In my May 15th entry 'The Nature of Ideas. Strange? ' I concluded, "How to contain, identify or tap those streams at useful intersections. How to filter out what matters: to me, to others, to the reader? That is the question at hand!
This conclusion hits the point, as I wish to speak about a suspected automation in the sensory-motor system and how it appears to center around C8. About why in riding making up one's mind appears to suffice. Why, as I rode Secret Taboo today...
...there was another thing to report, regarding the alignment of C8, the nerve section relating to the rider's ringfinger (but not only), and S2/3, the nerve section located within the equine sacral joint.
The most obvious often is the hardest to grasp. So let me give it a try.
When you make up your mind to get up from a chair and walk over to the table, you do not think about it. You just do it. A similar thing now happens when I ride. I make up my mind, and without further thought or impulse the horse 'does it'. Seemingly seamlessly my sensory system commands the horse's motor system. I don't use my motor system and the horse doesn't use its sensory system. In other word we so-to-speak join forces along the lines of a clearly defined work-sharing process. The horse none-the-less retains a sense of the ground it walks on and responds to it accordingly, indicating that (as Feldenkrais calls them in the human) equine automatic muscle reactions remain functioning.
This automation comes as a result of my experiments with lifting the vertebra from C2 and leaning back C8. This twin-movement puts my backbone in the rider's posture, as reported. A resulting general improvement of health and awareness came as a surprise. There was at first, however, no inkling of the real surprise. Who could have suspected, that improvements in my posture thus initiated would not only, as expected, improve the horse's posture but would, as it turned out, be the key to riding.
Who might have thought that the key to riding is the rider's will. Or was this obvious from the start? Is the will equitation's motor, the upright, unrestriced sensory-motor system its means? Enough said for now. The alignment of C8 and S2/3 will have to await another entry. It may be useful to have posted 'Elements of Equitation (2005)', Part II by then, which features a detailed description of human/equine nerve correlations.
Later another idea occured. The lifting of the human vertebra from C2 is the result of giving. It appears to trigger the release of muscles that in far too many humans keep the vertebra unduely curved. And with this release reflexes of the sensory-motor system appear to reawake.
The reader may ask, "Well, if all is so fine and dandy, why then are there so many complications in equitation, so many fixed, standing or draw reins, so many schools and, relative to measures taken and means spent, so little success leave alone pleasure?"
The rectangular horse's tendency toward warping, the modern human's tendency toward a curverature of the spine (speaking of a warp in the human vertebra) and the riding community's unawareness of their resulting effects is the answer. Genetical malformations and environmental damages in horses today do not help.
And that is why in the academy we begin in Equitation 101 with a concentration as long as necessary on how to make riders and horses straight without force.
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