On Tuesday I returned from a relaxing vacation in the Florida Keys and was looking forward to getting back to work on my horsemanship. So I hurried out to the barn only to discover that Sonny was limping. The timing could not have been any worse since we are scheduled to attend a clinic with Parelli 6 Star Master Instructor Carol Coppinger during the second week in April and I had been in Florida for the past month. Hoping that the problem was nothing more serious than Sonny having toes that were a little too long (the blacksmith was scheduled for Friday), I called Jane Bartsch, my regular Parelli instructor and asked if I could take my next scheduled lesson on one of her horses.
Switching horses for a lesson might not seem like much of a challenge to most people but for me it is kind of a big deal. I’ve been riding for more than three decades but during that time have not ridden more than a handful of horses. I didn’t start riding until I was almost 30 and have never been a particularly bold rider. When I finally was ready to buy my first horse, I found Max, a 9 year old appaloosa gelding, with smooth gaits and the personality of a puppy. Max lived to be 32 and while he was alive, he was my only mount.
Sonny arrived about a year after Max died. I struggled along for a few years with Sonny before discovering Parelli, but now we have a good partnership and although I still have some confidence issues at the canter, we are making progress toward our level three requirements with the help of weekly lessons with 2 Star Instructor Jane Bartsch.
When I talked to Jane on the phone about the lesson arrangement, she was quick to agree and suggested I ride her levels horse, Lynn, an appaloosa mare. She asked if I wanted to bring my own saddle since I ride in an English saddle but I had wanted to try Jane’s western Parelli saddle and I thought Lynn would be more comfortable with her own saddle. So Thursday morning I arrived at Jane’s farm, riding hat in hand, for my lesson with Lynn.
I was happy that Lynn was an LBI because I thought it would be easier for me to work with a horse that had the same horsenality as Sonny but I’ve never owned a mare and the first thing I noticed about Lynn was that she didn't seem particularly pleased to see me. Jane slipped me a couple of horse cookies and I spent a few minutes trying to establish a relationship with Lynn by finding her special scratchy places and slipping her a couple of treats. Jane is always telling me what a lovely expression Sonny has and after working with Lynn for a few minutes I began to understand how easy he was to please.
After doing some preliminary ground work, where Lynn and I were feeling each other out, I felt confident enough to climb aboard. Lynn is several inches shorter than Sonny so I was able to step up on Jane’s pedestal and swing up in the saddle. Because I have a bad left knee, I mount on the right side and that didn’t seem to bother her at all. I asked Jane to hand me my carrot stick, looped the reins around the saddle horn and asked Lynn to step off at a walk.
I have been putting a lot of effort in during the past year on my carrot stick riding. Like many people who came from the hunt seat school of riding, I had learned to be over dependent on using the reins and wasn’t confident in my seat connection to my horse. As a result, I tended to brace in my stirrups and that would cause Sonny to brace. Because he is such an easy going horse I interpreted his calm manner for relaxation and then complained about his choppy gaits. When I finally figured out that he wasn’t relaxed because I wasn’t relaxed, I made a concerted effort to reduce both my dependence on using the reins and the brace in my riding. Getting on Lynn was going to be a test of my progress.
Things were great at the walk. Jane has really developed Lynn and she is very responsive. When I asked her to yield her hindquarters and then her forehand, she went so briskly it almost felt like a spin. I could stop her just by sitting back and sighing and she would back up with only the slightest movement of my legs. She side passed over a log when I asked and I could get her to change direction by using only my leg and the slightest pressure of my hand on her neck. After 15 or so minutes at the walk, during which I never touched the reins, I was thinking that we really had it going and I was feeling pretty good about the fact that I was on this strange horse, riding in a different saddle and was feeling pretty confident. We were the picture of harmony. Then I asked Lynn to trot.
I guess I had expected her to step off it a little jog trot but as soon as I squeezed with my legs she scooted off in a fast, bouncy trot and after quarter of a lap broke into a canter. Feeling a bit of panic, I grabbed the reins, braced in the stirrups, pulled her to a stop, and then turned in my saddle to apologize to Jane. It was at that point, I realized that Lynn was telling me that perhaps I wasn’t as relaxed I had thought I was.
From that point it became very clear to me that Lynn was telling me a story about bracing. Despite the fact that I was trying very hard not to pressure her with my legs, I clearly was. To make matters worse, Jane’s arena is not completely level so on one long side we were traveling slightly downhill and the other slightly up hill. Every time Lynn started downhill, it felt like she was speeding up and my anxiety increased. Rather than just going along with her pace or sighing and using my body to slow her down, I would snatch up the reins and insist that she stop.
Despite the fact that I was getting a little bit rattled, Jane was maintaining her usual calm and reminding me to breath. In an attempt to manage my anxiety by using approach and retreat, I started playing the corner’s game, walking Lynn halfway down the long side of the arena before asking her to trot to the fence. That yielded a little bit of improvement but I was still bouncing around to Lynn’s choppy trot. Then Jane suggested that I pick a corner of the arena and have Lynn circle at the trot. This allowed both of us to relax a bit more and took some of the speed out of Lynn’s pace.
It was while we were circling the tree in Jane’s arena that it occurred to me while I felt like I was really bouncing along to Lynn’s quick trot, my butt wasn’t actually coming out of the saddle at all and Lynn wasn’t trying to run off with me so I didn’t really need to be snatching her in the mouth. What I needed to be doing at that point was to just go along with her pace. So I eased up on the reins, sat deep in the saddle and tried my best to relax my shoulders, legs and back. Almost immediately Lynn’s trot slowed into a more rhythmic pace. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an improvement.
Lynn and I kept working at improving our harmony at the trot. Each time I glanced at my watch (I was worried about going over my allotted hour) Jane told me not to worry about the time. She understood, perhaps even better than I, how important this was for me. As I recognized and tried to release my brace, I began seeing changes that indicated Lynn was also releasing tension. As I relaxed, she yawned repeatedly, something that Jane told me she seldom did.
I’m not sure how long we worked but eventually, Lynn and I were maintaining a steady, mostly relaxed pace while trotting serpentines in the arena. At that point, rather than move on to the canter, I chose to end the session. I felt pretty good at what I had accomplished. Riding a new horse in a new saddle, I had worked through my anxiety and reached a good stopping point. I was so encouraged with my progress that I asked Jane if I could ride my next lesson on Lynn.
Pat Parelli says that people teach horses and horses teach people. Riding Lynn helped me to recognize that although I have eliminated some of the brace in my riding, I have a long way to go before I am brace free. This fact was really brought home to me this morning when I woke to discover sore muscles in my neck, shoulders and core! In reflecting on my experience riding Lynn, I realized that many of the riding issues which I have attributed to Sonny are actually more issues of my confidence than of his gaits. But I also realized after riding Lynn, how important it is for my development as a horseman to broaden my experience by riding different horses.
So I want to say “Thank you Lynn”. You’ve given me the courage to search out other partners and from now on, I am going to look forward to more opportunities to ride a horse of a different color!
Friday, March 23, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Strength of Bond
Like many older Parelli students I discovered natural horsemanship after years of more conventional training where horses were often treated as if they had no capacity to think and methods were often based on force or coercion. I was intrigued by the Parelli promise to put the relationship first and attracted by the bond it created between horse and human. Little did I know in the beginning that the simple task of taking off a blanket would someday serve as a test of the strength of the bond I developed with Jody, one of the most skeptical horses at our rescue.
Jody was one of the first horses I noticed when I began volunteering at the rescue because unlike the other retirees, who sought attention and begged for treats, he remained always just out of reach. A bay thoroughbred with an upside down white tear drop shaped spot on his forehead, and a thick black mane and tail that hung in dreadlocks, Jody refused to allow himself to be caught for any reason.
Every day after I fed the horses I took a curry comb and brush and entered the paddock to groom any horse that would stand quietly for me. Jody often would stand on the far side of a horse I was grooming but if I moved toward him he would walk off. After many days of working quietly around the retirees, Jody finally allowed me to touch him on his neck. I never tried to restrain him, allowing him to choose when he wanted to leave, and slowly he began to allow me to spend more time standing next to him, stroking, brushing and sometimes even working my fingers through his dreadlocks to untangle them.
Because I always allowed Jody to make the decision about if he wished to stay with me and for how long, he eventually began to trust me enough to allow himself to be haltered and held for he blacksmith. I worked with him for an entire year before he would look at me directly with both eyes and it was another few months before he actually approached me when I walked out into his pasture. He had learned to trust me enough that I was able to hold him while the vet cleaned out infected lymph nodes under his chin when he came down with the strangles that swept through the rescue herd.
Despite the trust that had developed between us, Jody remained skeptical of other volunteers at the rescue and often would not allow anyone else to handle him so I wasn't surprised when I returned from a vacation in Florida last spring to discover that Jody was the only horse at the rescue still wearing his winter blanket. The Delaware spring weather had become pretty warm and all the other blankets had been removed by no one had been able to catch Jody to remove his so as soon as I stepped out of my car, the rescue's barn manager approached me and asked if I could please catch Jody and take his blanket off.
Jody was off by himself at the far end of the pasture so I picked up a halter and lead line and headed out to get him. On the way, I stopped to greet each retiree, scratching necks and slipping treats out of my pockets for each horse I passed. Jody occasionally interrupted his grazing by lifting up his head to follow my progress and he didn't move off as I got nearer to him so I didn't anticipate any problems haltering and leading him back to the paddock. When I reached him, he gazed at me with his big brown eyes and leaned into me as I scratched his neck. He was already beginning to shed his winter coat and when I slipped my hand under the edge of his heavy blanket I could feel that he was sweating so I was anxious to remove it. But when I tried to slip the halter on, he moved away a few steps and returned to his grazing. I waited a few moments and approached him. Again he stood quietly with me until I tried to halter him, but as soon as I lifted the halter up he stepped away.
I had never forced Jody to do anything he didn't want to do and I wasn't about to ruin his trust by starting now so I put the halter and lead line on the ground and gave his neck another good scratch. I knew I needed to get the heavy blanket off of him and I didn't seem to have a good option other than to try and remove it out in the field where he stood. I wouldn't worry at all about removing a blanked from my own horse Sonny if he were loose in a field but I was a very worried about trying this with Jody. I was worried because he really didn't like people working around his hind end and I was afraid that if he spooked when I was back there and ran off while the blanket was only partially unhooked, he could get him self tangled up in it, fall and hurt himself. But he seemed relaxed enough with me being out there with him even if he didn't want to be haltered so I thought I would give it a try.
Normally when I remove a blanket, I unhook the leg straps first, then the belly straps and finally the chest buckles, but I was standing at Jody's head and he had always been most comfortable with me in zone one so I decided to start there. His blanket had buckles instead of snaps at it chest closure so while he continued to graze, I slowly worked the buckles until they were undone. Then I spoke softly to him as I ran my hand along his neck and down his back, moving down his side to unhook the belly straps and unhook the leg strap on that side. Jody lifted his head to watch me as I worked at his side, but made no attempt to move off. So far, I thought to myself, so good.
Jody has always been uncomfortable when anyone is standing in zone four or five so rather than go around behind him, I walked back to his head and slipped a treat out of my pocket for him. Then running my hand along the other his body, I stepped around and reached for the other leg strap. That was when I realized that rather than being hooked normally to the rings on his blanket, the leg strap on this side seemed to be tangled with the other leg strap. I bent lower to get a good look at the problem and discovered to my horror that one of the legs straps had broken and someone had tried to fix the problem by knotting them together. There was no way to get the straps untangled from Jody's legs other than untying the knots, but the knots were crusted with manure dried mud and didn't want to budge. To make matters even worse, the tangle of knots keeping the two straps tied to each other was fairly tight against his belly and close to his sheath, requiring me to work in a sensitive area and at a spot where I knew he did not like to have anyone stay very long.
By this time Jody had stopped grazing and had craned his neck around to see what I was doing back there in zone 4. I had dropped to one knee to give myself some stability while I was desperately trying to work the stiffened knots loose and was praying that he wouldn't panic and take off. I don't know how long I knelt there working on that knot but it seemed like an eternity and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I knew that if Jody startled and chose to leave suddenly, I was in a vulnerable position and the blanket could easily be jerked off and become tangled around his back legs. He continued to stand with neck bent around watching while slowly the stiff material began to loosen and finally the knots were undone freeing Jody's legs.
Breathing an enormous sigh of relief, I lurched up to my feet and slid the blanket across Jody's back. When it was off, Jody blew and shook himself like a dog before dropping his head to the new green grass at his feet. For a few minutes I stood at his side, using my fingers as a curry comb and groomed great tufts of hair from his withers and back while he grazed. Then he reached around with his head and touched my hand with his nose before walking purposefully away, letting me know that this session, at least from his perspective, was finished.
