Sunday, 23 November 2008
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June 2007 • VOLUME 22 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine From one of our readers! On The Secrets of the Art of Riding from Wynmalen
"I love these. Thank you! "Your inspirational words remind me why I do this work and give me respite from my deadlines. I find solace in these words, that someone thought this way before me, and that others will learn it after we have gone. That makes me happy for the horses... It is always incredible to me how one can find this common thread throughout the centuries.”  "The Art of Riding is none other than the talent and the tact which are needed in applying our science to the living horse. With them, the results will be easy, fluent, and elegant and without them constrained, forced and mechanical. "...I want to devote a little space to what are, in my opinion, the real secrets of the Art. "...Secret Number One is to endeavour always to detect what is the lightest possible aid to which our horse will respond, and, on the discovery of this lightest possible aid, to continue to obtain response to a lighter one still!" Henry Wynmalen To obtain mastery in the art of riding we first need to understand how our science, in other words our knowledge, applies to the living horse. Our science, and any knowledge, is incomplete and affected by our own personal biases and concepts. Our very own belief system will create the basis of which pieces of science and which pieces of knowledge we will take unto ourselves, while those pieces of information and knowledge that we have dismissed as not valid are left behind. We do this without thinking, pushing away those things that we have decided are not true. And since we are not omnipotent, and because we don’t know all things, and we do make mistakes, we will dismiss true knowledge, and sometimes dismiss those pieces of knowledge that we need most. We can in some ways create constraints in our riding if we choose to impose those belief structures upon the horse. Lightness is all about liberating this constraint. We must divorce all of our preconceptions and allow the horse to tell us what the lightest aid possible is. This can't come from us, not from our ideas, not from previous experience, not from the instructor in front of us, only from the horse below us. Only the horse has the answer. We should not assume that because the day before, or the week before, or the moment before, when something else worked, that in this moment it would not be different. Perhaps the horse could have been distracted, maybe he really didn't understand, perhaps there was another aid that you were using at the same time that confused or negated the aid that you thought you were giving. No assumptions can be had. You must live in that very moment and quietly and gently and slowly feel towards that aid that this aid will be the lightest aid possible at this particular moment. And after this moment, in the next moment you must challenge yourself and your horse to react, to feel, to understand the next lighter aid still. And with each challenge, each request to notice the next lighter aid until you will be reaching towards that moment when a thought becomes an aid, this is the real secret of the art of riding. Of course this secret is perhaps not a true secret. After all, do not many talk about the lightness that you will find one day?
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An Equestrian Legacy