Riding without tears

Marie is a very active person, she rides daily and looks after Gabriel herself, which involves a great deal of physical labour. Gabriel is a ‘barefoot' horse, meaning he is unshod and Marie does not use a bit in his bridle. He doesn't live in a stable, but in a field with a small herd of other horses. This is as close to a natural way of horsemanship as is feasible in this country. Gabriel doesn't eat oats or any ‘heating' foods. To keep a horse like this requires a great deal of effort and dedication. Marie's back pain and sciatica was so bad she took daily over the counter pain medication at regular intervals throughout the day.

Your back is under considerable demand when you ride. It needs to be strong, but supple. The balance of your head on top of your spine will profoundly influence how springy- or not, you are throughout your back. This in turn affects your arms and legs. If your back is stiff you are likely to have tight arms and legs, leading to stiff wrists and hands. These problems will communicate to your horse, a stiff rider makes a horse stiffen in response. Marie was aware she was passing on her tension to Gabriel, she had heard Alexander Technique could help riders with their seat, and she had also heard it could help with back pain. In her first lesson, Marie asked could the two be combined? Yes! I said.

The common factor between back pain and good riding is posture and body use. This is a subtle matter, not just a question of sitting up straight or putting your heals down. It's more a matter of how you set about engaging your own balance, and it begins well before you get on your horse!

Marie had a tendency to lock her head down on her neck. Your neck is a slender flexible pillar supporting a heavy floppy head on the top. It's also the bridge of all communication between your brain, nervous system and muscles. If you have no tone in your neck, your head will fall forward onto your chest- as you sometimes see when someone ‘nods off' on a train. Clearly, some muscle activity is required in the neck, but if tone turns to tension, the neck muscles, instead of stabilising your head, drag it downwards and retract it. This in turn causes the column of the neck to buckle a bit under the pressure, and your neck sometimes twists in response- so you might carry your head on one side for example- as Marie did-, or the neck is dragged forward and down into your chest. Sadly, a lot of people will do both! It gets worse. Your whole body compensates for what goes on in your head and neck, so poor head balance will cause problems lower down in your back, and because your shoulder girdle sits on your ribcage, which is attached to your back, rounded or hunched shoulder become part of the misuse pattern. What to do?

We have to start with the basis of all movement, which is how we organise ourselves in response to the stimulus of life- or to put it more simply- how we cope with the ever present pull of gravity on us. If we go about or day holding tension in our bodies, we literally shorten ourselves. This becomes such a strong habit we don't notice we are doing it- it has slipped beneath our body/mind radar. For Marie, lessons helped reconnect her with her own balance and breathing in a natural way that gently unfolded long held tensions. Over a period of six months she found her pain went, so she no longer needed pain medication. Her riding improved enormously and Gabriel was a very happy horse. Her new springy back enabled her to respond to his movement freely and without pain. The most fundamental lessons Marie learnt was how to inhibit her old tension habits from taking over when she rode- or walked, or ate her dinner or washed her hair, or did any common daily action. Alexander Technique is truly a wake up call.

To read more about the meeting of two spines (yours and your horse's) see Body, Breath & Being by Carolyn Nicholls