Put the relationship first - it is such a simple idea but with our direct line, predator thinking, it is not always easy to do. And yet, it is often the little things, the quiet things, that we do every day when we are with our horses that builds the bonds of trust that allow us to become partners. I will never ride Jody and never play the seven games with him. He has earned his retirement. But by putting our relationship first, by allowing Jody the freedom to choose whether or not he wanted to stay with me every time I went out in his paddock or field with him, we developed a strength of bond that has allowed us each to be vulnerable in the presence of the other. And that, I think, is the mark of a true partnership.
Jody was one of the first horses I noticed when I began volunteering at the rescue because unlike the other retirees, who sought attention and begged for treats, he remained always just out of reach. A bay thoroughbred with an upside down white tear drop shaped spot on his forehead, and a thick black mane and tail that hung in dreadlocks, Jody refused to allow himself to be caught for any reason.
Every day after I fed the horses I took a curry comb and brush and entered the paddock to groom any horse that would stand quietly for me. Jody often would stand on the far side of a horse I was grooming but if I moved toward him he would walk off. After many days of working quietly around the retirees, Jody finally allowed me to touch him on his neck. I never tried to restrain him, allowing him to choose when he wanted to leave, and slowly he began to allow me to spend more time standing next to him, stroking, brushing and sometimes even working my fingers through his dreadlocks to untangle them.
Because I always allowed Jody to make the decision about if he wished to stay with me and for how long, he eventually began to trust me enough to allow himself to be haltered and held for he blacksmith. I worked with him for an entire year before he would look at me directly with both eyes and it was another few months before he actually approached me when I walked out into his pasture. He had learned to trust me enough that I was able to hold him while the vet cleaned out infected lymph nodes under his chin when he came down with the strangles that swept through the rescue herd.
Despite the trust that had developed between us, Jody remained skeptical of other volunteers at the rescue and often would not allow anyone else to handle him so I wasn't surprised when I returned from a vacation in Florida last spring to discover that Jody was the only horse at the rescue still wearing his winter blanket. The Delaware spring weather had become pretty warm and all the other blankets had been removed by no one had been able to catch Jody to remove his so as soon as I stepped out of my car, the rescue's barn manager approached me and asked if I could please catch Jody and take his blanket off.
Jody was off by himself at the far end of the pasture so I picked up a halter and lead line and headed out to get him. On the way, I stopped to greet each retiree, scratching necks and slipping treats out of my pockets for each horse I passed. Jody occasionally interrupted his grazing by lifting up his head to follow my progress and he didn't move off as I got nearer to him so I didn't anticipate any problems haltering and leading him back to the paddock. When I reached him, he gazed at me with his big brown eyes and leaned into me as I scratched his neck. He was already beginning to shed his winter coat and when I slipped my hand under the edge of his heavy blanket I could feel that he was sweating so I was anxious to remove it. But when I tried to slip the halter on, he moved away a few steps and returned to his grazing. I waited a few moments and approached him. Again he stood quietly with me until I tried to halter him, but as soon as I lifted the halter up he stepped away.
I had never forced Jody to do anything he didn't want to do and I wasn't about to ruin his trust by starting now so I put the halter and lead line on the ground and gave his neck another good scratch. I knew I needed to get the heavy blanket off of him and I didn't seem to have a good option other than to try and remove it out in the field where he stood. I wouldn't worry at all about removing a blanked from my own horse Sonny if he were loose in a field but I was a very worried about trying this with Jody. I was worried because he really didn't like people working around his hind end and I was afraid that if he spooked when I was back there and ran off while the blanket was only partially unhooked, he could get him self tangled up in it, fall and hurt himself. But he seemed relaxed enough with me being out there with him even if he didn't want to be haltered so I thought I would give it a try.
Normally when I remove a blanket, I unhook the leg straps first, then the belly straps and finally the chest buckles, but I was standing at Jody's head and he had always been most comfortable with me in zone one so I decided to start there. His blanket had buckles instead of snaps at it chest closure so while he continued to graze, I slowly worked the buckles until they were undone. Then I spoke softly to him as I ran my hand along his neck and down his back, moving down his side to unhook the belly straps and unhook the leg strap on that side. Jody lifted his head to watch me as I worked at his side, but made no attempt to move off. So far, I thought to myself, so good.
Jody has always been uncomfortable when anyone is standing in zone four or five so rather than go around behind him, I walked back to his head and slipped a treat out of my pocket for him. Then running my hand along the other his body, I stepped around and reached for the other leg strap. That was when I realized that rather than being hooked normally to the rings on his blanket, the leg strap on this side seemed to be tangled with the other leg strap. I bent lower to get a good look at the problem and discovered to my horror that one of the legs straps had broken and someone had tried to fix the problem by knotting them together. There was no way to get the straps untangled from Jody's legs other than untying the knots, but the knots were crusted with manure dried mud and didn't want to budge. To make matters even worse, the tangle of knots keeping the two straps tied to each other was fairly tight against his belly and close to his sheath, requiring me to work in a sensitive area and at a spot where I knew he did not like to have anyone stay very long.
By this time Jody had stopped grazing and had craned his neck around to see what I was doing back there in zone 4. I had dropped to one knee to give myself some stability while I was desperately trying to work the stiffened knots loose and was praying that he wouldn't panic and take off. I don't know how long I knelt there working on that knot but it seemed like an eternity and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I knew that if Jody startled and chose to leave suddenly, I was in a vulnerable position and the blanket could easily be jerked off and become tangled around his back legs. He continued to stand with neck bent around watching while slowly the stiff material began to loosen and finally the knots were undone freeing Jody's legs.
Breathing an enormous sigh of relief, I lurched up to my feet and slid the blanket across Jody's back. When it was off, Jody blew and shook himself like a dog before dropping his head to the new green grass at his feet. For a few minutes I stood at his side, using my fingers as a curry comb and groomed great tufts of hair from his withers and back while he grazed. Then he reached around with his head and touched my hand with his nose before walking purposefully away, letting me know that this session, at least from his perspective, was finished.
Put the relationship first - it is such a simple idea but with our direct line, predator thinking, it is not always easy to do. And yet, it is often the little things, the quiet things, that we do every day when we are with our horses that builds the bonds of trust that allow us to become partners. I will never ride Jody and never play the seven games with him. He has earned his retirement. But by putting our relationship first, by allowing Jody the freedom to choose whether or not he wanted to stay with me every time I went out in his paddock or field with him, we developed a strength of bond that has allowed us each to be vulnerable in the presence of the other. And that, I think, is the mark of a true partnership.
Friday, February 17, 2012
The Potential In Feeling Pleased
While I have been on my Parelli journey, I have been constantly amazed at how often a lesson I first learn while working with my horse turns into a life lesson that I can use with my family and friends. Most recently this happened with something I learned in one of my first clinics with Carol Coppinger about the potential that comes from feeling pleased.
We had been playing in the clinic with the circle game and trying to improve the elements, particularly the send and allow. Like many of the other participants, I was feeling the "clinic effect" of not being able to get my horse to do the things there that seemed to be easy when we were playing at home. I was getting a reasonably good send but no matter what I did, I couldn't get Sonny to maintain gait. He would wander around me at a walk but if I asked him to trot, he either broke gait back to the walk or he stopped altogether when he was behind me.
My horse Sonny and I are both LBIs which makes for some interesting sessions. I can get pretty focused and when I do, his opposition reflex springs into action so I try to maintain my sense of humor when playing with him. I was acutely aware of both Carol and Jane Bartsch, my local Parelli instructor, watching us and I really wanted to show them how much progress Sonny and I had made since the last clinic, but the harder I tried to get him to maintain gait, the worse things got. I was beginning to feel embarrassed by how bad we looked and them more frustrated I felt, the less cooperative Sonny became. Looking around me, I could see that many of the other clinic participants weren't having any better luck than I was and I could sense the frustration level rising.
Finally Carol told us to circle up around her and asked one of the other clinic participants who had been having trouble if she would be willing to volunteer for a demonstration. As the rest of us watched, the woman backed her horse away and tried to send it off on a circle. The horse's response was lackluster at best. It circled half a lap and stopped. The woman tried to resend the horse but he just stood there looking disinterested. Carol suggested she bring the horse back to her and start over which she did but without much improvement in response from her horse. As the woman struggled on, we could all see that her frustration growing and her horse's response becoming duller and less motivated. Standing in the circle watching, I could understand the pressure she must be feeling and could identify with her frustration. I was thinking of the hundreds of time during my journey with Sonny when I had been faced with a similar situation and how hard it was in those moments to maintain a positive outlook when my horse either didn't understand or didn't want to do what I was asking.
Finally Carol had her stop what she was doing and asked her what she was feeling. When the woman replied that she was really frustrated, Carol asked her how she thought that affected the horse. The woman turned and looked at her horse and the horse immediately looked away. It was apparent to all of us that there wasn't much of a connection between them at that moment.
That was when Carol told us that she wanted each of us to stand in front of our horses and to look directly at them and feel unhappy with them. I turned to face Sonny, and thinking about how our session had been going, didn't have to stretch far to feel unhappy. Almost instantly Sonny turned his head away from me and when I continued to focus my unhappy thoughts on him, actually stepped away from me.
"Now," Carol said, "I want you to feel pleased with your horse."
I thought about what a neat horse Sonny is an how much I enjoyed being with him. I couldn't help but smile and almost as soon as I did, Sonny turned his head and looked at me. I thought about much I loved going to Carol's clinics and started to grin. Sonny stepped toward me and started to push at my pocket for a carrot. For the rest of the clinic, whenever I felt myself becoming frustrated or a little too intense I practiced feeling pleased with Sonny. Whenever I felt pleased, Sonny became a little more focused on me and a little more responsive. I noticed that when I was feeling pleased, it was almost impossible for me to become worried about how I was doing or to feel embarrassed by my perceived lack of progress. When I was feeling pleased with Sonny I was happier and more positive and more relaxed.
While Carol's message about feeling pleased was a powerful lesson in the potential for positive thinking to improve my relationship with my horse, I recently used it to help my mother. My mother is almost 89 years old and suffers from some serious back problems. For the past five winters, I have taken her to the Florida Keys for a month so she can enjoy a break from the Delaware winters, which can be pretty miserable for someone who suffers from arthritis. She has always looked forward to these trips but this year I noticed that she was having some real anxiety about our upcoming travel.
My mother is a worrier and worries about things over which she has no control. As Mom has gotten older, it has become more uncomfortable for her to travel long distances in the car and she was so worried that she wouldn't be able to make the 7 hour drive from Orlando to the Keys that she actually considered not going to Florida at all this year. I planned our trip so it would involve only 2 hour segments in the car but by the time we left she had gotten herself pretty worked up and the strain was really visible in her face.
The first day involved a drive from our house to Amtrak's Auto train. She made the drive without any significant back pain and when we got settled on the train and I asked her how she was, she told me that she was surprised she had done so well but she was worried about the next days drive. I told her that instead of worrying about the next segment, I wanted her to feel pleased about how well she had done on the first leg. With some encouragement, I had her smiling and laughing about how good she felt. I could almost see the tension draining out of her.
For the next few days, any time she started to express a worry about something I would suggest that she "feel pleased" about something else. Pretty soon all I had to do to get her to smile was to ask her if she felt pleased. I am happy to say we are almost to the Keys and my mother is relaxed and enjoying herself. For a woman who has spent her life worrying about almost everything, and who has had to live with almost constant pain for the past few years, this has been a pretty remarkable transformation.
It is just one more reason why I love Parelli Natural Horsemanship. It really is a way to make the world a better place for both horses and humans!
We had been playing in the clinic with the circle game and trying to improve the elements, particularly the send and allow. Like many of the other participants, I was feeling the "clinic effect" of not being able to get my horse to do the things there that seemed to be easy when we were playing at home. I was getting a reasonably good send but no matter what I did, I couldn't get Sonny to maintain gait. He would wander around me at a walk but if I asked him to trot, he either broke gait back to the walk or he stopped altogether when he was behind me.
My horse Sonny and I are both LBIs which makes for some interesting sessions. I can get pretty focused and when I do, his opposition reflex springs into action so I try to maintain my sense of humor when playing with him. I was acutely aware of both Carol and Jane Bartsch, my local Parelli instructor, watching us and I really wanted to show them how much progress Sonny and I had made since the last clinic, but the harder I tried to get him to maintain gait, the worse things got. I was beginning to feel embarrassed by how bad we looked and them more frustrated I felt, the less cooperative Sonny became. Looking around me, I could see that many of the other clinic participants weren't having any better luck than I was and I could sense the frustration level rising.
Finally Carol told us to circle up around her and asked one of the other clinic participants who had been having trouble if she would be willing to volunteer for a demonstration. As the rest of us watched, the woman backed her horse away and tried to send it off on a circle. The horse's response was lackluster at best. It circled half a lap and stopped. The woman tried to resend the horse but he just stood there looking disinterested. Carol suggested she bring the horse back to her and start over which she did but without much improvement in response from her horse. As the woman struggled on, we could all see that her frustration growing and her horse's response becoming duller and less motivated. Standing in the circle watching, I could understand the pressure she must be feeling and could identify with her frustration. I was thinking of the hundreds of time during my journey with Sonny when I had been faced with a similar situation and how hard it was in those moments to maintain a positive outlook when my horse either didn't understand or didn't want to do what I was asking.
