This following is a brief excerpt from my book, How Good Riders Get Good In any true discussion of what creates the Great Dividebetween elite riders and all the others, this simple question: Does the spinal column of your horse merge with your spinal column, so that it feels like one entity when you ride? If it does, if you have acquired that oh so elusive independent seat, then you have at least ENTERED the magic kingdom. If you are uncomfortable, if, heaven forbid, you bounce, then you have two choices. 1, Achieve harmony with the moving back of your horse, by practicing enough to become a centaur, or, 2. Continue to bounce. It really is that simple, and you dont have to go to any horsemastership clinic to understand that. If we were to randomly choose 100 American riders, and by that I mean just randomly grab 100 people who ride anywhere in North America, any kind of riding, any discipline, I would be greatly surprised if ONE of them would be a centaur, in the sense of being harmoniously one with the horse at all gaits, on all terrains, with or without stirrups, with or without a saddle. So heres the question to ask yourself: Do I possess an independent seat? Heres the book excerpt, in case you havent read it--- Becoming a Centaur [A] To truly comprehend what is meant by “a riding body,” go to the bookstore or library and find copies of old Western prints of Plains Indians by Russell and Remington. If ever there were “centaurs,” the half-horse, half-human creatures of Greek mythology, these would be them. Think of what it would mean to live without a saddle, on the back of a galloping horse, flying over rocky, precipitous terrain, with just a single strand of rope around his jaw, guiding him solely with knee and thigh pressure because in your hands you are holding a bow or a lance. Then answer this next question. Could you now, or, if you are older, could you ever have imagined riding like that? Because if the answer is “no,” I would respectfully submit that you do not or did not have the “ultimate riding body.” This requires becoming an integral part of the living, breathing horse, almost as if the spinal column of the horse merges with the spinal column of the rider to create one entity. Anything less than that is less than the ultimate body—so let’s start with the ultimate and work backward. What did it take, back on the Great Plains of the 1700s and 1800s, to become “part” of a horse? When you are very little, you learn things easily, be they language skills or riding skills. Those Plains Indian boys started riding when they were very small, very flexible, and had the mindless courage of youth. They spent long hours every day riding over vast tracts of wilderness, climbing hills, fording streams, negotiating rocks and roots and declivities and canyons. They had a warrior mentality as a basic tribal ethic; riders lacking courage either got brave or got passed by. They weren’t paralyzed by riding lessons. They learned naturally, by simply letting their body accommodate to the movements of the horse, and they didn’t have a saddle between them and the animal to use as a crutch, or in any way to impede their total feel of the living entity beneath them.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 13:19:13 +0000
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