Ride Royally - Ride with Poise

RIDE ROYALLY - Ride with Poise

Crookedness holds us back. It prevents us from finding the fluidity and grace we seek.

To develop poise, we need to develop vertical and horizontal balance and to ride mindfully. Rider poise is achieved by riding lightly in heart, mind and body.

Maintaining  an open chest, open gullet, noble head carriage, with eyes soft and aligned between the horse’s ears, shoulder blades softly drawn together, we align our upper skeleton above our gently allowing and following hips. Together with wrists and knees kept soft, legs draped and feet relaxed, we lighten our horse’s load.

Influenced by the upward movement from the horse underneath, we softly bring on and release our core allowing their motion to raise us and lower us.

Exercised with grace and ultimately finesse our aim is to maintain a core that is neither fully engaged, nor fully released. We can develop feel for this tensegrity by practicing small adjustments to our core engagement. Breath in, rise in spirit, bring up the core. Breath out, float down in spirit, tone down the core.

Once we can we ride lightly and fluidly without tension, we are immediately aware of small shifts in our balance.

When things go wrong such as a momentary collapse in our upper body, it feels awful. The magic has gone. Our mindfulness allows us to regain our poise and rebalance our upper body.

Our pelvis is also alive to what’s happening. We can’t hang a hip and poke a seat bone into our horse without noticing - it becomes easy to maintain the alignment and bearing pressure.

If our horse should make a small mistake of balance and we lose connection with a hind leg,  we float above that dip allowing our horse to come back up under us confident that the aircushion will be there to meet him.

In this way, the rider gifts the horse straightness, trust and confidence where before there was brace, mistrust and weakness.

Ride with poise, bring your horse with you and find joy in the movement.