Long And Low
And our third time working on head lowering. This slow, easy, boring session is brought to you by: apples! A very high value treat for him.
It was a long slow lazy sort of ride. For me. It gave me lots of time to think and ponder and listen to Rusty breath. I came to realizations that I knew already. Kind of. Things I realized in fully thought out ideas instead of half formulated feelings. I know Rusty has a high double whorl. That he has two personalities. A silly joker who’s not afraid of anything. Then there’s his more serious side. A very nervous hard worker who has great powers of concentration. I know he gets worried about things. That he’s an over achiever.
As we meandered slowly about I listened to him breath. Every time I asked for something that he even slightly didn’t understand his breath got shallow and noisy. I could hear it roaring in and out of his lungs. He was breathing like a horse under heavy exercise. At a walk. He wants so bad to be perfect to get what I am asking of him just right. Anything I ask for he does to the extreme. No simple getting the job done for him. He will do it then add more and more until he has himself tied into a knot.
We will see if he stops worrying so much about this and does start to relax eventually.
Until then, I saw lots that I did really like when I watched the video. I was afraid that teaching this would throw him onto his forequarters. Instead I saw many moments where he was lifting beautifully through the shoulders. Truly rounding while stretching long and low. I saw his tail swinging rhythmically, no swishing or wringing. I think it is starting to help him relax even through the worrying.
The other thing I’ve been working on along with this is riding without reins. Coyote will work completely from seat and legs. It’s something I’ve always installed in a horse. I’m not doing it with Rusty though. Not on purpose. Back when I used to start horses I was riding all the time. There’s been a long stretch inbetween where I was busy having children. A good deal of time where I was sick pf training horses. All I wanted to do was sit on Coyote bareback and plod around in a halter. Coming back to training there’s a lot I need to relearn, re-remember.
Rusty still hardly ever gets ridden. I’ve found as I make the effort to drop my reins that his over thinking, over reacting applies to this as well. No big surprise there. I’ve known he does that when I ask for turns on the quarters. I touch him with a leg and he shoots off. Then I try to ride him off and he spins on some quarter or other.
With no rein to aid in the guiding I touch him with a leg and he curls around that leg bracing hard in the opposite direction. He has trouble curving to the right anyway but this is a bit extreme. Here I am thinking hard, perhaps too hard 
about cuing him. I am concentrating intently on leg placement, weight shift, breathing. In the end I added rein to clarify my desire to him. I did find that if I quit looking at him and looked where I wanted to go it help an amazing amount.
I will stop now, droning on about tiny discoveries, rediscoveries, that are only of interest to me. Nobody is reading by this point anyway. Oh well, it’s my blog to help me remember these things anyway so 😝