When an instructor teaches, she is empowering her student. She is handing over the knowledge and the skills for the rider to do for herself, what needs to be done.

When the trainer rides, he is empowering the horse. He provides the direction, the information to show the horse how he can be even more brilliant.

We invite you to help us empower others. To pass on knowledge that once they learn it, it will be theirs. The goal is to empower teachers, riders, riders to become teachers, and the horses.

Life and our relationships can be about empowering others and enjoying their new found strengths.

Imagine if all our relationships were truly about empowering others.

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."

Henry Ward Beecher

"How much more does the artist bring to this equestrian dance? He dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature upon his horse and the dance. Only to realize that the horse and the dance do the same and brush their natures upon you the artist."

Nadja King

"A stopped clock is right twice a day."

Think about it. There has to be a component of any riding or any training method that has to be correct, if it wasn't nobody would use it because it would be obvious.

The problem is that because there is a correct component within every training method that we can be fooled into thinking it is completely right, versus seeing what portions are truths and what portions are fallacies.

The stopped clock is always right at least twice per day.

Equestrians Quest

When asked about what he considered the most important philosophical consideration for the rider, Egon von Neindorff replied:

"Modesty -  and wanting to serve, putting ego aside. The desire to listen to the horse, which must come from one's heart and then must be filled in practice through the feeling of the rider. The study also entails all those things that go toward nature-oriented riding.

The ability to correlate and unify the feelings from the saddle with the philosophy in which we believe."

[From an interview with Erik Herbermann, published originally in de Hoefslag magazine in Holland in the 90s, reprinted in the October 2004 issue of Dressage Today.]