04/06/2025
I was maybe 21 or 22 when I had a lesson that’s stayed with me ever since.
It was one of those early spring days when the arena was still cold, but the sun was shinning.
My horse, a spirited youngster, was tense, and so was I. We were both fighting each other, me trying to hold everything together, him trying to escape everything I was holding.
My trainer at the time was soft-spoken, but her feel in the saddle was sharper than any words. She called me into the middle with just a glance.
She didn’t say much. Just walked up, took the reins from my hands, and held them for a moment.
Then she looked at me and said,
"You’re holding your breath. And you’re holding the reins the same way."
I laughed awkwardly, because she wasn’t wrong.
“Okay,” I said. “Soften my hands. Try not to die. Breathe. Got it.”
But she shook her head.
“No, it’s more than that,” she said. “The reins are the breath of the ride. They should move like breath. Expand. Release. Flow.”
I don’t remember the rest of the ride. But I remember sitting in silence at the end of the day, thinking about what she said.
Back then, I didn’t fully get it. I was too focused on outline, on contact, on “getting it right.” But over time, the lesson kept echoing back to me. Especially in the harder rides, the ones where nothing seemed to click.
And I started to notice:
When I held my breath, I held the reins.
When I was soft and present, so were they.
And when the reins breathed, so did my horse.
The reins aren't tools of control.
They’re a shared inhale, a shared exhale.
A rhythm not made of sound, but of feel.
Now, years later, it’s one of the first things I feel for in every ride:
Are we breathing?
Are we listening?
Because that space, the space between pressure and release, between ask and allow,
that’s where the magic lives.
That’s the breath of dressage.
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