Chicory Meadow Farm

05/28/2024

Wally and Annabelle💖

05/28/2024

Balthazar and Marly💞

05/28/2024

Bruno and Victoria♥️

05/28/2024

Milkyway going out with the girls!

05/28/2024

Our Memorial Day barn campout 🌧🌧🌧🌧

05/25/2024

❤🐴

05/24/2024

9 Facts About Perfectionism: A mindset that must be unlearned or will ultimately bring your riding down 🧠

1. Every rider makes mistakes, even the best of the best.
It’s an unavoidable, universal experience and all a part of the sport.

2. Mistakes are learning opportunities.
You can grow from them and become better because of them.

3. Hyper-focusing on mistakes helps them happen.
They both become a self-fulfilling prophecy and take your focus away from your ride.

4. Mistakes mean you’re on the right track.
You can’t improve, learn, overcome challenges, and level up without them.

5. It’s not what happened but how you move forward from it that matters the most.
Moving on from the mistake matters more than the mistake itself.

6. Mistakes are temporary.
Work to fix and put them in the past instead of dwelling and allowing them to stick around.

7. Mistakes don’t define you.
You may have had a bad ride, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad rider.

8. Social media only shows highlights.
Everyone is struggling whether they post about it or not.

9. Perfect doesn’t exist.
It’s impossible to meet unattainable expectations.

A perfectionist mindset and a lack of an ability to accept mistakes will do much more harm than good for an athlete’s mental performance. Mistakes are a normal part of sport and life. Everyone makes mistakes no matter how talented of an athlete they may be. Since perfect doesn’t exist, holding yourself to an unrealistic standard will only set you up for disappointment every ride. Instead, give yourself permission to make mistakes, using them to your advantage by viewing them as valuable feedback and learning opportunities. Refer to this post whenever you begin to feel hard on yourself, and remember that you are not alone! 🏇🏽💭✨
www.mindalignperformance.com

05/24/2024

Please share with your horsey friends!

05/22/2024

17hhs! Wow Rayas! Who else can do that???

05/22/2024

05/22/2024

05/21/2024

A seemingly small fix that fixes a million faults---(“A million” might be a slight exaggeration.)

We see it so often in the photos of the better riders like in this one of Bill Steinkraus.

What is this simple remedy? And why is it so damnably difficult to own?

It is so simple but so elusive---

In the air over the jump RAISE YOUR CHIN. Or, if you prefer, “LOOK UP.”

That’s it. Look at the sky. When you raise your chin it has a strong ripple effect of opening your chest, opening your shoulders. It holds your sternum away from the horse.

Try this---Lift your chin and see how far and how easily you can bring down your upper body from your waist. Now do the same thing, but this time drop your head and look down. Feel the difference?

I wonder if we tend to be so programmed to look where we are going that we look down over jumps at the landing?

For whatever reason, if you are, like so many of us are, a looker downer, try to be a chin lifter and see what a massive improvement it can make.

05/20/2024

It’s the pink glove!🌸

05/16/2024

05/16/2024

Today I want to debunk some of the most famous beliefs about horses, always used to justify the exploitation they endure. I personally like to call them "fairy tales" too, as it's just what they are: beautiful stories being told over and over to make appear right and nice what it's not so at all.
-"Horses need a job, as they are wasted without it...." No, horses don't need any job, they only need to be horses in order to be happy. Freedom, forage and friends: that's everything they truly need, as they just don't care at all about working and they surely don't feel wasted without a job.
-"You can never force such a big animal to do what he doesn't want to..." Of course you can. With the right training and mental conditioning you can absolutely force horses to do anything you want and what's more, with them being prey animals that are very easily scared, this can be even quite easy to get.
-"You can see horses performing a task even without the rider, so it means that they love their job..." No, it simply means that they are conditioned to do so through the training they got, just like a sort of robot automatically repeating what it's programmed to do over and over.
-"There are many horses performing different activities at liberty, meaning that they enjoy what they are doing..." No, being at liberty doesn't always mean at all the horses to be enjoying what they do: very often they are simply previously trained with different tools and coercive methods, in order for them to simply repeat at liberty too what they forcefully learnt.
-"With the right desensitization you can get a bombproof horse not being scared by anything at all..." Horses are prey animals who naturally tend to remain always alert and reactive, as it's just their inner instinct that made them survive throughout the years of evolution, so horses not reacting anymore to anything are most likely just turned off because of the learned helplessness: through a coercive training they learned that there's nothing they can do to avoid what happens to them, so they end by enduring whatever they have to face, no matter what and no matter how.
-"Horses need us to be a boss to obey to, that's what they do with other horses too...." First of all horses do perfectly know us not to be a horse and anyhow they don't need any boss at all, they only need a reliable calm guide to protect and support them: in nature too they don't like violence at all and the aggressive horses are usually isolated, as they don't represent the strength and sense of safety that a herd truly needs. In fact horses use aggressiveness only to protect their resources or territory and to fight for the reproduction, surely not to be a boss on each other: on the contrary they tend to naturally follow a horse representing a trustworthy wise guide, but surely they aren't ever forced to do it, it's a free choice.

Image credit: Anne Wipf

05/16/2024

Zabella and Stella together again💖

05/15/2024

05/13/2024

Absolutely!

Please share with your horsey friends!

05/13/2024

This. . . . . always!

Please share with your horsey friends!