This summer my family and I traveled over to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, home of Tim Harvey, friend and regular host of Mark Rashid. I had a really enjoyable week assisting Mark and Crissi on a group format clinic and here are some thoughts and discoveries that arose from that experience. The group format means that 9 riders, in this case, rode at the same time while focusing specifically on their own objectives. The clinic was 6 days long and that gave everyone plenty of time to work on their chosen goals, the format created a really relaxed atmosphere and seemed to allow for a very organic type of learning. By that I mean that people had some really significant breakthroughs and made these for themselves and in their own time, having time to digest and process information in a way that really seemed to enhance the learning.
Breathing, centering and teaching the feel of connection
Its hardly surprising at one of Mark’ clinics that we should open with some discussion and exercises about breathing. Building on this we also discussed connection between horse and rider in more detail than I had come across at Mark’s previous clinics. When two living things are connected a subtly of communication is possible that far exceeds spoken language between humans or techniques and cues between horse and rider. When you experience this with another person you know how they are feeling, which way they want to move or what their intention is without them having to express this in words. I am learning about this intimately from my daughter Katie. With a horse, this connection is experienced when the rider feels that they didn’t need to use an external cue, the horse “heard” or “felt” their thoughts and responded as that thought formed in the rider’s mind. I don’t mean to say that there is anything weird or magical going on, its just that incredible sensitivity is available when we are grounded, focused, aware and connected.
Mark showed us a number of exercises from Aikido which illustrate the power of establishing a connection. For example, with one foot forward we gently moved our whole body backwards and forwards on a straight plane with the motion originating from our center. The point of this exercise is to use the gentle movement to connect our center with our nervous system and with the mind. You could think about this as reconnecting the mind and the body. We did this with a partner as well, one person placed a hand on the other’s arm. The purpose of the exercise was for one person to imagine moving their arm to one side, backwards or forwards and to see if the other person could feel which way they were thinking about. First of all the two people found a connection as discussed above and then one of them just thought about moving in a particular direction. Every group experienced that the lead partner in the pair didn’t need to move at all, once a connection had been made, and their partner felt which way they wanted to move. They were able to just think about moving and have an impact on the other person. This exercise showed very clearly that once you have a connection the most subtle imaginable communication is felt by both parties. This would be a very great feel to consistently replicate when riding a horse.
We also worked with some exercises with the reins to show that if we focus on breathing, centering and our connection we can work with braces offered by our partner (or the horse) with a quietly consistent feel that was very effective indeed.
The exercises that Mark’s showed us at this clinic were reminiscent of some exercises I have done at NLP workshops with Robert Dilts. In order to teach us to achieve a connection with our clients we work through an exercise of breathing, centering and then focusing on our heart center and finally our “third eye”, a point in our forehead. The intention is that we become grounded, open and aware of ourselves so that we are able to be connected with what is around us. The objective seems to be the same as with the exercise we were working on with Mark in that by becoming connected to ourselves we can open to the possibility of a subtle connection with others. If this works between humans who are relatively dull, as animals go, then there is no question in my mind that this works between a horse and a human. Anyway, if we don’t give it a go and offer this feel then we’ll never know.
While we were talking about connection between people and horses I was really interested that Crissi raised the subject of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been the hot topic in the psychology world for the last decade as they may explain imitation, empathy and language acquisition. A mirror neuron is a neuron in the brain that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. The neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other animal, as though the observer were itself acting. The original experiments showed that one money watching another monkey eating fired the same parts of the brain as if it were also eating, in other words we can watch someone doing something and have similar brain activity and sensations as if we were doing that thing ourselves. These neurons have been directly observed in a variety of different parts of the brain in primates, humans and other species including birds.
Is the horse breathing?
Its not just humans who adopt poor breathing patterns. Its relatively common that horses are not breathing very well at all when they are working. This is especially apparent during the canter because at that time we should be able to hear the rhythmical out breath in time with the outside hind leg pushing off the ground. There were a couple of horses on the clinic who were not breathing well and Mark worked with each of them on the lunge at the canter to ask them to move until they could find a way to breath well. Sometimes this takes a little while and its not an entirely easy process for the horse but the benefit is that the horse is going to feel a lot more comfortable once its found a way to breath properly. Once the horse is breathing better it is able to hold the canter more easily and can quite quickly find their way back to a good breathing pattern again when the exercise is repeated over the course of a couple of days.
Since getting back from New Hampshire this is something that I have emphasized quite a bit more in my own clinics and the results have been very positive. More often than not the humans are not considering the breathing of the horse at all but its really easy to spot a problem once we start to talk about it. In one example we were working with an older polo pony, she was not moving that easily and there was something short and a little tight about her movement. It was not so much a physical issue, more that she looked as if she was holding herself tight from the inside. We asked her to trot and canter on the lunge and we all listened …….... and heard absolutely nothing at all. We waited and still heard nothing. After quite a few rounds of canter she did start to slightly blow her nose, and then nothing. After a few more rounds we started to hear a very shallow breath about once every three strides. And we really needed to stain our ears to pick that up. Shortly after that she did a large amount of nose blowing and we heard a few rhythmical breaths where she did manage to breath out on each stride. We called it a day with that exercise and repeated it for the next two days of the clinic. The second day we saw a definite improvement as it took far, far less time for her to blow her nose and start to breath out and on the third day we heard a lovely rhythmical breathing pattern from the moment she started to canter. I can’t help thinking that she is going to be a lot more comfortable breathing like this.
Openings
Maybe its just me but sometimes its really useful to hear things again …… and again…. and again! I have heard Mark talk about openings on many occasions and it was nice to have openings be the “word of the day” on the second day of the clinic so that we were all reminded to focus on what this means for us and our horses.
Think about making a simple halt to walk transition with two different frames of mind. Here’s the first example: Say we want the horse to move away from his current position. We pick up the reins and use our legs to let him know that we want to move forward. Our emphasis is on moving him away from where he is standing right now.
And the second example: To make the same halt to walk transition we could think about creating an opening into which both the horse and the rider are going to move. In order to do this we need to pay attention to what happens before we start to make the usual physical cues. We can create an opening by thinking about where we are both going to go, what’s the space that we are going to move forward into together, is there a focus on where we are going? We will very likely still use the same physical cues (at least to start with) but they are directed towards what it is that we do want, which is to move together in the opening.
The interesting point here is that the feel changes because offering an opening is such a totally different way to go about things, its generally a less confrontational option.
I felt a really amazing physical example of what openings are all about when we were doing the dismounted exercises. Mark showed us a number of exercises along the same lines but the one that really stuck in my mind was very simple. One person braced themselves ready for their partner to try to push them backwards by placing thier hands on their stomach. The first time we did this the person just pushed at the stomach and most people were pretty strong and able to resist the pushing pretty well. In the second part of the same exercise the person doing the pushing imagined an opening behind the other person into which they were both going to move. The difference in feel was absolutely amazing, it was almost impossible to resist the energy of the second push and both people moved as one into the opening.
Time and again with my own horses and when I am teaching I have found that people do much better when they think about creating an opening rather than just pushing on the horse in the direction in which they want to go. Its something really simple that affects the way to approach the situation, usually to the benefit of both horse and rider.
My thanks to Mark and Crissi for giving me the opportunity to come and assist, to Hilary Lecluse for the photos used in this blog, to Heidi Uhlman of Deer Creek Farm for hosting the clinic, to all the riders for riding and to Peter and Katie for coming with me to enjoy New Hampshire.
