Lakeland Celebration

The Lakeland Celebration was fantastic.  Right from the get-go, our audience was one of our most interactive, vocal and enthusiastic in the whole tour.  Reina, the HSUS rescue horse was fascinating, she’s a Left-Brain Extrovert whose dignity had been shattered, so she was really defensive and appeared aggressive when Pat went to mount her.  Up until then she’d been doing great, but when it came time to ride, she could not give permission and had zero trust.  Watching Pat transform her opinion was fascinating and the true mark of natural horsemanship. The next day Reina was completely different.  What Pat can do in 30 minutes takes most of us 30 hours, weeks or months!

The best part is that Reina was adopted by one of our top student’s younger brother and Pat offered to take Reina for 2 weeks to make sure he’d gotten her over the ‘hump’.

Remmer was outrageous this weekend – so motivated, exuberant, and playful… like I’ve never seen him before!  Allure’s hind legs were stocked up on Saturday so instead of taking him into my session on extroverts and introverts, I asked if I could use Lauren’s new horse Westpoint.  He’s just like Allure and showed off for Left-Brain Extroverts!  Playing with him was so much fun and I was able to demonstrate that if you encourage a Left-Brain Extrovert to do what he wants, pretty soon he’s interested in what you want.  And presto… it worked again

And my lesson with Walter Zettl went well.  People told me how much they enjoyed it and said they could tell how far we’d come.  But it’s hard for me to feel that because I’m so busy doing what Walter tells me to do and struggling with my fluidity and communication with Remmer under the circumstances!  For sure I felt some really super moments in our developing pirouettes, piaffe-passage transitions and flying changes.  Phew!

The Savvy Spotlights were, once again, inspiring and very impressive.  The standard here in Florida is very good, we had entries from Georgia and the Carolinas too.  Pat stepped in and helped a few whose horses got quite Right-Brain about being in front of a 1000+ people, and of course we all love that because it’s highly educational – a lesson with Pat!

Finally watching Lauren ride her upcoming star, Westpoint, was breathtaking… and her Olympic story is always riveting and a good tear-jerker. She’s quite a role model.

Naturally Yours,

Linda