Helping.  Breathing.

These are the two themes that floated to the surface for me today in the workshop with Mark Rashid.  Helping was a theme for all three days, and one that I needed to hear every day.  He asked us to consider this question:  “How can I help him to do what I am asking, not how can I make him do it?”  Because of our big brain and the big ego that accompanies it, we often default to making, not helping.  Helping requires us to continually move inside toward listening and feeling.   For ego driven humans, that is very hard.  We direct, we make things happen, we push, we demand.  Helping engages different parts of us – the more tender, vulnerable, receptive and willing parts.  Somehow in working with these generous creatures who show us through their bodies exactly what we are doing -both right and wrong – we have to homogenize these parts of ourselves.

How?  Well, Mark dropped some hints like, “An exhale would go a long way here.”  Or, “When the wheels come off, try exhaling.”  During my lesson, he saw that I was not breathing – not in a way that would allow me to open to the horse, or sustain the activity of riding.  So he had me breathe in on a four count and out on a five count in rhythm with the walk.  He had me maintain that rhythm in the trot.  And in his perfect way, Sam, the lovely blue roan quarter horse I was riding, began to breathe himself, his stride opening and lengthening, and then I noticed that I was having fun,  And what is more important than that?

I am in Savannah, GA taking a workshop with cowboy-Aikido master, Mark Rashid.  I have written about him before, and being able to ride with him and experience his work firsthand is a dream come true.

Today I rode a horse named Sam who had, as Mark said, “an industrial strength brace” that showed up in the way he hit the bits by throwing his head.  Sam would hit the bits so hard that he would back himself up – like a wave hitting a sea wall.  He could not soften.  With me on his back, Mark again and again corrected him, backing him up all the way across the big paddock where we were riding.  That sounds harsh and punitive.  It wasn’t.  What was interesting was with all that backing, I could clearly feel when the horse “homogenized”  in other words, stopped feeling like four separate, blocky quadrants and suddenly came together in a smooth flow.

When Mark showed me what he was doing with the reins, by having me be the horse and brace my hands and arms, he softened my resistance with something that felt like to me warm water moving up the reins.  He explained that he was sending intention, and “going underneath,” something that comes from his practice of Aikido. His point is that the fix is not mechanical, but happens by finding the connection between the inside of the rider to the inside of the horse. He says that if you aren’t connected to yourself, there is no way that you can connect to the horse.

Then he had me take the reins and instead of meeting the horse’s resistance with my own resistance, just picture my hands moving toward the horse’s mouth.  Doing that dissolved the brace for both me and the horse, and gave me a sensation that I have never experienced before.  Which for a smart somatic person was pretty exciting and humbling. He also cataloged my own stiffness without hardly looking at me in about five seconds.  Like I said, humbling.

For those of you who have been following the Deo Diaries, you can imagine how excited I am to go home and try all of this with him!