Over the years there have been a number of trail blazing authors who have sat the traditional ‘riding teaching principles’ on their head – and turned to new, more sensitive, more body aware ways of tackling the equestrian art. One of the most influential has been British author and instructor, Mary Wanless. Mary’s book – Ride With Your Mind – made a major impact

Roz Neave recorded this introductory interview with her…

My family were not horsy at all – but I can remember being horse mad at four. It took me ten years to persuade my parents to let me ride. We lived in outer London, so there weren’t riding schools near by, so I didn’t start to ride until I was fourteen. I used to ride at a little school, and help at weekends. I kept doing that until I was eighteen, and I used to spend my summers up at a trekking centre up in Yorkshire, helping there.

Then I went to University, and happened to hit Bristol University Riding Club about the same time as Christopher Bartle. We had a very active club, that was my first introduction to indoor schools, and anything other than muddy ponies. It was my introduction to proper British Horse Society instruction, a rather more ‘up market’ approach. We had a very good club, with subsidized lessons.

The first summer I was at Bristol, I did my AI, I was a working pupil for eight weeks and I just scraped through the exam at the end of it.

When I went back to university I was much more confident and competent. When I graduated I thought I would spend a year with horses to get it out of my system – which must have been the biggest joke alive. I went up to Yorkshire Riding School and I was head girl there for quite a while. I went to Ireland, trained young horses for a while- then I went back to England to do teacher training. I lasted about six weeks then quit the course, started doing youth work part-time, and bought a horse with a friend. That was my first horse. I was about twenty one, and we bought a black and white colt between us… kept it on our student grant.

From then I went straight into horses full time.

When I just scraped through my AI one of the examiners patted me on the head and said ‘well done, dear, but don’t try any more exams’ – that was like a red flag to a bull. I tried for my Intermediate BHS certificate, and tried and failed three times. For a while I felt like I was bashing my head against a wall. My teachers were telling me the same things over and over again, and I was trying to do the same things over and over again – I guess I had an inkling that there was a secret, some magic about riding that some people could do it and some people can’t – and no-one was telling me what the secret was. I had this inbuilt sense that something was missing in the way I was being taught, there was a secret.

I left Bristol, left the University setting, and just before I was about to do my Instructors Certificate, I still had this lack of confidence in what I was being told, and what I was teaching. I advertised myself in Horse & Hound looking for a job, and my advert was answered by a guy who is now dead unfortunately, a guy called Dan Aharoni, an Israeli who had trained with Colonel Handler, at the Spanish School, and with Egon von Neindorff, one of the old German classical masters. Dan took me on as his head girl and I worked with him for two years.

During that time he did his utmost to teach me how to ride. He was himself a very skillful rider, and he had been exposed to some of the best and most classical continental teachers. He was a very strict purist, a very interesting man. He was an accountant, in the City of London.

We lived about two hours journey out of London, so he’d come home about seven, we’d have supper and about eight o’clock we’d go out to the stables. It was not unknown for him to lunge me on three horses, one after another, and at midnight I’d still be on the lunge. Then I’d have to sweep the yard – he wouldn’t let me go to bed until I’d swept the yard, then I’d go to bed and I’d be up again at seven the next morning mucking out seven horses.

His teaching was the beginning of the philosophical stance that I have now, which very much says what happens in the horse is a mirror of what goes on in the rider. The rider is responsible for very much more of the horse than most people would recognise. When you get the rider right, you get the horse right.

We had a lot of very uninspiring, difficult horses through our yard, and Dan would sit on them and he would transform them. I spent the first six months sitting by the riding arena watching it happen, and I knew I’d found what I wanted to be able to do. I knew I’d found what riding was – and I knew that all the other teachers I’d had before had I 0% of his skill. I knew I’d found the real thing, but I couldn’t necessarily do it. He put a lot into teaching me, I learnt a lot, improved a lot. I got very steeped in his philosophical position – he was a very good friend of Erik Herbermann, who wrote The Dressage Formula. I count Erik as one of my mentors, I’ve known him now for twenty years.

Dan’s philosophy was very similar to Erik’s – the way Erik has set it out in his book.

So I became very steeped in this philosophy, but I also became very exhausted. I was doing a lot of stable work. I was teaching a lot. At the end of two years I decided I’d had it, I was bashing my head against a new brick wall. I was riding much better, I had my ‘I’ (British Horse Society Instructors Certificate), but I still wasn’t satisfied. It was bit like I’d seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I couldn’t really touch it. I decided I’d quit. I sold my horse, quit my job and went to London. I really had reached the point where I vowed I’d never ride or teach again. I sold fire extinguishers for a while…

It just so happened that I had planted myself in London near Hampstead Heath, and I was walking on Hampstead Heath a few weeks after I arrived in London, and I saw a girl on a pony. She told me she kept the pony at Kentish Town City Farm, and that it wasn’t really her pony. She got to talking to me, and finally asked ‘have you got your AI?’ I said ‘actually I’ve got my I’- she said ‘Cor blimey, you should come to the farm!’ So I went to the Farm, which was run by a charity to disabled and disadvantaged kids. It was run by two girls who both had their Ais, they were eventers, and I ended up agreeing to work for them. I ended up riding and teaching a little, back into horses, really because I found that fire extinguishers weren’t a lot of fun.

