6-16-2011: Notes from a 3-hour workshop

I started playing with Patriot and Glory today, two huge, green draft/Saddlebred crosses—a really fun mix of a lot of life mixed into a ginormous draft body!! Not too much to say, just working on the very, very basics of getting clear about their space-my space, standing still, freeing up the front end, going in some circles, etc.

This evening was a workshop with me and Maia and two other lovely ladies. We did groundwork and I came away with a lot of good things to remember for Maia.

1. Getting clear about space

Things are really going a lot better in my learning to release Maia back into a spot—releasing her feet back works a lot better if I think about moving her whole diagonal (both the front/back foot) and not just the one foot I want.

However, when we were just standing there, she was doing the tinest bit of creeping. It wasn’t bad at all, she wasn’t rooting around, but every few minutes she’d put one of her feet forward. I’d go in and release her foot back, but had to definitely keep repeating it. That was when Karen mentioned that too much of that starts becoming an awful lot like correction and

On rock climbing and horsemanship: The place of 100%

Getting effective with Maia

A great time with Maia this morning. I’ve been realizing that I’m not been very effective at all in what I do with her—I get so concerned about not using pressure that I never wake her up to release. I’m holding back from 100%, holding back from a confident saying of “be RELEASED!” I take “release” to mean I can never be sure she can or will give me a response and so I’m always hesitant and we only get worse.

So, somehow, something popped, you could say, in me today with that. I was doing some stuff with her and finally I was like, you know what, you are going to respond to this release and somehow we’re going to get it. It helps that just watching Karen and thinking about all of this, plus with my improvement as a horseperson in general, my feel had gotten somewhat better. So I’d start releasing and know when I did it right and she was tuning it out and so I’d really pop her off that spot. I could use my ropes better and feed her that float and she got so much more freed up, it was remarkable! I actually felt like I was USING feel and release versus just trying!

But the tough part was, when I’d release, I’d feel I had done a good release and she’d just be dead to the world, so I’d have to really firm up on that space, scream in her ear as it were, and snap her out of it and bring up some instinct again. The thing is, I had to not only KNOW my original release was good and she needed a wakeup call, I had to be 100% committed to the