self-discovery

Get Out of The Way

Jess Filippi2 Comments

Lately, our trainer has been trying to hold horses for us to ride in our lessons. When we get to the barn at 1 pm on a Saturday, it’s pretty hectic and our usual mounts have often already had their quota of rides for the day, leaving us with few options. After a difficult lesson a few weeks ago before Thanksgiving, this week she tried to get a horse for me that I love and feel comfortable on–either Jasper or Summer–to make sure I’d have a better and more confidence-boosting ride this time.

Jasper was already being ridden and Summer would be used in a horse show at the barn the next day, so that left me with only the more challenging options–basically, the two ex-racehorse mares, Sparkling Gal and Misfit, and another mare named Star that we’d never seen before. Riding Buddy, being the more adventurous of us lately, chose to try out Star, who was a tall, lovely chestnut with a big jump. Deciding between the more mental/emotional difficulty of keeping skittish Sparkle calm in a crowded ring, or the more physical challenge of slowing the calmer but still strong Misfit in the same environment, I chose the latter. I was slightly rattled, having expected an easier mount. Sitting there, hemming and hawing over what seemed like all bad options, I was annoyed at myself. There was a time when I’d ride anything in the barn. I don’t like to think of myself as a tentative rider.

When we started the lesson, I remembered how much I liked Misfit the one time I’ve ridden her previously. She’s quite sane for a Thoroughbred mare, sensible and comfortable to ride. She wasn’t fazed by the crowded ring and didn’t seem interested in charging around.

Misfit’s biggest challenge is getting the correct lead on her right lead canter. In contrast to the last time I rode her, she and I both seem to have strengthened our muscles a great deal. The last time I rode her, back in July, my body was totally different. I was ten pounds heavier then, had no muscle tone, and as a result my muscles were very tight and cramped. That made it difficult for me to sit up and marshal her through the tight circle we canter on to keep her from switching to her more-comfortable left lead. But this time I had so much more strength and control. Last time felt like a sloppy mess; this time I felt like a rider, like I was working hard to get something done but I actually had proper form doing it as well. As for Misfit, I could definitely feel the difference in her as well. They have been working with her a lot more recently at the barn to strengthen her right lead and the results are apparent. Her balance is improved, her bend is more flexible. She didn’t break once in the canter and didn’t once get flustered and switch to her other lead. I was very proud of us both.

After the difficult right lead, it’s a reward to get to canter her on her left. Her canter is smooth and comfortable and propulsive without being manic.

As we prepared to jump, I found myself with those little prickles of doubt and worry creeping up on me. I know that Misfit can get a little fast on the approach and take a big jump and that made me a bit nervous. The important part of that sentence is that I said I felt nervous, and not anxious. I realized the distinction on the drive home from our lesson. When I say that I felt nervous this time around, the difference from the anxiety I’ve felt before was that it was more easily dispelled. The nervousness was a state I was in relating to a specific thing; I was nervous to take the jump because sometimes Misfit gets fast. The anxiety I’ve felt before has been, I think, triggered by situations such as this that might normally cause nervousness, but the feeling has grown out of proportion and has expanded to encompass larger, more global fears about myself and about life and because of that it has taken over and shut me down. Nervousness doesn’t shut me down. I just say to myself, “What’s the worst that will happen? She’ll get fast. You’ll slow her down.”

Nervousness is in my mind; it is a thought that can be dealt with rationally. Anxiety is everywhere, a fear that I feel throughout my entire body. Horses are very sensitive to this; they can feel agitation in the rider and that agitates them in turn. Because I didn’t have that bodily response, I didn’t infect Misfit with it. As a result, she didn’t even get fast over the jumps. She took them beautifully. And because she was taking them beautifully, so did I. My trainer said my equitation–something I’ve felt I’ve always struggled with because I’m generally more focused on getting the job done than looking pretty while I do it–was perfect. She keeps telling me that when I don’t put up these mental blocks, that when I get out of my own way, I’m a great rider. It’s been hard for me to feel that for a long time, but today I felt it.

 

Confidence in Action

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The last few weeks we’ve been back to renting a Zipcar to get out to the barn, after the unfortunate passing of ‘Betsy’, my riding buddy’s car. This week we lucked out; after she recently drove back from Texas with a friend who is relocating here, the friend graciously let us borrow the car. We’ll see what the transportation situation is in the future; she might get a new car, or maybe my boyfriend and I will finally decide to commit to staying in NY long enough to justify getting one of our own. Until then, it’s Zipcar–adding a good $40 each for every lesson–but it’s still totally worth it, especially for lessons like we had this week.

We finally, finally got to ride outside this week and what a beautiful day we had for it.  It was sunny and warm but with the cool breeze of fall in the air, just about perfect riding weather. My riding buddy continued her streak of riding her new favorite, Malcolm, and I rode my cute little Arabian mare, Summer. I don’t think I’ve ever ridden her outside before and since she’s such a fun jumper that I couldn’t wait to take her on a course.

