10/03/2025
Forward motion is essential to a horse's wellbeing.
It's very human to be more comfortable with stillness. Often when I teach people and I introduce one extra task, they freeze to process - they can no longer move and hear input, enacting them in motion. Many people experience fear of moving with horses, and convince themselves that going slow or being stationary is safer on a horse. It is easy to understand why it feels that way -
So you can imagine why it is difficult for a human to understand a horse's need to move -
Horses, from birth, are pushed biologically: mentally and physically for movement. Movement is safety, movement is regulation. People love to look at the horse from their OWN perceptions of safety, especially now, often using pseudo science or popularized therapy jargon in an anthropomoprhic way to look at the horse.
But if we look at the horse in its true nature - free of our assumptions and learned methods and principles and so on - filters we've learned to see the horse through - movement is natural and necessary for the horse.
When I have a nervous horse, one of the first things I like to do to help them is find rhythmic movement. Not just disjointed chaotic movement - and this here is key.
Rhythmic movement helps horses learn to breathe deeply, processing the world around them while simultaneously learning to focus in on one simple task. It doesn't say DON'T look at things, it doesn't force the horse forward - rhythmic movement gathers chaotic energy and funnels it into productive, aware, calm, and focused movement. This is where horses can feel safest -
Not only does it allow for deep and regular breathing, but creating a pattern of predictability helps horses learn and recieve aids and inputs far better. A "soft" hand that comes out of nowhere with no predictable pattern is much more jarring than a hand that comes WITHIN the rhythm. A horse who can feel the swing of a rider and get within the circuit of aids can be responsive and supple because of a pattern of predictability - the aid comes not outside the center of the rider but within.
Probably everyone has experienced a horse who is "perfectly calm" standing still with some stimulus (let's say a young horse saddled, seeming just fine) and have that same horse come completely unglued once moving with that same stimulus (the saddled horse moves off and begins bucking). There is a huge difference here between accepting stimulus in a standstill (which so easily turns to freezing or tuning out) to feeling, understanding and completely accepting it in motion -
Motion is so important to horses wellbeing, mentally and physically. Good, organized forward motion makes horses sound. It calms them. It teaches them, soothes them, and so much more.
It's humans who do not like the horse's forward motion, and find all sorts of ways to frame their blocking of forward energy to make it sound ethical in all kinds of mental gymnastics.
If you love a horse, you need to learn to love forward motion. Not crazy out of control forward motion - organized, rhythmic and balanced motion. But, you have to develop a seat and some trust in movement to create that - it's a lot easier to find ways out that make you sound nice, than practice and study and toil over your seat for years, which is what that takes.
Photo by Jessie Cardew - explaining to a student how to allow forward motion to come through in fine motor control movements where it is quite easy to accidentally block or shut it down.
