Progress

Photo courtesy of Sara Fogan

This photo of Galahad was taken in 2011, before I bought him
and before his serious training as a dressage horse began.

 

Yesterday, I finally had a few hours free so I could watch my dressage trainer, Laurel van der Linde, school my horse, Galahad. While I do spend time with him every day, now that my hypnotherapy practice is growing, I don’t get as many opportunities to watch him work as often as I used to. My horse’s training is much further along than my own, so it is a real treat for me to be able to see Galahad’s progress for myself. And he has progressed a lot in the past five weeks or so.

When I watched him work yesterday, I suddenly understood what my grandparents meant when they told me how grown up I seemed since the last time they saw me. The Santa Ana winds were blowing hard during his schooling session, but Galahad remained calm, relaxed and focused the whole time he was in the arena. Even from my seat outside the arena, I could see that his back was up and stretched all the way through his topline; I think I got a virtual back stretch just watching him move. The length of his trot strides was longer, and the movement of his hindquarters reminded me of pumping pistons as my horse pushed his body forward. When Laurel asked for canter transitions, my horse easily picked up a comfortable, rhythmic canter that seemed both slower and more contained than I remembered him doing last time I watched them train. Galahad has always been a very balanced horse in that he carries his weight pretty equally (self-carriage) at each gait—walk, trot and canter—while tracking both to the right and to the left. Yesterday, he seemed even freer in the shoulder and through the back while cantering on the right lead, which has always been a little stiffer for him in the past. Also, he has had a tendency to rush a bit in some of his canter-trot transitions—especially when on the right lead—but yesterday Galahad’s body moved in that even, flowing cadence of a true rocking-horse canter.

I was most impressed by the way he was able to maintain an almost-vertical flexion in his poll and the lift in his back throughout Laurel’s ride. It has taken a lot of time, training and conditioning to get him to this point, but Galahad seems to understand that his work is easier to do the more collected he is. How do I know this? Well, at the risk of seeming to anthropomorphize my horse’s interpretation of collection, whenever he received praise after he completed a movement, he needed very little aid to transition back into what he had just done.

He suddenly seemed like a much more mature and “together” version of himself than I had ever seen. I couldn't take my eyes off him: Is this really my horse? I kept thinking. Laurel has been fine-tuning his flying lead changes, and Galahad did some gorgeous ones yesterday. He looked like a real dressage horse. I have already started visualizing, imagining, picturing and pretending how he will look doing—and how it will feel to ride—his single tempi lead changes, one day.

 

I am so lucky to have this wonderful horse in my life. Now, I have to work hard to keep up with him!

 

 

Sara R. Fogan, C.Ht. is a certified hypnotherapist based in Southern California. She graduated with honors from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in 2005. For more information about Calminsense Hypnotherapy® and to set up an appointment, please visit http://www.calminsensehypnotherapy.com/.

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