At the start of the lesson, I was having a little trouble getting in sync with her at the trot. I think it’s just that I’ve been riding Jasper and Max lately, two big, lumbering boys who feel like entirely different animals than compact, sporty Summer. Once we got to the canter, however, I felt amazing. It was the best canter I’ve had since I returned to riding. I felt completely in rhythm with my horse, I felt tall and graceful in the saddle…it was just that wonderful feeling of “I’m doing this RIGHT!” This is definitely a result of all the ab work and upper body weight lifting I’ve been doing. I can daily feel my posture changing as all the little muscles that hold me together become strong again, but it’s even more apparent when I’m on a horse.

I feel like I’ve finally crossed the threshold with working out where my body feels like my own again. I’ve been pretty consistent with exercising three times a week and now it feels like it has been incorporated into my lifestyle. It’s really the only way for me to live and be sane and healthy.

But the more important threshold that I feel I’ve crossed is the regaining of my confidence. I wrote last time about the space that the absence of fear left open in me; this week I realized what it feels like when that space is filled with the confidence I had lost.

It certainly surprised me when after trotting into the first jump in a line, Summer decided to bolt on the landing as if the second jump were the finish line of the Kentucky Derby, but I think what was even more surprising to my trainer was my reaction to it. We landed and I thought, “Holy shit!” but instead of blacking out with anxiety, my mind was able to make rational decisions about what to do. I considered whether I should try to pull her out of the line, missing the second jump, but figured it would be easier and safer just to go with it. While my mind was calmly deciding this, my body was acting on its own through muscle memory, getting into jumping position to be in sync with my frantic mare as she barreled through the second jump. Afterwards, we galloped around half the ring before I was able to wrestle her down to a walk. I looked over at my trainer, who seemed to be holding her breath waiting for the inevitable nervous breakdown that could have ensued. But when she saw me patting and soothing Summer, she just asked, “You all right?” to which I smiled and answered that I was. Then we talked about how to proceed.

She was a bit tentative with me for the rest of the lesson, asking always if I felt comfortable trying something with Summer, asking if I wanted her to get on and school my horse. We have a nice relationship where she’s sensitive to the fact that I’ve had anxiety issues but still wants me to push myself and is very supportive of whatever decisions I make about what I’m up for since, as she says, she knows that I know what I’m doing.  But this time there was no meltdown, there was no helplessness or fear. I knew what I needed to do and I did it.

I took Summer back over the line, bringing her in at an extremely reserved trot and then sitting up and woahing her hard in between. It worked. She wasn’t trying to get away with something; I honestly think she just got freaked out by a noise the first time down. We took it slow for the rest of the lesson, incorporating each jump in the line piece-by-piece just to be sure, but she has such a sweet temperament that it felt like we were working together rather than me schooling her.  There was one jump slightly higher than the rest, a diagonally-placed green jump that we were taking singly at a trot. We weren’t getting it. We’d go to it too deep and that was messing up my timing so I kept getting left back and hitting her mouth over the jump, which was making her land and get a little frenzied again. But the frenzy didn’t worry me, because I was actually confident that I knew what was going on. I suggested to my trainer that even though we were trying to keep her slow, it was working counter-intuitively against us here, since the jump was a little too high for her to take without more impulsion. So I asked if we could do it at the canter instead, which fixed the problem immediately. I was still able to keep her calm and collected before the jump even at the faster gait, she had more confidence in her jump because she had enough speed heading into it, and my timing with my position was right, so the jump went beautifully.

This newfound confidence is giving me a new excitement about riding, so I can’t wait until our next lesson. Unfortunately, my riding buddy is going away for three weeks on her belated honeymoon, so it’ll be a while. But in the meantime I’ll be getting stronger both physically and mentally, getting prepared to go back into it ready to be challenged.

The Absence of Fear

Jess Filippi1 Comment

I got to ride two weeks in a row, something that hasn’t happened in ages. It’s great to have some consistency, to be able to build on successes and feel my strength returning. I also rode Jasper again, and having the same mount a few times in a row is something I’m really liking right now. There’s the riding where you’re working on yourself and not having to adjust to a new horse’s quirks each time out gives you to space to do that. Of course, I’ve always said that riding lots of different horses makes for a stronger and more versatile rider, so I’ll likely want to switch it up next time or the time after that.

I wrote last week about how the anxiety about performing well impedes performance, and that was in my thoughts again this week as well. We had a lesson in the crowded indoor arena despite the unseasonably warm weather because the flies were swarming in an apparent last hurrah before the cold wipes them out. As I walked Jasper around the busy ring, I looked out over all the other riders and horses, normally a sight which could cause at least agitation if not outright anxiety, and felt nothing but calm. I noticed that something was missing, and then quickly realized that what was missing was fear.

There are a number of external factors that would contribute to my feelings of calm in this situation on this particular day. Familiarity with some of the other riders in the ring and riding a mount that I know well and trust. Having a newfound body confidence; knowing that my muscles, stronger now than they have been in a long while, will respond to my commands when I need them. I also certainly can’t discount the flood of relief that came with my man’s return from being away; the incredibly reassuring realization that we are Home for each other and so wherever we go from here it will be all right as long as we’re together.

