When things hit the fan I have a tendency to fly into full alert – like a prey animal- run run run. Chasing a solution, an action – running to quiet a racing heart.
But sometimes it is better to just stand. To root your hooves down, and feel the place where you are. Breathe, then move. Keep feeling. Stand some more. Breathe.
This is a photo of my beautiful stallion Capprichio at Dressage at Devon in 2004. He is ridden by Sabine Schut-Kery and dancing with Ana Ayromlou. Today he is is almost 20 years old, and our riding is cooked down, basic. A little trot, a little canter, long companionable walks across the beautiful, grassy meadows.
If I put on music when I am riding him, I can feel him fill up, his neck arches, he starts to prance and blow, remembering all his chops – the passage, piaffe, the pirouettes and rears. I love that feeling – all that wildness and energy coming up under me. But dancing isn’t good for his ligaments or his joints, so we let that wave pass, and go back to being our companionable selves. In my heart and mind though, he is always dressed to kill, and we are dancing together, full throttle. Even just standing together gazing at the landscape, our six legs on the ground.
It seems that most of our conversations with horses are mediated by some form of restraint: halter, lead line, bridle, side reins, longue line, martingale, etc. Tethering is part of the human-horse thing.
In this picture, I am introducing the rope halter to Nelson. He has seen it before. Bu like many things horse, just because we did it last week does not mean that he is fine with it today. So we go through a chunking down process, breaking putting the halter on into lots of little steps, so that the whole process becomes digestible. What happens after this picture is that I rub the halter all over his body, come to the other (more scary) side of his body and do the same thing there. I put the rope over his neck and ask him to walk with me with just the rope. He thinks that is fine. After a bit, he will calmly let me put the halter on and even consent to being led. But not to being led on his left side, and not to walking into the stall with the halter on. He will however, walk in and out of the stall with nothing on his head as many times as I ask just as nice as you please. It is something about the restraint that he does not trust. In the horse world, restraint has a nasty history. I am more interested in the Buddhist concept of restraint, which has to do with managing one’s reactions.
To build trust and to expand our vocabulary, everything that I do with Nelson with his halter on, I also do with his halter off. This includes picking up his feet, leading, grooming, moving around his whole body in both directions. Three months ago, none of this was possible. Nelson was wild – skittish, distrustful. Bit by bit, we are dissolving some of that wildness, introducing a practice of restraint of body and mind. The reason to do things without the halter is is that I want some parts of my conversations with him to be unimpeded by ropes and tack. Untethered. Eventually, I want him to be ok whether he has the halter on or not. No big deal. So that when he has a halter on he doesn’t panic or refuse something that is actually quite reasonable, like coming into the stall.
To do all of this requires restraint on my part. I have to keep myself in check, staying calm and smooth in my requests, and make my body language comprehensible to him. He has to be able to read me. That means me finding his rhythm, so that we can sync up and work together.
The real thing is this: I am tethered to Nelson by love. He can feel that. When I get it wrong, move too quickly, that bond is what lets us settle fast and get our groove back. It’s not sappy or romantic. It is an undercurrent that I imagine is like the subsonic rumblings of elephants – something that can be felt through the herd.
After I wrote the post on Nelson, talking about the “basic, homogenized body”, I thought about the other side of that coin: the separate and distinct flavors of the body. A little like the difference between Western cuisine, which strives for combinations of flavors, and Japan, where there is more of an emphasis on meals consisting of distinct foods, each retaining their own individual taste and appearance.
When I first started to ride, I was overwhelmed by all of the sensory information from my own body and the horse’s body – like trying to listen to about five hundred radio stations at once. After about fifteen years of sifting and sorting, I can (often, not always) selectively tune into one channel at a time. It happens quickly – like a momentary check in: my hips, my legs, his mouth (I feel that in my hands through the reins), each of his legs, my spine, and so on. This requires a light, quick body-mind, one that doesn’t bear down or get stuck in one place. No over-thinking, no aggressive fixing. Corrections happen in a flow, awareness is dextrous and global. That is the goal.
I can feel my lovely trainer, Brandi Rivera, smiling as she reads this. She has seen me get very stuck, heavy-handed and frustrated. When that happens, I am usually not tasting or feeling much of anything. The parts have gotten thick and mushy, like a bad soup. At that moment, I find it helps to tune into the fluid base of the breath, and from there let the mind bloom out to the feast of flavors once again. It’s the same when dancing – sensing the whole while feeling the relationships and qualities of the parts.
