at the door—easier said than done—by making her aware of the havoc it’s playing with her riding. Marriage counselors are fond of suggesting that you treat your time-worn spouse as a new conquest whose whims, fancies, and grotty habits are all yet to be discovered. In a similar vein you need to persuade your student to void every preconception and expectation of the horse she knows all too well. Even if she thinks she knows “this won’t work”, to be willing to try it anyway. A blank slate is the only way to shed all that baggage and find some new insights whose certain failure is not preordained by past routines.

Your student must realize she can accomplish this without letting down her guard—the price of freedom is eternal vigilance after all. She must allow herself to experience her horse anew in “real time” without automatically refighting yesterday’s battles, avoiding the traps that over-familiarity can lay.