Way back in November I posted, ‘I'm going to put up a number of clips over the next week or so: cats falling, guys chopping and sawing wood, bush men lighting fires, cheetahs running, dogs shaking--a whole bunch of things.  I'll be making some comments, but really I think the imagery speaks for itself.’

Well, although I’ve been going on about sense of time on the comments to recent entries, I guess it’s been more than ‘a week’ since I wrote this last November!  Bit like the Nick Hughes reply letter…anyway, Trish has been getting on my case so I’m going to resume putting up these clips.

The one we’re looking at today represents something that was a big part of my life for over twenty years.  It’s about performance horses and their riders and trainers.  I got into it completely by accident.  It’s a long story, but when David Dubow died, his wife Erika was left with a whole bunch of horses she’d bought as a ‘business’ but it was really more of a hobby for her.  Now they were costing her a fortune, I was out of a gym, and it seemed only natural for me to step in and take over the running of the horse business.  Talk about diving in at the deep end.

The horses were American quarterhorses imported to Britain to be trained and sold on or used in a Western-style riding business in England.  Some came to us ready to be ridden, but others needed a lot of work before they could be sold on.  I was already familiar with the guys who David had been buying from: Bill House, Dick Hur, and Doug Thompson.  These are all established riders and trainers, and I’d picked up a whole heap of riding information off them informally.  I’d begun to transfer a lot of this understanding into my martial arts practice and teaching.  Some of it had given me a new insight into martial arts concepts and terms that had previously been kind of ambiguous or cryptic. 

For example, the Tai Chi expression ‘controlling a thousand pounds with four ounces’ could almost have been talking about a horse rider.  I’d seen riders at the sales in the States go through a selling performance.  It went something like this.  The guy would ride in on a horse, demonstrate what the horse could do, and then uncinch the saddle and slip it out from underneath himself so now he’s riding bareback.  Then he takes off the bridle and holds it in one hand while he uses one rein around the horse’s neck to go through the same performance.  In other words, there’s no advantage of the bit.  The guy is simply never letting the horse realise he’s 1000 pounds of animal.  He never lets the horse get past the four ounces of his control.  It’s always there.  When I started to understand the sensitivity required to do that, it became a challenge to me to do the same. 

Where in recent comments we’ve been talking about visual processing of information, this work is tactile.  And it’s being performed on an animal that’s often unpredictable.  The only thing you’ve got to go on is touch. 

The years I spent training horses had a profound effect on my practice and teaching.  Every horse brings a different problem to the trainer, and you very quickly learn to find different ways of getting around the problem. It's just like when you're training people.  It's not a stereotypical approach.  Or when you're fighting a new opponent.  It's a new game.  You have to be very adaptable.  And because the horse can't talk, you have to rely on your senses.  People tend to get caught up with language, but working with horses teaches you to get underneath that, to bypass language. 

When you look at this video, you’ll see horses doing spectacular things, but what you can’t see is what the rider is doing to assist the horse or anticipate the horse’s actions.  Going back to the story of how the riders sell the horse by showing off its performance, what you then see afterward sometimes is that the buyer gets on the horse and the horse doesn’t cooperate.  Once he’s been sold, he doesn’t put on the performance he did before; in fact, he usually does the wrong thing or nothing at all because the new rider is miscuing him all over the place.  The horse is talented, but the rider is extremely important.  In the clips, the rider looks like a passenger.  You can’t see what’s going on between him and the horse, but believe me, there’s a lot going on at a tactile level.  To ride at this level, you’ve really got to be switched on.  Otherwise you’re exiting rapidly from the vehicle!  No parachute included.

The phenomenon going on between the rider and the horse was what the Chinese sometimes call ‘listening energy’.  The problem with this principle in martial arts is that the person the master is working with is often extremely compliant.  Horses, from my experience, ain’t.  Especially stallions, and stallions with an attitude really will cut you no slack. 

So you’ve got to be in his heightened state of awareness, but not anxious, because the anxiety will transfer to the horse.  And you’ve got to act instantly and decisively on whatever the horse is doing, or whatever you want the horse to do.  You really do have to be in unison with the animal.  I found that this ability was something I could transfer directly into my martial arts.  The mindset I acquired by training horses was the same one I fight with.  It’s the same mind zone. 

Another thing about horses is the guys who ride them.  My exposure to the American trainers who worked with performance horses gave me a sense of who these guys are.  Typically they’d get a horse and they’ve got 60 days to have him ready; their business would fail if they took any longer.  Some of these horses are dangerous.  (At a personal level, I’ve been bitten, butted, kicked, stomped—you name it.  In fact, several times over the years people who’ve trained with me have remarked on the ‘muscularity’ of a region of my back.  I’ve had to laugh and tell them that the great big lump on my scapula is actually where I was bitten by a stallion—the teeth marks are still visible.)  To be in a profession where you have to get back up there every day and do your business no matter what’s happened to you the day before—these guys are mentally tough.  But they’re not hard men in terms of how they present themselves.  They slouch around, real low-key, don’t say a lot, and they’ve had more broken bones and physical confrontations than many fighters who act the tough-guy role.  You have to have a raw courage to get on some of these anaimals.  My hat’s off to these guys. 

There’s lots to tell about horses and riding, but I’ll end on the clip for now.