But there’s a kind of fear that can live inside the body no matter the external circumstances. The kind that even when you’re safe in your bed and there is objectively nothing troubling happening can still reduce you to a shaken wreck. That fear, the anxiety that has built up over time through negative experiences and the eating away of confidence that regret about so many of life’s choices brings–that fear was, for the first time in a long time, absent. It has suffused every area of my life, but I see now in its absence just how much it has affected my riding. Riding is a scary and potentially anxiety-producing activity, fraught with physical danger. It’s natural to feel some fear; it would be unsafe not to have the kind that goes hand and hand with respect for the strength and tolerance of the horses. But all the rest? The fear that I’m too old and not good enough and too out of shape and the thing that I love doing the most won’t be available to me–that is useless. The fear that I’m trapped in work and a lifestyle that has never been suited to me–unacceptable. I can’t sit around spending all my energy desiring change and simultaneously fearing even beginning to try to enact it, so that’s stopping now. These are the anxieties that Huxley wrote about getting in the way. And without them…what an incredible difference. How much space there is inside of me, how much flexibility and movement and acceptance; how much openness there is to experience and to learning.

I feel like this is a new starting point for me. In life, but particularly in riding. There was nothing in my lesson that I looked at with worry, with a feeling of “can’t”. I even thought about riding Sparkling Gal again–my riding buddy was on her after her original mount, Malcolm, turned up lame–and felt confident and game. The presence of fear in my life has been like an artery-clogging plaque, narrowing my worldview and my ability to apprehend life to such a thin, unsatisfying stream. The absence of fear leaves open the space for everything.

Life Lessons

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It has been weeks since we’ve been riding, since my riding buddy and I both had plans for the last several weekends. In the interim, however, I’ve been working on getting fit in earnest.

There are a some lessons in life that, when realized, are blatant, obvious, and so clear that I think they become underestimated, lost in plain sight. These are things that we must learn over and over and over again and then kick ourselves for all the time spent living poorly without their practice. One such lesson, which I will have to get tattooed on my forehead it is so vital to living, is that I have to be active. Ideally, I’d be engaged in a sport or a hobby, or–even better–a job that keeps me physically active. Softball and horseback riding are two such pursuits, but they are not enough. In the absence of a nonstop fun-filled sporty lifestyle, I need to make exercise a priority. And perhaps the lesson I’ve learned lately is that it needs to be one of the main priorities. It can’t be something that is done half-heartedly, as a dispirited attempt to mitigate the bodily strain caused by the sedentary life of an office worker. It needs to be something I that I really challenge myself with.

The first week or so of getting back to the gym is always hellish. It is a chore and everything feels awful. But there’s a hump to be gotten over and once I have, I actually start to feel awful if I don’t work out. Once I start really feeling the results–as I did this week during my riding lesson–I get even more motivation to keep going.

But then something always happens to interrupt the momentum. Usually for me, it’s the shortening of the days and the dropping of the temperature. Despite the clear evidence that exercising is the best thing to mitigate the worst of my Seasonal Affective Disorder symptoms, those very symptoms are what usually keep me from exercising. Fatigue, depression, a physical sensation of heaviness in the limbs all eventually combine to convince me that I’m not capable of doing much of anything, let alone going to the gym.

I’m hoping that this time around, I can finally make exercising a part of my lifestyle, instead of just a habit that I form briefly between periods of inactivity. I feel like I am working out smarter than ever before, using weights to build up all the muscle I’ve lost over the years and then doing a bunch of cardio to burn off the fat. And there is a focus this time around that I’ve never really had before. The gym, with its TVs on every machine, is set up to distract people from what they are doing. The message is, “This is horrible, but you have to do it…so you can watch TV at the same time to make it more palatable.” I can’t watch the TVs. In addition to my seeming allergy to TV these days, it takes away my focus from what I am there for–to make myself stronger. If the mind wanders, I can’t think about getting the most out of what I’m doing. It’s easy to fall into a rut of just absentmindedly lifting the same amount of weight or running the same distance and speed. It takes a lot of mental energy in addition to physical energy to keep adding weight, to keep pressing that button to raise the speed on the treadmill. And that’s what keeps me engaged. Playing games with myself, negotiating with myself about my limits–“Can you do another whole minute at this speed?”

All of this paid off this week in my riding lesson. The muscle tightness that has been preventing me from being effective on the horse is not there anymore. Instead of taking almost the entire lesson to warm up, I was warm after a few minutes of flatwork, as I should be. I was able to get my heels down, able to support my horse with my leg, and able to hold my upper body steady. I realized as I was riding that I wasn’t having to try to force it. There’s enough strength in my body again to give it suppleness. And that suppleness allows me to do something that makes me even more effective than simply muscling my way through it–it allows me to relax.

I’ve been reading The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley and I thought about it while cantering on Jasper this week. Huxley wrote the book in 1939 after a time of near total blindness and then a years-long period of severely impaired vision, after which he was introduced to the methods of W. H. Bates. Bates wrote about a re-education in the way we approach seeing that for Huxley, as well as many others, completely transformed and improved vision malfunction. According to Huxley, one of the main problems in any art–whether it be seeing, learning an instrument, or horseback riding–is the amount of tension and anxiety brought by the performer. He speaks of something called “dynamic relaxation,” the counterpart of “passive relaxation,” or a state of complete repose and rest. Dynamic relaxation is “that state of the body and mind which is associated with normal and natural functioning.”

