No matter what discipline your ride you want a balanced horse. You want a safe horse. You want a horse that says YES! and is always up for new adventures.
You want a horse that can be both a performance horse and a family horse.
In short you want a horse that can be an extension of your thoughts and body while at the same time being able to freely express itself.
Finally, you want a horse that has complete wellness in mind and body, and which imparts the same wellness and joy to you.
This roadmap will help you and your horse get there.
Think about the horse training in the same way that you would think about martial arts training. Some of it is for fitness, wellness, suppleness, and strength. Some of it is training of the mind and emotions.
As in martial arts there is a very logical progression through different levels that correspond to the different color belts in martial arts.
At the end of the colored belts you get the black belt. After the blackbelt there is of course any amount of decades of mastering – what martial artists call the dans. But you need to get to the blackbelt as a base minimum and once you have the blackbelt you really do have a level of competence and freedom that most other people just don’t have.
So, in this course we start with the green horse and we take this horse through a serious of levels to eventually achieve the piaffe, which is the equine equivalent of the black belt.
Most people think of the piaffe as something unachievable, but in fact it’s something every horse does in nature and when the horse can do this under a rider, at the riders command, both horse and rider can move in 3 dimensions and the horse can become an extension of the riders thoughts and body.