Finally Carol had her stop what she was doing and asked her what she was feeling. When the woman replied that she was really frustrated, Carol asked her how she thought that affected the horse. The woman turned and looked at her horse and the horse immediately looked away. It was apparent to all of us that there wasn't much of a connection between them at that moment.
That was when Carol told us that she wanted each of us to stand in front of our horses and to look directly at them and feel unhappy with them. I turned to face Sonny, and thinking about how our session had been going, didn't have to stretch far to feel unhappy. Almost instantly Sonny turned his head away from me and when I continued to focus my unhappy thoughts on him, actually stepped away from me.
"Now," Carol said, "I want you to feel pleased with your horse."
I thought about what a neat horse Sonny is an how much I enjoyed being with him. I couldn't help but smile and almost as soon as I did, Sonny turned his head and looked at me. I thought about much I loved going to Carol's clinics and started to grin. Sonny stepped toward me and started to push at my pocket for a carrot. For the rest of the clinic, whenever I felt myself becoming frustrated or a little too intense I practiced feeling pleased with Sonny. Whenever I felt pleased, Sonny became a little more focused on me and a little more responsive. I noticed that when I was feeling pleased, it was almost impossible for me to become worried about how I was doing or to feel embarrassed by my perceived lack of progress. When I was feeling pleased with Sonny I was happier and more positive and more relaxed.
While Carol's message about feeling pleased was a powerful lesson in the potential for positive thinking to improve my relationship with my horse, I recently used it to help my mother. My mother is almost 89 years old and suffers from some serious back problems. For the past five winters, I have taken her to the Florida Keys for a month so she can enjoy a break from the Delaware winters, which can be pretty miserable for someone who suffers from arthritis. She has always looked forward to these trips but this year I noticed that she was having some real anxiety about our upcoming travel.
My mother is a worrier and worries about things over which she has no control. As Mom has gotten older, it has become more uncomfortable for her to travel long distances in the car and she was so worried that she wouldn't be able to make the 7 hour drive from Orlando to the Keys that she actually considered not going to Florida at all this year. I planned our trip so it would involve only 2 hour segments in the car but by the time we left she had gotten herself pretty worked up and the strain was really visible in her face.
The first day involved a drive from our house to Amtrak's Auto train. She made the drive without any significant back pain and when we got settled on the train and I asked her how she was, she told me that she was surprised she had done so well but she was worried about the next days drive. I told her that instead of worrying about the next segment, I wanted her to feel pleased about how well she had done on the first leg. With some encouragement, I had her smiling and laughing about how good she felt. I could almost see the tension draining out of her.
For the next few days, any time she started to express a worry about something I would suggest that she "feel pleased" about something else. Pretty soon all I had to do to get her to smile was to ask her if she felt pleased. I am happy to say we are almost to the Keys and my mother is relaxed and enjoying herself. For a woman who has spent her life worrying about almost everything, and who has had to live with almost constant pain for the past few years, this has been a pretty remarkable transformation.
It is just one more reason why I love Parelli Natural Horsemanship. It really is a way to make the world a better place for both horses and humans!
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Crossing Thresholds
Recently I’ve been thinking about thresholds and reflecting on how my ideas about thresholds have changed since I began studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship four years ago. When I was younger, I pretty much considered thresholds to be something that brides were carried over on their wedding day. Later, as I pursued my studies in chemistry, I expanded my thinking about thresholds to include the limit below which a chemical substance could not be detected. I never considered a threshold as something that had a psychological meaning and when I first heard Linda Parelli talking about not pushing your horse past thresholds, I was still thinking about them in more physical terms. It wasn’t until I met a young quarter horse by the name of Hershey’s American Hero that the light bulb finally turned on in my mind.
Hero was a four month old cremello colt that had been rescued from the Camelot kill pens in New Jersey. He arrived at the rescue, thin, sickly and shy and had to be doctored back to health by a combination of good food, good care from our veterinarian and lots of love from the volunteers. Assisting in Hero’s rehabilitation was our director’s mare, Bugsy. Bugsy is an aged quarter horse with a strong mothering instinct and she has fostered every foal brought to the rescue. She immediately became Hero’s protector and he followed her around as if she was his own mother. She stayed by his side as he fought his way through a nasty respiratory infection even sharing his runny nose for some time.
Because Hero was so cute, he received lots of attention from the volunteer staff and after a few months at the rescue he was well on his way to being tamed. He would allow himself to be haltered and groomed and his ground manners were admirable considering how much he was fussed over on a daily basis but he would not allow himself to be led. This hadn’t really posed a problem for the volunteers so far because if anyone wanted to move Hero from place to place, all they had to do was to lead Bugsy and he would follow along. But Hero was growing quickly and the rescue’s director knew that so we would need to be able to lead him independently of his foster mother.
Teaching Hero to lead became my summer project. Because he was so tame, catching him was not an issue and he would allow me to slip the halter on his head, even turning his nose in my direction as I positioned it and tied the knot. I started by making sure my friendly game was solid and then would ask him to take just a step or two away from Bugsy. He quickly learned what the pressure from the halter meant and soon I was able to lead him in circle around Bugsy. I kept our sessions short, gradually increasing the distance I asked him to walk and although I hadn’t tried to lead him completely away from the herd, I felt I was making good progress.
One afternoon, as I was headed out to the field for another session with Hero, our barn manager Meredith called to me. “If you’re going to get Hero,” she said, “Could you bring him back to the barn? The vet is coming to see him.”
Hero and Bugsy were in the front field. It was separated from the field around the barn by a double fence. In the daytime, we opened both gates between the two fields, forming a chute the horses passed through on their way out. Because the horses preferred the grass in the front pasture, they were always in that field whenever the gates were opened. While it was only perhaps a couple of hundred yards from the front pasture to the barn, I would have to lead Hero away from Bugsy and the herd, through the chute and then through another gate and I knew that might be a challenge for the little fellow.
I slipped Hero a treat as I put the halter on and then gave him a good scratch before starting away from Bugsy. Standing at his side, I asked him to go forward with a slight pressure on the halter and a kiss. Hero took a few steps and then stopped, looking around for Bugsy. I scratched his neck, waited for him to look back at me and then asked him to more forward again. He took a few more steps and stopped so I repeated the wait and the scratch and in this way we walked out of the front field and through the chute into the barn field. It was slow going and although I could see that Hero was a bit concerned about being asked to move so far away from his herd, he wasn’t really agitated. When he would stop, I would stop and I waited to make sure he was with me before I asked him to move forward again. I was trying to be really careful about not forcing him forward but I wasn’t really thinking in terms of thresholds.
We made it all the way to the next gate before we hit the wall. Hero walked through gates all the time at the rescue and although I knew gates presented a squeeze, I wasn’t all that concerned. When I opened the gate and asked Hero to move forward, he actually planted his feet and pulled back against the halter. “This is different,” I thought to myself and I quickly let up on the pressure and studied the situation. That was when I recognized the first threshold, a physical one.
Some of our horses are fed at buckets that hang on the fence adjoining this gate, so the ground is pretty bare in that spot and is the rich red color of the dominant clay in the soil. On the other side of the gate in that spot, there is a thick, green carpet of grass and right at the gate, there is a small, 2 to 3 inch difference in the ground so that a horse has to step up slightly when going from field to grass. Because horses notice changes, I could see how this could present a problem to Hero. While he walked through gates all the time, he seldom faced this particular situation. I was asking him to “squeeze” through this gate and go across this physical threshold all at once.
Figuring that approach and retreat would probably be appropriate in this situation, I led Hero away and waited for him to relax. When he finally dropped his head, I turned him around and approached the gate again. This time he came a little closer. We repeated this a few times but when I finally tried to encourage him with a slight increase in pressure on the lead line, instead of moving forward he reared straight up. He was well and truly stuck and I was beginning to think there was more to this threshold then just the physical line in the clay that the color change presented.
I was standing at the gate scratching Hero’s neck and trying to figure out what to do next when Hannah, one of our younger volunteers, walked up. Wondering if a little pressure from behind might encourage Hero forward, I asked Hannah to take a spare lead line, go behind Hero and twirl it. Because I didn’t want Hero to feel too much pressure, I told Hannah to stand well away from Hero and I also asked her not to face him. She started twirling the line and Hero craned his neck around to see what was going on behind him. Then I asked Hero to step forward. He hesitated but he didn’t rear up. That was a good sign. He swiveled his head around again to look at Hannah. The next time I asked him to step forward he popped through gate with a small jump and came to rest at the other side, first looking back at where he had just come from and then looking directly at me. He gave himself a shake and began licking and chewing, nodding his head up and down a couple of times while he did.
I stood next to Hero, scratching his neck and giving him all the time he needed to process what had just happened. Finally his breathing became regular and he dropped his head for a bite of grass. When I finally asked Hero to walk forward with me he stepped off immediately and he walked quietly at my shoulder the rest of the way back to the barn. He led beautifully, making no attempt to stop again for the remainder of our journey and walking through the next gate without any hesitation. I handed him over to Meredith and as I watched her lead him away toward a stall, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just a physical threshold that Hero had encountered at that other gate, it was a psychological threshold as well.
For the entire walk in from the front pasture, I think Hero had been experiencing a series of psychological thresholds that had to do with leaving his herd. Each time he stopped, he had reached a threshold and each time I asked him to go forward, I was causing him to cross the threshold. I think the pressure was building up for him until we finally reached the gate. At that point, the combination of the squeeze at the gate, the physical threshold between the clay and the grass and the psychological threshold of leaving the herd built up to the point that Hero became stuck. When he finally crossed through the gate without anything bad happening, it was a significant moment to him. I think at that point, he truly accepted me as a leader and therefore it became OK to move away from the horse herd because he finally understood that we were a herd of two and that I wasn’t going to let anything bad happened to him. That was the moment when Hero really learned how to be led and I learned that psychological thresholds can be every bit as real as physical ones.
Since that time, I have become a lot more sensitive to the idea of psychological thresholds for my own horse Sonny. Because he is a calm and relatively brave LBI, his reactions are a lot more subtle than Hero’s were so it has not always been easy to recognize when he has reached a threshold but I have been working hard to understand them and that has helped continue to strengthen our bond. I have also experienced my own psychological thresholds as I’ve begun to ride my horse Sonny bareback and because I can recognize them for what they are, I am able to use approach and retreat as a way to help myself across.
Hero was a four month old cremello colt that had been rescued from the Camelot kill pens in New Jersey. He arrived at the rescue, thin, sickly and shy and had to be doctored back to health by a combination of good food, good care from our veterinarian and lots of love from the volunteers. Assisting in Hero’s rehabilitation was our director’s mare, Bugsy. Bugsy is an aged quarter horse with a strong mothering instinct and she has fostered every foal brought to the rescue. She immediately became Hero’s protector and he followed her around as if she was his own mother. She stayed by his side as he fought his way through a nasty respiratory infection even sharing his runny nose for some time.
Because Hero was so cute, he received lots of attention from the volunteer staff and after a few months at the rescue he was well on his way to being tamed. He would allow himself to be haltered and groomed and his ground manners were admirable considering how much he was fussed over on a daily basis but he would not allow himself to be led. This hadn’t really posed a problem for the volunteers so far because if anyone wanted to move Hero from place to place, all they had to do was to lead Bugsy and he would follow along. But Hero was growing quickly and the rescue’s director knew that so we would need to be able to lead him independently of his foster mother.
Teaching Hero to lead became my summer project. Because he was so tame, catching him was not an issue and he would allow me to slip the halter on his head, even turning his nose in my direction as I positioned it and tied the knot. I started by making sure my friendly game was solid and then would ask him to take just a step or two away from Bugsy. He quickly learned what the pressure from the halter meant and soon I was able to lead him in circle around Bugsy. I kept our sessions short, gradually increasing the distance I asked him to walk and although I hadn’t tried to lead him completely away from the herd, I felt I was making good progress.
One afternoon, as I was headed out to the field for another session with Hero, our barn manager Meredith called to me. “If you’re going to get Hero,” she said, “Could you bring him back to the barn? The vet is coming to see him.”
Hero and Bugsy were in the front field. It was separated from the field around the barn by a double fence. In the daytime, we opened both gates between the two fields, forming a chute the horses passed through on their way out. Because the horses preferred the grass in the front pasture, they were always in that field whenever the gates were opened. While it was only perhaps a couple of hundred yards from the front pasture to the barn, I would have to lead Hero away from Bugsy and the herd, through the chute and then through another gate and I knew that might be a challenge for the little fellow.
I slipped Hero a treat as I put the halter on and then gave him a good scratch before starting away from Bugsy. Standing at his side, I asked him to go forward with a slight pressure on the halter and a kiss. Hero took a few steps and then stopped, looking around for Bugsy. I scratched his neck, waited for him to look back at me and then asked him to more forward again. He took a few more steps and stopped so I repeated the wait and the scratch and in this way we walked out of the front field and through the chute into the barn field. It was slow going and although I could see that Hero was a bit concerned about being asked to move so far away from his herd, he wasn’t really agitated. When he would stop, I would stop and I waited to make sure he was with me before I asked him to move forward again. I was trying to be really careful about not forcing him forward but I wasn’t really thinking in terms of thresholds.
