October 2007 • VOLUME 26 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

'Feel', we speak about it so often. But how can an instructor teach feel? And without feel, anything that we learn through a lesson, through a book, through a video, through an article, is just words that really do not mean anything.

Actions without feel, activity without feel, when we are talking about the horse, are actions that are blind, mute and deaf. Actions that may be useless at best, but could be harmful without your knowing.

Actions that we have no idea if they are heard or felt by our partner the horse.

So can feel only be taught by the horse to the rider? On top of a horse?

Learning how to feel needs more than just a rider and a horse. Otherwise how can we explain how many riders have so much difficulty learning feel?

Susan, like many riders, struggles to find feel. To know when it feels correct. To know how her body should feel so that she can share that feeling with her horse.

She struggles and struggles... and still continues to struggle. Trying to find inside her own body, those feels that she wants to share with her horse.
Until one day she has a dream....{vieownly=special}

“Speaking of feel – and how to find it….the reward for all my reading and thinking and talking and searching and video-viewing, together with the step-by-step analyses you have so kindly given me on the videos of me and Michy, that reward was a wonderful dream I had recently in which I was riding Michy, and all the movements were beautiful, light, easy, together, we passaged and did collected trot into piaffe, oh, it was a wonderful dream!

"I felt in my body what I had seen in the videos of Eddo Hoeckstra and Manolo Mendez, that huge soft flowing movement of the horse’s body, the incredible spring of the lift in the movement, the upwardness of it. I could feel my body totally at one with his, I only had to think of the movement and we were doing it, the majesty of the passage and the pride of the piaffe, really like being a centaur!

"I was consciously thinking as I rode in my dream - this is it! This is what the masters meant! This is what Nadja means when she talks of being one with the horse and dancing onto a different plane! And when I woke up I found it was still so real I could tap into the feelings I had had in my dream, not just into the visual element!

"So it must have been a coming together in my dream of all I had read and heard about and watched in others. Some trainers are sceptical of the value of reading. You can only learn by doing they say, and in part they are right, part of learning has to be through doing. When I was a teacher of English as a Foreign Language I would tell my students that learning a skill (for me, language learning is a skill) is like learning to ride a bicycle. You can study the bike, learn the names of all the parts and how they work and interrelate, you can even learn the theoretical principles of balance and the biomechanics of pedalling, but the first few times you actually get on the bike you will doubtless wobble and fall off, because ‘doing’ is something extra.

"Yet all that theory does help, it makes doing more accessible in many ways, we must just remember that it has to be translated into doing and that that is not always easy. But that does not invalidate either the reading or the riding. We can try to move between the two, each enhancing the other. You once wrote in your introduction to a feature in the magazine

'What are the secrets of the masters? What special things helped them the most? What secrets did they possess that they believe helped them in their mastery of the art of riding?

Wynmalen too believes in mystery.

Believes in secrets.

Secrets that he isn't afraid to share with others. Secrets that he has found makes the difference between those who ride, just to ride and those who seem intent on truly discovering the true art of riding and horsemanship.' (April 2006)

"In particular the video clips I have seen on Horses for Life have helped enormously with conveying a sense of that feel - Entwickeln demonstrated by Eddo Hoeckstra being one of the most memorable: the unity, the relaxed enjoyment, the ‘lostness’ of the pair in the movement, are all palpable and stunningly eloquent. And remember too that my journey in the current series of lessons online started with what I felt when I watched Manolo Mendez. Both of these riders and their horses seem together on a separate plane, both enjoying the intricacies of the movements and of the togetherness. While words cannot convey feelings so easily, together with the video clips they help one along the path.

"You can educate people about what sort of feel to look out for, so that when it actually happens they recognise it for what it is, otherwise it could slip past unremarked or at best unidentified?! Things happen so fast when we are riding we need to have this knowledge to help us catch the fleeting moment, for when it does happen the first times, the moments are indeed fleeting - having a peg to hang it on already there and waiting is highly useful!”

Susan

This is what I think sometimes is missing in so many of the how-to articles because it isn't about how to, it is about feel. If somehow a few words can engender a feeling that gently enters your heart, then anything is possible.

No matter how many times you read about using certain aids to do a certain movement or take instruction, the feel somehow has to enter your very bones. I know many say you cannot learn how to ride through reading.

But I sometimes wonder if some people forget that it is words that we use communicate our feelings, words that a good writer can use to get us so emotionally involved that he brings insights and feelings to us that can make us laugh out in delight, can make us cry in despair, in sympathy, and with empathy. It is the feel that is important when you ride. Strive for a feeling and I think you will succeed. Perhaps if how-to books were written trying to pass on a feeling of what it is like to ride, more people would succeed?

The Editor

And from beginning to find her dream, Susan reports that "things are going so well with Michy, I can't tell you .... like living my dream, we dance, clumsily a lot of the time but I feel we are trying to work things out together now, I suggest and ask, he listens and interprets, I see if I made it or not, adjust and so we go on, it's heaven! Now I know what it means to really believe that it's the journey that counts not the destination!!!"

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