When Throughness Is Achieved, Possibilities Are Limitless with Chris Irwin

Yeah, a question that really popped into my mind there when you're talking about with the hands and people and horses.

Because we are all not symmetrical, we are either right hand dominate or left hand dominate.

So we're stronger or weaker.

And so is the horse.

so until we really recognize that in ourselves you know the balance within ourself is not balanced because we haven't if we haven't even had the observation of what we tend to do then it's very hard to achieve what you're explaining everything must peel it right back to going okay well as a writer you really need to understand your own strengths and your own weaknesses and then strengthen what is weak, soften what is too strong, so you can better harmonize, so you have a chance of doing what you are talking about.

Because if we don't even know that, then it's like playing a game and not knowing the rules.

A hundred percent.

And if you break that down into steps, throughness as an outcome requires balance.

As you just said, without balance, you won't have throughness.

Balance requires alignment.

Alignment requires awareness.

So you say we're asymmetrical, then that's not in alignment.

Taking all your moving body parts and aligning them, integrating them synchronistically with all the moving body parts of a horse, is a profound art and science it's it's easy to just get up on a horse and kick and go it is not easy to ride really well to do it justice poetic justice um something i know i've mentioned before is is throughness i believe is there innately and the The first thing a rider needs to learn, I was saying this to a young colt starter, a youngster here the other day, he was picking my brain, asking me questions, what about this and what about that? And I sincerely said to him, before you look at what you need to do to ride better, first you have to become aware of what not to do.

Because there's a lot of things that, and you've alluded to this, there's a lot of things that the human body is doing, specifically you mentioned the hands start going fetal and pulling back when we get nervous, get afraid.

A lot of people aren't really aware when that begins to happen.

They're not self-aware of the beginning of that tension.

People are not self-aware.

I hate to pick on our species, but here we go.

There's a huge distinction, Pernilla, between a reactive pulling hand, bit or bitless, a reactive pulling hand or a proactive blocking hand.

So all of the reactive pulling hands inhibit throughness.

Horses don't want to go forward into them.

You know, connecting simple dots, the horses who rear, they're saying, I am not going forward into contact.

I don't like what I feel when I engage into that bridle, bit or bitless.

No, I don't want to plug into the human contact.

And a large part of that You can look at a thousand different scenarios, and often it comes down to the human instinct to reactively pull on a horse's head instead of proactively block.