I always find that I am teaching the things that I most need to learn.  During last night’s Embodied Horsemanship free teleclass, I got very clear that I wanted to deepen a part of my own horsemanship practice.  I call it the intentional pause.

While I am riding, I use the pause to “unplug”, soften and center.  Here is how it works:  Several times during the ride, I ask Deo or Sanne to open into a halt and then drop the reins (loose contact, on the buckle).  Then I just stand (sometimes with eyes closed depending on what else is going on in the ring) and focus on “homogenizing” the inside of me with the inside of the horse.  I am looking for a feeling that all of my cells and all of his cells are humming on the same frequency – soft, opening, allowing.  The breath is the portal and the anchor.  I am looking for them to drop their head, or take a big breath and to lose any sense of needing to move.  When we do start to move, I find that it is easier for me to offer a soft connection, easier to feel their body and my own.

However, I also find that using the intentional pause when I am not at the barn, not with a horse is just as important.  Most of us, I find, tend to harden into our activities, using momentum and drive to get from one place, one activity to another.  We think of moving from one “destination” to another, without a lot of consciousness about the transitions or the journey from here to there.  The intentional pause helps us to feel into the whole bodily, sensory landscape of where we are.   It is about being in the midst of doing.  Here is how that works: As I am typing this blog post, or picking up my cup of tea, or walking from one room to another, I pause.  Sometimes the pause is momentary, other times it is longer.  In the pause, I open my sensory awareness out, remember my breath and soften the feel of what I am doing. Then I begin again.  The pause is like a little intentional recuperation.  I like to experiment with how long or how short I can make a pause.

Try it and let me know what you discover!

(I am available to work with you and your horse one-on-one or in a workshop or clinic.  josajones@gmail.com)

During my recent Aikido/Horsemanship with Mark Rashid, at one point he said, “Do one thing instead of 20.”  Returning home to ride on my own, I could feel myself starting to do 20 things with Amadeo, getting too busy with the reins, leg, mind.  I stopped.  I let the reins all the way out and we just stood there.  The one thing I focused on was feeling the inside of me connecting to the inside of him.  When he tried lowering his head, i said “good” and after a few moments, he relaxed all the way down.  When I picked up the reins again, the one thing was maintaining a feeling of internal softness in the contact.  And breathing.  We did that several times, with some walking in between.  I could feel him settling, looking around, calming, his whole body seeming to change texture.  Mine too.  When we started to trot, I needed to firm up a little, because for Deo, too much softness feels like no direction or structure, which is ineffective.  But the firming up has to have the softness all the way through it.

My daughter Bimala is getting very good at doing one thing.  Being with a baby is a lot like being with a horse.  Both require feel, timing, blending, balance and breath.  When we get too busy with Laila, she lets us know right away that we have lost one of those things.  Deo is the same.  The interesting thing is that with both of them, I am finding a deep quality of grounding and stillness.  One breath at a time.  Repeat.  Repeat.

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Sometime during the Mark Rashid Aikido and Horsemanship clinic, someone started to tell a long story about how difficult their horse was.  He looked at them and said, “Don’t tell a story.”  From then on, all week I noticed the stories.  They were all tethered to the past, to stuff that was probably going to go wrong because it had gone wrong in the past.

Sometimes it is hard to remember to tell the story of what we want instead of what we don’t want.  Focusing on what we want can feel counter-intuitive and require some heavy habit breaking.  Aren’t our conversations usually grounded in our problems?

Today riding Amadeo, I focused on what I wanted, and on getting quiet and soft enough to let that come through.  Instead of paying attention to all of his clatter (which after all is only mirroring my clatter), I kept coming back to breathing, offering softness, and being consistent about what I was doing.  So every time he grabbed the bit (think every 5 seconds or so), I asked him to be soft.  I took long breaths, and after a short time, so did he.  New story, good ending.