Sally Swift arrived in the 80’s as the first Guru of Alternative Riding. Gone the rigid discipline of the Cavalry School, and in its place the touchy feely world of Centred Riding. “The ultimate goal of Centered Riding is not to be a discipline unto itself. It must go forward in its purest and least complicated form so it may be integrated into all disciplines of riding.” – Sally Swift
THM editor, Chris Hector with his Thoroughbred gelding, Gallie, check out the alternative…
CHRIS HECTOR CHECKS OUT THE ALTERNATIVE
For the editor of The Horse Magazine, the memory of the heady days and unnaturally bright eyes of the alternative sixties is just that – a fast fading memory, and it was a considerably stouter and more conservative variety of journalist who arrived at the Sally Swift School to find that the Alternative Society is alive, well and kicking in Gisborne!
It started when I went in search of a reviving cup of coffee, only to find that the young woman in the kitchen was putting the finishing touches on a pot of parsley tea. Caffeine located and liquefied, I took my place in the lounge/meeting room to await the arrival of the Guru of Vermont – and observe the range of effortless cross legged gymnastics occurring around me. We were after all, advised to bring our own yoga mat (or blanket) to the clinic, and one particularly impressive young woman had gone better than that, and was seated on a meditation stool, a little platform about four inches from the ground, and while reading, ran her body through an effortless series of gymnastic arrangements – the most impressive of which looked remarkably like Rodin’s Thinker.
All around me the series of remarkably lithe women sat in various stages of cross-leggedness (we persons of the male persuasion were in a decided minority – two out of twenty in fact. “It’s always the same,” observed one as she tossed off an effortless full lotus, “Tai Chi, Meditation… every school you go to, the women always out-number the men.”)
Sally Swift, and Richard Weis had been delayed by a camera crew from the 7.30 Report, but when she arrived Sally was all you expected. Small, frail and strong at the same time, radiating her own brand of charisma and warmth. Soon we are off to the indoor school to work – us – not the horses. Richard leads the group in a shake-out, loosening our wrists, arms, shoulders, legs – walking around, finding our own little space capsules of security.
Now this body awareness is all very well except that I have a cold, and the last thing I wish to be reminded of, let only awared of, is my body. It’s not so much a problem of soft eyes, as runny eyes – and I must confess that my ‘centre’ feels a good deal less vibrant than whatever it is Sally is describing, but no doubt it will liven up over the next few days. The basic concepts should by now be familiar to most readers – soft eyes, breathing, centring and building blocks. And those readers who are not, ought refer to their Horse Magazine index where they will find an extensive listing of Richard Weis articles, not to mention an interview with Sally. Please go back and read them before proceeding.
Richard Weis tunes up
There are just a few little chords that strike the wrong note. Like when we have our bodies nicely lengthened, we have the feeling that our head and neck is on a string, then we are told by Sally that this is like the horse being ‘on the bit’. Really now… that might describe a horse that is relaxed, a horse that is stretching, but there’s many a step along the training scale before that relaxation becomes on the bit. It’s a bit like saying that because I am now a bit better aligned in the body department, I’m ready to go out and score a perfect 10 on the parallel bars. Sure, I’ve achieved a basic precondition, but there’s still a fair bit of mental and gymnastic achievement along the way before I give any of the Soviet gymnastic squad a fright!
If my body awareness was a bit ordinary, certainly there was nothing wrong with the way young Gallie was feeling when we finally did get mounted later in the afternoon. Where I live, you end up with fit horses, the hills take care of that, and after standing around all day in a windy yard, that nice flat expanse of dressage arena was a positive invitation for any healthy young Thoroughbred to act like a goose.
Gallie decides to be nice…
I’d ride him round, inviting him to take a nice long rein and relax, and he’d shake his pretty head, put it down, squeal and try a wimpy little buck.
Now I know full well the story of the apprentice at the Spanish Riding School whose horse spooked every time a train went by the working area, until the Master sat (doubtless very centred,) in the middle of the saddle and did absolutely nothing and the horse stood likewise the next time the train rolled past. However I’m not a candidate for the tri-corner hat, and I’m not in favour of Gallie ‘doing what comes naturally’ -if that happens to be dropping his head (who knows- with a bit of practice he might just get good at it!) So every time the lad goosed around, I took a firm hold of his head and attempted to convey my disapproval of this most untypical behaviour from my usually mild mannered, even a trifle dopey, Galbatross. I still think that every time he acted in a civilized manner, I gave him back the rein… and that the rest of the time he didn’t deserve my ‘trust’.
