Up here in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with lovely Sanne, studying Aikido and horsemanship with Mark Rashid.  In the Aikido class this morning, we practiced circling our hips like stirring a big pot.  Then we circled our hips from the “inside wall” of the body, and then from the organs.  Then we came to stillness while still maintaining the feeling of circling the organs inside the body.  To me, this felt like a dynamic, soft stillness.  We practiced breathing laterally, expanding our ribs sideways.  We learned the horseman’s kata – more about that tomorrow. We practiced transmitting softness to and through our partners.

Riding in the afternoon was about bringing the lessons from the morning’s class into the horsework.  It was amazing to feel how the habitual patterns of riding pushed away the newer somatic information from the morning. I felt as if I had to wade through my busy-ness, my “doing something” to get quiet enough to feel myself and my horse. I thought about re-patterning and how learning a new pattern can take hundreds, even thousands of repetitions.  I thought about how learning softness – because it is not really a pattern, but a way of being – is slipperier still.  Part of that is because our human tendency is not toward softness, but resistance and tightening.  It is reflexive, protective, fearful.  Sanne, on the other hand, tends toward softness.  The minute he feels an opening, he is soft.  That is his gift, his teaching, his desire.

My job is to look for and create that opening. Breathe in, breathe out.  Repeat with attention.