Alexander Technique and Riding

ALEXANDER AND RIDING

Who Was Alexander? Who Comes For Lessons? Alexander & Riding

Your horse looks to you for direction and leadership. You supply the mind, your horse provides the feet. It’s no wonder such a strong emphasis is placed on connection.

The ideal is to achieve lightness and freedom of movement, suppleness and obedience from the horse, poise from the rider, an efficient symbiosis in motion.

The relationship of human poise and balance to horse locomotion applies to any riding technique.

That is the ideal, of course. The reality tends to wreak a great deal more frustration in the average rider. I have found in working with clients in the Hudson Valley, so many of whom have the horse bug, that Alexander works beautifully in helping them better understand what they already know innately about their horse’s movement and its relationship to their own bodies. Because they have already been introduced to this level of awareness, riders often become my best Alexander students. They also become better riders.

The tipping point is your connection to the horse through its back and mouth. As Lorna Faraldi, an Alexander teacher who worked teaching horse clinics with Janet Black explained: every little imbalance, be it fear, doubt or confusion, comes through as static and causes the horse to look elsewhere. In gaining greater awareness of your body, when to inhibit (or wait) and when to direct (allow the intent to come through), you enhance your understanding of your horse’s aids by improving your ability to communicate them.

Udo Bürger, in his book The Way to Perfect Horsemanship, explains it this way:
“The first thing that a rider must learn, if he aims to become an artist, is the art of relaxation. This means detachment, serenity, enjoyment of work for the sake of beauty, unconcern with success or failure, praise or criticism… Towards this end he must learn to meditate whenever he is given the opportunity to relax, to loosen excessive mental and physical tension. No valuable work can be produced without thought….

“Posture is all-encompassing: breathing is the path, and awareness is the result. If we inhibit awareness through contortions of the body or contortions of the mind, the results will be the same: a rigid being and, in riding, an inflexible seat. The correct posture alone has the power to open one’s consciousness.”

Sally Swift similarly addresses this in her book Centered Riding, emphasizing the learning and discovering awareness of one’s self, of where your body is, its different parts and how they work as a unifed whole so that horse and rider become as one, enjoying the common communication and greater ease of movement.

It is in achieving that greater ease in movement, that strength in communication that those ideals start to become your relationship with your horse, and you will find that your horse likely has as much to teach you about Alexander as I do.