Even when it was time for Sally and Richard to work on our bodies while we sat in the saddle, Gallie was acting like an ape and Sally decided that it might be more peaceful for all concerned if someone held the horse, and I did my body work on the ground.
As a guide to putting your body into new and brilliant alignment, Sally Swift is superb! (and as I was to discover in subsequent sessions, Richard Weis is just as good) On a scale of fitness and suppleness, I’d rate myself as nought out of ten, but with the most unpromising material, the lady worked undoubted wonders. I really did feel good – and Sally seems to have solved the dilemma of sit up straight and tall, but stay relaxed and supple, in the most brilliant fashion. Time to get on a now much quieter Gallie for a bit of mounted body manipulation.
“Ouch!” This is what we sometimes do to our horses…
“Oooh… Wonderful!” Any horse would like this better!
He had been held by a TEAM (Linda Tellington-Jones) disciple who had quickly diagnosed him as being chronically sore and hurting in half a dozen places, but since when he was not ducking his head, the horse was trotting even and true (which could not be said for the horse the TEAM lady had been riding earlier) I was sticking to my own ‘bubble in the brain’ hypothesis to explain his behaviour- still there was no denying that the usually cuddly bay was enjoying having his ears pulled in TEAM approved fashion and was standing quietly. Which was a relief since I had no desire to go down in equestrian history as the rider of the horse that squashed one of America’s most distinguished living riding instructors.
Now when we walked away, Galbs was behaving himself and happy to walk along on the buckle despite the fact that the conditions had got far worse with a storm raging on the outside of the school. At the end of the day in question and answer session, one participant felt that one of the highlights of the day had been when I’d given my horse the rein and ‘trusted him’ – he’d lengthened and walked quietly – the implication being that Sally’s teaching had produced the result. Since Gallie has been happily walking on a loose rein more or less from the day he came out of Angus Armanasco’s tender, loving care, I’m not totally convinced. (But it’s not an argument you can win. If you’d trusted him at the start, he would have been quiet from the start. But I did trust him and he tried to buck. Ah, but you didn’t really trust him … Try getting out of that one!)
I left the arena hoping that the horse would settle down the next day and be his usual calm self, leaving me to concentrate a lot more on finding the patch of blue at the back of my head, and less on keeping Galbs on the ground. The incident does crystalize some of my doubts about the wider claims of the Centred Riding creed. There is an under-current that seems to say (and I must point out that it comes more from the followers than from anything Richard says or Sally writes) that if only the rider’s body is perfectly in harmony and balance, all will be well, with no attention paid to the horse or its level of education and athletic development.
When you concentrate, distractions are of no concern.
The reasoning seems pretty dodgy to me, and greatly over-simplifies the process of putting the horse’s ‘building blocks’ into place.
Ponder for a second this scenario… If you ask me to go straight into sitting trot on Gallie, then in all likelihood, I will bounce about and look reasonably uncomfortable (there are times, after he has worked well that we get the sitting trot together fairly well, but it does take a bit of working in.) So our ‘rider is all’ theorist could doubtless spot any number of reasons in my body that cause this less than elegant result. Tight in the hips, not relaxed, not balanced, hard eyes, breath holding, not centered, the whole gamut, and they’d be 100% right.
But give me a Grand Prix horse, like Clemens and Judy Dierks’ Galoubet or Miguel Tavora’s Rubens, and with all due modesty I sit the trot without a lot of trouble. Not Dr K perhaps, but I sit quietly and steadily even in an extended sitting trot. Why? My body isn’t more or less relaxed, centered, etc, etc. When I put my foot in the stirrup of both the Grand Prix and the Novice horse, it was the same for better or for worse body. BUT the educated horse makes it easy. He is straight, he is supple, he accepts the aids (including your seat) and because he has learnt to bend his hocks, lower his haunches and elevate in front, then sitting into the horse is a breeze. The horse invites you to sit tall, proud, deep and effective.
