The horses are my joy. They continue to teach me about living with heart and awareness and I continue to love sharing the lessons of Embodied Horsemanship.
For information about clinics or individual sessions, contact me at josajones@gmail.com
EMBODIED HORSEMANSHIP-HD (1080p) from Paula Josa-Jones on Vimeo.
Sensing and feeling the mid-line can be a challenge when most of us feel out of kilter and out of balance a lot of the time. A couple weeks ago my lovely Amadeo had a nice big buck while I was riding. I was feeling fragile emotionally, and so not quick enough to come up out of the saddle to protect myself. The result: a coccyx sprain. I walked around feeling rotated, disconnected and fragmented until my next osteopathy appointment. It was frustrating and interesting to feel that off my mid-line. Andy Goldman, my osteopath, encouraged me to ride my mid-line in sync with the mid-line of the horse. So on my next ride, I paid attention to my newly centered tailbone, feeling it connect to the horse’s tail, and sending my energy up my spine through the center of the occipital ridge while seeing/feeling the horse’s poll.
The result was a surprising deliciousness and sense of connection and balance in the ride. I also noticed that Deo’s crookedness tracking right was connected to the way I close the space between my right shoulder and sternum (shifting my mid-line too far to the left), effectively closing the door to his ability to open to the right! When I opened that space, with a feeling of widening and softening, he began to straighten and soften!
Revelations!
Then today, while coaching a performer (the lovely Sari Max), I asked her to notice her mid-line with a couple somatic exercises of moving away from and then back onto a centered mid-line. Then I asked her to move from lying down to standing pausing along the way to look at where her mid-line was in that moment, The result was that her movement from floor to standing was beautifully effortless and grounded. Then we took that same sense of mid-line into the text of the play, connecting a physical sense of center and balance to the emotional through-line of each line. The result was a deeper authenticity and groundedness in the language and movement. Brilliant and transformational!
I love working with horses and their humans. Most of what goes wrong with horse and their humans is not in the saddle. It happens on the ground. it happens in the stall. It happens on the way from one place to another. A lot of it has nothing to do with the horse at all. It has to do with things that are older and deeper that make their way into the relationship with the horse. It is rarely intentional or malicious. It often has to do with a lack of awareness, or regard, or attention or understanding.
Most often what I do starts with movement observation. I watch how the person moves around the horse, how the horse responds to them, to its environment, to the various parts of tacking up, leading, riding. I watch. And then bit by bit, I start to decode the dance. What is working? What is confusing? What is missing?
Much of what I do has to do with bringing both horse and human more fully into their bodies, and then more fully into connection with each other. That makes for a better relationship. And usually it makes for a better ride. Happier horse, happier human. I love that.
If you want help, you can contact me here.
photo: Chandrika Carl-Jones
Spent another wonderful day at Little Brook Farm in Old Chatham working with the drill team and the lovely Mustang Amado and the brilliant Summer Brennan. If everything goes as well as it has been, we will perform with him at the Extreme Mustang Makeover event in August!
I am not a fan of anything extreme when it comes to horses, and I do not think that Mustangs need any kind of makeover. Nevertheless, watching Summer gentle this boy has been incredibly inspiring. Her work with him has been gradual, caring and smart.
Bringing dancers into this event may shake things up a bit! I hope so.