Mary Wanless - Ride With Your Mind Mary Wanless BHSI BSc

We do two more exercises, as I encourage you to realise the immense value of the off-horse exercises that are part of my approach to learning and coaching. We then revisit some more of the common traps in learning, before focussing in on ‘flow’. This experience/brain state more than doubles your rate of learning, and makes it so much more fun. That fun is based on brain chemistry of small wins, and that in turn is based on noticing. I finish by quoting T. S. Eliot: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.’ This is my wish for you.

I was right all of those years ago when I thought there was something my teachers weren’t telling me! But this is innate in the human condition, where we pass through conscious competence before we become unconscious of our incompetence, and no longer have words to describe our skill. My aim is to stay conscious enough to remember feelings and words, and to leave a trail for others to follow. This podcast contains my main tips for enhancing your learning, beginning with ‘seek out good information’…

We have talked about asymmetry patterns being rotational, but it can be more helpful - and with some riders more accurate - to think of one third of the body being sheared forward, whilst the other is sheared back. This distinction suggests some new pushes and pulls on the saddle (or furniture) which help to mitigate it. It also leads us to think about how we transition from ‘turning like a bus’ to ‘bend’. A lot is presupposed in the concept of ‘bend’, which is so often misrepresented like a simple skill rather, than the sophisticated strategy it really is.

One of my pupils broke her upper arm in a fall, and damaged her wrist and elbow. After surgery and recuperation she returned to riding, and found herself with a total reversal in her asymmetry! This very rarely happens, and the story of how we worked with it is illuminating. It also provides a good review of the basic principles of how an asymmetrical human interacts (for good or ill) with an asymmetrical horse!

Many riders spend their life stuck in ‘one side on/one side off’. Others ‘ping-pong’ between right on/left off and left on/right off. Few people discover how to get ‘both sides on’ consistently. Once they have this, they can learn how to make a wider, higher, more supportive long back muscle on the side where the horse would only have a ‘sloping roof’. We do an exercises to show you how this profound level of influence works, and another to get you clearer about the anatomy of your underneath, and the part of it that sits across those long back muscles.

Most people have a strength differential between their two boards, and don’t address this well - so as the weaker one becomes stronger, the stronger one gets in on the act and also gets stronger! But ‘bad sides’ do eventually become ‘good sides’, leaving the rider very confused. Ideally any asymmetry fix would involve both sides of the body, but the rider’s limited ‘brain space’ might make this impossible for a long time. 
The horse has two boards and three thirds just like the rider. If he were symmetrical, sitting on him would be like sitting on an oil drum, but he may have one long back muscle that’s like a flat roof whilst the other is like a sloping roof. The issues of steering are not yours alone - the sloping roof temps your seat bone on that side to slide away from the midline.