Pocahontas is in town

Have you ever noticed how we take our riding soooo serious?

This morning while brushing my hair I decided to do the Pocahontas thing, 2 braids, and this at my age 😉 This is also when I had to smile and think about how we take things so serious. When did we forget that life, and riding especially, was fun? Sure, nothing ever is only just fun and games, but why do we loose our sense of wonder, our ability to laugh and just be surprized by whatever comes next? Like children do. They rarely question laughing, and I am often fascinated by their ability to just be in the moment.

We have all heard it before: “horses teach us to be in the moment.” But somehow we very seldom manage that, to just be in the moment. And we are so serious when we ride. Always. How exhausting is that?

I am sure we have all done the thing where you have a plan what you are going to do whilst riding, let’s say flying changes, but once we start riding, the trot transitions are not really any good. Then we are so serious about our plan we made yesterday after dinner, that we cannot be flexible. Then there is this thing with perfection… We persist that everything must be perfect. Who lives in that world? Brené Brown (go check her out) says that perfection is the death of joy and creativity. If you aim for perfect flying changes when the horse is doing not so well with trot transitions, as a perfectionist you will most likely not be able to respond in a creative way to work on trot transitions, but probably insist in a gloomy way to perfect the flying changes.

What I personally love about riding is that my horse teaches me more than I could ever imagine to teach him. And at the risk of giving him human attributes, he has a really great sense of humour! So I laugh a lot and often when I ride! Just imagine me riding him ala Pocahontas :-)) This doesn’t mean that I don’t want him to do the exercises correctly, I most certainly do. But my bigger intention is that we both have fun and enjoy the ride.

Riding, for most people, starts as a hobby, and isn’t a hobby meant to be enjoyable? There is that joy word again…so let´s get over ourselves and try not to be too serious, and maybe, heaven forbid, even be joyful.