About Balance
The thing about learning to ride very well is that it starts, grows, and perfects itself in balance.
For the rider and for the horse.
We balance through our architecture, the way we're conformed, the way we're shaped: a tall skinny person will have a different 'correct' way of standing than a short muscular one, or a tubby one, or a female or a male.
We are architectural beings.
But...
Our architecture also includes subtle architecture: the quality of the mind, the quality of the emotional body. We like to lean on something. So we tend to posture ourselves habitually in tension, shored up by the quality of groundedness that feels like it provides.
Sounds nuts?
Well, do you habitually stand perfectly balanced on both legs? We tend to habitually lean on one leg or the other. If you want to meet your “intellectual and emotional architecture” and feel what I mean when I say “it thinks its found groundedness”, force yourself to lean on the leg you don't usually use this way.
It'll demonstrate this idea.
So learning to simply stand up is riddled with mistakes that, over time, cost us. They wear out our joints, they perpetuate a feeling of tension and constantly correcting with opposition as 'normal'.
-
Whereas balance-- REAL balance-- supports us for real. But here's the bizarre thing. Real balance doesn't feel heavy and 'grounded' in the same way our locked in habitual way of standing does. Real balance feels, instead, light, peaceful: full of potential and possibility.
Which, when we're used to the stuck and locked up quality of what's normal, feels kind of... wifty. Unfettered. Uncertain. We like certainty. We do.
But
When that potential, that possibility, becomes your ground? THEN you can learn to ride. THEN you can learn to walk and stand and move as your joints and bones and muscles were designed to carry you.
THEN you're friends with this body you get to inhabit throughout your life.
And it feels....
lovely.
