In the Company of Horses........... cont.

Continuing the write up.
6. Softness

"Being 'soft' doesn't mean I or my horse turn into a doormat.  This is a common misconception.  That's not soft, that's weak.  Softness requires that we retain our point of view through the process.  Soft isn't necessarily slow, soft isn't necessarily easy, soft doesn't necessarily look a certain way for every horse, soft isn't necessarily the path of least resistance, but soft is, well, soft.

A person or horse is soft when he's using as many muscles as necessary to get the job done and no more.  So we end up back at 'as little as possible and as much as necessary'."

7. Mean Well

Most of us don't purposely want to do harm, but sometimes I think it's possible to overlook this in the quest to accomplish something.

"Meaning well or the lack of meaning well is one of those things that under-lies and colours our horsemanship.  When we work with our horse, do we mean to help him, or do we mean to 'make' him?  I think there's a big difference to the horse."

"The more we know about horses and the more we try to accomplish with them, the more responsibility we have to do no harm.  As one's knowledge grows, so does one's responsibility to do no harm."

8.Breathing

I think this is very important, but something that's often overlooked.

"When we talk about breathing, we're not talking about the kind of breathing that just gets you by and keeps you from passing out.  We're talking about a deep, deliberate, rhythmic, diaphragmatic breath that fills up the lungs and oxygenates the muscles and brain. Most of us don't realize that even in our everyday lives, we don't breathe very well. When we get around our horses, we seem to breathe even less well, to the point that we end up breathing as little as we can and still survive, which is not a help to our horsemanship.

If a rider is holding his breath or isn't breathing well, it creates tightness, making it difficult for his horse to move.  If our horse gets scared or concerned, we often hold our breath.  that makes it hard for the horse to move under us,just when he's thinking that movement might really be the best thing for him. If we hold our breath, we can become a tight, restrictive, dead weight up there, which might make our horse go from 'kind of' concerned to very concerned."

9. Consistency

Emotion = lack of logic = inconsistency. Something I'm becoming much more aware of and learning to control.

"If we use emotion while we work with a horse, we risk losing our logical thought pattern. Once we lose logical thought, we become inconsistent. And then we lose softness as well, because we become reactive rather than responsive"

"The way horses learn is through consistency, for better or worse."

10. Simplicity
This should be easy for me (k.i.s.s.) but it's not as easy as you might think.

"Ironically, although it appears that it should be easier to simplify than to multiply, that isn't always the case. As a matter of fact, many of us did start with simplicity, when we were kids. As kids, we just rode. Somewhere along the way the simplicity was lost"

11. Hope

In striving to achieve goals with horses, I think sometimes it's quite easy to lose hope, but we keep coming back for more, that's a kind of hope, isn't it?
"If we have a passion for horses, that passion is often a combination of love and hope and fear and awe. It's all in there, and that's what makes the horse so magical to us.  I wonder somethimes if the horses have hopes for us as well."