Pull straight up on some hair directory on top of your head above your ears
And the reverse is true! Horses are naturally crooked, born crooked, and left wild and running free, usually travel crooked. And when we get on their backs, no matter how nicely we sit, we create a whole new set of problems for the horse to deal with. It takes an educated rider to gymnasticize a horse in such a way that it can travel straight on a straight line (and unlike some of the lessons that once taught seem to stay, keeping a horse truly straight is a fairly full time occupation). An American dressage writer, Jan Dickerson writing Dressage and CT has discussed the way in which this leads to the rider with a collapsed hip:
“What the instructors don’t realize is that in virtually every instance of a rider who has a persistent tendency to sit crookedly in the saddle, the problem is not in the rider, but in the horse. It is the horse that has the collapsed hip, or scoliosis – and that may be because it is green, or because it has been poorly schooled. The rider’s only problem is that he doesn’t have a feel for it, and doesn’t know how to make his horse truly straight.”
Jan Dickerson finds support for her argument in the writing of the modem master, Steinbrecht who observed in his Gymnasium des Pferdes: “beauty and lightness of the seat do not depend only on the posture of the rider, but just as much on the correct carriage of the horse.’
If you imagine you are a doll weighted down at he bottom, you will remain stable
Steinbrecht argued that a student should be taught first to ride comfortably in a posture appropriate to the carriage that his horse offered, and that meant that he should be taught to ride with his body inclined forward ‘like a race rider’ if his horse traveled more on his forehand than its hindquarters. Later, he said, when the rider was ready and able to start working on the carriage of the horse, he could start learning a classical seat – but the work on the horse’s posture should always take priority over work on the rider’s posture.
It is the emphasis entirely on exercises for the rider’s posture and the lack of concern with the exercises a horse needs to improve its posture that worries me about the Centred approach. There seemed an assumption that once we could get a horse traveling nicely and freely and in balance on a completely loose rein, then most of the horse’s problems of locomotion would be solved.
Now I think that letting a horse go long and low is a very useful exercise when combined with all the other useful exercises of the modem dressage training scale (ie. Losgelassenheit (letting through the aids), rhythm, acceptance of the bridle, impulsion, straightness, collection) I also believe that as many horses can be damaged by spending all or most of their time working long and low as can be damaged by jamming them together – like the horse in the Clinic which dragged a toe throughout the trot work. Had he been driven up into contact and asked to use himself properly instead of flopping around on his forehand, then the chances of him breaking down in the stifle joint would have been lessened – riding him all strung out only encouraged a conformational weakness.
Be a spruce tree. The roots grow down from you centre as the trunk grows up…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there is nothing in the Sally Swift approach. There is a great deal of value, a great deal that even the most competitive of competition riders could absorb with benefit – but just as I find it distressing to watch instructors who ignore the fact that the rider is totally out of balance and causing most of the horse’s problems, while addressing themselves solely to how the horse is going, I find it equally crazy that we should spend hours working on our own bodies and expect that the horse will somehow find a ‘natural’ balance all of its own (as if there was anything in the natural history of the horse that prepared him for the weight of the rider!)
And that is what dressage is about. Developing an effective seat so that we can work our horses through a series of gymnastic exercises that make it easier for the horse to carry us – and finally, carry us more beautifully… then riding becomes an art.
But whatever my personal misgivings about the horse work, I join those in the school who were full of enthusiasm for Sally and Richard’s ability to help us in our riding, and certainly, not all the riders were of the ‘horses are made to be cuddly toys’ school of thought. Jacki Baker who runs an equestrian centre at Lysterfield in Victoria – agistment, breaking in, re-training, buying and selling, taking lessons – paid her dues in the very rigorous British Horse Society school, successfully completing her Intermediate Instructor’s Certificate. Most of Jacki’s competitive experience has been in the dressage ring, both in England and Australia, but she also enjoys the thrill of a cross country run with an eventer.
How do you relate to Centred Riding after serving time with the BHS?
“The British Horse Society is a very traditional, classical style. One in which you are worked quite hard in a more military fashion – much more so than Centred Riding.”
When did you become interested in Centred Riding?
“I’ve been having Alexander lessons and found them very beneficial. I was holding a lot of tension in my head and neck, especially working full-time with horses. I was looking for a less intensive way of working my horses…“
“Just before I went back to England for a visit, twelve months ago, I attended one lecture with Richard Weis, and found what he had to say interesting, and it fitted in with my own philosophies. I asked him who I could go to in England, and he recommended Danny Pevsner. He’s a fellow of the BHS, and also an Alexander instructor. I was quite inspired by the work he was doing.”
