Canter-Thyme
Woop Woop :dance::skip:
What a great ride today turned out to be....
I went up with the sole intention of trying out my new Rockin S Snaffle
http://www.markrashid.com/forsale_bit.html
Then when I got into the arena I saw the mounting block and thought 'I'll teach Thyme to stand alongside that'. I had got her stood still next to it last week when I wanted to ride bareback but it was not a well-taught or well-learnt lesson so today she swung out again. I tried to tell her what I was after and she got pretty frustrated by it immediately - probably because I taught her in such a rushed & confused way in the first place. "I'll teach her properly this time" I thought. BUT my plan was to test the new bit. So I was in a hurry and was feeling impatient with her frustration.......
A few seconds after launching into this impulsive lesson a snippet from Kathleen Lindlay came to me....
"I would go into the arena thinking I'd work on rhythm. Then I'd notice the horse cutting the corner so I'd work on that. Then I'd see there was a brace so I'd work on softness. Then I'd get the brace in transitions so I'd work on those... After a while neither me nor my horse would know WHAT we were working on..." I am VERY familiar with this type of approach!
So I abandoned the mounting block idea. After all, I have only just got Thyme standing for mounting anyway (which she still is :angel
and I hopped on. She seemed pretty unsure of it at first. She was not softening to it when I picked up a contact. Instead she started offering lots of responses and showing frustration. Going back, turning, head tossing, stamping, snorting, pawing......
It came to me that my reaction to all that - in fact my view of it - has changed since the Mark Rashid clinic. I saw the behaviour as 'offering responses' and then getting frustrated because she did not know what to do, and it is natural to feel frustrated when we are unsure. So my response was to sit very still and maintain the light contact which was basically saying "I want something" and to ignore all the incorrect 'answers' she was offering to me which was telling her "no that's not what I want". Eventually we got the light bulb click of Thyme flexing her jaw and poll, while staying still and holding the bit calmly in her mouth. Hurray. She went quite nicely in the bit after that.
I realised afterwards that in the past I would have started trying to correct each of her responses: correcting going back with some leg, going forward with some rein, pawing, stamping with some random 'no' signal that would almost certainly be meaningless! So we would have ended up both offering each other loads of 'noise' and activity and would not have had any idea of what each other was saying :tongue: It's a miracle my lovely Charlie ever managed to decode my wishes.....
Anyway, Thyme went so well in the bit that I decided to take her out of the arena into a larger sloping field for our first canter. She was fab. I walked and trotted round it both ways to get her used to unfamiliar sights/smells etc. She was very starey at first but soon chilled out. Then I set off in a diagonal line across the field slighly uphill in trot, clicked for canter and she just popped up easily :dance:
Came back to trot nicely when asked. Did that a couple more times, this time combining the click with a canter aid behind the girth. She cantered easily each time, bless her. Even managed to canter round a corner! She was unbalanced as you'd expect but for a first go I am delighted with her :cloud9::angel: My baby girl can CANTER :running:
layfull: 