Basically I started riding and teaching again for the money- but something very interesting happened. Whereas before I had been ambitious, I wanted to get my I, I wanted to compete my horse, I was a very determined, ambitious rider, but after I gave up, I really didn’t care. Didn’t care how I rode, didn’t care how the horse went. I had no investment in it. It didn’t mean I sank or swam as a person according to how I rode. The interesting thing that started to happen was that I started noticing things I’d never noticed before.

I started noticing things like ‘why is my right seat bone always behind my left?’, ‘why is it heavier than the left?’, ‘does that influence the fact that horses tend to be heavier in my right hand?’ I started noticing things like that. I noticed that every time a horse jogged or shied, I pulled my stomach in. That was the first thing I noticed.

Then I noticed that when I pulled my stomach in, I hollowed my back. I started teaching myself how to do the opposite, and found that I could stop spooks and shies and jogs without pulling on the reins, but totally through what was happening in my stomach, and in my back.

So I started playing around with that in my teaching, and the whole thing became a huge experiment. I started going back to Dan, and he would say, ‘My goodness, you’ve improved, this is what I was trying to teach you!’ One of the things that started happening was that I literally started doing the opposite of all the things I’d been told. I’d always been told ‘sit up straight’- and in my efforts to sit up straight what I’d actually been doing was hollowing my back. When I did the opposite, I started thinking about pushing my stomach out, which is now the ‘bearing down’ that I write about, and making sure my spine stayed straight rather than hollowed. It felt to me as though I was making myself shorter, shrinking down rather than growing tall.

I started to think ‘who’s crazy round here?’ Is it me? It is them? What’s going on? So I started doing these things and going to Dan and other teachers, and they’d say ‘that’s good, you are doing it right’. I thought this is mad but I kept doing it, because they said it was right, and I kept teaching it, and my pupils started having some astronomical changes in their horses – they were going much better than previously. This went on for about a year.

I then went to the United States where I did a three month course at the San Francisco Dancers Workshop with Anna Halprin, a post-modern dance group. They have a really wonderful approach to teaching body skills. I came across Moshe Feldenkrais’ body work there. I know there are Feldenkrais teachers in Australia. I came across Timothy Galway’s ‘inner game’ thinking, he’s an American tennis pro- who wrote the ‘Inner Game of Tennis’. I came across stuff about how the right and left brain hemispheres operate. In discovering all that, I realised that in my riding I’d hit on something really important. I wasn’t just being an eccentric riding teacher – which IS what I thought previously- but I was really onto something.

So then in December 1980 I had the idea of writing a book because I realised I was onto something big, and that it deserved to be known. Finally it was published seven years later as Ride with your Mind. I went back home, and started reading a lot of sports psychology, started training a bit in sports psychology, did some inner game training, and biofeedback, learning about body/mind interaction, and also started doing some martial arts. I found that the martial arts approach to the body, and to power and strength was very relevant to riding.

I kept riding and teaching, and going to very good riding teachers, who I found didn’t teach me very much, but they were very good at saying, ‘yes, that’s right- no, that’s not right’. I worked quite a bit with Ferdi Eilberg at that time – I also went to Portugal, to Nuno Oliveira, and more recently I’ve worked with von Neindorff. These people have given me feedback you’re on the right course, you’re off it. They’ve very rarely been able to tell me the stuff that I now say to other riders. That has come through my own riding, my own experience – finding out what works for other people.

Whenever I get a big change in a rider I will ask them, ‘what did I say that helped, what have you done differently?’ And I get really valuable input from them. I’ve read a lot, studied a lot, and gradually it has developed into a cohesive theory.

There is more in the new book about the physics of it, about the centres of gravity, what’s actually happening between the rider and the horse, the whole mechanism of the rider on the horse’s back. It started off as a very intuitive experimental learning experience, and gradually became something that is quite stream-lined and that I can justify according to the laws of physics.

Our winters are very cold, and that’s the time when our freelance riding teachers go broke, so I invented the idea of dismounted teaching. I offered two dismounted workshops, a series of six evenings. That meant I had to invent something to do in them. So I invented a whole series of exercises that riders could do lying on the floor, some martial arts exercises that were useful, an introduction to mental rehearsal. That has developed tremendously. I’ve done advanced courses now…

Recently I have had contact with quite a few good riders. I have been interviewing many of the top riders in Britain and the United States for the new book. It is very nice when you have an Olympic rider who asks ‘why does my canter pirouette never work to the right the way it does to the left?’ and you can help them out. 100% of the people I teach tell me how much more pleasure they get out of their riding than they used to. A lot of that is because a lot of the frustration goes… I can remember how frustrated I was because riding seemed such a simple thing that other people could do, and I couldn’t – and I couldn’t find a reason why.

I made the typical mistake of 90% of riders, I knew an awful lot about how it was supposed to be, I’d read a lot of books, I could recite to you what Podhajsky had to say on the subject, but I had very little idea of what was actually happening in my body. A lot of the work I do is based around people finding out what is actually happening with their body, it means that a rider can go away from a lesson with very specific things to focus on – what I am talking about is an exploration, a discovery, an unravelling of a process, rather than into a mould.