Introduction
As we are learning to ride and train, we sometimes encounter big problems that seem to appear very suddenly, and we wonder: what happened??!! Everything was going fine, and all of a sudden, the horse is acting up. Maybe he suddenly stopped and refused to go forward, from one day to the next. Maybe he started turning around for no discernible reason. Maybe he started to rear or buck. In some cases, the reason is pain-related. But in some cases, the extreme reaction is the final stage in a longer process. The rider kept making small mistakes with her seat and aids that the horse didn’t like. So he started to react in small ways at first. Maybe he pinned his ears in certain situations, or he lost some impulsion, or he became more crooked, or he inverted. But when the rider didn’t notice the subtle warning signs and didn’t change what she was doing, the horse had to send out larger and larger signals. Some riders only get the message when they get bucked off. But by that time they have missed hundreds of smaller warning signs over a period of several months. And once the horse is so annoyed that he bucks or rears, the problem has become very serious.
(I can remember all too well when Egon von Neindorff used to say drily in lessons: “Now we have annoyed him”, when a student had got so stuck that the horse refused to cooperate. That was usually the moment when he put a better rider on the horse who then got the horse unstuck within seconds).
Confront the difficult while it is still easy
This is where the Tao te Ching passage is relevant for riding and training. Every problem begins small, barely noticeable. The longer the rider allows it to continue without addressing it, the bigger it becomes, until it eventually spirals out of control. The earlier the rider feels deviations in the horse's gait, the more easily and discreetly she can correct them with invisible aids. The later she begins to try and correct them, the more difficult it will be in every respect. Otto von Monteton (Über die Reitkunst, 1877, 29f.) addresses the same issue: “Everyone who trains horses will admit that one of the rider’s most important tasks is to sharpen his awareness in his seat, leg, and especially in his hand, so that he feels the slightest difference in pressure. As every mistake should be corrected right at the beginning – this is the only time where it is possible to correct it, because avalanches cannot be stopped in the psychological or in the physical world -, this is only perceptible and feasible with a pressure that is as small as that of our relaxed finger muscles. For a muscle loses its sensitivity for subtle nuances to the same degree that it contracts.”
This is one of the most important training principles, yet it rarely receives enough attention. There is a very beautiful illustration of this central training principle in Thomas Cleary, “Zen lessons. The Art of Leadership” (1989, 100f.):
“The small is a step of the great, the subtle is the sprout of the obvious. This why the wise are careful of the beginning, sages are mindful of warnings. Even dripping water, if it does not stop, can ultimately turn a mulberry orchard into a lake. A flame, if not removed, will ultimately burn a meadow.
“When the water is streaming, and the fire is raging, the disaster is already happening – even if you want to help, there is no way. Of old it has been said, 'If you are not careful about minor actions, ultimately they will encumber great virtue.’ This is what is meant here.”
This is why it is of the utmost important that the rider pays very close attention to the horse every step of the way. She has to be very conscious of where her intended line of travel is, whether the horse’s legs are on this line, or whether they are escaping from it. She has to notice the smallest change in rhythm and tempo, balance, straightness, relaxation, and rein contact, as they can be an indication that something is going wrong. This requires a rather balanced, supple, and independent seat that allows the rider to feel very subtle nuances and tiny changes in the quality of the gait.
Many riders wait much too long before they react, either because nobody has taught them that they needed to pay attention to these details, or because their seat isn’t balanced and relaxed enough yet to be able to feel small nuances. You can see riders who wait half a circle before they take action, when the horse speeds up, for instance. By then the horse has lost his balance so thoroughly that it takes relatively drastic measures to bring him back under control. The ride is disrupted, and the harmony is lost, as in a musical instrument that is hopelessly out of tune. If the rider had caught the loss of balance and change in tempo during the first stride, most observers would not even have noticed what happened, because the aids would have been that discreet.
In other cases, riders don’t notice when their horse starts to get behind the aids. They miss all the smaller and larger warning signs. It is not until they get bucked off a couple of times, perhaps six months down the road, that they realize something has gone wrong. By that time, it is almost too late, because the horse is well on his way to becoming dangerous. All of this could easily have been prevented if the rider had been more aware of the subtle changes in the horse’s gait and attitude. This is not even really the rider’s fault because you simply don’t know these things if nobody has explained them to you, and if nobody has told what you need to pay attention to.
One big problem with delayed rider reactions is that the aids not only have to be much heavier than if they had been applied in time, but the rider often overcorrects the horse, so the horse in turn reacts too strongly. In these instances the rider is constantly lagging behind, struggling to catch up with the horse. A typical example would be a horse who loses his balance and speeds up. The rider notices it too late and pulls on the reins. The horse then abruptly stops, so the rider kicks him forward, because she didn’t mean to stop. The horse, in turn, runs forward again, etc. It looks like somebody trying to drive a car with a manual transmission who is not used to driving with a stick shift and who has trouble managing clutch and gas pedal at the same time.
The issue of delayed reactions exists not only with respect to the rider, but also with respect to the horse. If a horse ignores the rider’s driving aids because he is not paying attention, and the rider keeps asking and nagging without ever addressing the attentiveness issue, the horse eventually will overreact and jump or run because although the horse was ignoring the driving aid, the energy it was supposed to create was stored inside the horse instead of being translated into immediate motion. The horse then becomes a little like a volcano whose magma chamber fills up more and more until the pressure has become so big that it finally explodes.
Conclusion
You can apply this line from the Tao te Ching in a couple of different ways.
1. Pay close attention to the quality of the horse’s gait and subtle changes in the parameters of the gait, such as tempo, stride length, energy level, alignment on the line of travel, balance, suppleness, rein contact, etc. so that you can make the necessary adjustment in the same stride that the unwanted change occurs. And since horses are creatures of habit, they tend to make the same mistake in the same place of the arena every time.
Once you have observed a mistake twice in the same place, chances are that the horse will make the same mistake in the next 100 times as well. You can then take preventive action the next time you are approaching this spot in the arena. You can also watch for warning signs. Is there anything that changes in the horse’s posture or gait within the last 3 strides before the mistake or the negative behaviour?
If you can identify a warning sign, you can take preemptive action and break the cycle. This enables you to prevent mistakes, rather than having to correct them.
On my own journey I went through different phases. First, I was taken completely by surprise when certain mistakes happened. So I had no idea what caused the mistake, and I was way too late with my correction. Then I learned what I needed to pay attention to, the mistake was less of a surprise, and the delay of my aids became shorter. I remember going through a phase where I could feel the mistake happening in real time, but my body was still too slow to catch it in the same moment. Then I became faster and was able to catch it as it happened. Then I started to think that there musts be a warning sign during the 1-3 strides before the mistake. When I learned to feel these warning signs, I was able to prevent the mistake. And, if there was a clear pattern that the mistake would always occur in the same place, or in the same context, I was able to take preemptive action. This is always the best solution. Be alert, pay attention to details, think ahead, and prevent mistakes, instead of having to fix them after the fact.
2. There is also the long term perspective that we need to pay attention to the development of our horse over time, so that we notice new trends that happen slowly over weeks, months, and years, so that we can take advantage of positive trends and stop or redirect negative trends in our horse’s gait, posture, and behaviour. Some things start imperceptibly small and increase over a long period of time, so that they can stay under the radar until it’s too late because we don't notice the tiny changes from one day to the next. We only notice it once the situation has deteriorated so far that it is very unpleasant - and difficult to course-correct.