When my muscles are weak and I’m straining to just keep up the most basic equitation, it makes me get in my own way. Worrying about why I can’t do what I need to do and feeling the ego loss associated with not performing to the level I know how to perform at make the tension and anxiety worse. Huxley says,

“Malfunctioning and strain tend to appear whenever the conscious ‘I’ interferes with instinctively acquired habits of proper use, either by trying too hard to do well, or be feeling unduly anxious about possible mistakes. In the building up of any psycho-physical skill the conscious ‘I’ must give orders, but not too many orders–must supervise the forming of habits of proper functioning, but without fuss and in a modest, self-denying way.”

It’s all a balancing act. Being focused and invested enough to perform well, but not so much that I become anxious about not. Of course, that’s the other lesson I keep having to learn: balance. It seems like every day, in every single part of my life, it’s what I keep coming back to: find balance. Security and freedom. Pushing myself to improve without browbeating myself with perfectionism. Including my emotions in my decisions without letting them overrun my thoughts. Practicality and passion.

I wrote earlier about needing an outlet in which to throw myself wholeheartedly, about needing change and finding work that fulfills me. About wanting to feel like a strong, engaged, alive person who is able to do amazing things. Most of my focus when trying to enact that change has been on external circumstances; trying to get myself to a situation in which it will be easier to do what I want to do. But recently, I feel like I’ve been doing a ton of work internally as well; throwing myself into finding the balance in all these areas to be the person I want to be, so that I can do the things I want to do. It’s a daily struggle, but just like the working out, it feels like it’s paying off. It feels like maybe soon I’ll get over the hump and then finding balance will not be something I have to force myself to do with distractions, but something I can delight in, do naturally with strength, flexibility, suppleness and without tension or anxiety.

Know Thyself

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Lately I’ve been thinking about a re-centering of values, a return to navigating by my own lights. This has expressed itself often in a game my boyfriend and I have been playing, called, “I’m Tired of Pretending.” Essentially, we take turns saying, “I’m tired of pretending…” and finish that thought with something we’re no longer going to pretend to like, or dislike, accept as true just because everybody else seems to think it is, or accept as true because it used to be true about us before even if it isn’t anymore.

I’m tired of pretending that I love riding Thoroughbreds. They are prized because they are beautiful and athletic, but they are also skittish and high-maintenance and can be downright scary. I have a hard time trusting a Thoroughbred and because of that, riding them becomes a different activity. It’s no longer an athletic partnership, but rather one where I struggle to manage anxiety–both my own and that of my horse. I’m on high alert for anything that will scare her and I’m fighting letting that tension become apparent in my body since that will work her up as well. My equitation goes to hell and the focus in jumping becomes about getting over obstacles without falling off instead of gracefully and effectively flying with my mount.

I’ve come to this realization lately as my riding buddy and I have been trading off on the two ex-racehorse mares, Sparkling Gal and Misfit. Every week I have gone to the barn since I fell off Sparkle, I have had this internal conversation where I know I don’t want to ride her again because she’s so skittish but where I keep protesting to myself about how much I like her. She’s a beauty and she’s a good girl, but she isn’t really a good match for me. Misfit is less anxiety-producing because her temperament is much steadier, but she’s still very strong and a handful in her own way.

What I really enjoy are horses like the one I rode this week. Summer is a small Arabian chestnut who I’ve ridden a couple of times before. While she is slightly smaller than my ideal horse, she is definitely my ‘type’. I love compact, competent, steady-minded Quarter Horses and finely-wrought, willing, and sensitive Arabians. Perfection would be a mix of the two if I could find one close to 16 hands.

Understanding and accepting this about myself is not to say that I don’t believe I should occasionally push myself out of my comfort zone. It all comes back to my lifelong quest to find the right balance. The difference here is really a matter of self-talk. There is a balanced sort of pushing myself and an unbalanced sort of pushing myself. I could say, “Sometimes I should ride Thoroughbreds to challenge myself,” a statement that accepts who I am and what I like and yet encourages behavior that could make me improve as a rider. Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time saying, “I should like Thoroughbreds,” which is a statement that carries self-judgement, saying that who I am is not the person I should be and that I’d be a better rider if I could be this other girl instead.

I’m not looking for a push-button pony. And I’m not going to stop riding Thoroughbreds altogether. But I’ve realized that I have strengths and weaknesses, that I have preferences that are acceptable and yet that I can learn from pushing myself beyond those preferences if I don’t spend the whole time beating myself up. This seems incredibly obvious as I’m writing it now, something that I probably knew unconsciously when I was 5 but which somehow seems to be something I need to keep consciously learning over and over again as an adult.

Closing Doors

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Today was a lovely ride, yet I left feeling kind of low.

My riding buddy and I switched it up this week, trading our usual mares. I was a little tired and preoccupied to feel comfortable riding the high-strung Sparkling Gal, and had been wanting to try out Misfit after my riding buddy’s raves about her. Now that I’ve tried her, we’re going to have to be drawing straws for her in future lessons, because I loved her too. She’s like all the good things about Sparkle–the beautiful conformation, the athleticism, the sweet temperament–minus the anxiety-provoking skittishness.

