When I first started riding, I was like any other horse crazy girl. I just wanted to be around those giant, glorious creatures all day, every day. When I got my first horse, Tanimara Tempest, I began the rocky learning process of just what it takes to keep a horse. Other horses followed, but it was with Triple Wish that the competitive bug bit, and bit hard.
Nearly five years ago now, I started to experience disabling back pain. My right leg would buckle when I walked, and I had to face the reality of being unable to ride. After a lifetime spent in the saddle, such a reality is a dark place it is hard to come back from. Even after two years in and out of physical therapy made it possible for me to walk normally again, something had been broken inside of me.
The saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is no joke. I spent a year away from all of my horses, only seeing them every other weekend while I finally finished college, and in that time I realized that simple truth: I needed horses in my life.
Now after so many physical issues, mental blocks after two years living my supposed dream and barely surviving the mental abuse that came with it, there was no easy way to just start riding again. When I did , I tried to fall back into the same mentaility that the only way to successfully ride was to compete. Then life interceded, but instead of it being me to face back issues, it was Drummer.
Over the last few months, I’ve come to embrace a different way of riding and working with Drummer. Some days all I do is wander around with him and listen to what he has to say. This works wonders when it comes to where he’s particularly tense, and it has helped me realize where I might be holding some tension in as well.
I covered in a previous post how he holds a bunch of tension in his beautiful Benedict Cumberbatch cheekbones. Now that we’ve established that area, he’s become more and more willing to work with me, sometimes anticipating me and staring to crack his own jaw in large yawns to work through tension. With such progress, I’ve moved back to where his jowls meet with his neck. And we’ve reached a new sort of learning curve.
I really need an assistant to do justice to what we’re working through, he isn’t a very willing subject when it comes to pictures unless he’s hamming it up. However, when it comes to the back side of his jaw, I’ve quickly come to realize that concentrated pressure points aren’t on the menu yet. He’s still too sensitive, so I’ve been working on getting him to accept my palm first, then sliding the pressure onto just one side of my hand. If the pressure is too localized, he immediately reverts back to an old habit his last owner taught him, to put his head on the ground rather than continue the conversation. I won’t lie, it annoys me, but I know it isn’t any fault of his own.
Too often, as riders and equestrians, we have a predetermined idea of what we want, and we reward what we think we’re getting, but in doing so, we teach out horses to repeat a motion without keeping the dialogue open. Drummer is truly the perfect candidate in working to maintain open channels. He was trained in his younger years to be a good citizen, to put his head down when asked, to curl into a frame with pressure, but that isn’t who he is. It isn’t who most horses are. And after having lived with him with the mode he found to express himself through – acting out and aggression – my top priority with him remains to keep those channels of communication open. As long as he recognizes that I’m never going to push him into a box, he stays open. And this latest pressure point just goes to show that sometimes they’re physical, and sometimes they’re mental.
This journey Drum and I are on now is one that will be a daily learning experience, and every lesson learned is a step forward in understanding horses in general. And if I’m being honest, helping to understand myself as well.
Until the next lesson.
Haute Ecole* 