Ep. 19 The Wordscape and The Brainscape

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis, introducing you to podcast number 19. Last time we talked about how, through the layers of the onion, as descriptions become more accurate and less simple, you might learn to put your thigh on the saddle and then learn from that basis how to draw the horse's ribcage out. That talks about the evolution of a feeling and a principle over time. This is similar, but different. So way back through time, when I evolved the idea of slingshot. And slingshot is a way of making your thighs into a longer, thinner, narrower V, as if they were the elastic in a slingshot or a catapult. And this longer, thinner, narrower V puts your thighs under tension and draws your seat bones back a bit. And then this is the way that I think of the rider drawing her center of gravity a little back. And it's a technique for the horse especially, who tends to pull the rug out backwards from underneath you. We all know about the motorboat horse who pulls the rug out forwards from underneath you and tempts you to lean back and water ski. But some horses really invest energy in not going, and it's like they're pulling the rug out backwards. So the extreme of this is the horse that stops in front of a jump and the horse decelerates fast and the rider topples forwards. But a really skilled rider holds themselves in place as the horse decelerates and probably starts to whip tap to encourage the horse, but doesn't end up toppling forward. The rug's gone out backwards really fast from underneath the rider. At that point, often the horse is pulling the rug out backwards rather more subtly by just kind of withholding and not going. And very easily, the rider gets her center of gravity in front of the horses. So this idea of the longer, thinner, narrower V shape for your thighs, with you still stacked up above that V shape with your pelvis, seat bones pointing down, front and back of box, still vertical, is how we think about bringing your center of gravity back. And it was many years ago, after the evolution of that feeling, that I came up with a feeling that I called sitting over the hind legs. And it was a sense of being really far back. Of course, that's an outrageous feeling because there's no way you actually are sitting over the horse's hind legs. But it was a way of talking about a sense of being really back in slingshot and changing how the horse's hind legs operated by doing that. And I can remember teaching this feeling to one of my colleagues in the US and her virtually going, this is someone who'd had a lot of lessons from a lot of big names and her saying to me, oh, I remember so and so really big name, international competitor talking to me about sitting on the hind legs and I had no idea what she was talking about. But now you're saying this, I bet you she was after the same feeling. And I was able to teach my friend and student this feeling and she was able to get it and she had that of recognition of somebody's tried to teach me this, but I just couldn't put it together from their words, which of course I'm not at all surprised about. One of my horses tends to withhold a bit and at times that's been pretty significant. And looking back on it, I realise it was pain related. And I think his body issues are now largely solved, thank goodness. We think he had a rotational fall back through time and we've peeled the layers of the onion of getting his body functional. But I had a feeling on him for a long time where I had to slingshot and I had to really aim my bear down down low and I felt somewhat hollow backed when I did it, but I didn't look that way in the mirror. And if he got me disorganized, if the disorganized horse managed to disorganize the organized rider, I'd lose that and my pelvis would come too forwards and my seat bones would point a bit forwards and my center of gravity would get ahead of his and he could then run his numbers on me more effectively. So over time I developed this feeling of where I had to be. And I'd forgotten the sitting over the hind legs idea that I'd had many years before, but had somehow disappeared from my repertoire in exploring other things. So, yes, if you feel you lose things as time goes by, you're not the only one. This happens to me too. And I think it would happen to anybody who isn't either supremely talented or superhuman. So I'd lost that really good feeling. And it was riding another horse during the lockdown of this year when these podcasts were recorded. I've been riding one of our school horses, who's a rather tortured little soul, but has been a fantastic teacher for me. And I came up with a feeling rather similar to my own horse. But maybe just because she's a little more distant to me, she matters less. We didn't have the history. It took me back to remembering this idea of sitting over the hind legs and realising that that was what I was doing. Now, in the intervening years, my understanding of the rider's body and the horse's body and the anatomy and how body's work has increased immensely. And any of you who know the Rider Biomechanics