Episode 256: Bend is your friend, especially when bridleless

Episode 256_ Bend is your friend, especially when bridleless.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 256_ Bend is your friend, especially when bridleless.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
The concept of the horse bending their body to match the curve is widely accepted. Well, the same thing is going to be true when you go into riding without the bridle. But now you're going to have to get more creative about how you're going to create that bend.

Speaker2:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Speaker1:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I'm here to help you understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. In this podcast, I'm discussing challenging emotions, basic bending for safety and advancing and advanced bending for safety and understanding. I just finished teaching a series of webinars on Bridleless riding as a way to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of my first Bridleless ride in competition. If you didn't catch the webinars, I did also write a series of articles that you can find over on my website, and if enough of you ask for a summary, I might edit together a summary of the Bridleless webinars. One of my favorite parts about teaching is answering all the questions that come in, and oftentimes those questions are phrased in ways that give me insights into the thinking behind the question. The person asking the question where they're coming from, or sometimes they're asked in a way that tickles my brain and causes me to approach answering from a slightly different angle. And there were hundreds of questions that came in, so I had lots of materials to review. Let's start with the challenging emotions. And what I've done here is pulled out a bunch of the phrases or emotions that came up in some of the questions how to overcome tension or feelings of being inadequate, fear, tenseness, anxiety, how to control rapidly beating heart and shallow breathing, how to get your body to relax when entering the show ring, managing your fears, avoiding tension in my body from nerves that confuses or worries my horse.

Speaker1:
When I look at all of these, I oftentimes want to see if there might be one possible cause that could fit many of these situations. And for me, one of the possible causes for potentially all of these is a rider who's in a rush to get. Quote unquote, there. Here's what I want you to consider. What if the emotion is the indicator light on the dashboard of the vehicle? What if the emotion of feeling rushed or frustrated or afraid is actually trying to give you information? Google's definition of rushing is a feeling of constantly being behind, which causes stress and anxiety, feeling like you're always in a race to accomplish tasks on your to do list, leading to frustration if anything holds you up. And Google also says frustration is defined as the feeling of being upset or annoyed, especially because of an inability to change or achieve something. So it often works like this when you're in a rush to get. Quote unquote there, wherever that is. Like, let's say bridleless riding. I find that you often cause many of these problems. When I was a teen and I first imagined riding Bridleless, I actually thought that if I were able to take the bridle off and run like Alec Ramsay on the beach, like in the Black Stallion movie, I thought I would have a feeling of freedom. So without this direct line of thinking. But I'm telling you, it's underneath there.

Speaker1:
My mistake was thinking that the feeling of freedom was going to come from taking off the bridle. Or in my case, I actually decided to go into a halter thinking this was a great first step. But essentially it's the same idea. I thought the tack change changing the headstall would give me the feeling of freedom, and it turned out that it gave me the feeling of being wildly out of control as my horse ran away with me. She was completely unstoppable on a hard packed dirt road. So the feeling I was after was that feeling of freedom that I imagined when I watched the movie or read the book. But what the reality was was that I hadn't prepared myself or my horse, and the feeling of freedom didn't actually come from just taking off the bridle. So what I learned in the next ten years before I did my first bridleless ride and then what I have studied even deeper over the next 20 years, the last 20 years of riding bridleless is that the feeling of freedom was something that I could actually find with the bridle on. That feeling of freedom is actually much more attached for me to the experience of the understanding between horse and rider. So what I found out after being run away with and being very scared by that experience was I committed to understanding more. And as the understanding grew, as my understanding grew and as my horses understanding grew, what grew along with that understanding was a feeling of freedom.

