Resistance

Do you ever notice that what you resist only gets bigger and takes on a life of its own? Have you noticed this with your riding? When you focus on where your horse is resisting, you just get more resistance. What can you do instead?

Ride with presence, and ride from your center. There is a place outside of what is going on that can see, observe, and be able to have a choice in what happens next. This your “center”, the place where you don’t have to REact, you can simply be, observe, and ACT from a place of freedom and peace.

How do you find this place?  Notice when you are in the middle of reacting to something.  For example, you put your leg on and instead of the horse moving off it, the horse moves into your leg.  Notice how you respond to that situation.  What are you doing?  Is there a different way of encouraging your horse to move off your leg?  Just by asking these questions, you are NOW in your center and have a way of choosing to act, instead of just reacting.

It has taken me a while to get to this place in my riding, but what it has done for my horse is amazing. My horse used to be anxious and concerned about what she needed to do next. Now she has learned that we are only concerned about what is happening in this stride, right now. This new way of being for me and my horse even carries over to when others ride her. They are amazed at how my horse behaves in such a friendly, calm, and accepting way. They are amazed that when they get on, even if they make a mistake, my horse still stays calm and works to do her job. Things that frighten other horses don’t bother my horse because she has learned to trust her humans and know they will make sure she doesn’t get hurt.

Spend some time seeing if you can find this place of peace and observation. See if you can bring this to your life and to your riding. I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at the changes you find happening without any resistance to the change.

Peaks and valleys

We crave the peak experience.  We hang onto days where everything feels great, life is exciting, and we’re in “The Zone” like a shipwreck survivor clings to flotsam.  We assign the quality of “good” to days like this, and “bad” to days where things don’t go our way, to days when we have sand in our mental shorts, and everything we do turns into a biggeer mess than when we started.  Yet where does this striving get us?

If life is one long peak experience, then what becomes a peak?  If there are no lows, then how can we tell we’re at a high?  How can we treasure the days when we feel cruddy just as much as the days when we feel like we’re floating through life like it’s effortless?

For me, it is realizing that my valleys define my peaks.  I can’t always say that I can immediately see the “good” in where I’m at, especially when it seems painful or frustrating.  What I can do is turn my awareness to this process of categorizing things as “good” and “bad”, and instead let go of the value judgements to simply be with what is there.

Is this easy?  Does it come naturally to me?  Of course not … I am human after all.  What I can say is that I’m not giving up and that I keep returning to this inquiry.  That is what this blog and this community is all about … continuing one step at a time to try again, to acknowledge the glorious imperfection of humanity and embrace this as what helps make us great.

I encourage you to try this for yourself.  Does setting aside the concept of a “good” or “bad” day help you gain perspective?  Do you work at taking small steps to create something new?