Microwave dressage

Microwave dressage

In a microwave oven, we can place our food in and it gets cooked instantly. However, in the realm of working with horses and dressage you can’t expect a microwave oven kind of training/dressage.

No achievement with a horse or human happens all of a sudden. There is a process of growth, a gradual process of developing ourselves and our horses. No clinician, trainer or instructor is going to bring results on the spot.

Microwave dressage and instant training are always an illusion. While you are welcome to enjoy the illusion when these things occur, understand that such things always pass.

Even in those things which seem to occur on the spot, a closer look will reveal an a lot of small things which need to be in place before the big moment of revelation. Sometimes it appears that an individual clinician, instructor or method brings a profound awakening but do not lose your mental balance to such appearances. In the end, our progress is up to us and is always slow and progressive.

As a clinician, I get to have students presented to me by instructors that I have trained. Sometimes I can awaken a kind of awe in those students, achieving amazing results in a short time and thus winning the praise of everyone.  I appear to eclipse the local instructor but without the patient work of that local instructor and the work of the students themselves, I would not be able to make the “miracle.”

The problem created by these miraculous revelations lives in that they create an expectation of magic in someplace other than in our own hearts. The student, lost in the excitement of revelations, proceeds to seek and follow a train of endless clinicians and instructors in an attempt to find the ultimate magician.

There is no ultimate magician except the student themselves or through the cultivation of the skills in the day to day ordinary and simple work. Excellent dressage is always found in the simple and reveals the basic goodness in the horse or human.

As an instructor/clinician, it is important not to deceive yourself too. Good instruction is not an invention but the revelation of the goodness which is already present. Our practice as students is to find the way to get out of our own way and reveal what was always present.