“See that? See how your hands moved wider? That shows me you are balancing with your arms still,” she says. “You need to be balanced through your seat, so your arms don’t move.” I fret, and complain for a minute, and then take the horse back up into the trot.
I drive away from that lesson an hour later with this question in my mind: what does it take to be balanced? She says it takes doing the opposite of what you want to do, everything your body wants to do, is built to do, naturally does, all the instincts it has to keep itself safe on this giant moving animal -
do the opposite.
But how can I? I have been back for only two rides and already I feel this longing, to have unlocked the secret that I suspect isn’t a secret: to wake up one day just magically able to trust the horse under me and the body that I am enough to let go. Forget the dream of waking up with magical abilities in riding - I want them in trust, in release, in the not-doing that occupies so much of this work.
What is the thing you should do the opposite of? Where do you grip your life too tightly, from pain or history or experience, where do you hold on so tight that you limit the movement? I hold on too tightly to my kids, I know this in the unsteady rise of my voice when they go out of sight, behind a tree, or crouched down in the grass picking the first of the tiny purple wildflowers.
I hold on too tightly to ideas of myself as an accomplished person, and ideas of myself as a failed writer. I grip this idea - that I didn’t do all the things I should have done - and it holds me back down, the horse not really free in forward motion.
That’s the thing about riding, and about riding being this metaphor for life. In riding all the movements and non-movements have a consequence. Grip with your knees and the horse can’t be as supple in all directions, can’t collect fully, can’t come through the back. Hold the balance in your hands and you’re kept from using them for the things you need them for, apt to send accidental signals that confuse you and the horse.
Everything I do with my body - everything I do with my mind and my heart - is a form of direct communication, an input with the guarantee of a response. The response is not always predictable. But the response is always there. This horse may be the most willing conversation partner I will ever have, the one being with whom I experience truly immediate feedback, for whom and with whom I learn something about the immediacy of myself.
Those things I grip in my mind, those places of anxiety, they keep me from living as fully. In a conversation where I might have taken a risk, in a kindness I laced with insecurity and expectation of a favor returned, because I didn’t want to risk being unnoticed or unloved. What if I did what my instructor says, in her wisdom which is not limited to riding but finds an expression there:
what would be freed in me? What would come to be?
I spent an hour on a circle (not quite 16m but close, for those of us who are curious) being asked to do the opposite of what I think will keep me safe. To stop overcompensating for the fear of falling by hanging on tighter. To stop fearing the movement but welcoming it, to let myself do it, and believe in it later.
And something is being freed.