Speaker1:
So back when I was in a rush to get to the Bridleless experience, it caused me to take a huge leap in the physical world, and I basically removed the communication tool that my horse understood. The bridle without replacing it with something else first. I'm just really glad that neither one of us got hurt that day, and I'm also really glad that it didn't scare me enough that I totally dropped the idea. I kept pursuing that deeper and deeper understanding, which actually showed me how I could be achieving this in much smaller steps. What is it that you're wanting to do that's got you a little bit nervous? That could be going on a trail ride alone for the first time or competing in your first show or teaching your horse and advanced movement or like, in my case, riding Bridleless. If you notice, you're in a rush to get there. Sometimes you'll hear people say that you should slow down because if not, you're going to miss the journey. But what does that mean? For me, I think that you'll often try to bypass or skip the understanding that those yucky emotions are pointing towards. What is your fear? Trying to tell you if you are concerned about being able to slow down or stop your horse, if that's what your fear is pointing to, then do you have a solution for that? And more importantly, do you have a solution you believe will work? Because oftentimes you maybe hear me say this is what you could do.

Speaker1:
But if you don't have any experience using that technique and you don't have the experience of feeling it in your body and having your horse do it, then that's still going to cause tenseness to come from you. So oftentimes riders that are in a certain situation, like going to a show and having like a lot of anxiety around it, I'll often find that they're pushing forward against their own will. But you want to be careful because you could end up like me, where I imagined I would have the feeling of freedom when I took the bridle off. But really what I found was a feeling of being run away with. When you get to the point where you can slow down enough that you can evaluate the step before and you can evaluate the next step you're considering, that's when you'll really unlock something. You'll get faster progress and you'll enjoy it more So when the red flags like your anxiety around whether or not you'll be able to slow your horse down when that becomes the warning light and then you have a plan for how to handle it, you know what you already do that's going to slow your horse down and you know what you're working on to verify that even more. Those warning signs actually become challenges that are educational instead of roadblocks. I do not suggest you go all the way to removing the bridle to find those.

Speaker1:
One thing that I gave over and over again for a tip was tying the reins up loosely. That's something that I've been recommending now for 20 years because it's the way that I safely found my way towards Bridleless riding. Tie the reins up with a lot of slack in them so that you can safely reach for that safety net if you need to. But you can also practice your bridleless riding and actually love that. The International Liberty Horse Association, the Google that if you haven't looked it up, you can actually show in a liberty class in the bridle division with the bridle on and the neck rope on underneath there. So if you haven't seen that, check it out. And if you're going to go down to the festival that's happening here in October 2023, look me up. I plan on being around there some. Okay? During my webinar, I also showed videos of my Bridleless training sessions with Willow, and on day three a question came in and I could tell that the person had attended at least one of the previous sessions. And the question just really spun me around and made me answer it in a different way. And I want to share that with you here. So first I'm going to read the question and then I'm going to give you some context. So the question was, so you need to have your collection, quote, solid in order to, quote, move towards bridleless.

Speaker1:
And when I read this, first of all, they already had words in quotes, which in my mind put them up for interpretation, the three words for me that really were. Up for interpretation were collection solid and move towards That means that my definition of collection might be different than your definition of collection. My definition of solid might be different than your definition of solid. And my definition of move towards could be different than your definition of move towards. So even in the asking of the question, we realize that there's a much deeper dive that's needed. The reason this question triggered me to approach it in a different manner was because I knew I had been showing video of Willow doing Walk, trot and canter around my four leaf clover pattern. Way back in episode 39 of this podcast, I discussed Bend is Your Friend, and in that episode I was talking about riding with the bridle. So my idea of Bend in the bridle is that it is for safety because when you can bend the horse's head and neck, when you teach that step by step from the ground and then as if you were mounted and then when you first mount the horse, bending their head and neck around helps prevent some of the common problems that people run into, which would be rearing head tossing, speeding up and not being able to slow down. And so in that way, Bend is your friend with the bridle on? Well, one of the interesting things about about riding bridles, especially if we're not just talking bitless, which is essentially like riding in a halter or some kind of bitless bridle, if you're truly talking about bridles where maybe you have a neck rope, but you don't have anything on the horse's head.

