Introduction
We have probably all had days when we felt like we had completely forgotten how to ride when it seemed as if we couldn’t do anything right. I suspect that as long as we ride, we may never be completely safe from experiences like this. Fortunately, the incidents seem to become fewer and farther in between, the more we learn. - Or maybe we just don't take bad rides as personally anymore, because we know that we will have another good ride again soon. Just like we know after a good ride that there will be more difficult ones waiting for us in the future.
More Than A Sport
Although Riding is very much a physical activity that requires a certain level of fitness of both the horse and the rider, it also has an emotional, mental, and psychological dimension. When we first started taking riding lessons, most of us probably had no idea what we were signing up for. We probably thought that this was just another sport where you learn a certain technique, and that’s it.
However, riding is so much more because it’s an activity we do together with another living being who has his own personality, likes, dislikes, fears, quirks, past experiences, trauma, and his own ideas of what is fun and what he would rather be doing at the moment.
This complexity of having to learn a technical skill together with the horse (because the horse has to learn how to perform turns, transitions, and movements in good balance under the weight of the rider) AND to build and honour the relationship with the horse at the same time, can lead to all sorts of challenges and frustrations that we had never expected before we started on this journey. In the movies and in videos it always looks so easy, and in our imagination, we pictured a series of wonderful experiences together with our four-legged friend.
These wonderful experiences do, in fact, exist but they have to be earned by learning skills that go far beyond physical technique. Actually, the physical part is the easiest one in some ways, although it doesn’t seem like it to a beginner.
What is much more difficult (and much more painful) is to learn to deal with our own unmet expectations, our frustrations, our judgements of ourselves, our disappointments, our attachment to results, our ego which likes to think that we are more advanced than we really are, and the undesirable aspects of our personality in general. Horses hold up a mirror to us, and we don’t always like what we see. That’s why learning to ride is at times emotionally much more painful than we could have imagined.
Good Rides and Bad Rides
We have to make peace with the fact that there will always be good rides and bad rides. Sure, it would be nice to have only good rides, but it is highly unlikely. Learning does not take place in a straight line or in a parabolic curve. Learning always proceeds in fits and starts, it has ups and downs, learning phases in which we make visible progress, and plateau phases in which we seem to be stagnating. We have to explore detours and dead-ends which end up costing us more time than if we had avoided them. The days on which we don’t feel like we are “moving the needle” and progressing can seem like bad rides - at least they did to me. In retrospect, I realize that these were all necessary and valuable experiences because they taught me important lessons, and they made me who I am today. It takes ALL experiences, the pleasant ones as well as the unpleasant ones, to become a mature human being and a mature rider and trainer.
The Manic-Depressive Roller Coaster
When I was young I defined myself through my riding. I completely identified with my last ride. After a good ride, I felt like I was flying on top of the world. I could do no wrong. I was a genius.
After a bad ride, I felt hopeless, like I was never going to get it. I was too stupid to learn to ride, I had no talent. Everybody else was progressing faster than I was… You get the idea. The depression lasted until I had a good ride again. It was an emotional roller coaster that was utterly exhausting - and very unhealthy. Today I think it was the result of my attachment to being or becoming a good rider.
A More Balanced Perspective
Looking at all the different rides more objectively, without all the wild and crazy emotions, I realise that first of all no ride is all good or all bad, even if it feels that way in the moment. Even in our worst rides, we probably did something right. And in our best rides we probably still made some mistakes. That’s simply the nature of things.
Rides that we perceive as good make us feel like we can RIDE. They give us confidence, and they give us hope. They also help us to continue on our journey instead of giving up during the inevitable rough times.
Rides that we perceive as bad make us feel hopeless and untalented. They wreak havoc on our ego because they show us that we are not nearly as advanced as we had imagined on our good days. They are reality checks that impress on us that we still have so much farther to go and so much more to learn.
For many years I really struggled and suffered when bad rides “happened to me” - until I realised that these bad rides were actually more valuable than the good ones in some ways because they were the ones that propelled me forward. After a good ride, we can pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves how good we are. If everything goes perfectly well, there is no need to change anything. And that’s dangerous because it can make us complacent and stifle any further progress. Hence the Taoist saying that praise is more dangerous than criticism.
Often the value of a “bad” ride lies not so much in what I learn DURING that particular ride, but in what the analytical process teaches me that follows the bad ride. These rides make us feel like failures for not being able to do something that we think we should be able to do. They bring us face to face with our inadequacies. They show us where we are too imprecise, too sloppy, too uncoordinated, too rough, too clumsy, too hasty, too late, you name it. The horse essentially lets us know that what we thought was acceptable is not only NOT acceptable, it is actually quite poor (sometimes). In an instant, we become aware of where all the holes are in our own riding as well as in the training of our horse. Because I always hated this feeling of failure and inadequacy I became obsessed with figuring out the problem and coming up with a solution. I was only content when I had found a promising course of action.
However, as emotionally challenging as these rude awakenings can be, they also show us exactly what we need to work on from now on. There is opportunity in the misery. If we accept the reality that just hit us over the head and start addressing those issues that were brought to our attention, we will learn and grow and improve as riders. This may take takes a few days or even weeks because it’s a process to come to terms with this very unpleasant realisation, to figure out where the root cause of the problem is located, and then to find and implement a solution. But, for me at least, this seemed to be the only way to make real progress.
Keeping Things in Perspective - The Zen of Learning Dressage
Just because you had a bad ride or made a mistake does not automatically make you an incompetent rider, a hopeless case. On the other hand, winning a prize and public acclaim does not automatically make someone a great rider, either. In the big scheme of things, these are all just small pieces of the puzzle that make up the totality of our experience, and we have to take them all in stride, without being affected too deeply by any one of them. It is easy to get wrapped up in a single event. A bad ride can leave us feeling devastated and ready to give up, whereas a good ride or praise can over-inflate our ego, leading us to think that we are better than we actually are. That's why it is good to take a step back after an exceptionally good or bad experience alike, in order to put it into the proper perspective, without the momentary emotions attached.
Sometimes I think that the greatest masters are probably not necessarily the most gifted individuals, but the ones who went through the most difficult rides, and who had the inner strength to turn these (perceived) defeats and hurtful experiences into triumphs by learning the lessons they offer. Just as in Aikido each punch of an attacker is received as a gift, according to George Leonard (The Way of Aikido. Life lessons from an American sensei, 1999), we can actually try to see "bad rides" that leave us feeling defeated and incompetent as learning opportunities, whereas we don't learn nearly as much from fabulous, successful rides. They just make us feel good. For a balanced evolution, we need both. Without the hard lessons, we would never get out of mediocrity, and without the elating, "perfect" rides, we would probably lose the courage to continue the journey.