What are you getting out of the Sally Swift clinic?
“A balance. Sally Swift works very much on the right side of the brain, on imagery. The emphasis on not having to work on your riding, but just release yourself through an understanding of what you are doing, into the movements of the horse. I feel I have a far more comprehensive and thorough understanding of my seat, my body and a deeper understanding of the whole relationship between horse and rider. The more I was able to use the imagery, and release my body to allow it to move with ease, the more the horse was able to relax.”
“My horse is quite tense, and when she would take fright, then I could feel a closing and tightening of the pelvis, and in using the image of widening in the hips and allowing my legs to run down towards the ground, I was able to deepen my seat to the horse, without tightening the knees, and that helped the horse relax.”
Was there any particular image?
“The Indian. I found that was very good for opening up the whole of the body. Once you practise on the ground without the reins, you can use the projection of that particular exercise, and you’re able to use the memory of that exercise and recall the feelings of release and softness, and use it – during shoulder in, during flying change.”
The Indian to which Jacki refers is an exercise of sitting arms and body open to the sky… like the classic statue of the American Indian and his horse. It was an exercise that helped many in the school… but then again everyone had their own little favourite. Mine was ‘blue skies’, it was a way of (be aware gentle reader, describing very tactile images in words is a bit like gymnastics on radio) rotating you head just slightly forward (opening up the little patch of blue sky behind your head), a movement that realigns the whole of your back and seat into a much more comfortable and effective position.
Wilma Hearn is a rider who needs no introduction in the world of Showing. Riding her great hack, Quality Street, Wilma won the Garryowen in 1969. She too finds blues skies a great help:
“The idea of blue skies makes me lengthen and grow – when I centre as well it really feels good, I feel in a nice position on the horse. What Sally told me about arching my neck to arch the horse’s neck, that showed an immediate response in the trot he did afterwards. Together as a combination, she and Richard are marvelous.”
How did you come to be at a Sally Swift clinic?
“Don, my husband, and I did a school with Richard Weis, and we were really thrilled with the experience. Since then we’ve been working along Richard’s lines… applying Richard’s softness to our horses we feel we’ve had an immediate response.”
Do you wish you had Quality Street back, now?
“I really do. I think we could have made him much softer, and although he had tremendous movement, I think we could have helped it even more. It would be great if you could bring back your favourites.”
Siphon some weight out of the heavy leg and drop it into the light one
Gayle Gawler is an old hand at meditation and body awareness clinics, but for her, working with a horse was a new challenge.
Gayle Gawler teaches meditation, relaxation, and positive thinking to cancer patients at the Australian Cancer Patients Foundation. For her the flow on to Centred Riding was a natural progression:
“I became interested in Centred Riding through Tai Chi, which is very much concentrated on Centring. I did various meditation and yoga techniques, then I found Sally’s book, and it all fell together. The soft eyes she talks about are very much a technique of the Tibetan masters, where you’ve got to focus without focus. I started playing around with that with my riding, and was impressed with the results, minor as they were, then I saw that Sally was coming here… “
“I’m a very physical sort of person and I really like getting a good awareness of where my body is in space. I’ve done dance, I’ve done sports, and everything I do is in a different dimension – and this has taken it to yet another dimension, in that I am working with an animal. Attempting to make that move as one, flowing … Torvill and Dean with a horse. It’s that flowing and centring with a horse that I’m really looking for.”
“I’ve got a lot more inner awareness thanks to the clinic. A lot more feeling for what my horse is doing, and who my horse is. I feel I’ve made a lot of breakthroughs, major breakthroughs.”
Which techniques have really worked for you?
“I can’t separate two of them. One is rolling the oranges off my knees. I hit Sally beautifully with one when I came round the corner yesterday. The orange image creates an opening and creates a space. It gives my knee joints more flexibility, and I can really see these things rolling, starting slowly at my hip joint but as soon as it comes to my knees it really goes. It is as though I can see the oranges rolling and going out further into space. And as they go further out into space my knees become more flexible, and that’s a new feeling because I’ve never had flexible knees when I’m riding. I can sit in a full lotus for half an hour but put me on a horse and there is a locking up. If there’s one single thing I’ve learnt from the clinic that is trust. It’s really a trust in yourself and a trust in your horse. Let go and have fun, enjoy yourself and achieve something at the same time.”