Misfit hasn’t been ridden as much as the other school horses, which probably explains her relative sanity. She had been on lease and now is available for lessons again. The one difficulty with her is that she is very unbalanced on her right canter lead. When you are cantering, the inside front leg is the one that should be going first in order for the horse to keep their balance around the turns. Misfit has a hard time with this and will often try to switch up mid-stride to the left lead, where she feels more comfortable. The solution to this is to ride her in a very tight circle going right, holding her in a deep bend in order to force her to have the correct balance.

Keeping her tight on the circle isn’t scary or difficult compared to, say, trying to slow down a horse that wants to run out from under you, or buck, or do something purposefully bad. At no point does it feel like she’s doing something “wrong”, it’s just something that she needs more training on to get her used to it. So I don’t feel any trepidation at having to school a horse this way, or feel that I’m not up to it. My mind completely understands the principles of what needs to happen, and I know in my body, in my muscle memory, how to do it. But this is where my frustration comes in: I can’t do it well enough. I am able to get the horse to do what needs to be done, but my position is woefully out of whack; I feel sloppy and weak and because of that, ineffectual. I lose my stirrups like a beginner, and it feels terrible.

I mentioned this in my last post, about not being able to keep my heels down. It is certainly a symptom of how generally out of shape I am. But in the last few weeks I have returned to making a greater effort to eat well and exercise. I am starting to see and feel a difference: a slimming down, a little more strength and tightness in my muscles, better posture and increased energy. And hopefully I’ll be able to remain consistent with this and things will only get better. However, the problem here is more specifically that I am out of riding shape. Riding horses uses muscles that nothing else really exercises. I could go to the gym five days a week and still not really be able to stop my lower leg from swinging, as it is not supposed to do, even on Misfit’s extremely comfortable left lead canter.

My trainer gently reminds me of these position faults: that my heels need to be down, that I need to sit up more, and I become frustrated because this is deeply-ingrained knowledge. My body is not on par with my mind.  I can’t physically do the things I know how to do.  My thinking all along has been that if I could just get to a place where riding is easier to come by, or the cost of living was lower and I could eventually get a horse; if I could just get into a situation where I was riding several times a week, then I could get my body to the same level as my mind. Then this could be what I want it to be, a challenging, fulfilling activity that I am putting my all into, something to grow with. In practicing an art, or a sport, or any kind of activity, the more you do it, the deeper you realize you can go with it, the more nuance you uncover and delight in. I am there, after so many years of riding. Sitting on the tip of the iceberg, and feeling its immensity underneath me, so excited to explore the depths and simply not having the time, money, or lifestyle to do it. And now, starting to really question if I ever will.

I’m about to be 33. I ride one or twice a month. I haven’t showed since 2003. These are facts that, in the light of which, I can’t help but begin to think that my “dreams” are really just “fantasies.” When I returned to riding nearly two years ago, I told myself, “Yeah, I’m 30, but equestrian isn’t like gymnastics or these other sports where your career is over at 18. There are people in their 50s and 60s competing at a high level; that could be me.” And that could be me. If starting right this minute, I was able to devote all my time, money, and energy to riding. But that’s not reality. My life is such that I don’t know how I would do that. I’m feeling at a loss for what I will do for work (both in the sense of my life’s work, what I am meant to do to feel I am contributing to the world, and “work” in the sense of making money, since it is more and more apparent that those two are not likely to be the same thing). I’m not sure where I want to live, not sure where I will be in a few months, let alone a few years. Everything feels constantly up in the air. So in attempting to figure this stuff out, to pin something down so I can have a starting point, I start thinking about closing doors.

I vacillate on this. There’s the idealistic part of me that shrieks in terror at the thought of giving up my dreams; that stridently refuses to just roll over and accept the mediocrity that most people seem to be content with but that I know I never will be. Then there’s the responsible, rational side of me who can accept that certain things are just not for me, like that since I haven’t played in a band since I was 17, I probably won’t ever be a rock star. But once again, where can I find balance? What dreams are not unrealistic? What can I reach for? I have to reach for something, since I never have and I’m completely unsatisfied with what this “safe” life has to offer. Is it too late for that? Did I miss my chance to live the kind of life I want? I know we all feel our mortality to varying degrees at different times in our life, and as we get older it becomes more in focus. But lately I have felt it so acutely, have been living with this fear that I will have to accept that the things that are important to me, that I want more than anything else out of life, are just simply out of my reach. That I will have to die not ever having experienced them. I see my life slipping away, time spent in pursuits that are not those that I value, and I am scared and angry.

Roll With It

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This morning, after the approximately sixty-third night of piss poor sleep that I have had since introducing a kitten into my studio apartment, I woke up in kind of a control freak mood. The cats will not let me sleep, I need to have sleep, nothing I have tried has made the cats stop not letting me sleep, so today I got out of bed and immediately began cleaning and tidying the apartment. It’s reliably an activity that can calm me and make me feel grounded when the world is spinning out of control. Like, for example, when the god damned subways will never run properly and in the few hours of sleep I have snatched from the batting paws of my feline tormentors over the past week I have dreamed of being on packed, delayed subway trains, sometimes with particular individuals that I dislike, sometimes simply afloat in the faceless, alienating multitudes. That’s the sort of thing that makes me need to eliminate all the clutter in my home that has accumulated during the days I’ve come home too tired to be perfect, the need to restore everything to its place so that my eye, at least, is untroubled during my continuing imprisonment in this madhouse while I wait for the weather to warm up enough that I can at least find the motivation to step outside for a change and interact with something other than these wild animals.

