I am going to tell you story about my first job outside of my own business and ranch where I grew up in Indio, California. The job was in La Jolla, California, at a large riding academy and I looked all these beautiful riders there, they were riding hunters and jumpers and I thought they looked better than I did on a horse. And so I said, “I don’t know why you would hire me train these people because they seem to be riding better than I do”. The academy people said, “No, no, no, no, you watch them”.So I watched them and I saw that when a horse refused to take a fence and ran out on the left that the person was thrown off the horse. I saw that even when they were just cantering around that if a horse just moved the wrong way, off went the rider because they did not have any balance.

They had not become connected to their horses and—> I realized that connection can’t happen in lessons. It has to come from the connection that you have on a horse. The connection you have when you are not under instruction. So when I teach people how to ride, what I do is I pay more attention to how the person feels while they are on the horse. How do they feel on this horse? If I tell them to put their heels down when they are not really connected to their horse, it’s a waste of time and plus it makes them a brittle rider. If you want to learn how to ride correctly on a horse, what you want is someone to tell you when to do things at the time that’s most going to help you.

I rode in the desert for years on horses that I trusted and felt balanced upon and I become such a part of the horse. Someone saw me riding when I was about 14 and they said, “We want you to show our horse” and I said, “Well, I don’t know too much about riding a western horse” and they said, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference, you just come on down anyway and we want you to show this mare in western pleasure and trail horse classes”.

So I went down and they showed me how my heels should be, how my knees should be, how my back should be, how my hands should be and how everything should be. It turned out I was the high point of the show because I felt connected with my horse and I knew how to get my horse to feel connected to me and that is the secret. The secret is that you feel connected and he feels connected to you. Then when you are told to put your heels down or to do this or to do that, you are empowered in a way that does not make you a brittle or unbalanced rider.

It was a nice talk with all you guys out there and hope that it will inspire you to make decisions that will help you with your relationship with horses.

You can comment on this article by clicking –>HorseConscious Forum