If _____ Was Better, Everything Would Be Better

The last three mornings, I have been experimenting with our conversations about energy and relaxation, on line and at liberty. This thought process comes to me via Karen Rohlf… as exercises to develop these conversations are the very first ones in her book. The basic picture is as simple as this: can you begin with a horse that is totally relaxed, ask for energy and get a response that matches your intention 100%, and then release and have the horse return confidently and immediately to relaxation?

While Finn and I have gotten some pretty good results in the last few sessions, today I just didn’t feel like he was quite there. He was definitely offering some good efforts. I questioned whether I was just being unrealistic in my expectations, as sometimes I can be. In the end, I think we kind of settled. I just couldn’t think at that moment what I might do to get a better result and I felt like it was turning into drilling.

Then, after saddling, I was working on Buck’s half-circle exercise while practicing a new mindset I’ve been trying out which involves moving space instead of moving the horse, and again Finn’s responses were nice, but just a TINY but sticky… almost imperceptible, but definitely not quite right if I was honest with myself. And as I continued to work through that, it became more and more noticeable to me that, in particular, it was his hind feet that were stuck.

So, I started focusing more on clearing the space under his hind feet and being more particular about what I rewarded and things improved. So I went back to the car to get my bridle, and quickly realized I’d left it at home. At first I was dismayed, because it meant I wasn’t going to be able to have the ride I’d been planning on. I almost just pulled the saddle off and called it a day. But in the end I decided to ride in the arena with a halter and one rein and continue the conversation we’d been having on the ground.

Picture the same exercise I described earlier, just translated to the saddle. It’s very basic. Is energy 100% available? Can we relax together? But getting this REALLY good is harder than you might think.

I continued to think about clearing the space under Finn’s hind feet… just picturing our bubble closing from behind. What I realized (or admitted to myself), is that often it feels like Finn is pulling himself with his front end, and that is probably why we don’t flow very well. That because especially clear after I felt the energy flow from behind a few times. Yup, that was different!

We played with halt-to-walk transitions, slow-walk-to-fast-walk, and walk-to-trot, all with the same focus and all countered by the question, “can we melt back to a stop/relaxation?” I felt enough to know that this is definitely a hole in our communication (the energy part, much more than the relaxation part), and as long as it is there it will continue to hold everything back.

So for now, this is the answer to the “question” I’m always posing to myself, again ala Karen Rohlf. It’s a fill-in-the-blank question: if _____ was better, everything would be better. I use it to focus my time and effort. If our communication about energy was better, if Finn flowed from his hind end better, everything would be better. I have no doubt.

The trouble is, it’s so easy to skim over these most basic of communications when they work well enough to get by. When things are pretty light and pretty smooth, it can be easy to want to work on other stuff and let that be. Or, it can be easy to enjoy the pleasant picture of almost being there rather than shake things up to get a better connection. I declare myself guilty on both counts!

I’m not really sure what direction my quest to get this working better will take. I will for sure be continuing to experiment with it tomorrow; maybe after that I’ll have a clearer idea of what the way forward will look like.