This was the frame of mind with which I attended my riding lesson today: that of a sleep-deprived, stir-crazy, desperate control freak. So when we arrived to find that not only were we not down in the scheduling book, but that our trainer wasn’t even there today, my mind pretty much short circuited. It was clearly a miscommunication and I wasn’t angry, just simply at a loss. We were offered the choice of taking a ride on the beach (an immediate ‘nope’ as it is sunny and in the 50s, but also frigidly windy), to hack without an instructor in the indoor, or to take a lesson with whoever was free at that time. I just kind of silently gawked at my riding buddy until she said, “I guess we’ll take the lesson with whoever’s available,” relieved that I didn’t have to pull it together to make a decision and could just roll with it.

Faced with the uncertainty of an unfamiliar trainer, I hoped to ride Jasper, my reliable man. But he was out in a lesson so instead I rode Casper, the grey with the bitless bridle that I last rode this summer outdoors. It was once I got on him and was reminded that he doesn’t ever feel like walking, trots off without being asked, and oh, doesn’t pay attention to requests for downward transitions since he doesn’t have a bit on his bridle (i.e. the thing that controls the horse), that I realized this wasn’t just going to be a lesson, it was going to be a Lesson. Of the “The Control You Think You Have In Life Is An Illusion, Jessica, And You’re Going To Have To Accept That” variety. I sighed, and loosened my reins.We had been going around at a reasonably collected trot at this point, but it was using all my arm and back strength to pull back on the reins and it was accompanied by Casper doing this spastic upward twisting of his neck and head while occasionally charging forward into a faster gait. Not so pretty, or comfortable. I didn’t want to race around the ring at the pace he wanted to go at. It’s too cramped in there for that nonsense. I wanted to ride at a collected trot where I could slowly warm up and ease into working on my position. But I had to connect with and calm my mount, and scrunching him up wasn’t going to achieve that. At the trainer’s urging, I loosened my reins a good deal and stepped up my posting to match the quite fast trot that resulted. We sprinted around the ring a few times, dodging all the slower horses of which thankfully there were much fewer than usual this week. Amazingly, after giving Casper the freedom to go how he wanted, he slowly calmed himself down, settling of his own volition into the collected trot that I had wanted before and had been working so hard fighting him to get.

During the working parts of the lesson, Casper was a gentleman. His canter is smooth and easy and jumping him is a pleasure. But every time I had to pull him down to a walk from the trot or the canter, it was a struggle. And once I had him at a walk for the brief rest periods we take throughout the lesson, it was a constant fight to keep him from bolting into a trot. These are situations in which I couldn’t let him have his way and which I had to exert control. At first, I was wearing myself out pulling back on sitting back in the saddle and pulling on the reins. But that soon turns into a tug of war that, horse v. rider, the rider is never going to win. So I let Casper keep walking with looser reins, but every time he started to speed up, I turned him in a small circle. This exerted control, dissuading him from the bad behavior without a fight because of instead of fighting the behavior, I directed it elsewhere.

This has me wondering if I can redirect the cats’ behavior from respectively pouncing on me in my sleep (the little one) and meowing the entire night (the big one). I sure hope so. But it also makes me want to consider how I can use this soft control on myself when times are stressful, giving myself room to walk around instead of yanking on my reins all the time.

Anti-Intellectual

Jess Filippi1 Comment

It’s 50 degrees and sunny, which feels like a goddam miracle after the endless snow and bitter cold we’ve had for what seems like as long as I can remember now. Sitting in the passenger seat of my riding buddy’s car as we drove down the highway to the barn, I baked in the warm sun coming through the windshield. This has put me in a blissfully relaxed mood, and has brought incredible relief to the sun-starved, anxiety-ridden wretch I’ve degenerated into this winter. I can’t let the relief become total, cannot completely relax and soften with the knowledge that it’s over and we’ve come through to the other side, because we haven’t. This isn’t Spring. This is merely a respite before the cold snatches back its sovereignty. But while the respite is available, I will enjoy every last drop of it.

Maybe this is why I approached today’s lesson as I did, with much less thought than I have been recently. I came to a realization last night on the treadmill (where I seem to be doing my best thinking these days, movement having always been the best way for me to shake loose new ideas) that I really need to have something that matters in my life. Riding matters to me, and I think it could be the thing that I want to drive me. I want to eat and sleep and exercise because of riding. I want to structure my life around it, sacrifice all the other worthless crap I have in my life now that doesn’t fill the void of wanting something to throw myself into, but merely weighs me down. But the way I am living now, it can’t be that thing. Riding every other week or so is not enough, not satisfying that urge. But the problem is that I have been trying to cram that significance into these occasional lessons, and I think that’s working against me as a rider. I will continue to work toward changing my lifestyle to get it to be one in which riding can be central, or at least more central. But in the meantime, I’ve gotta quit running myself into the ground, making every second I’m on the horse be something I need to learn from. Forced, focused learning like that doesn’t stick on me. It doesn’t enrich, it drains. I’m making a bottleneck of experience, shutting down the “play” part of it all. The doing it to do it. The doing it out of love.