We made it all the way to the next gate before we hit the wall. Hero walked through gates all the time at the rescue and although I knew gates presented a squeeze, I wasn’t all that concerned. When I opened the gate and asked Hero to move forward, he actually planted his feet and pulled back against the halter. “This is different,” I thought to myself and I quickly let up on the pressure and studied the situation. That was when I recognized the first threshold, a physical one.
Some of our horses are fed at buckets that hang on the fence adjoining this gate, so the ground is pretty bare in that spot and is the rich red color of the dominant clay in the soil. On the other side of the gate in that spot, there is a thick, green carpet of grass and right at the gate, there is a small, 2 to 3 inch difference in the ground so that a horse has to step up slightly when going from field to grass. Because horses notice changes, I could see how this could present a problem to Hero. While he walked through gates all the time, he seldom faced this particular situation. I was asking him to “squeeze” through this gate and go across this physical threshold all at once.
Figuring that approach and retreat would probably be appropriate in this situation, I led Hero away and waited for him to relax. When he finally dropped his head, I turned him around and approached the gate again. This time he came a little closer. We repeated this a few times but when I finally tried to encourage him with a slight increase in pressure on the lead line, instead of moving forward he reared straight up. He was well and truly stuck and I was beginning to think there was more to this threshold then just the physical line in the clay that the color change presented.
I was standing at the gate scratching Hero’s neck and trying to figure out what to do next when Hannah, one of our younger volunteers, walked up. Wondering if a little pressure from behind might encourage Hero forward, I asked Hannah to take a spare lead line, go behind Hero and twirl it. Because I didn’t want Hero to feel too much pressure, I told Hannah to stand well away from Hero and I also asked her not to face him. She started twirling the line and Hero craned his neck around to see what was going on behind him. Then I asked Hero to step forward. He hesitated but he didn’t rear up. That was a good sign. He swiveled his head around again to look at Hannah. The next time I asked him to step forward he popped through gate with a small jump and came to rest at the other side, first looking back at where he had just come from and then looking directly at me. He gave himself a shake and began licking and chewing, nodding his head up and down a couple of times while he did.
I stood next to Hero, scratching his neck and giving him all the time he needed to process what had just happened. Finally his breathing became regular and he dropped his head for a bite of grass. When I finally asked Hero to walk forward with me he stepped off immediately and he walked quietly at my shoulder the rest of the way back to the barn. He led beautifully, making no attempt to stop again for the remainder of our journey and walking through the next gate without any hesitation. I handed him over to Meredith and as I watched her lead him away toward a stall, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just a physical threshold that Hero had encountered at that other gate, it was a psychological threshold as well.
For the entire walk in from the front pasture, I think Hero had been experiencing a series of psychological thresholds that had to do with leaving his herd. Each time he stopped, he had reached a threshold and each time I asked him to go forward, I was causing him to cross the threshold. I think the pressure was building up for him until we finally reached the gate. At that point, the combination of the squeeze at the gate, the physical threshold between the clay and the grass and the psychological threshold of leaving the herd built up to the point that Hero became stuck. When he finally crossed through the gate without anything bad happening, it was a significant moment to him. I think at that point, he truly accepted me as a leader and therefore it became OK to move away from the horse herd because he finally understood that we were a herd of two and that I wasn’t going to let anything bad happened to him. That was the moment when Hero really learned how to be led and I learned that psychological thresholds can be every bit as real as physical ones.
Since that time, I have become a lot more sensitive to the idea of psychological thresholds for my own horse Sonny. Because he is a calm and relatively brave LBI, his reactions are a lot more subtle than Hero’s were so it has not always been easy to recognize when he has reached a threshold but I have been working hard to understand them and that has helped continue to strengthen our bond. I have also experienced my own psychological thresholds as I’ve begun to ride my horse Sonny bareback and because I can recognize them for what they are, I am able to use approach and retreat as a way to help myself across.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Pygmalion Effect
Faith is a powerful thing. What we believe we can do or not do, and what is believed by those around us can greatly impact what we will ultimately accomplish in our lives. I know this is true for me and since studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship, I have learned it is also true for my horse Sonny. But recently I learned just how powerful it can be when my faith in someone else was combined with my faith in the principles taught by Parelli.
My belief in the power of faith began with a lesson from my parents. Even though I was a girl, growing up at a time when opportunities for girls were limited, my parents raised me to believe that I could do anything I wanted to do. They believed in me and expected that I would be successful. No matter what I told them I wanted to be; a veterinarian, a dolphin biologist, an Olympic swim coach, a geochemist, they told me I would be great at it.
The lesson was reinforced many times during my careers, first as a swim coach and science teacher and then as a manager for the DuPont Company. I never forgot the time a supervisor asked me with all sincerity one morning, “Well, what miracles are you going to perform today?” I would have moved mountains for that man and when I became a manager, I tried to believe in the people who worked for me as much as that man had believed in me. Because I held high expectations of my swimmers, my students and my employees at DuPont, they often performed better for me than they did for other people. I treated them as if they were capable of great things and because of that, often they were.
While I held high expectations for the people in my sphere of influence, before I began to study Parelli Natural Horsemanship, chauvinism keep me from according my horses the same respect. I loved my first horse, Max, but I didn’t think he was very smart. Fortunately for both of us he was very well trained and very athletic. Riding him was like driving a high performance sports car. Sonny came along 23 years later. He was bigger, more stubborn and, I thought at the time, kind of clumsy. If I didn’t walk him straight out of his stall, he would bump into the wall. He wasn’t particularly careful with his feet, stepping on me more times in the first month that I had him than Max did in the previous 23 years. Sonny was rock solid on the trails but riding him was like trying to muscle around a RV. I didn’t know anything about horsenality and didn’t understand his left brain introvert nature so I quickly came to the conclusion he was a nice horse but he wasn’t particularly athletic.
I would like to say that my expectations began to change as soon as I discovered Parelli but it would be almost 2 years I before I realized how much my lack of faith in Sonny was affecting our progress. I was in my first clinic with Carol Coppinger and we were playing with the circling game. Sonny was having trouble maintaining gait through the change of direction and Carol had come over to help us. I was fumbling my way through the exercise and making my usual excuses for Sonny. It was bad on so many levels.
“He has trouble with circles all the time,” I told Carol. “He’s so big and he just isn’t very athletic.”
“Can I try?” she asked, reaching for the lead line.
I handed her the line and retreated to the edge of the arena. Carol walked up to Sonny and stroked his neck. “You are a big fellow,” she said to him. Then she looked over at me. “I bet he’s way more athletic than you are giving him credit for.” With that, she backed him away from her and sent him off in a circle. Before long she had him changing direction at a trot without breaking gait. When she asked him to change at the canter he pivoted alertly and threw in a flying change. Clearly I had been underestimating his potential!
That clinic was a turning point in my relationship with Sonny and it also had impact on the way I approached The SummerWinds Stable horse rescue, where I worked with rescued horses. Where others saw problems, I saw potential. I expected the horses to respond positively to the Parelli method and they did. Working mostly on the ground with new horses coming into the sanctuary, I improved ground manners, solved catching problems and eased horses into a new way to relate to the humans in their lives.
It was an experience with a young girl at the rescue that helped me see the power of combining positive expectations with the Parelli principles. Besides rescuing horses, The SummerWinds runs programs for children and this spring was hosting a home school group for a series of beginner riding lessons. Being the horse specialist at the rescue, I seldom became involved with the children’s programs but that morning I was sitting in the barn while the instructors were having their meeting before the sixth and final week of the program. I overheard them discussing the difficultly they were having with one little girl who was very fearful. It sounded to me like they didn’t think she was capable of overcoming her fear and they didn’t know what else to try with her.
Without thinking, I spoke up. “Do you want me to give it a try?” I asked.
Everyone turned in my direction and I could read the skepticism on their faces. “Sure, if you want to” the head instructor replied. “Have at it.”
There were six little girls in the lesson and each one had her own instructor. My little girl was about 8 years old and I could see right away that she was nervous. Although she was big for her age, she was assigned to ride Holliday, a large red and white paint whose size must have been intimidating for her.
Holliday originally had been purchased by the rescue’s director as a Christmas present for her daughter. When Holliday arrived at the rescue, he didn’t pass his vet check because of a problem with his eyes. Rather than sending him back to his former owner, who hadn’t even recognized the problem with his eyes, the rescue shipped him up to the New Bolton Center for surgery to correct the eye problem. Although the director felt he wasn’t suitable for her daughter to show, she felt he was a nice horse so the rescue kept him as a lesson horse. He was a big boy with a quiet disposition, ideal for someone with confidence problems.
After the horses had been tacked up, I introduced myself to my student for the day, helped her onto Holliday’s back and started to lead her around the arena. Walking beside her, holding Holliday’s lead line, I could see that despite her apprehension, she was embarrassed to be the only student who was not riding independently. My years of experience coaching swimming and teaching told me that this was a child who really needed someone to believe in her.
I led Holliday back to the center of the arena, asked him to stop and then stepping back to his side looked up at the child on his back. “Did you know that there are only four things you need to be able to do to ride a horse by yourself” I asked her.
She looked down at me, eyes wide, face solemn, and shook her head.
“Yep” I said. “All you need to be able to do is to go forward, to stop, to back up and to turn. That doesn’t sound too hard does it?”
Again she shook her head and then added in an anxious voice. “You won’t let go of him, will you?”
“Nope, I got him” I said. “Now, let’s work on getting Holliday to go forward. Here’s what I want you to do. First I want you to squeeze him with your legs. Don’t kick him, just squeeze. If he doesn’t move then I want you to cluck to him like a chicken.” When I put my tongue against the top of my mouth and made the clucking sound she gave me a tiny smile. “Can you do that?” I asked.
“I don’t think so” she said.
“How about making a kissing sound?” I asked. “Like this.” When I puckered up my lips in an exaggerated kiss she laughed.
“Like this?” she asked and then she smooched.
“Yep, just like that and if he doesn’t move then, I want you to take the reins and just swing them back and forth on his shoulders until he moves.” I demonstrated with the reins and then let her try it. After a few swings she seemed to have the hang of it. “OK, here we go.”
Holding on to the very end of the lead line, I waited for her to begin. I had never done this with Holliday before but I had confidence it would work and I needed it to work for the sake of this little girl. She sat up straight and pushed her legs into Holliday’s sides, then she smooched to him loudly. Holliday stepped forward. I was careful not to move until Holliday took a step, then I walked along side for a few steps. I looked up at the little girl on his back. There was just the slightest smile on her face. I stopped Holliday and let her try asking him to go several times. Each time Holliday moved forward on her smooch.
“OK” I said to her as we walked along the rail, “now you have to learn how to stop him.” I looked right at her and asked, “Who do you think is stronger, you or Holliday?”
“Holliday is stronger” she answered.
“So, can you stop him by pulling back on both reins if he doesn’t want to stop?” I asked. When she shook her head I said. “So here is what you do when you want him to stop. You just lift up one rein and hold it until he stops.”
“Like this?” she asked, lifting her right hand up and pulling the rein to her chest.
“Keep your arm straight,” I said. Just lift it straight up like this. With that, I used my hand to straighten her elbow and lift her arm straight up in the air. Holliday took two steps and stopped. Silently I thanked this quiet horse for being such a quick study.
We tried starting and stopping until she seemed to have the hang of it and then I taught her to turn by holding her arm straight out to the side using a direct rein. She turned Holliday left and right. Finally I showed her how to back him up. We were 30 minutes into a one hour lesson and she had the basics.
“OK,” I said, “now I am going to unhook the lead line so you can do this by yourself.” A look of panic began to creep into her eyes. Before she could protest, I said. “I’m going to walk here right next to you, just like I was when I was leading. I know you can do this by yourself but I’ll stay right here just in case. So ask Holliday to walk forward.”
I smiled at her and nodded my encouragement. She took a big breath, kissed to him loudly and he stepped forward. I walked right along with her, encouraging all the way. At my direction she had Holliday walk forward, stop and turn. Then she backed him up. I moved a little further away from Holliday’s side and asked her to do it again. Then I asked her to walk Holliday around one of the barrels and over a pole on the ground. Each time she did something new, I moved a little further away from her and the horse. Finally I was standing about 10 feet away.
“Can you take ask Holliday to go down to that barrel,” I said as I pointed at a barrel on the other side of the ring. “Then go around the barrel and bring Holliday back to me?”
She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know,” she answered.
“Well, with as good as you have been doing, I’m sure you can do this” I said. “How about you give it a try?”
“OK,” she said and she smooched to Holliday. He ambled off in the direction of the barrel. When he got there, she pushed him into a big right hand turn with her direct rein and walked him back to me.
“Now can you walk him over there to the fence?” I pointed in the other direction and off she went. By the time we had done this several times, she was clearly riding with more confidence.
