06/11/2023
❤️❤️❤️
Intent
Aids are not buttons.
It’s amazing how often beginners think that riding a horse is a matter of learning to push the correct buttons- “kick to stop, pull left to go left”…. But what is more amazing is how often advanced riders get sucked into a much more complex version of the same type of thinking…. “Left seat bone down, left leg gently on, left hand slightly open, right leg back and hugging, steady solid right rein against the neck, shoulders pointed to corner letter, keep the hips moving SHOULD equal half pass left, SO WHY ARE YOU TILTING YOUR HEAD AND NOT HALFPASSING?!?!?”
There are well over 600 muscles in the human body. You are not going to align all of them perfectly through 1+1+1+1+1+1 mentality. On top of that, our job is to put the horse into balance, so our aids ebb and flow and change with the horse.
What unifies our aids and makes the symphony of aids cohesive is our intent. The first lesson that really drives this point home is when students learn that no matter what they do with their body, if they are not looking where they want to go, chances are they won’t wind up there!! when students first recognize the difference. They seem to think this is one of the buttons required- like the horse feels your head move and takes it as a cue. Us instructors do love to explain that your head is the weight of a bowling ball and looking where you are going absolutely influences your weight in the rest of your body, but honestly, Horses don’t really think about where you are looking, nor do they care.  What they really do care about is when your right rein is pulling on them, but the whole rest of your body is falling to the left.  Even the dullest of horses are typically much more in tune with your weight, and the general feel of your whole body than they are one hand or one leg. Imagine if a little kid is sitting on top of your shoulders, and they swing their whole body to the left while pointing to the right. Their movement is going to pull you to the left, no matter how clearly they communicate that they would like you to do otherwise.
Horses are not sitting around, memorizing our pattern of aids in order to know what we want, nor do they come preinstalled with such knowledge. It’s more like a school of fish where the rider is the majority of the fish and the horse is in the middle just following the crowd. A good rider shapes themselves into a movement pattern in a way that it just feels natural for the horse to match.
The power of intention becomes really obvious when it stops working… maybe leg yields to the left have been your nemesis, to the point you can’t even imagine it going well. Just the thought of an upcoming leg yield has you contorting, or shutting down the motion of your hips, or stiffening, or clambering at the reins. If you picture your horse getting bogged down, inverted, resisting your hand, etc, then you’ve accidentally set that intention!!!
Our subconscious mind loves to work hard to accomplish whatever it is that we picture in that big complex brain of ours!  so if we can picture what it should look like and what it should feel like we are well on our way towards accomplishing our goals. But if we get stuck in a negative headspace, we’re all we can picture is our failures, then we are stuck, repeating them over and over and over again, to the point that we absolutely train that response into our horse.
If your horse is a little barn, sour and blows out the right shoulder every time he goes around the one turn, it might be safe to say that he started it! Lol. But by the second or third time around, it’s now your job to look to the left, turn your belly button to the left, step in your left stirrup, point both hands to the left, and focus on going left like there is 0% chance of any other options!!!  But what often happens instead is that riders become nervous about whatever it is on the horse’s right side that they might step, on or run into, or go through so, the rider starts looking at where it is they think the horse is going to take them, therefore perpetuating it.  at this point you need a little bit of Peter Pan style “believe” and “think happy thoughts” in order to get around the turn. If you don’t think you can, guaranteed you won’t.
 So much in riding is learning to control your thoughts and attitude, so that you have a consonant intention that the horse can easily follow.