So while warming up on Cisco while walking around the ring, I originally started to think again about the techniques from Centered Riding for feeling the horse’s rhythm at the walk. But my mind kept shirking this kind of focus, and eventually I just said to myself, “Forget it, and enjoy.”

Hannah had warned me that Cisco has been very slow of late, and armed me with both a crop and spurs. I can’t remember ever having ridden with spurs before, but with my legs already well-used from a hard run yesterday at the gym (the first time I’ve been there in about two weeks), I was willing to have them as a backup. I was surprised, though. I’ve only ridden Cisco maybe once or twice but I remembered him as pretty straightforward. And at the walk he seemed willing and responsive enough. But I accepted the extra aids and I still don’t really know if I needed them. Cisco seemed to be in just the same sort of relaxed, energetic mood as I was in, and we had a fantastic lesson. Hannah and the other trainers in the ring expressed their confusion with what was apparently a big transformation. Just two hours prior, another trainer had to take her student off Cisco and school him herself for being stubborn and difficult. I had no problems with him at all. I started to wonder what could have brought about the change in his behavior, always wanting to chase down the “why” driving the actions of both people and horses, but then I just let it go. Why ask why today? The horse I’m riding is the horse that he is. His earlier mood has no bearing on me.

Everything came very easily. My core is becoming much stronger thanks to a return to my former regimen of 100 crunches every morning when I get up. I could really feel the difference at the canter and over the jumps, building on establishing more upper-body stillness like I did in my last lesson. There’s nothing much more to say about it all than that. I rode a horse today and I did it well and I loved it.

Thinking vs Doing

Jess Filippi1 Comment

One of the symptoms of being cooped up in the indoor is that I have a lot more time to think about my jumping. Doing courses outside, I get into a rhythm with the jumps. I have space to feel the movement of my horse before, between, and after the fences and because of that my body is more attuned to what it needs to do; I can rely on instinct to feel the spots. In the indoor, everything is so stop-and-go. There’s a lot more downtime between fences because we are usually only doing a single jump or a line. It requires a lot of planning, like deciding whether I prefer to negotiate a clusterfuck of ponies on the approach or on the landing. On the approach it can make me so disorganized, often putting us off-center on the first jump because the turn has to be cut short to dodge all the other horses. That makes the whole line out of whack. I find that dealing with them on my landing is preferable, although only the lesser of two evils. It means that the whole way down the line I’m thinking about where I’m going to take the barreling 1,500 lbs underneath me so that it doesn’t crash into or run over anyone.

The remedy for this, I’ve found, is to take a lot of time to get set up. To circle, to plan, to wait. And all that time, I’m thinking about what I’m going to do. How my left leg is going to push my horse over to the center of the jump. How I’m going to hold him to the base, wait to find the closer spot. These are important things to think about. But thinking about them too much in previous weeks has, I think, gotten in the way of me doing them. In today’s lesson I focused a lot more on my bodywork on the flat and because of that was able to get back to more instinctual jumping.

I rode Jasper, who I believe is my favorite horse in the barn. He’s not the best mover or the best jumper. He doesn’t have the finesse of Max or the verve of Summer. But something just between us just gels and I tend to have my best jumping lessons on him. He was fresh when I got on him, making the flatwork energetic and fun. I worked a lot on lengthening and shortening his stride, making a game of weaving in and out of the other horses to keep our forward momentum. I also tried out the technique I used last week with Max to get him off the forehand. It was not as drastic a result with Jasper, but I certainly felt his head come up and his weight shift backward. With this balance, I was able to bend him a lot better than usual as well. As Hannah described it, he “turns like a motorcycle”, just chopping corners left and right. But today he was really responsive to my leg and more flexible than usual.

The main thing I wanted to focus on today was quieting my upper body–particularly on my transitions and over the jumps. Two things helped me do that. The first is a concept that I just recently re-read in Centered Riding, where Swift describes growing your upper body out of the saddle like a tree. The image in the book shows that below the waist are the roots, while above are the trunk (your spine) and branches (your arms, your jaw, everything that hangs). She suggests trying to stretch yourself up in the saddle to illustrate that “growing” is different.  When you stretch yourself up, your seat loses contact with the saddle. When “growing”, your body extends from your center upward as your legs reach down and around your horse. You have much more stable, and much less rigid, contact with the saddle and your horse. I’ve been practicing this growing with my upper body all week as I stand at my desk at work and as I walk around. I think what has contributed to being able to do that more easily is the second thing, which is that I’ve been swimming regularly. I finally have gotten on track with my workout schedule and have been swimming a few times now. I can already feel the difference it is making in my upper body, particularly in my chest and upper back. These are historically weak areas for me and have always been a problem spot in my riding position. But with this increased strength in my chest, the upper back is able to relax open, the shoulder blades moving down my back instead of my shoulders being forced open by my upper arms. The chest itself is more open as well. The area around my sternum pushes forward and upward, allowing room for my spine to extend naturally and my neck to lengthen, lifting my head.  With everything open like that, there’s so much more space for my muscles to do what they need to do. Instead of scrunching down and rounding my lower back to firm my upper, it feels like my muscles are free to stretch out and support the framework of my bones. There is simultaneously much more stillness and much less tension in my whole upper body.