Speaker1:
One of the interesting things about that is that Bend is still your friend, and Bend is still going to be something that you will need for safety. So if I rewind 30 years ago to my first scary bridleless, I never would have been able to bend her using any kind of tool outside of the bridle rein. So I didn't have an understanding developed with her where my seat and my legs or any of these other tools like a neck rope or something like that. I didn't have any of that in place to where I could bend her. I could really barely bend her well. And it was inconsistent with the bridle. So the inconsistent bend with the bridle did not support more advanced bending and that advanced bending, like being able to turn a circle and have that horse bend in its body to match that circle. The concept of the horse bending their body to match the curve is widely accepted. Well, the same thing is going to be true when you go into riding without the bridle, but now you're going to have to get more creative about how you're going to create that bend.

Speaker1:
And so with the bridle system, if you're not bending the horse because of some kind of rein, connection up to their head, what you're essentially doing is you're bending their body and when you successfully can do that. So the way that I do that is going to be with my seat and my legs, my core and my horse's understanding of these three different positions along their sides, as I put one leg in like position 2 or 3 and the other leg in position one, that horse is going to bend around my inside leg and they're going to understand the direction of travel due to how I'm using my legs and my seat. And with that I'm able to create bend throughout their body that fascinatingly enough, reflects as bend in their head and neck. So at the end of the day, the horse that is bending through their body because they understand my seat and leg, cuz that horse also shows that bend throughout their head and neck. And what's interesting about that is that the horse that shows all of that also is saying, Hey, I understand that your legs don't just mean go forward because one of the most basic problems when people start considering riding bridles is the challenge of how you communicate to the horse that every leg doesn't just mean go fast or faster, because in elementary school it is common for the legs to mean go faster. But if we're looking at Bridleless riding, I put that in college and in college, the horse has to have an understanding, a mental concept that the legs mean more than just go faster.

Speaker1:
They can mean bend and shape and they can also regulate speed control. So for me, when I read this question, collections definitely a piece of what I'm going for before I'm going to take the bridle off because it's going to be an indicator that my horse understands that my legs don't just mean go faster and solid is going to be something I am searching for because I don't want there to be mistakes where my horse thinks that the legs just mean go fast or faster, but where it gets a little more questionable is in order to move towards Bridleless riding because to me, I'm moving towards Bridleless riding the whole time that I'm adding more and more understanding to my horse. The beauty of the system that I use is that because I am simultaneously using the bridle to help clarify and working towards riding Bridleless, I'm able to be moving towards Bridleless riding. The whole time that I'm training in the bridle, I'm replacing the things that used to need the bridle reins. So if slowing down with the bridle reins is what your horse understands right now, then I'm going to need to be replacing that with something else first. And in order for that to be solid enough for me to consider the extreme of taking the bridle off, then absolutely I'm going to be moving towards it with the bridle on and I'm going to build that in a way where it feels seamless, where I can tie the reins up and never have to reach for them, because then that way I know I've truly replaced that.

Speaker1:
Cue the rein, cue with something else that takes place in my body and my legs. This might seem overly simplistic, but I really think they're true. Some of the common reasons why riders feel dependent on the reins are because they haven't learned other cues to replace the reins with. Or their horse hasn't learned. Other cues that replace the reins or the rider hasn't learned how to train the horse. Other cues that would replace the reins. So at that point, if you don't know the other cues or your horse doesn't know the other cues, it's going to naturally have you feeling dependent on the reins. These are just a few of the takeaways from teaching these Bridleless webinars. And what I hope you take away from this podcast is that challenging emotions can actually be indicator lights. That basic bending when you have the bridle on is for safety and for advancing and then advanced bending. When you can bend your horse without using the bridle. Reins is also for safety and it indicates a high level of understanding from both the horse and the rider. That's what I have for you today. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Speaker2:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy westfall.com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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