“Would you like to try a trot?” I asked.
She looked a little doubtful.
“You’re doing so well, I think you’re ready” I said to her. “You can put one hand down here on the saddle and push. That will help you stay put. I’ll stay right next to you and we will only do a few steps at a time. We’ll count together, one, two, three, four and then stop.”
Planting her hand on the saddle, she nodded her OK. I chirped to Holliday and trotted forward. He jogged next to me and we both counted out loud to four. When Holliday stopped I looked up to see how she was doing. She was smiling.
“How about six steps this time?” I asked. She nodded again. We jogged off a second time and when we stopped she was giggling.
When I glanced at my watch I realized that the hour was up. “So,” I asked, “how was your lesson today?” But I didn’t really need an answer because her smile told me everything I needed to know. As we left the ring, we walked Holliday past the picnic table where the mothers had been sitting to watch the riding lesson. One mother turned to me and silently mouthed ‘thank you’. There were tears in her eyes.
The hour I spent with this young girl was a demonstration both of the power of positive expectations and the power of Parelli. Years of coaching and teaching children had given me the confidence to work positively with this child I had just met, while years of studying Parelli gave me the confident that Holliday would respond positively and without fear to the signals he was being given.
Despite her lack of success in previous lessons, I was able to go into this lesson with the expectation that on this day, with this horse, this child could learn the four simple things she needed to do to independently ride a horse at a walk. My belief in her gave her the confidence she needed to learn how to go forward, to stop, to back up and to turn. Her success at doing this while I was walking beside her gave her the confidence to try it alone. Her confidence grew every time Holliday responded correctly to her signals.
There is nothing more powerful than belief. Pat Parelli tells us to ‘expect a lot, accept a little, and reward often’. Each time we do this with ourselves and our horses, we build a stronger relationship and further our journey toward becoming a true horseman. When we do this with the people around us, we give them the gift of recognizing and realizing their true potential.
My belief in the power of faith began with a lesson from my parents. Even though I was a girl, growing up at a time when opportunities for girls were limited, my parents raised me to believe that I could do anything I wanted to do. They believed in me and expected that I would be successful. No matter what I told them I wanted to be; a veterinarian, a dolphin biologist, an Olympic swim coach, a geochemist, they told me I would be great at it.
The lesson was reinforced many times during my careers, first as a swim coach and science teacher and then as a manager for the DuPont Company. I never forgot the time a supervisor asked me with all sincerity one morning, “Well, what miracles are you going to perform today?” I would have moved mountains for that man and when I became a manager, I tried to believe in the people who worked for me as much as that man had believed in me. Because I held high expectations of my swimmers, my students and my employees at DuPont, they often performed better for me than they did for other people. I treated them as if they were capable of great things and because of that, often they were.
While I held high expectations for the people in my sphere of influence, before I began to study Parelli Natural Horsemanship, chauvinism keep me from according my horses the same respect. I loved my first horse, Max, but I didn’t think he was very smart. Fortunately for both of us he was very well trained and very athletic. Riding him was like driving a high performance sports car. Sonny came along 23 years later. He was bigger, more stubborn and, I thought at the time, kind of clumsy. If I didn’t walk him straight out of his stall, he would bump into the wall. He wasn’t particularly careful with his feet, stepping on me more times in the first month that I had him than Max did in the previous 23 years. Sonny was rock solid on the trails but riding him was like trying to muscle around a RV. I didn’t know anything about horsenality and didn’t understand his left brain introvert nature so I quickly came to the conclusion he was a nice horse but he wasn’t particularly athletic.
I would like to say that my expectations began to change as soon as I discovered Parelli but it would be almost 2 years I before I realized how much my lack of faith in Sonny was affecting our progress. I was in my first clinic with Carol Coppinger and we were playing with the circling game. Sonny was having trouble maintaining gait through the change of direction and Carol had come over to help us. I was fumbling my way through the exercise and making my usual excuses for Sonny. It was bad on so many levels.
“He has trouble with circles all the time,” I told Carol. “He’s so big and he just isn’t very athletic.”
“Can I try?” she asked, reaching for the lead line.
I handed her the line and retreated to the edge of the arena. Carol walked up to Sonny and stroked his neck. “You are a big fellow,” she said to him. Then she looked over at me. “I bet he’s way more athletic than you are giving him credit for.” With that, she backed him away from her and sent him off in a circle. Before long she had him changing direction at a trot without breaking gait. When she asked him to change at the canter he pivoted alertly and threw in a flying change. Clearly I had been underestimating his potential!
That clinic was a turning point in my relationship with Sonny and it also had impact on the way I approached The SummerWinds Stable horse rescue, where I worked with rescued horses. Where others saw problems, I saw potential. I expected the horses to respond positively to the Parelli method and they did. Working mostly on the ground with new horses coming into the sanctuary, I improved ground manners, solved catching problems and eased horses into a new way to relate to the humans in their lives.
It was an experience with a young girl at the rescue that helped me see the power of combining positive expectations with the Parelli principles. Besides rescuing horses, The SummerWinds runs programs for children and this spring was hosting a home school group for a series of beginner riding lessons. Being the horse specialist at the rescue, I seldom became involved with the children’s programs but that morning I was sitting in the barn while the instructors were having their meeting before the sixth and final week of the program. I overheard them discussing the difficultly they were having with one little girl who was very fearful. It sounded to me like they didn’t think she was capable of overcoming her fear and they didn’t know what else to try with her.
Without thinking, I spoke up. “Do you want me to give it a try?” I asked.
Everyone turned in my direction and I could read the skepticism on their faces. “Sure, if you want to” the head instructor replied. “Have at it.”
There were six little girls in the lesson and each one had her own instructor. My little girl was about 8 years old and I could see right away that she was nervous. Although she was big for her age, she was assigned to ride Holliday, a large red and white paint whose size must have been intimidating for her.
Holliday originally had been purchased by the rescue’s director as a Christmas present for her daughter. When Holliday arrived at the rescue, he didn’t pass his vet check because of a problem with his eyes. Rather than sending him back to his former owner, who hadn’t even recognized the problem with his eyes, the rescue shipped him up to the New Bolton Center for surgery to correct the eye problem. Although the director felt he wasn’t suitable for her daughter to show, she felt he was a nice horse so the rescue kept him as a lesson horse. He was a big boy with a quiet disposition, ideal for someone with confidence problems.
After the horses had been tacked up, I introduced myself to my student for the day, helped her onto Holliday’s back and started to lead her around the arena. Walking beside her, holding Holliday’s lead line, I could see that despite her apprehension, she was embarrassed to be the only student who was not riding independently. My years of experience coaching swimming and teaching told me that this was a child who really needed someone to believe in her.
I led Holliday back to the center of the arena, asked him to stop and then stepping back to his side looked up at the child on his back. “Did you know that there are only four things you need to be able to do to ride a horse by yourself” I asked her.
She looked down at me, eyes wide, face solemn, and shook her head.
“Yep” I said. “All you need to be able to do is to go forward, to stop, to back up and to turn. That doesn’t sound too hard does it?”
Again she shook her head and then added in an anxious voice. “You won’t let go of him, will you?”
“Nope, I got him” I said. “Now, let’s work on getting Holliday to go forward. Here’s what I want you to do. First I want you to squeeze him with your legs. Don’t kick him, just squeeze. If he doesn’t move then I want you to cluck to him like a chicken.” When I put my tongue against the top of my mouth and made the clucking sound she gave me a tiny smile. “Can you do that?” I asked.
“I don’t think so” she said.
“How about making a kissing sound?” I asked. “Like this.” When I puckered up my lips in an exaggerated kiss she laughed.
“Like this?” she asked and then she smooched.
“Yep, just like that and if he doesn’t move then, I want you to take the reins and just swing them back and forth on his shoulders until he moves.” I demonstrated with the reins and then let her try it. After a few swings she seemed to have the hang of it. “OK, here we go.”
Holding on to the very end of the lead line, I waited for her to begin. I had never done this with Holliday before but I had confidence it would work and I needed it to work for the sake of this little girl. She sat up straight and pushed her legs into Holliday’s sides, then she smooched to him loudly. Holliday stepped forward. I was careful not to move until Holliday took a step, then I walked along side for a few steps. I looked up at the little girl on his back. There was just the slightest smile on her face. I stopped Holliday and let her try asking him to go several times. Each time Holliday moved forward on her smooch.
“OK” I said to her as we walked along the rail, “now you have to learn how to stop him.” I looked right at her and asked, “Who do you think is stronger, you or Holliday?”
“Holliday is stronger” she answered.
“So, can you stop him by pulling back on both reins if he doesn’t want to stop?” I asked. When she shook her head I said. “So here is what you do when you want him to stop. You just lift up one rein and hold it until he stops.”
“Like this?” she asked, lifting her right hand up and pulling the rein to her chest.
“Keep your arm straight,” I said. Just lift it straight up like this. With that, I used my hand to straighten her elbow and lift her arm straight up in the air. Holliday took two steps and stopped. Silently I thanked this quiet horse for being such a quick study.
We tried starting and stopping until she seemed to have the hang of it and then I taught her to turn by holding her arm straight out to the side using a direct rein. She turned Holliday left and right. Finally I showed her how to back him up. We were 30 minutes into a one hour lesson and she had the basics.
“OK,” I said, “now I am going to unhook the lead line so you can do this by yourself.” A look of panic began to creep into her eyes. Before she could protest, I said. “I’m going to walk here right next to you, just like I was when I was leading. I know you can do this by yourself but I’ll stay right here just in case. So ask Holliday to walk forward.”
I smiled at her and nodded my encouragement. She took a big breath, kissed to him loudly and he stepped forward. I walked right along with her, encouraging all the way. At my direction she had Holliday walk forward, stop and turn. Then she backed him up. I moved a little further away from Holliday’s side and asked her to do it again. Then I asked her to walk Holliday around one of the barrels and over a pole on the ground. Each time she did something new, I moved a little further away from her and the horse. Finally I was standing about 10 feet away.
“Can you take ask Holliday to go down to that barrel,” I said as I pointed at a barrel on the other side of the ring. “Then go around the barrel and bring Holliday back to me?”
She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know,” she answered.
“Well, with as good as you have been doing, I’m sure you can do this” I said. “How about you give it a try?”
“OK,” she said and she smooched to Holliday. He ambled off in the direction of the barrel. When he got there, she pushed him into a big right hand turn with her direct rein and walked him back to me.
“Now can you walk him over there to the fence?” I pointed in the other direction and off she went. By the time we had done this several times, she was clearly riding with more confidence.
“Would you like to try a trot?” I asked.
She looked a little doubtful.
“You’re doing so well, I think you’re ready” I said to her. “You can put one hand down here on the saddle and push. That will help you stay put. I’ll stay right next to you and we will only do a few steps at a time. We’ll count together, one, two, three, four and then stop.”
Planting her hand on the saddle, she nodded her OK. I chirped to Holliday and trotted forward. He jogged next to me and we both counted out loud to four. When Holliday stopped I looked up to see how she was doing. She was smiling.
“How about six steps this time?” I asked. She nodded again. We jogged off a second time and when we stopped she was giggling.
When I glanced at my watch I realized that the hour was up. “So,” I asked, “how was your lesson today?” But I didn’t really need an answer because her smile told me everything I needed to know. As we left the ring, we walked Holliday past the picnic table where the mothers had been sitting to watch the riding lesson. One mother turned to me and silently mouthed ‘thank you’. There were tears in her eyes.
The hour I spent with this young girl was a demonstration both of the power of positive expectations and the power of Parelli. Years of coaching and teaching children had given me the confidence to work positively with this child I had just met, while years of studying Parelli gave me the confident that Holliday would respond positively and without fear to the signals he was being given.
Despite her lack of success in previous lessons, I was able to go into this lesson with the expectation that on this day, with this horse, this child could learn the four simple things she needed to do to independently ride a horse at a walk. My belief in her gave her the confidence she needed to learn how to go forward, to stop, to back up and to turn. Her success at doing this while I was walking beside her gave her the confidence to try it alone. Her confidence grew every time Holliday responded correctly to her signals.
There is nothing more powerful than belief. Pat Parelli tells us to ‘expect a lot, accept a little, and reward often’. Each time we do this with ourselves and our horses, we build a stronger relationship and further our journey toward becoming a true horseman. When we do this with the people around us, we give them the gift of recognizing and realizing their true potential.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
What I Learned at Fast Track
It’s been almost a year since I returned from the Fast Track program at Parelli’s Florida Campus last November and I have been thinking this week about something head instructor John Barr told the class on our first day. He said that we would learn a lot during our four weeks at the program but we might not realize all of what we had learned until well after we returned home. So after reflecting this week on my experiences both in Florida and here in Delaware since I returned home, I’m going to try and summarize what I learned at Fast Track.
