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?

Living life one stride at a time.

When riding, we often talk about riding the horse one stride at a time.  This is a reminder to the rider from his or her coach that with a horse, you can’t just “set it and forget it”.  You can’t say, “I’m going to canter from A to B,” and not think about how you’re going to get there.  Well, okay, you can.  You can decide that instead of thinking about the task at hand (guiding 1,000 pounds of animal moving at 20 miles per hour), you can think about that weird look you got from the person on the other side of the barn aisle and what it could possibly mean, and if they have a problem with you, and what could they possibly have a problem with you about, and what you’re going to do about this person who clearly has some weird thoughts about you … does this sound familiar?  You can ride this way if you’re not worried about the outcome, about the quality of the experience for both you and the horse.

When riding, we often get jerked out of this train of thought (if we’re lucky) by suddenly realizing the horse is no longer doing what we originally asked him to do ten strides earlier.  If we’re not lucky (and really lost in thought) we come back to the present when we find out our horse was paying more attention to our surroundings than we were, spooks at something, and we are suddenly half-way to the ground.  By not paying attention, by getting lost in our own thoughts, we lose the ability to see where we’re going and how we’re getting there.

Horses require us to tune into what is going on in the present moment, and STAY tuned in.  By developing this awareness, we take our first step toward a safe and enjoyable ride by staying aware of our surroundings and how our horse is relating to them.  Even the most calm, the most bomb-proof horse will have moments where all bets are off and they are back to running for their lives away from something that they are positively, abolutely sure will kill them.  Your awareness of your surroundings will help you work with your horse, reassure him when the Boogey Man appears, and show him that he can do something other than run away.  By staying present, you have the opportunity to manage a situation instead of being a victim of circumstances.

Further developing this awareness of being present to each little “now” leads you to a new level of mastery in your riding.  As riders, we strive to develop what is known as “self carriage”, or basically where the horse can continue to perform the task you asked him to do, in the exact way you asked him to do it, without you having to micro-manage him and constantly correct his way of moving.  So, isn’t this contradictory to riding “one stride at a time”?  Isn’t riding one step at a time preventing the horse from developing self carriage?  No, it isn’t … depending on how you do it.

By tuning your awareness into the exact feeling your getting at each moment, you have information you can use.  I asked the horse to trot on a large circle.  Are we still trotting?  Does he feel like he’s almost ready to slow to a walk?  Does he feel like he’s speeding up and going to break into a canter?  How does the horse’s body feel?  Is his neck relaxed?  If it’s tense, in what part of his neck is it tense?  Can I feel an even curve following the arc of the circle through his whole body?  If I can’t feel that, where is he stuck?  Does the quality of his trot feel light and floating, or does it feel like he’s stomping around like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum?  I can go on with the list of questions here, but you get the idea that the more you can bring your awareness to what is going on, you can decide if things are fine or if the horse needs some correction.  You then have the information to be able to give the correct feedback to your horse at exactly the right time he needs guidance to improve his performance, not three strides later when the correction no longer applies to what the horse is doing.

This process also translates beatifully to our daily lives.  If we’re asleep at the wheel, how can we expect to avoid a wreck?  If we’re not aware of what is ACTUALLY happening RIGHT NOW, instead of the imaginary chain of events we construct in our thinking, how can we take the appropriate action for what is going on?

The key is to relax and not over-think it.  Really?  Yes.  Even after I described that list of questions I ask myself as I ride, it’s a way of tuning in to my awareness, not a check-list for a rocket launch.  Think of it like a mantra or a relaxation tape running in the background … giving gentle nudges to your brain to stay focused, and giving it something to focus on for a brief moment.  Just like the horse, your brain is going to keep moving, so this gives you a way to guide how and where it’s going.

How have I applied this off the horse in the rest of my life?  Yesterday was a great example.  I had the most stress-free day I have ever experienced by staying relaxed, and meanwhile repeatedly bringing my awareness to what I needed to do, what was a priority, what I could get done quickly and just be done with it, seeing if I was still on track to meet my time-sensitive commitments, and taking brief breaks when I had the time.

Can you see this working for you in your life?  Does this sound fine when you’re working on a sport or hobby, but useless when dealing with tough customers, or deadlines?  I welcome your thoughts on how living life one step at a time can apply to you.