Goodness comes from both your mind and the horse’s. The mind relates with your body, and the body relates internally with your posture and externally to the horse. Try to combine all those aspects together. Try to have a very good, solid daily practice.
Of course there are other points of orientation with the horse. This is a matter of consciousness. Where you focus your attention and where the horse does determine the manner in which you communicate.
Learn first how to direct your own mind and then find how to gently bring the horse’s mind to you. Good dressage is in how to co-intensify space so that you and the horse take the same point of orientation.
When done without aggression or fear, the horse seeks out the places of common touch and comes to enjoy the intensification of space which provides the locus for communication.
Space vibrates and is regular in good dressage. The vibration has cadence and is predictable. When this is so confidence comes. The aids are regular and predictable.A properly trained horse then becomes both trustworthy and frank.
The point of dressage is to bring the horse to demonstrate both of these qualities. To be able to achieve this result means that we must also be able to find those qualities in ourselves.To be trustworthy is to be reliable but also to be above suspicion. To be frank is to be free from bondage or restraint from the aids.
To trust ourselves is to be able to properly dwell in who and what we are. This is about how we take our seat. From the horse’s view, We must be free of suspicion. This is possible when we are able to find a primordial confidence that can only occur when we align ourselves with the present moment. The seat and aids link us to the horse and the horse to us.
Our frankness is to be able to free ourselves from the bondage of training methods and judgements. We no longer need to hold the horse and we are free from the bondage of what we think we need to do. So it is that our frankness enables us deal with the moment to moment situation. We can see what arises in ourselves and the horse.
This maybe challenging but whatever the difficulty in trusting and being frank, we must not turn away from the task. Good dressage requires this and what a difference it makes in the horse when we can extend our trust and frankness.
In conventional terms we can work the horse in the release of the aids. Lightness is automatic and when we find such lightness, kindness and gentleness always follow. Clarity is always part of good dressage because trust and frankness joined together automatically produce it.
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