“Making the RRRRR sound when you ride has been really important for me. Even in Tai Chi, for nine years my teacher has been saying ‘breathe, breathe’ and for some reason my breathing just stops. It was the same when I was riding, by doing the RRRR, and even doing the RRRR mentally, I keep breathing and the breath is becoming circular, you can feel it, in and out.”
“My horse has never ever brought his head down of his own accord, it has always taken absolute force – I’ve only just got him and before that he was ridden for years in a martingale. When I started to move my hip joints at the walk, suddenly he got a message and his head went down. Every time I felt tension in my body, and let it go, the horse has responded in exactly the same way and that has been a wonderful feeling. Every time I’d release, he’d release.”
A wide band of weight covering the horse’s back, seen from above…
There was one rider who had a more than usual interest in the new teaching techniques. Sue Haydon, a cerebral palsy sufferer herself, works full-time with the Riding for the Disabled Association. She came to Sally and Richard’s school interested in seeing how far their techniques could be applied to her areas of activity…
“My work is mainly training instructors to teach people with disabilities to ride horses. What we are looking for is to teach our riders to ride as normally as possible, so we are just seeking different ways to give them the skills to get that basic position on a horse. I did a workshop with Richard, eighteen months ago, and was very interested in what he had to say. It seemed that the teaching skills came more from the mind than from the body, and a lot of use of imagery helped me to relax on the horse and allow my body to do what it should be doing naturally rather than me interfering with the movement.”
“At the Sally and Richard clinic, I was very excited to feel again changes happening – particularly on the ground and the body work on the horse. I was frustrated for the first few days because I felt I was continually getting mental blocks and not able to completely relax and allow the horse to be doing what it should be doing beneath me. On the last day I finally changed my attitude from a negative ‘I can’t do this’ attitude to a positive ‘Of course I can’ and found an absolute break through to freedom.”
“It was really exhilarating. It was absolute ecstasy, sheer delight – an opportunity to feel what it must be like for a normal person to ride a horse without any physical restriction whatsoever. I just felt like I was floating on air, and nothing my body was doing was going to break the contact with the horse. I felt the complete oneness with the horse that I have heard so much about – worked so hard for – but I never thought as a disabled person myself, I would ever attain it.”
Riding within parallelograms – formed by perpendicular lines of the building blocks, crossed by the energy lines through the upper body and the angles of the thigh and lower leg
When you go back to your RDA work…
‘’I’m hoping to be able to translate a lot of what I’ve learnt, and modify some of it to use with riders with disabilities. I find the idea of using images absolutely fascinating because many of our children and adults, who have intellectual impairment, can’t understand how to move their bodies the way we are teaching them – but the use of imagery, such as the balloons and building blocks, the clouds and the blue sky, will help them have a better understanding of how to relax and allow their body to become that image. This is what we are hoping to bring across to our instructors – a new, different way of teaching riding skills.”
But it wasn’t only Sue who was feeling new freedoms in the saddle. Even the ageing cynic on the naughty bay Gallie, was relaxing, sitting better, allowing his horse to canter freely and rhythmically round the school as the rider sat (as Nuno Oliveira is wont to say) like ‘the king of the world’. Forget the strangeness of crawling round on the floor, forget the overtones of parsley tea and trendiness, Sally Swift has spent a life time thinking about the body, specifically the rider’s body, and she has developed an unrivalled series of techniques to make it work, more efficiently, more beautifully.
The angles of the elbow and the knee open and close as we rise to the trot
Richard Weis has not had Sally’s years of experience, but drawing on his Alexander Technique studies, and a highly developed capacity to inspire and unblock, he works his own brand of magic too. Scoff not but try the Alternative just once. It might not elevate your horse to instant Grand Prix status, but it might help an awful lot along the way…
Last word to Robin Petifer, she just about summed it all up:
“I have no real qualifications. I do teach. I work with horses which I enjoy very very much, all I’ve got to say about this clinic is that it has taught me a hell of a lot about myself. I’ve discovered feelings and physical things that I just didn’t know were there, and that also relates to my horse – I’ve discovered things about her that I didn’t know were there. When I’ve put the two of them together – even if it has only been for five seconds – what I’ve got out of that has been worth so much. The clinic has given me a selfawareness.
