Just Letting Go | RES 077

Ride Every Stride | Horsemanship and Personal Growth with Van Hargis

Don’t know what you can do unless you let go of comfort zone. It’s easy to hold onto what we know and stay in one spot, but unless you branch out, you’ll never know what is just beyond our reach. So there a lot of things that can hold us back in both our humanship and horsemanship. Most of these are in our mind—like a stake in the ground that keeps an elephant from running off from a circus. They could easily tug it free, but they’ve been conditioned since birth to believe that can’t yank that thing out of the ground. So we will be talking about how to not be that elephant, and how we can let go and let our horses grow with us.

Key Takeaways

So how do you ride every stride if you let go of the reins? Well, I like to look at the reins as a last resort steering wheel. There I so much other communication to learn between you and your horse, your body, voice, and weight. And 9 times out of 10 if you do let go, your horse isn’t going to bolt. Thinking your horse is a ticking time bomb is detrimental to your growth and the horse’s too.

More often than not, what we are holding our horses back from doing is just based on our own fears. Getting over that fear can come in steps, but one of the key tickets to letting go is visualizing what you want to happen. Like a batter see’s hitting a ball, let your imagination go first and let your body follow through.

Something I like to say about both us and our horses is that we need to be willfully guided. But to be guided, we have to be moving first. After all, how are you going to ride every stride if you’re not riding! Just take a step, even if it’s in the wrong direction. You have to be moving in order to guide the horse and be guided by what the horse makes you feel.