So these things helped a great deal, and I was able to do what I set out to do. With my transitions, I took some extra time to set my horse up and with my tall and quiet upper body, had so much of an easier time using my legs to push Jasper into the canter. He picked it up smoothly and then once we were there, I didn’t have to take several strides to pull myself together as I usually would do when rocking my upper body to generate momentum; we were already collected.  And then when we were jumping, focusing on keeping my upper body still took my mind away from over-thinking my fences. I was much less hesitant than I have been in previous weeks. Jasper can always use some encouragement, even on an up day. We trotted into the cross-rail and cantered out over a low vertical. I know he can tend to hold back and go for the closer spot most of the time, but I wasn’t into “knowing” today. More connected than I have been in weeks, I could feel his rhythm, and without thought I closed my leg and went for it. He was right there with me and every time, we took off from a smooth, even, slightly big spot. And it felt great. The line felt like the exciting place it is, a place containing our inexorable and united movement toward the jump.

Heavy

Jess Filippi2 Comments

I’ve been fighting (and occasionally succumbing) to this cold/cough/flu thing that has been going around, so I didn’t make it to the gym once to carry out the fitness plan I decided on last week or really have any physical activity at all. But riding two weekends in row has helped, and I stretched really well before I left today so I felt much better than I expected to.

I’d like to take a second to note that I am writing this with a tiny kitten in my lap. A friend found her last weekend in a Christmas tree on the sidewalk and I decided to take her in as a companion to my first cat, Simon. Her name is Darby and right now her slightly-under-2 lbs frame is reverberating with her surprisingly loud purr.  I dream of the day that I can report that I’ve adopted a horse, but until then caring for tiny lives is just as satisfying in its own way as taking care of big ones.

The lesson this week was very productive; it felt like a good marriage of focus on training the horse and training myself. Normally Hannah chooses our mounts for us, but today she told my riding buddy and I just to look at the list of available horses and choose for ourselves. We rode later in the day so the options were limited to horses who hadn’t already been ridden twice. My riding buddy took her favorite mare and I had a choice between Jasper and Max. Jasper is one of my favorites, but I haven’t yet ridden Max, although I’ve seen my riding buddy have a few lessons on him. I was tempted to go with Jasper because he’s familiar, but after a moment’s pause and at my riding buddy’s urging, I chose Max and I’m glad that I did. I’ve always loved having the opportunity to ride different horses and learning to adapt to their different ways and personalities. I have to keep pushing myself to do that in my old age, instead of becoming too comfortable with one horse.

In some ways, Max isn’t too different from Jasper, and they are both very different from the horse I’ve had the last two times, little Summer. They are both tall and have quite long necks, which makes them both tend to be a bit heavy on the forehand. This means that the weight of the horse is more in his front legs instead of balanced or in his back legs. This is not ideal because the impulsion that moves the horse forward comes from the back legs. When a horse is heavy on the forehand, it can feel like you’re riding into the ground. It can be frustrating to constantly feel pulled down and like you’re not getting anywhere. Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult to pull Max out of this. Hannah suggested that as I was trotting around, I should occasionally give him some half halts, pulling upwards a little on the reins to get his head up. At the same time, I should squeeze him forward with my legs, letting him know that I didn’t want him to slow down or lose impulsion and in a way pushing his body and momentum up into my hands. These things together served to rock his balance backward; I could actually feel this as it was happening. Max’s movement immediately became more comfortable and forward.

The forehand issue is the same when cantering, but he was just as responsive to my hands and leg and once collected, he felt great. I felt very connected to him in a way that I hadn’t even really realized I’d been missing on so much of a smaller mount these last two times with Summer.

The interesting contrast came when we started jumping. The first few times over cross-rails and even over the lower verticals, he didn’t put in much effort. I rode him down into the ground right before the jump and then he barely picked his legs up going over it. I overcompensated, like I do, by sort of throwing my upper body at him over the jump. In retrospect I realize that when I do this it’s like I’m trying to take the jump for my horse, to pull us both over it with my body, which obviously doesn’t work. But once I was able to be patient and wait for my horse to rise up to meet me, the jumps were much smoother. When we cantered to the vertical, it was so easy to find the spot with Max; easier than with any other horse I’ve ridden in memory. Because despite his typical heaviness on the forehand, he had this incredible lightness on his feet right before the jump when we approached it with a collected canter. It’s hard to describe, and I was tempted at first to refer to it as scope, but that really refers to the over-the-jump ability. It’s analogous, though, and I’m not sure there’s a word that refers to what I’m talking about.  On the approach, he collected himself in a way beyond what I was doing to keep him off the forehand, it’s like in preparation for the jump all laziness or clumsiness left him and he became light as air. And in that state, becoming almost intangible, it was easier to meld with him, to be in perfect rhythm for finding the spot.

I can’t wait to go outside again and jump a proper course with Max. With anybody, really. I’m feeling very cooped up these days. But the work we’re doing on individual jumps in the indoor is going to show once we get outside again.