Probably the most important lesson I learned while in Florida was that I had been confusing ‘calm’ with ‘relaxed’. My horse Sonny is an easy going guy and there isn’t much that gets him excited, so I thought that most of the time, he was pretty relaxed. When I got to Florida and watched all of the instructors and many of the other students work with their horses, I began to notice how often the horse would blow and how infrequently Sonny blew, especially when I was riding. I began to ask questions about the signs of relaxation in introverted horses and to watch Sonny really closely when I was working with him. It was then that I began to realize how very subtle the signs were that could tell me the difference between Sonny just being calm and being truly relaxed. His head might be an inch or two lower in carriage, his breathing might slow ever so slightly, his lick and chew would become a little less secretive, his mouth might relax slightly, his gait might become slightly more rhythmic. The signs were very subtle and only if I was paying close attention could I see the signs for what they were. Once began paying close attention, I discovered that often I wasn’t giving him enough time with a particular exercise to become truly relaxed.
When I returned from Florida, I gave Sonny a week off and then I did an experiment aimed at getting true relaxation. I decided I was going to go into the arena, and using the pattern of ‘follow the rail’, see just how low I would have to stay on that pattern to get Sonny to relax enough to blow. I put Sonny on the rail and began to walk. We walked for 30 minutes before he blew. During that entire time, he walked calmly around the arena. He wasn’t upset but it took him a very long time to give that sign of relaxation. Clearly there was something going on here and that brings me to the second lesson I learned at Fast Track.
My second important insight from Fast Track was that there was a lot of brace going on when I was riding Sonny. Clearly some of the brace was Sonny but I started to recognize in Florida just how much brace I had in my riding. Often this came when I wasn’t feeling particularly confident. I would brace in the stirrups and then Sonny would brace in response. Another situation that often caused brace would be when Sonny would have a stiff and bouncy trot. Sonny was capable of a nice jog trot but often, as a result of a lack of rhythm and relaxation, his trot would get very large and hard to ride. That would cause me to brace in my stirrups which in turn caused his trot to stiffen further. It was a vicious circle.
This brings me to my third insight from Florida, that despite my best attempts at shimming, my saddle, a saddle in which I was very comfortable, was causing problems for Sonny. When I got home, I bought a new saddle. The change had an immediate, positive impact on Sonny. The first day I rode in the new saddle, Sonny blew within five minutes of me mounting. The second day he blew in less than two minutes. The third day he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. Sonny’s gaits also changed almost immediately. His head lowered. His stride became long, smoother and at the trot, much easier to ride. Because of the change in his trot, I found I braced much less which also had a positive impact on our fluidity. Of course this change resulted in some other issues but I have worked through most of them. (See the post “Fear of Flying”)
The fourth insight I had at Fast Track, and this one has probably been as important to our progress as the ‘calm vs. relaxed’ realization, is that I developed a whole new understanding of the meaning of ‘neutral’. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the concept of ‘neutral’ when playing the seven games on the ground but I had very little understanding of what ‘neutral’ meant when I was riding. I realized while I was in Florida just how much I was fiddling with the reins when I was riding. My hands were in almost constant motion. They didn’t make big movements. I didn’t jerk on Sonny’s mouth or make exaggerated corrections but I was playing with the reins all of the time when I was riding. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for Sonny. He must have thought I was nagging at him all the time. No wonder he didn’t move as well as I wanted off my leg and seat, he must have been consumed by the micromanaging I was doing with my hands. Poor boy!
When I came home from Fast Track I made a concerted effort to plant my hand on his withers when I was riding and just leave it there until I needed to make an actual correction. By letting Sonny make mistakes rather than prevent him for making them, I took a leap forward in creating a better connection between Sonny and my seat. Who would have known that the finger bones are connected to the seat bones?
Fast Track is a very individual experience. There were 45 students in my Fast Track class and we were all over the board in terms of our skills and our relationship with our horses. I went to Florida worried that I would be the oldest, least experienced, least physical fit and least skilled person there but I learned that I wasn’t; a fact that was a great relief to me. I put a lot of pressure on myself while I was in Florida and to a certain extent, that pressure tested my mental, emotional and physical fitness.
Physically I did better than I expected I would. I have really bad knees. One of my knees has been bone on bone since I was 22 years old (I was 62 when I arrived in Florida). I seldom work more than three or four hours a day with horses. In Florida we were going from 7 AM to 7 PM and often we rode for three or four hours in the afternoon. Sonny’s pen was a long way from anything and I walked more than I have since I was in college. The first week was agony and I hurt all over. I went back to my rented apartment each evening and took enough Advil to stop a truck. I didn’t sleep well and I can’t remember ever being so tired but I soldiered on and by the second week, I felt better. Eventually my knees did get the better of me and I didn’t ride for part of the fourth week but I was thrilled with how well I kept up with the pace.
Emotionally, I didn’t do as well as I had expected. For 28 years I worked for EI duPont de Nemours, a major chemical company. Much of that time I held high pressure management jobs. I figured spending a month with my horse in Florida among supportive, like-minded people would be a snap but it was harder than I imagined. I found that I often felt quite emotional, particularly when being exposed to something new. At least part of the emotion was due to being so tired all the time. I had a good friend who once said that “Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” and certainly the lack of sleep didn’t help. But I also think that I set high standards for myself and trying to live to those personal expectations created a mental and emotional stress that I hadn’t anticipated.
I was helped by something that head instructor John Barr told us. He said that each of us was on his or her own journey and that we each were “exactly where we were supposed to be” on that journey. Accepting that idea helped me deal with the emotional stress and also allowed me to give myself permission to stop riding during the last week when my knees really began to hurt. Without that permission, I might have tried to push through and keep riding, only to find that I had damaged my knees beyond repair.
Spending the month in Florida at the Parelli Center was about the best present I ever gave myself. Sonny and I came home with a better relationship and I came home with a greatly enhanced understanding of the principles and the tools that embody Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I also came home with a better understanding of what I need to do to keep growing as a horseman and the determination to continue on this journey so I can help accomplish the mission of making the world a better place for people and horses.
Probably the most important lesson I learned while in Florida was that I had been confusing ‘calm’ with ‘relaxed’. My horse Sonny is an easy going guy and there isn’t much that gets him excited, so I thought that most of the time, he was pretty relaxed. When I got to Florida and watched all of the instructors and many of the other students work with their horses, I began to notice how often the horse would blow and how infrequently Sonny blew, especially when I was riding. I began to ask questions about the signs of relaxation in introverted horses and to watch Sonny really closely when I was working with him. It was then that I began to realize how very subtle the signs were that could tell me the difference between Sonny just being calm and being truly relaxed. His head might be an inch or two lower in carriage, his breathing might slow ever so slightly, his lick and chew would become a little less secretive, his mouth might relax slightly, his gait might become slightly more rhythmic. The signs were very subtle and only if I was paying close attention could I see the signs for what they were. Once began paying close attention, I discovered that often I wasn’t giving him enough time with a particular exercise to become truly relaxed.
When I returned from Florida, I gave Sonny a week off and then I did an experiment aimed at getting true relaxation. I decided I was going to go into the arena, and using the pattern of ‘follow the rail’, see just how low I would have to stay on that pattern to get Sonny to relax enough to blow. I put Sonny on the rail and began to walk. We walked for 30 minutes before he blew. During that entire time, he walked calmly around the arena. He wasn’t upset but it took him a very long time to give that sign of relaxation. Clearly there was something going on here and that brings me to the second lesson I learned at Fast Track.
My second important insight from Fast Track was that there was a lot of brace going on when I was riding Sonny. Clearly some of the brace was Sonny but I started to recognize in Florida just how much brace I had in my riding. Often this came when I wasn’t feeling particularly confident. I would brace in the stirrups and then Sonny would brace in response. Another situation that often caused brace would be when Sonny would have a stiff and bouncy trot. Sonny was capable of a nice jog trot but often, as a result of a lack of rhythm and relaxation, his trot would get very large and hard to ride. That would cause me to brace in my stirrups which in turn caused his trot to stiffen further. It was a vicious circle.
This brings me to my third insight from Florida, that despite my best attempts at shimming, my saddle, a saddle in which I was very comfortable, was causing problems for Sonny. When I got home, I bought a new saddle. The change had an immediate, positive impact on Sonny. The first day I rode in the new saddle, Sonny blew within five minutes of me mounting. The second day he blew in less than two minutes. The third day he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. Sonny’s gaits also changed almost immediately. His head lowered. His stride became long, smoother and at the trot, much easier to ride. Because of the change in his trot, I found I braced much less which also had a positive impact on our fluidity. Of course this change resulted in some other issues but I have worked through most of them. (See the post “Fear of Flying”)
The fourth insight I had at Fast Track, and this one has probably been as important to our progress as the ‘calm vs. relaxed’ realization, is that I developed a whole new understanding of the meaning of ‘neutral’. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the concept of ‘neutral’ when playing the seven games on the ground but I had very little understanding of what ‘neutral’ meant when I was riding. I realized while I was in Florida just how much I was fiddling with the reins when I was riding. My hands were in almost constant motion. They didn’t make big movements. I didn’t jerk on Sonny’s mouth or make exaggerated corrections but I was playing with the reins all of the time when I was riding. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for Sonny. He must have thought I was nagging at him all the time. No wonder he didn’t move as well as I wanted off my leg and seat, he must have been consumed by the micromanaging I was doing with my hands. Poor boy!
When I came home from Fast Track I made a concerted effort to plant my hand on his withers when I was riding and just leave it there until I needed to make an actual correction. By letting Sonny make mistakes rather than prevent him for making them, I took a leap forward in creating a better connection between Sonny and my seat. Who would have known that the finger bones are connected to the seat bones?
Fast Track is a very individual experience. There were 45 students in my Fast Track class and we were all over the board in terms of our skills and our relationship with our horses. I went to Florida worried that I would be the oldest, least experienced, least physical fit and least skilled person there but I learned that I wasn’t; a fact that was a great relief to me. I put a lot of pressure on myself while I was in Florida and to a certain extent, that pressure tested my mental, emotional and physical fitness.
Physically I did better than I expected I would. I have really bad knees. One of my knees has been bone on bone since I was 22 years old (I was 62 when I arrived in Florida). I seldom work more than three or four hours a day with horses. In Florida we were going from 7 AM to 7 PM and often we rode for three or four hours in the afternoon. Sonny’s pen was a long way from anything and I walked more than I have since I was in college. The first week was agony and I hurt all over. I went back to my rented apartment each evening and took enough Advil to stop a truck. I didn’t sleep well and I can’t remember ever being so tired but I soldiered on and by the second week, I felt better. Eventually my knees did get the better of me and I didn’t ride for part of the fourth week but I was thrilled with how well I kept up with the pace.
Emotionally, I didn’t do as well as I had expected. For 28 years I worked for EI duPont de Nemours, a major chemical company. Much of that time I held high pressure management jobs. I figured spending a month with my horse in Florida among supportive, like-minded people would be a snap but it was harder than I imagined. I found that I often felt quite emotional, particularly when being exposed to something new. At least part of the emotion was due to being so tired all the time. I had a good friend who once said that “Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” and certainly the lack of sleep didn’t help. But I also think that I set high standards for myself and trying to live to those personal expectations created a mental and emotional stress that I hadn’t anticipated.
I was helped by something that head instructor John Barr told us. He said that each of us was on his or her own journey and that we each were “exactly where we were supposed to be” on that journey. Accepting that idea helped me deal with the emotional stress and also allowed me to give myself permission to stop riding during the last week when my knees really began to hurt. Without that permission, I might have tried to push through and keep riding, only to find that I had damaged my knees beyond repair.
Spending the month in Florida at the Parelli Center was about the best present I ever gave myself. Sonny and I came home with a better relationship and I came home with a greatly enhanced understanding of the principles and the tools that embody Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I also came home with a better understanding of what I need to do to keep growing as a horseman and the determination to continue on this journey so I can help accomplish the mission of making the world a better place for people and horses.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Fear of Flying
I’ve spent the last year trying to overcome a fear of flying. I’m not talking about the kind of flying that charges you extra when your luggage weighs too much, although I must admit I don’t find that kind of flying much fun anymore. I’m talking about the kind of flying that finds you galloping through a pasture or up a hill with wind whipping your horse’s mane into your face and every muscle in your body alive with the feel of connection between you and your horse. This is the story of how I developed that fear and how Two Star Parelli Instructor Jane Bartsch is helping me conquer it.
I wasn’t always afraid of flying. There was a time when I liked nothing better than to take my first horse Max for long rides through the 6000 acres of Maryland’s Fair Hill resource area, galloping up every hill I could find, jumping logs along the way. But I learned to ride as an adult and I never really developed the sense of balance that seems to come so naturally to people who learned to ride as children. Besides that, I’m a bit of a buttoned up type of person who has never thrived on that feeling of being right at the edge of control.
After taking riding lessons for about 3 years, I bought my first horse, Max. I was 30 years old and he was almost 10, but he had been professionally trained and was the kind of horse people refer to as a “school master”. Max had wonderful, smooth gaits and if I could even approximate the correct aid, he would do whatever I asked. This gave me great confidence when I was riding and I wasn’t even afraid to hop on him bareback with only a halter and lead line and ride him though a pasture full of horses back to the barn.
