The Rollercoaster

Riding is hard in every way. Obviously, physically it’s a challenging activity. All four quadrants of your body must be doing different things simultaneously, while sitting on a horse who has a mind of its own and is moving different parts of its body in different ways – sometimes unpredictably. Anyone who says, “You just sit there, the horse does all the work!” is showing their hand – we instantly know they’ve never actually ridden a horse. I deal with those comments by saying “Thank you! If it looks like I’m doing nothing up here, then I’m riding well.” Because isn’t that the ultimate goal? To sit on a horse in perfect harmony, moving as one, with imperceptible aids?

Photo Credit: Mutt Love Photography

But there’s more to it than the physical side of learning to ride. Mentally, it is a very demanding sport. There is so much to learn, so much to think about. Trying to master seemingly basic skills like posting the trot or having quiet, following hands takes a ton of focus, as well as hours upon hours of practice. Then once we figure out what our bodies are supposed to be doing, we must learn the intricate details of shaping and balancing the horse’s body underneath us. And yet, that’s not even the hardest part.

Well then, one asks, what is the most challenging thing about riding horses? It’s the emotional rollercoaster. Horses bring out our innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires. They have this way of making us face our life lessons, and deal with emotions we can otherwise push down and keep locked away deep inside of ourselves. You can be high as a kite one ride, and down in the dumps the next. If there’s one thing that’s certain in horses, it’s uncertainty.

The journey is never linear. As much as we would love it if we could just make steady upward progress, part of the thrill of riding is actually the ups and downs. If it were always easy, always steady, always moving in the right direction, the good rides wouldn’t mean as much. We wouldn’t have the same appreciation for our horses, ourselves, or our accomplishments if it came easily. It is the very fact that riding is hard that makes it so rewarding when it goes well.

It's not just the actual riding that’s hard, either; it’s everything to do with horses. Building a partnership and communicating with an animal that doesn’t speak our language is an incredible challenge. Yes, we do that with house pets as well, to a degree. But building a relationship with a house pet is not the same as riding and handling a prey animal that is ten times our size and hardwired to flee from predators (us).

Then there’s the emotional side connected to grief and loss. As animals that can die from a tummy ache, who are terrified of being eaten alive and yet seem to be the most accident-prone creatures on the planet, we inevitably face some level of heartbreak by loving them. Things might be going great in the saddle, and then the next day our beloved mount comes in from the field lame. Just when we thought we were about to start learning flying changes, we are thrown back to trotting straight lines and walking corners.

The better you get, the more your coach throws at you. If you feel like you’re getting worse because you’re being given more things to work on each lesson, remember that your coach will only teach you the things you’re ready to learn. It’s a sign that you’re progressing when you start being told to do more things. Yet this often becomes a trigger for us. We might feel like we aren’t getting anywhere, that we suck, that we should just give up.

So, why does riding horses seem to take us on this emotional rollercoaster? Because they have a way of bringing up our life lessons. Half of learning to ride is learning to ride, the other half is learning about ourselves. For better or for worse, we always seem to end up with the horse that triggers something in us.

Often, we attract horses into our lives that mirror our personality. In addition to that, as we spend more time with them, they take on characteristics of our personality. Horses and humans both have mirror neurons. These mirror neurons enable us to mirror emotions and actions, as well as empathize, learn via observation, and reflect energy back to one another. I have both witnessed and experienced horses’ temperaments change over time due to the influence of the humans they are around, as well as the other horses they live with.

Different people bring out different personality traits in each horse they work with, and vice versa. Have you ever worked with a person who just grated on your nerves? Or met someone you instantly “clicked with” and struck an immediate friendship? This happens between horses, as well as between humans and horses as well.

There is an old saying “the world is your mirror,” meaning what you notice in others is actually what you see in yourself. Oftentimes the things we find triggering in our horses or in other people are characteristics we ourselves possess. We might get upset with our horse for spooking, for example, but the root cause of that emotion is fear, because we get scared of losing control or falling off when they spook. So we are mad at our horse for being afraid, when we, in fact, are equally afraid. Or we get frustrated with them for not understanding when we are asking, but we are actually equally frustrated with ourselves for not being able to get them to do what we want.

If we are impatient and too focused on the end result, we might attract horses into our lives that make us slow down and live in the moment. This can happen in the form of an injury that forces us to take a step back in our training, a horse that is more anxious and needs things slowed down into smaller sessions, or a variety of other scenarios. If we focus on the journey versus the end result, we enjoy the process and find we learn even more and jump further ahead in the grand scheme of things. If we get stuck on trying to get there faster, then we keep getting new “setbacks” that add to that life lesson until we learn it.

Horses are very quick to assess us, as their survival depends on “reading the room.” They figure out what is acceptable (safe) and what is risky. Then they look for the easiest way of doing things. Work smarter not harder, as the saying goes. Often, we get frustrated and call them lazy or sometimes even dumb, but the smartest horses are the ones that are quickest to figure out that if they pretend not to understand something, they might not have to do it!

We have to develop the ability to read horses the way they read us and figure out whether they don’t understand something/find it uncomfortable, or if they’re just smart enough to know how to get out of doing it. This is a critical ability to have as a rider, because we need to be firm with an evasive horse, but compassionate with one that doesn’t understand or has a physical problem that is causing the work to be difficult or potentially even painful.

One of the lessons that horses teach us is to be compassionate and patient when they are struggling. We must learn to empathize with them and determine the root cause of why they are having a hard time doing what we are asking – or why they are ignoring us. If we simply get mad at them or frustrated when things aren’t going well, we often end up making them feel frustrated or apprehensive about their work. We need to learn to control our emotions and not spiral in the moment.

When we are learning, we also need to treat ourselves with compassion. We don’t get on a green horse and expect it to know how to leg yield, so why do we get so down on ourselves when we are learning, or when we don’t know how to do something? Often, we are better at being compassionate toward other people or our horses than we are toward ourselves. If that is the case, try taking a step back and looking at it from a different perspective. Encourage yourself as you would a friend, instead of tearing yourself down.

Life is full of lessons; it is one of the joyful things about living. As Steve Siebold stated, “You’re either growing or dying; stagnation does not exist in the universe.” We might find some of these life lessons frustrating, but they’re also what contribute to the joy of being alive. Feeling like we’ve learned or accomplished something is a wonderful thing. The next time our horse presents us with a learning experience, instead of being frustrated, what if we thank them for showing us the next thing we need to learn?