It’s made me realize that yes I can do these things – there is something within me that can release, that I didn’t know was there. Even if I never went to another course like this again, it will stay with me forever.”
And you should have seen the smile on her face as she said that.
Sally Swift
1913-2009
Perhaps no single book has had such an immediate and dramatic influence on how we ride as Sally Swift’s Centred Riding. Here was a new approach to the business of riding that made it so much easier to attain the sort of classical style that comes so easily to the naturally gifted equestrian. Here was a teacher and author who could think creatively about not just what to do, but how to do it!
How did you come to write the book Centred Riding?
“When I was a child of eight years old, it became apparent that I had lateral curvature of the spine. I worked with Mabel Todd in Boston Massachusetts all through my childhood, and she wrote a book called ‘The Thinking Body’, and she was very interested in the mind having control of the body in areas that could not be reached by just movement of an arm or a leg. I grew up thinking about creative work with the body. There was always a skeleton hanging beside the bed, a table where they worked on us, and I became familiar with anatomy automatically as I grew up.”
“I started teaching riding after I got through high school. I found that I was riding using my centre, and occasionally used it in some of my teaching, but not very much because I was shy about it then. Later in life I went on to other things, and when I came back to teaching riding in 1975 I began working with bodies a lot more. I began to realise that most people were teaching riding but only telling people WHAT to do. Very few people tell you HOW to do it. In fact, many riding teachers don’t know how they do it, their riders work well anyway. If you ask them how they take their leg back they say they don’t know.”
“It goes back when they want it to. Some of us mortals who are not so coordinated really have a hard time of it, and we have to learn HOW. In many instances, those of us who have had physical problems that we’ve had to deal with, can teach better than the people who are the natural athletes and the very superior riders. It was through my own body that my interest in centred riding started.”
“I started playing with other people’s bodies, getting their hips soft and their bodies a little more balanced. Back in 1975/76, I was teaching at Denily Emerson’s. At the end of the day he brought me a book called The Ultimate Athlete by George Leonard. George Leonard has looked for the ultimate athlete through a martial art, and the one he chose was Akido. I read the book with total interest. Denny had said to me ‘Everything you are teaching is in this book’. He was right, there wasn’t a horse in the book at all, but the whole philosophy of teaching was there. This had a tremendous impact on me, because I had been getting a little bit shy about being an unknown little old white haired lady teaching riding in an non-conventional way, and wondering why I thought I could do it better than anyone else. All of a sudden when I read this book I realised that it was alright. I had 2000 years of precedence in my thinking and my way of teaching.”
“It really set me up, and I went for it full blast. The teaching has evolved since then by trial and error. In the next few years I went to many many clinics to watch other people teaching. I learned a whole lot more about how a horse moves and how it should move, and began trying to get the rider’s body free enough so that they could let their horses move the way I now knew they should move. It has been very exciting and it is still evolving, there seems to be no end to it.”
What are the ‘Four Basics’ and how did they come about?
“They just happened. Early on when I was teaching I began to realise that I was using these four things all the time. In all my work these four things kept turning up and I realised they were very basic to my teaching. So they got named the four basics: Soft Eyes, Breathing, Centreing, and Building Blocks. When I wrote the book, the chapter on the four basics was one of the early chapters I wrote, and it was probably the least changed of all the chapters in the book. It stood on its own feet and it still does.”
Could you clarify how we use the four basics?
“Soft Eyes is seeing everything. It’s really peripheral vision as against focussing on one thing – like focusing on your horse’s ears, that’s all you see. You get so interested in the ears that you can’t think about anything else. If you look above the horse’s ears and sec everything, you can see 190 degrees without any problem, this in turn not only allows your eyes to sec everything – soft eyes – but it also allows you to become more aware of your body and your horse’s body.”
