Watching Walter Teach

Dear Friends,

When Walter comes to visit us, he teaches not only me and Pat, but also a handful of Pat’s Mastery Students. I love to watch these lessons as much as I can, because it is fascinating to see how Walter brings the horse and the rider together and how true he stays to his process. In fact, after I had my breakthrough with Remmer, I found myself being more focused on what the horse was doing and then what the rider needed to do. Let me be more specific. The night of my breakthrough, Walter and I watched the video of my lesson so I get a second bite at the cherry, seeing what I felt as Walter was teaching me. I love to be able to do it so quickly after the lesson because the feelings are still so present for me and I get to ask Walter a lot of questions.  

As we were watching, I said to Walter "How do you see all these details?" because he says things like, "close good your little finger," and I can't believe he can see that when I'm on the other side of the arena! And then he told me his secret: "I only watch the hind legs. From there I can see or know everything that is not happening." Wow. Suddenly I realized that my problem was in trying to watch everything - the whole horse, the whole rider, and then trying to figure out what was needed to improve the situation. He told me that it is all about the hind legs, so when you see that they are under-tracking, or pushing instead of 'carrying' the horse, lagging out behind, shorter on one side, etc., it tells him what is going wrong and therefore what to fix.  

So as I watched the Mastery Students riding, I found myself watching the hind legs and pretty soon I was thinking "not enough schwung...or rein too tight on the right side...or not enough inside leg..." and yet those were things I could mostly not tell by watching the whole horse and rider...I couldn’t see what to correct in order to make the biggest difference. This is something I would work on in training sessions with our faculty - what one thing could you fix in order to make the biggest difference for a student and their horse? As a teacher, that's the art; there's where mastery really lies. Anyone can pick on a million things and still not make a valuable difference!

Yours Naturally,
Linda

P.S. Click here to see a quick video clip from the breakthrough lesson I wrote about on Tuesday!