Thursday, February 13, 2014

Soak Time

I’ve known for a long time that my learning process is one that requires a good deal of soak time. I ponder things, turning an idea over again and again, examining it from all directions before reaching a conclusion. For me it’s never been blinding flashes of insight but rather small glimmers at a distance to be mulled over and meditated upon before being accepted or rejected in time. I thought this was a particularly human quality of learning but lately I’ve begun to realize that horses need soak time too. My first Parelli partner, Sonny, is a left brain introvert. Big, easy going and slightly dominant, Sonny has a well-developed opposition reflect. Many of our early sessions were consumed with Sonny resisting my efforts to get him to do what I wanted and me struggling to maintain my composure in the face of his stubbornness while trying to figure out how to make my idea his idea. Slowly I developed the patience and creativity that I needed to play with him and he developed more willingness and exuberance for the play. It wasn’t long into my Parelli journey before I realized that Sonny was smart. It was often frustrating for me that he applied his intelligence toward resistance but he did learn fast and once he had a skill, he really had it. Sonny’s learning process seemed to be one of serious resistance followed by a leap ahead. He seldom seemed to be confused about what I wanted him to do; he just didn’t seem to want to do it. He was so calm most of the time that in the beginning, I often missed the both subtle signs that he was worried and the subtle movements that indicated his slightest try. As I became more skilled in recognizing his try, our progress accelerated. Sonny didn’t seem to require any soak time once he had moved past his “I don’t want to” phase. When Sonny went lame at the end of 2013, I began working with a six year old Appaloosa gelding named Dillon. Dillon belonged to a friend of mine and because her work schedule was making it nearly impossible for her to spend much time with him, she asked if I would be willing to work with him. I’ve always been drawn to Dillon. He reminds me of my first horse, Max, also an appaloosa, with his sweet disposition and desire to please. But where my left brained Sonny was calm and mostly confident, right brained Dillon was twitchy and unconfident. I had no such problem recognizing when Dillon was unconfident because he became so emotional. Inherently a right brained introvert, he could go quickly and emotionally extroverted when pressured. Odd things seemed to bother him. He had boundless curiosity and would approach seemingly scary objects like large, noisy equipment but wouldn’t circle in the round pen because he was afraid to squeeze between my back and the round pen fence. He loaded easily into a trailer but it took me weeks of patient work to get him to walk by himself into the wash stall. It’s been a lot of fun to work with Dillon. Like Sonny, Dillon is very smart. But unlike Sonny, who always seemed to be trying to figure out how not to do what I wanted, Dillon really seems anxious to please. His tries were always so obvious that it was easy to recognize and reward him for his efforts. We made progress quickly, moving through level 2 skills both on line and under saddle. Dillon had a lovely trot and both on line and under saddle he had smooth, quiet transitions between halt, walk and trot in any combination. Canter transitions, on the other hand, had been problematic and I whenever I succeeded in pushing him up into a canter, the transition came with lots of emotion. It was a heads up, tail wringing affair, often with a crossfire or counter canter, particularly going to the left. He was unable to even take a canter on a 22’ line and I had been working him on the 45 to give him the room he seemed to need. Given the level of emotion he was displaying going into the canter on line, I’d been reluctant to ask for the canter under saddle and was beginning to lose hope that I would ever canter him I had finally stopped riding Dillon altogether to work on this transition issue. During one of my weekly lessons with Parelli instructor Jane Bartsch, I was working with Dillon on line. It was cold and he was having a problem focusing. To get him in a learning frame of mind, Jane placed a pole on the ground, oriented such that the center of the pole would lie just beyond the outer edge of his circle. She instructed me to circle Dillon for several laps and then disengage him as he was approaching the pole, and once he was disengaged and facing me, back him over the pole. It took several repetitions but he was finally able to focus on what I was asking him to do. Once we seemed to have Dillon’s full attention, Jane told me to ask Dillon to canter by putting a more definite feel on the line before asking with the stick and string. I turned with Dillon as he passed my shoulder, put a slight feel on the line and kissed to him twice. To my amazement, he stepped smoothly into the canter. His head was down. There was no head shaking or tail wringing, just a nice soft canter. We repeated the sequence a couple of times to the right, Dillon’s easier side and then moved to the left. He displayed more emotion to the left, both counter cantering and cross firing but there was a lot less tale wringing and head throwing. Still, both Jane and I were pleased with the progress. Recognizing that you are always training today for progress tomorrow, we stopped after a few repetitions. It has been a horrible winter in Delaware and a combination of sleet, snow and miserably cold weather prevented me from even reaching the barn for more than a week after that lesson. When I finally did get there I wondered where Dillon would be after our enforced layoff. I’ve learned to warm Dillon up slowly to reinforce our connection and make sure he is confident and in a learning frame of mind but this morning he was with me from the moment we entered the arena. When we finally began our circling game he seemed calm and focused. After a few walk trot transitions, I put a slight feel on the line and kissed twice. Dillon stepped into the canter, head down, and back rounded. After a few steps he actually looked in at me as if to say, “How was that?” We tried it again and again he had a smooth, unemotional transition. Then I tried the other direction with the same results. There was no crossfire only a nice soft transition. It was as if a light switch had been thrown in his brain that took him from “Oh my gosh!” to “This is easy!” In our next session, I had Dillon on the 22’ line for warm up and he seemed so calm and connected that I decided to see what his transitions would look like in a smaller circle. A week earlier he had needed almost the entire length of the 45 for his canter. This week, he trotted out to the end of the 22’ line and when I kissed twice to him, stepped smoothly into the canter, first going to the right and then to the left. I was amazed. It was as if he had spent our weather enforced layoff thinking about his canter transition issue, cogitating on the experience of his last lesson and deciding that this canter transition was no big deal. He certainly now seemed to have a “what me worry?” attitude about the transition. As our sessions progressed, his transitions remained calm and smooth and it occurred to me that maybe he was a horse that needed soak time. So I started experimenting with the idea. Whenever he was struggling with a skill but had shown some definite move forward on it, I would skip that particular skill in our next session and then pick it up in the following one. Low and behold, Dillon would display a dramatic difference in his confidence with the performance of that skill. I’ve always thought horses were such interesting animals, each with its own personality but through studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship, I have learned that each has its own unique learning process as well. Where Sonny needed motivation through creative play to make progress, Dillon needed soak time. I’m now on vacation in the Florida Keys for a few weeks, happy to be out of the snow and ice that seems to be a constant issue in Delaware this winter. Because of the extreme weather before I left, I never did get a chance to canter Dillon, and shortly after I return from vacation I will be attending a clinic with Carol Coppinger. So Dillon and I are both getting a chance for some additional soak time and I am hoping that it will translate into some brilliant canter transitions when I return.

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