“Focussed hard eyes don’t give you time to feel anything else, you are too busy looking at what you are focussed on. Soft eyes are a tool for awareness. Breathing is very important. The diaphragm is the very important element in breathing, it is the biggest muscle in your body, it goes across to the bottom of the rib cage. If you put your hand on your belly you can feel it in motion. But if you breathe only in your chest you will lose that motion under your hand, and the breath is much shallower and more difficult. If you experiment with your body and hold your breath for a few seconds you will find that your body goes stiff, especially your back. Then breathe normally again and your body can be released. Any time you hold your breath you build in tensions. The horse is upset by these tensions, just as you would be if the horse held his breath. It’s very important to keep breathing, it is an important basis for your relationship with your horse and the freedom of your own body.”
“Centreing relates to the fact that the biggest nerve centre in your body, for body control and energy lies very deep in your body, below and behind your navel, almost in the pelvis. If you let the control focus there, then you can let the mind be remote control – the director who says what to do, but the doing is done by the centre deep in your body. This influences the entire body.”
“Building blocks are nothing but balance; the bottom building block is your feet. If you are sitting in an upright deep seat, you will have your feet at the bottom and over that you will stack your hips, then you’ll stack your ribs and shoulders and head and neck. If you run a plumb line through through from your ears it will go ear, shoulder, hip, ankle, and it will also go through your centre, and that’s the really important part: the centre must be over the feet.”
“You can ride any seat, you can ride a half seat, or gallop across country, or a racing seat or ride western and work cattle, but in all cases your centre must be over your feet. And in many cases it is only your centre over your feet because the knees and hips become shock absorbers and levers in front of, and behind, the saddle. The centre of gravity of the rider is also in this same area. They are not the same thing but they are in the same area.”
In what way does Centred Riding help serious competitors?
“It gives them a very true sense of balance and it allows them to stay supple, softeyed and open, so they can feel their horses are all times and be one with their horses. I think it makes them a much closer partner with their horse. Instead of having a rider dictating to the horse all the time, you get an understanding between horse and rider and the horse does a lot of the work. The rider goes along with the horse and then asks for what he wants, because the horse is already happy with the rider, the horse offers more generously. I see it happening in competition – happier horses and happier riders.”
Those of us who have worked with you hear you say ‘allow’ rather than ‘make’…
“Allow is a very important word as is aware. The body likes to do things correctly. Nature likes to be correct. We do a lot of interfering with the tension of our life and society. We tend to dictate to our body what we want it to do. The body is a very complex machine. More complex than anything we can comprehend. When we start to tell it what to do, we frequently make it less efficient than it can be. When the body is truly efficient it only uses the muscles that it has to. If you get the Centred Riding approach you learn to trust your body and to let it do the work. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have to know how to do the work – you have to do that training – but once it knows how, it is up to us to let the body function and not push it round all the time.”
“A cat waiting for a mouse is not thinking about what its body is doing all the time – it’s waiting for the mouse. When the mouse comes out, the cat explodes. Our bodies can do much the same thing.”
Can you tell us something about the development of Centred Riding – the approach and the book…
“I retired from office work in 1975, I was sixty two at that time. I figured I’d retire and teach a few of my friends. Because I was getting interested in this teaching of bodies, my friends told more friends, and first thing I knew I was being asked to do clinics in all sorts of places I hadn’t expected. The whole teaching thing grew like a mushroom. I never advertised – people wanted the information and it was the new approach they had been waiting for. I wasn’t teaching anything new actually, it just seemed that I was the first person to put it all together. Actually I’ve been teaching Centred Riding since early 1976.”
“It took me seven years to write the book, which is probably just as well because as I wrote it, I kept developing and changing it, all except the four basics. The book has been out now for three years, and once the book was out, the demand was much more universal. Now I’m having to turn people down… I can’t cope with the demands.”
Is there an evolution to the art of centred riding?
“Yes, I’ve been living through it and it is still going on. I have a feeling that I have learnt so much new in these past two years that sometimes I wonder how I am going to deal with it- it’s very exciting, and it keeps on coming. It feeds in from other people, from circumstances, from books, from experimenting… it evolves, and it will always evolve. There will never be an end because there arc always new ways of saying the same thing.”
“I find I’m doing a great deal more by making people aware of where their feet arc and how they feel, and how they can feel. I’m doing more and more with lateral balance as well as forward and back balance. I’m doing more with the two sides of the horse moving separately all the time, and the fact that the rider needs to follow the two sides of the horse, separately and all the time. Evolving newer, easier, more potent techniques all the time to teach this.”