Max lived to be almost 33 years old and during that time I seldom rode any other horse. In his last few years, I didn’t ride often and when I did, we mostly took long walks in the fields around the farm. He was bothered by navicular changes as he got older but when I put the saddle on him, he walked away from the barn with his head up and his ears pricked, looking forward to the adventure at hand.
I was devastated when Max died but I wanted to get back into riding so I adopted a 12 year old thoroughbred gelding from a local horse rescue and set about trying to get myself back into shape. It was a bad match from the beginning. The horse was a RBE with some serious post racing mental issues. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with the concepts of natural horsemanship and I had no idea how to help him through his issues. After 9 months of frustration I admitted to myself that I was actually afraid of this horse and I donated him back to the rescue before I got hurt. Then I started searching again for my next horse and found Sonny.
Sonny was a 6 year old paint with an easy going disposition. He had been a husband’s horse, used mostly for trail riding and while he was solid as a rock on trails, he could hardly trot in a circle without tripping all over himself. Unlike my original horse, Sonny didn’t have particularly smooth gaits, although he could produce a nice little jog trot when he wanted, so for the first couple years of our partnership, I mostly used him for trail riding and I seldom pushed him into a canter. We might canter up the occasional hill but mostly we walked and trotted and I felt pretty comfortable riding him.
Sonny and I got along pretty well most of the time. He was very easy going, which I liked, but his attitude toward me seemed pretty indifferent. Unlike my first horse Max, he wasn’t crazy about being groomed and while he didn’t seem to mind being ridden, he could be stubborn and argumentative. I’d had Sonny for a couple of years when I began working at a local horse rescue and was introduced to Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I was so intrigued by the concepts that I barrowed a set of the original level one program video tapes and started practicing on Sonny. From the first day the change in Sonny’s attitude and behavior was remarkable. It was as if he had been deaf and suddenly he could hear me, although now I know what really going on was that I had been speaking gibberish for two years and now I was beginning to speak horse.
I was hooked and we progressed quickly on the ground but when I started to ride I ran into problems. I rode English style and only rode on a loose rein at a walk. At a trot or a canter, I had been taught to ride with contact and I found that if I tried to trot Sonny on a loose rein, I felt very uncomfortable. More disconcerting to me was the idea of riding with a hackamore but according to the Parelli method that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing at this point. I bought a hackamore to ride in it but whenever Sonny started trotting, I gathered up the reins as if he still had a bit in his mouth and he clearly didn’t like that.
I slowly worked through my anxieties at the trot and after several months was trotting on a loose rein but the canter was another story. It took me a long time to admit it to myself, but even the thought of cantering Sonny made me anxious. He was a big horse with a big stride and he didn’t have a smooth canter departure. Most of the time when I asked him to canter he would just trot bigger and faster until I was bouncing all over the place. By the time he did canter, I had a knot in the pit of my stomach and I wasn’t enjoying myself.
This is where Jane Bartsch enters our story. Fortunately for me, Jane lived close and had recently become a Parelli Instructor. I began taking weekly lessons and Jane helped me refine my balance point riding. She also helped me develop a smoother canter departure from a walk. Finally I gained enough confidence where I could canter Sonny in the arena on a loose rein. I still had some slight anxiety but I thought I had the problem licked. I didn’t realize that things were about to get much worse.
With Jane’s help, I progressed to the point where I was accepted into a three day clinic with Six Star Parelli Master Instructor Carol Coppinger. Sonny and I did so well at the clinic that we passed our level 2 freestyle test. I was thrilled and thinking that we would soon be riding easily at level 3 but at the end of the clinic, Carol did something in passing that had the unintended consequence of putting my riding into a downward spiral. She came over to Sonny and tried to slip her hand between his saddle and his shoulder.
“I think this saddle is pinching your horse,” she said. “See how I can’t get my hand in here. There isn’t any clearance. Have you thought about getting a Theraflex® saddle pad for him?”
Since I began studying Parelli, I had been slowly changing out Sonny’s equipment. I had changed the bit I was using, added a chin strap and had taken off his breast plate. None of these changes had resulted in anything dramatic so it didn’t occur to me that changing the saddle pad would so I purchased a new Therafex® pad. Clearly the saddle had been pinching his shoulders because the first time I put the new pad on, his stride was noticeably freer.
While Sonny liked the new pad, I was struggling with it. At first I felt like I was tipping forward in the saddle. Jane helped me shim it properly but I had trouble placing the pad consistently in the same position under the saddle. Each time I mounted, I felt like I was sitting a little differently and this created some anxiety. Sonny’s longer stride was also making me nervous but I was trying to push through my nerves at each lesson so I could continue to make progress.
I had been riding with the Theraflex® pad for a couple of months when I took Sonny down to the Parelli Florida campus to attend the Fast Track course. I must admit that I was nervous about being at Fast Track and nervous about riding Sonny in such an unfamiliar environment. Early on, one of the instructors came up to me, stuck his hand under the edge of Sonny’s saddle pad and told me that he thought the saddle was still pinching his shoulders. Over the month that I was there, I realized that when I was riding Sonny, he seldom relaxed enough to blow. While some of that was probably a reflection of my lack of relaxation, I came to the conclusion that Sonny needed a different saddle.
While I would like to have ordered a Parelli saddle for Sonny, my budget wouldn’t accommodate that large of a purchase so after trying several saddles, I settled for a new Wintec wide. The effect of the new saddle on Sonny was immediate and intense. Freed of the restriction on his shoulders, his stride was huge. I could feel it in the walk and trot but in the canter it was dramatic. It felt to me like he was leaping into the canter and the thrust pushed me forward in the saddle, throwing me off balance. To make matters worse, I couldn’t seem to get the shimming correct. Pretty soon I had 4 shims in the Theraflex® pad.
Sonny seemed to love the new saddle. The first time I rode him in it he blew inside of five minutes. The second time it took only two minutes. The third time he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. His stride was free. He relaxed more quickly. His trot became smoother and less bumpy to ride. There were all good things and I should have been pleased but I hated the new saddle. I didn’t feel comfortable in it. The saddle was deeper than my old one and I felt like I was sitting too far forward in it. With all the shims, the saddle was perched on the Therafelx® pad like a turtle on a mossy log, slipping this way and that depending on where I put my weight and I didn’t feel stable. I was relatively OK at the walk and the trot but even the thought of cantering put me in a panic. Sonny would leap into a canter and I would grab the reins as if they were my only lifeline.
Jane did her best to help me work though my discomfort. She was patient with me in lessons and we practiced a lot of approach and retreat, cantering only a few strides and then stopping. She respected my thresholds and when I said that was enough in any lesson she let me stop. But as the winter progressed, things got worse for me. Whenever Sonny cantered, I felt completely out of control. I knew my emotional fitness was going to hell in a hand basket because I had gotten to the point where I was so worried about cantering that I didn’t even want to go out to the barn anymore. I would bargain with myself by telling myself that I didn’t have to ride or if I did ride, I didn’t have to canter. It finally got so bad that even if I was only thinking about going to the barn, I could feel a knot growing in my stomach and I was worried that if I didn’t do something to reverse this trend soon, I would stop riding altogether.
One night I was lying in bed thinking about my first horse, Max and I remembered the first time I had taken a lesson on Max. The instructor had wanted me to ride without stirrups. When I told her that I hadn’t ever done that before and I was a little worried about riding without stirrups, she put Max on a lunge line and had me ride him while he moved around her in a circle. She told me I could hold onto the saddle if I felt like I needed that for balance. Pretty soon she had him cantering. Pushing on the saddle, I had gripped him with my legs and ridden his rocking chair canter around and around. I remembered how it felt like I was flying but connected to the instructor by the lunge line, I didn’t feel out of control. I felt safe.
“That’s it!” I thought to myself. “I need to get the feel again of flying without feeling like I have lost all control.”
I was excited at my next lesson and I told Jane that I wanted her to put Sonny on a 45 foot line so when we cantered I wouldn’t have to worry about anything except getting comfortable with the feel of the canter. She agreed that would be a good idea and after we’d had a good warm up, she clipped the 45’ to the halter I had left on under his bridle.
“OK.” Jane said as she played out the 45’. “Ask him up into the canter with your body. Try not to hit him with your heels”
I brought the energy up in my body and Sonny leaped into his canter. Reflexively I planted on hand on the front of the saddle and pressed myself onto my balance point. He cantered a lap and a half around Jane before dropping into a trot.
“You need to breath” she told me.
I smiled weakly in her direction and walked for a couple of laps until I felt a little calmer. Then I brought my energy up again and asked Sonny to canter. This time the departure was a little softer. I still had my hand on my saddle but I felt a little more relaxed. We repeated this pattern for about 20 minutes, alternating walking with one or two laps of canter; until I had done all that I felt I could do for the day. I was pleased with the result and even though I was still nervous about cantering, with Jane holding onto Sonny, I no longer felt completely out of control.
Jane and I repeated this on line lesson for several weeks. I could feel myself slowly becoming more confident with
Sonny’s canter and also more comfortable in the new Wintec saddle. An added benefit of these lessons was the refinement that it was creating in Sonny’s canter departures. I was learning just how little I had to do with my body to get Sonny to step off into a canter. I no longer felt like he was leaping out from under me.
One day I asked Jane if I could try just cantering around her in a circle, as if she still had the 45’ line in her hand. I walked Sonny around her until I felt we were both calm and relaxed. Then I asked him to canter. He stepped into a nice canter. I put my outside leg on him and took a tiny feel on the inside rein to keep him moving in a circle but I basically had him on a casual rein. His canter felt almost like a lope, slow and balanced and we circled Jane twice before I asked him to stop. I was grinning from ear to ear. The war might not be over but I had just won a major battle.
Jane continued to help me work my way thought my anxieties. After I mastered cantering in a circle, my next big step was to get comfortable when Sonny cantered down the long line of the arena. This was a problem for me because when he came off the corner and began moving down the line, his stride would begin to lengthen and I would begin to panic. My left brain knew he wasn’t running away with me by my right brain would begin screaming loudly and I would tighten up and pull him down into a slower gait.
“The next time he begins to lengthen on you,” Jane told me, “I want you to sit down on him and sigh. He knows what that means and it will slow him down. He might even stop.”
I asked Sonny to canter in a circle and then headed down the long line of the arena. Sonny’s stride began to lengthen. I sat deep in the saddle and sighed. Sonny almost skidded into a trot and I pitched forward laughing.
“See,” said Jane, “He listens to you. He responds to your body. It’s like a cruise control. You can use it to adjust his gait.”
We worked through the spring and the summer, Jane encouraging at each lesson. Gradually I stopped feeling anxious when I thought about going down to the barn. Some days when I got there, I realized that I wasn’t relaxed enough to canter but that no longer stopped me from riding. I began doing more carrot stick riding and for short distances was even able to canter Sonny without holding on to the reins. I felt like I was finally developing some of the mental and emotional fitness I needed to conquer this fear.
My fitness was finally put to the test in September when I attended another three day clinic with Carol Coppinger. I had worked really hard in preparation for the clinic and I knew that I would be reasonably comfortable when we were asked to canter. On the first afternoon of the clinic, Carol had us following the rail in the indoor arena. She had us count off in pairs.
“OK, here’s what we are going to do now,” she announced. “While the group keeps following the rail, one pair at a time is going to come into the center of the arena and using only your carrot sticks, canter your horses in a figure 8.”
My stomach immediately started to tighten into a knot. I had expected to be asked to canter Sonny but not without reins, using only a carrot stick. My right brain began to whisper urgently that I was not ready to do this and I knew that Carol wouldn’t think any less of me if I used my reins. But my left brain said ‘wait a minute’. You have done this before and you can do it now. Just breathe and stay relaxed.
I was in the 3rd pair. While I watched the two pairs before me go with some measure of success, I focused on breathing and staying relaxed and positive. When our turn came, I walked Sonny into the center of the arena, dropped the reins, looked in toward the center of the circle I wanted him to canter and brought the life up in my body. Sonny stepped into a canter and we cantered a circle. When he broke into a trot, I slowed him to a walk and asked again. We didn’t make the figure 8 exactly (Sonny has trouble with his right lead) but I did canter two circles without touching the reins. I glanced over at Jane who was assisting with the clinic. Now we were both smiling ear to ear.
I’d like to say I’ve completely conquered my fear but I know that isn’t true. I still sometimes get nervous before I canter my horse and there are even some days when I know I’m not in the right mental state for trying. But I also know that I am making progress and that someday soon, I’m going to take Sonny back to Fair Hill and have him galloping cross country, with his mane blowing in my face and we are going to be flying.
I wasn’t always afraid of flying. There was a time when I liked nothing better than to take my first horse Max for long rides through the 6000 acres of Maryland’s Fair Hill resource area, galloping up every hill I could find, jumping logs along the way. But I learned to ride as an adult and I never really developed the sense of balance that seems to come so naturally to people who learned to ride as children. Besides that, I’m a bit of a buttoned up type of person who has never thrived on that feeling of being right at the edge of control.
