Riding Freya, cont.

Apparently, I completely missed posting last week.  I didn't even realize until the week was half over and then my schedule was so hectic, I didn't have time to write.  This week, though, things are getting back to the normal state of chaos and confusion, so my brain can remember that it is, in fact, Monday.

I wrote earlier about my first attempts with Freya to start working on balance.  Thankfully, I had a lesson with her a couple of weeks ago, and my instructor was able to work with me on a more advanced level, so I could make some progress, instead of blindly feeling my way through.

The first thing we worked on, and in fact, the only thing we worked on, was asking Freya to yield and soften through the poll.  To do that, we slowed down her walk and later her trot, to give her the ability to balance herself better.  What we found at first is that her initial response to my request was to jack her neck up as high as it would go and stick her nose out so it was almost parallel to the ground.  Much like I had when I worked on my own, we tried an assortment of exercises designed to help her without putting a lot of pressure on her.  So things like shoulder-in, small circles, walking a square.  We also experimented with my position.  

For about 15 minutes, nothing worked.  But we kept trying, and experimenting.  My instructor thought it might be the bit putting pressure on the roof of her mouth because of her extreme head raising, but I knew that couldn't be it because I had a Myler mouthpiece with a broken mouthpice, tongue relief, and a very low port.  There was no way that the bit could be jack-knifing in her mouth like a regular snaffle could.  It was possible that she didn't like the bit, of course, but my gut told me it was just because she'd become accustomed to being allowed to move in a very unbalanced way.

Finally, my instructor asked me to use a bit more pressure on the reins.  We'd tried every other variation except that because my initial attempts at asking for balance prior to the lesson had indicated she would be really fussy about the pressure.  But nothing else was working.  So I used more pressure on the reins, kept my hands low, made sure I was sitting back, and asked her to move forward slowly and with softness through her poll.  I should note that I wasn't wearing spurs or using my whip at all.  Just asking with the tone of my body, some light leg pressure, and probably about 2 pounds of pressure on the reins.

At first, Freya's response was even worse.  She started going backward and sideways and then her front feet came off the ground.  None of her antics were particularly intimidating to me because of my work with Nimo, who spent years teaching me how important balance in the saddle is with his spooking, spinning, and bolting tendencies, but I also know she is much more sensitive that Nimo was in terms of her mental state.  So I worked on finding a way to still be clear what I was looking for, but give her openings to move forward.  And within a minute, she was giving me what I asked for.  The extreme reactions were gone, perhaps because she realized what I was asking was not nearly so hard as she thought it would be:)

Once my instructor and I had worked out the nuances of what Freya needed from her rider to understand what she was being asked to do, I got off and put Gemma on.  I'll admit I didn't know what to expect.  I had to work pretty hard to convince Freya to soften for me, and I knew Gemma didn't have the same experience in the saddle.  So would she be able to get anything?  

It turns out the answer was an amazing yes.  When Gemma did the same things I had done in the saddle, she got the same results.  I'm sure it helped a lot that Freya had worked with me first, but it was pretty cool to see Science of Motion principles work with an 8-year-old on a horse just learning.  You can watch a short video of the work they were doing below (note that mobile users may need to switch to Desktop view to view it).

So the lesson was a huge step forward, and gave me to information I needed to start working with Freya more frequently to help her change the way she moves to something that is more balanced.  We still have a long road ahead of us, but I'm super excited to see how Freya develops.