laterally and literally

jazz and i enjoyed a great dressage lesson this week, right before the monsoon hit on wednesday. it was one of those lessons where i left feeling invigorated, motivated, and proud of my mare. i even called my mom to tell her about it, even though after all these years of me riding, she still insists that you hold on and steer a horse with your knees, and once my mom has an idea in her head, it's hard to convince her otherwise. so i may as well have been talking to the one year old twins i nanny,  but it was nice to have someone to tell about it, since all my horsey friends were busy at work.

since our last lesson, we have been working on making transitions, especially the upwards transition into canter, less of a "big deal". i tend to overanalyze sometimes and the old mantra "perfect practice makes perfect" rings continuously in my head. so when our transitions into canter were jumpy, bucky, or wrong-leady, i would get all mentally frazzled about what i am doing wrong and how to better and more clearly communicate to jazz, who was probably just wondering why mom is all frazzled up there and why our canter transitions were such a "BIG.DEAL!!!". so our lovely dressage trainer brought this to my attention and said she could see my body language changing as soon as she asked for a canter, so i was busted... and thank God she busted me! So for the last two weeks, i just pick a spot, a random spot, and ask quietly. If she gets the wrong lead we just come back down to trot , put ourselves back together, and ask again- no fuss and no worry. The other thing is that i cannot ask in the same place twice, if i do, ms. smarty pants mare will literally canter at that exact spot every time we pass over that spot for the rest of the ride. maybe i should just tape our dressage tests up in her stall and she can learn them instead of me?!

anyway, the other exercise that has really helped us lately with transitions and maintaining a rythym are shoulder-ins. for the first 6 months i rode jazz, my biggest issue was keeping her attention on me, we've solved that issue now and she is quite willing to work, but now we need the consistency in our gaits and consistency in her body (and mine) so that every time i ask for a lengthening or shortening or transition or i reach up to swish my bangs out of my eyes, it doesnt go like this: lovely trot...mom, youre moving your body...hollow back, head up, tail swish, choppy steps, mom! what do you want??....oh, you were just scratching your nose....head down, back up, lengthen stride...lovely trot....
so although i LOVE that my mare is sensitive to my aids and to my body, sometimes we both have to learn to overlook eachothers mistakes (i.e. extraneous movements). i truly dont know whether she is sometimes using my subtle shifts as an excuse, or if she is truly trying really hard- but i like to think it's the latter. so the shoulder- in, although some would argue it's too early to be working these since we are still working on rythym in the training scale, has been beneficial for us in more ways that one. first, it's made me more cognizant of riding her front end and hind end differently, but in unison, and has made me much more efficient in riding BOTH sides of the horse well and simultaneuously, and also, she really looks for the contact to understand what i am asking of her and i have seen her grow much more relaxed lately. in an even more pleasantly unexpected result, it has helped me to unlock her sometimes "strong" shoulders and get her weight off of my inside leg and allow her to take larger steps, instead of quicker ones.  the mare is a pretty good faker sometimes, and will look like she's on the bit and relaxed and round through her back and neck, but secretly, her inside shoulder is pushing at my leg and her body seems "locked" to me, even though it will fool an eye on the ground. so the shoulder-in and beginnings of lateral work in general have helped us in that now it's too hard for her to "punk" me with her shoulder, because it has to be active! yay!

on to the literally part of this post- we literally actually and realistically started working on trot lengthenings and shortenings- well mostly shortenings!!! i feel like dressage is suddenly much more fun. not because we are learning "tricks", but because i can tell what a difference it's making in my horse and me- and dang it- it's fun to see work pay off!
so again, kudos to my dressage trainer for explaining the beginnings of this process in a not so esoteric way to me because, i just read "practical horseman", i still can't understand "dressage today" and it makes me fall asleep!  so this is how i thought about it after she explained it: think of the trot as a scale from 1 to 10. one being the most collected trot ever (i saw passage in my head), and ten being a super extended trot (i saw phillip dutton and connaught from rolex 2009). once i have my mare in a real working trot, she naturally falls at about a 6 on the scale for cadence and length of step, so my job was to make her a 3, without losing the cadence (the hard part!) and turning into a western pleasure looking trot. and we actually did it! jazz was soo soo good about listening to me and even though it used to seem counterproductive to "click" at her with my mouth while asking her to "stay" underneath me, all of the sudden it seem natural and the aids made sense, she really was able to do it and it was a very proud moment for me because she is strong enough to and athletic enough to- and i can't wait to work on it more! it was neat to feel the normally very forward energy underneath me change from the feeling of (trying to make this an analogy that the non horsey folks can understand) water squirting out of a hose, to water spinning in a front load washer. i wasn't losing any energy, it was just recirculating underneath me.

so for those of us on a journey with a horse where we learn together to be correct in our movements, it was a big deal! i have only ever ridden an upper level dressage horse twice, so it's hard sometimes to teach something to your horse when you've never felt it yourself! yay for the good lessons, and yay for the horses that teach us as much as we teach them.

thats all for now!