After taking riding lessons for about 3 years, I bought my first horse, Max. I was 30 years old and he was almost 10, but he had been professionally trained and was the kind of horse people refer to as a “school master”. Max had wonderful, smooth gaits and if I could even approximate the correct aid, he would do whatever I asked. This gave me great confidence when I was riding and I wasn’t even afraid to hop on him bareback with only a halter and lead line and ride him though a pasture full of horses back to the barn.
Max lived to be almost 33 years old and during that time I seldom rode any other horse. In his last few years, I didn’t ride often and when I did, we mostly took long walks in the fields around the farm. He was bothered by navicular changes as he got older but when I put the saddle on him, he walked away from the barn with his head up and his ears pricked, looking forward to the adventure at hand.
I was devastated when Max died but I wanted to get back into riding so I adopted a 12 year old thoroughbred gelding from a local horse rescue and set about trying to get myself back into shape. It was a bad match from the beginning. The horse was a RBE with some serious post racing mental issues. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with the concepts of natural horsemanship and I had no idea how to help him through his issues. After 9 months of frustration I admitted to myself that I was actually afraid of this horse and I donated him back to the rescue before I got hurt. Then I started searching again for my next horse and found Sonny.
Sonny was a 6 year old paint with an easy going disposition. He had been a husband’s horse, used mostly for trail riding and while he was solid as a rock on trails, he could hardly trot in a circle without tripping all over himself. Unlike my original horse, Sonny didn’t have particularly smooth gaits, although he could produce a nice little jog trot when he wanted, so for the first couple years of our partnership, I mostly used him for trail riding and I seldom pushed him into a canter. We might canter up the occasional hill but mostly we walked and trotted and I felt pretty comfortable riding him.
Sonny and I got along pretty well most of the time. He was very easy going, which I liked, but his attitude toward me seemed pretty indifferent. Unlike my first horse Max, he wasn’t crazy about being groomed and while he didn’t seem to mind being ridden, he could be stubborn and argumentative. I’d had Sonny for a couple of years when I began working at a local horse rescue and was introduced to Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I was so intrigued by the concepts that I barrowed a set of the original level one program video tapes and started practicing on Sonny. From the first day the change in Sonny’s attitude and behavior was remarkable. It was as if he had been deaf and suddenly he could hear me, although now I know what really going on was that I had been speaking gibberish for two years and now I was beginning to speak horse.
I was hooked and we progressed quickly on the ground but when I started to ride I ran into problems. I rode English style and only rode on a loose rein at a walk. At a trot or a canter, I had been taught to ride with contact and I found that if I tried to trot Sonny on a loose rein, I felt very uncomfortable. More disconcerting to me was the idea of riding with a hackamore but according to the Parelli method that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing at this point. I bought a hackamore to ride in it but whenever Sonny started trotting, I gathered up the reins as if he still had a bit in his mouth and he clearly didn’t like that.
I slowly worked through my anxieties at the trot and after several months was trotting on a loose rein but the canter was another story. It took me a long time to admit it to myself, but even the thought of cantering Sonny made me anxious. He was a big horse with a big stride and he didn’t have a smooth canter departure. Most of the time when I asked him to canter he would just trot bigger and faster until I was bouncing all over the place. By the time he did canter, I had a knot in the pit of my stomach and I wasn’t enjoying myself.
This is where Jane Bartsch enters our story. Fortunately for me, Jane lived close and had recently become a Parelli Instructor. I began taking weekly lessons and Jane helped me refine my balance point riding. She also helped me develop a smoother canter departure from a walk. Finally I gained enough confidence where I could canter Sonny in the arena on a loose rein. I still had some slight anxiety but I thought I had the problem licked. I didn’t realize that things were about to get much worse.
With Jane’s help, I progressed to the point where I was accepted into a three day clinic with Six Star Parelli Master Instructor Carol Coppinger. Sonny and I did so well at the clinic that we passed our level 2 freestyle test. I was thrilled and thinking that we would soon be riding easily at level 3 but at the end of the clinic, Carol did something in passing that had the unintended consequence of putting my riding into a downward spiral. She came over to Sonny and tried to slip her hand between his saddle and his shoulder.
“I think this saddle is pinching your horse,” she said. “See how I can’t get my hand in here. There isn’t any clearance. Have you thought about getting a Theraflex® saddle pad for him?”
Since I began studying Parelli, I had been slowly changing out Sonny’s equipment. I had changed the bit I was using, added a chin strap and had taken off his breast plate. None of these changes had resulted in anything dramatic so it didn’t occur to me that changing the saddle pad would so I purchased a new Therafex® pad. Clearly the saddle had been pinching his shoulders because the first time I put the new pad on, his stride was noticeably freer.
While Sonny liked the new pad, I was struggling with it. At first I felt like I was tipping forward in the saddle. Jane helped me shim it properly but I had trouble placing the pad consistently in the same position under the saddle. Each time I mounted, I felt like I was sitting a little differently and this created some anxiety. Sonny’s longer stride was also making me nervous but I was trying to push through my nerves at each lesson so I could continue to make progress.
I had been riding with the Theraflex® pad for a couple of months when I took Sonny down to the Parelli Florida campus to attend the Fast Track course. I must admit that I was nervous about being at Fast Track and nervous about riding Sonny in such an unfamiliar environment. Early on, one of the instructors came up to me, stuck his hand under the edge of Sonny’s saddle pad and told me that he thought the saddle was still pinching his shoulders. Over the month that I was there, I realized that when I was riding Sonny, he seldom relaxed enough to blow. While some of that was probably a reflection of my lack of relaxation, I came to the conclusion that Sonny needed a different saddle.
While I would like to have ordered a Parelli saddle for Sonny, my budget wouldn’t accommodate that large of a purchase so after trying several saddles, I settled for a new Wintec wide. The effect of the new saddle on Sonny was immediate and intense. Freed of the restriction on his shoulders, his stride was huge. I could feel it in the walk and trot but in the canter it was dramatic. It felt to me like he was leaping into the canter and the thrust pushed me forward in the saddle, throwing me off balance. To make matters worse, I couldn’t seem to get the shimming correct. Pretty soon I had 4 shims in the Theraflex® pad.
Sonny seemed to love the new saddle. The first time I rode him in it he blew inside of five minutes. The second time it took only two minutes. The third time he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. His stride was free. He relaxed more quickly. His trot became smoother and less bumpy to ride. There were all good things and I should have been pleased but I hated the new saddle. I didn’t feel comfortable in it. The saddle was deeper than my old one and I felt like I was sitting too far forward in it. With all the shims, the saddle was perched on the Therafelx® pad like a turtle on a mossy log, slipping this way and that depending on where I put my weight and I didn’t feel stable. I was relatively OK at the walk and the trot but even the thought of cantering put me in a panic. Sonny would leap into a canter and I would grab the reins as if they were my only lifeline.
Jane did her best to help me work though my discomfort. She was patient with me in lessons and we practiced a lot of approach and retreat, cantering only a few strides and then stopping. She respected my thresholds and when I said that was enough in any lesson she let me stop. But as the winter progressed, things got worse for me. Whenever Sonny cantered, I felt completely out of control. I knew my emotional fitness was going to hell in a hand basket because I had gotten to the point where I was so worried about cantering that I didn’t even want to go out to the barn anymore. I would bargain with myself by telling myself that I didn’t have to ride or if I did ride, I didn’t have to canter. It finally got so bad that even if I was only thinking about going to the barn, I could feel a knot growing in my stomach and I was worried that if I didn’t do something to reverse this trend soon, I would stop riding altogether.
One night I was lying in bed thinking about my first horse, Max and I remembered the first time I had taken a lesson on Max. The instructor had wanted me to ride without stirrups. When I told her that I hadn’t ever done that before and I was a little worried about riding without stirrups, she put Max on a lunge line and had me ride him while he moved around her in a circle. She told me I could hold onto the saddle if I felt like I needed that for balance. Pretty soon she had him cantering. Pushing on the saddle, I had gripped him with my legs and ridden his rocking chair canter around and around. I remembered how it felt like I was flying but connected to the instructor by the lunge line, I didn’t feel out of control. I felt safe.
“That’s it!” I thought to myself. “I need to get the feel again of flying without feeling like I have lost all control.”
I was excited at my next lesson and I told Jane that I wanted her to put Sonny on a 45 foot line so when we cantered I wouldn’t have to worry about anything except getting comfortable with the feel of the canter. She agreed that would be a good idea and after we’d had a good warm up, she clipped the 45’ to the halter I had left on under his bridle.
“OK.” Jane said as she played out the 45’. “Ask him up into the canter with your body. Try not to hit him with your heels”
I brought the energy up in my body and Sonny leaped into his canter. Reflexively I planted on hand on the front of the saddle and pressed myself onto my balance point. He cantered a lap and a half around Jane before dropping into a trot.
“You need to breath” she told me.
I smiled weakly in her direction and walked for a couple of laps until I felt a little calmer. Then I brought my energy up again and asked Sonny to canter. This time the departure was a little softer. I still had my hand on my saddle but I felt a little more relaxed. We repeated this pattern for about 20 minutes, alternating walking with one or two laps of canter; until I had done all that I felt I could do for the day. I was pleased with the result and even though I was still nervous about cantering, with Jane holding onto Sonny, I no longer felt completely out of control.
Jane and I repeated this on line lesson for several weeks. I could feel myself slowly becoming more confident with
Sonny’s canter and also more comfortable in the new Wintec saddle. An added benefit of these lessons was the refinement that it was creating in Sonny’s canter departures. I was learning just how little I had to do with my body to get Sonny to step off into a canter. I no longer felt like he was leaping out from under me.
One day I asked Jane if I could try just cantering around her in a circle, as if she still had the 45’ line in her hand. I walked Sonny around her until I felt we were both calm and relaxed. Then I asked him to canter. He stepped into a nice canter. I put my outside leg on him and took a tiny feel on the inside rein to keep him moving in a circle but I basically had him on a casual rein. His canter felt almost like a lope, slow and balanced and we circled Jane twice before I asked him to stop. I was grinning from ear to ear. The war might not be over but I had just won a major battle.
Jane continued to help me work my way thought my anxieties. After I mastered cantering in a circle, my next big step was to get comfortable when Sonny cantered down the long line of the arena. This was a problem for me because when he came off the corner and began moving down the line, his stride would begin to lengthen and I would begin to panic. My left brain knew he wasn’t running away with me by my right brain would begin screaming loudly and I would tighten up and pull him down into a slower gait.
“The next time he begins to lengthen on you,” Jane told me, “I want you to sit down on him and sigh. He knows what that means and it will slow him down. He might even stop.”
I asked Sonny to canter in a circle and then headed down the long line of the arena. Sonny’s stride began to lengthen. I sat deep in the saddle and sighed. Sonny almost skidded into a trot and I pitched forward laughing.
“See,” said Jane, “He listens to you. He responds to your body. It’s like a cruise control. You can use it to adjust his gait.”
We worked through the spring and the summer, Jane encouraging at each lesson. Gradually I stopped feeling anxious when I thought about going down to the barn. Some days when I got there, I realized that I wasn’t relaxed enough to canter but that no longer stopped me from riding. I began doing more carrot stick riding and for short distances was even able to canter Sonny without holding on to the reins. I felt like I was finally developing some of the mental and emotional fitness I needed to conquer this fear.
My fitness was finally put to the test in September when I attended another three day clinic with Carol Coppinger. I had worked really hard in preparation for the clinic and I knew that I would be reasonably comfortable when we were asked to canter. On the first afternoon of the clinic, Carol had us following the rail in the indoor arena. She had us count off in pairs.
“OK, here’s what we are going to do now,” she announced. “While the group keeps following the rail, one pair at a time is going to come into the center of the arena and using only your carrot sticks, canter your horses in a figure 8.”
My stomach immediately started to tighten into a knot. I had expected to be asked to canter Sonny but not without reins, using only a carrot stick. My right brain began to whisper urgently that I was not ready to do this and I knew that Carol wouldn’t think any less of me if I used my reins. But my left brain said ‘wait a minute’. You have done this before and you can do it now. Just breathe and stay relaxed.
I was in the 3rd pair. While I watched the two pairs before me go with some measure of success, I focused on breathing and staying relaxed and positive. When our turn came, I walked Sonny into the center of the arena, dropped the reins, looked in toward the center of the circle I wanted him to canter and brought the life up in my body. Sonny stepped into a canter and we cantered a circle. When he broke into a trot, I slowed him to a walk and asked again. We didn’t make the figure 8 exactly (Sonny has trouble with his right lead) but I did canter two circles without touching the reins. I glanced over at Jane who was assisting with the clinic. Now we were both smiling ear to ear.
I’d like to say I’ve completely conquered my fear but I know that isn’t true. I still sometimes get nervous before I canter my horse and there are even some days when I know I’m not in the right mental state for trying. But I also know that I am making progress and that someday soon, I’m going to take Sonny back to Fair Hill and have him galloping cross country, with his mane blowing in my face and we are going to be flying.
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