book will know how it's really increased through my understanding of fascia. And fascia is the connective tissue within the body, which strings muscles together, rather like sausage skins string sausages together. So each muscle is surrounded by an envelope of fascia. And if you've ever eaten a chicken leg, you've seen that covering around one of the muscles, at least one of the muscles on the chicken leg. And that skin becomes the tendon at the end of the muscle, which becomes the ligament around the joint, which becomes the joint capsule, which is the joint capsule on the other side of the joint, and the next ligament and the next tendon and the next muscle. And it's only the traditions of dissection which have carved up each individual muscle and said, it begins here and it ends there. And it does this job with the understanding of fascia, which is now considered as an organ in its own right. And actually, it's the origins of our feel, because it has six times as many nerve endings as muscles. And those nerve endings are registering the tension in the fascia, how it's being pulled, and how one layer does or doesn't glide over the other, because sometimes layers get stuck. So with my understanding of fascia and how the main lines in the body work, and you can think of them as lines of points and one of the lines of pull in us and the horse, and I'm going to just describe part of it in the horse. If you think of from the horse's stifles up the inside of his hind leg to his pubic bone, crossing over to the other side of the pubic bone to go along the edge of the opposite abdominal muscle all the way along to the pecs and into the pecs and into the opposite forearm. And this is actually the front functional line in a human and part of the functional line in a horse. And with my newfound theory, when I came back to this feeling of sitting over the hind legs on my school horse, I found myself going, oh, yeah, this is what I've been doing on my horse as well. But I just didn't code it or understand it that way. And then I understood that what I was really feeling was how that fascial pull comes up the inside of the hind leg, crosses over the horse's pubic bone into the opposite abdominal, and that cross, if everything just gets a bit stuck, duck and globbed together, the hind legs don't work well. And all those years back, my feeling of sitting over the hind legs was addressing this, but I couldn't give you the theory to go with it. Whereas now I refound that feeling, metaphorically whacked myself over the head a few times for going, how could I have lost this along the way? I didn't lose Slingshot, but I lost this extra understanding of what can happen in Slingshot, until I rode my rather remedial school horse and then related this to my rather remedial personal horse, then related it to the theory I'd learned in the intervening years. And right now the horses and I are doing really well. And I hope to God I will not forget this again, and I really don't think I will because I've got a whole picture of it now. So when you ask somebody, how does this work? How do you get a horse on the bit? How do you do this? There's a variety of possible answers you can get, of course, according to their mental representations, their understanding, and their ability to link words to feelings. We talked in one of the earlier podcasts about the idea of the right brain feeling that the really good rider has that she wants to teach to her pupil. So she has to put it into words. The pupil hears the words and the pupil has to make a feeling out of those words. And what are the chances that the pupil makes the feeling the teacher intended to convey? With my student in America, with the original Sit over the hind leg, she couldn't make a feeling out of that. With. When I fleshed it out more, she could make a feeling out of that. It would be more accurate in some ways and more helpful to use a more modern description of this. And I owe this to Professor Guy Claxton, who's been professor of education and psychology both at my old university, Bristol. Then he moved to Winchester. He's written some lovely books. One of them is Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, which is well worth reading on learning. And he's a great guy. I've met him, we've talked. He's a really great guy. And he came up with the idea, a metaphorical idea, that we have the wordscape within the brain and the brainscape. And these are two different layers of processing. So the wordscape will be the processing in the brain of language. And we've all heard sit deep, use your back, driving forward, relax, stretch your leg down. All this kind of stuff, which is so much words in the wordscape. The brainscape will be the level of the brain of neurological patterns, and we have more or less good or not good patterns in that layer. And when I draw this out for people, I draw a cube with the word scape as the top horizontal surface of the cube and the brain space as the bottom horizontal surface of the cube. Here's a great story of somebody I know who went up to an elite, well known international dressage rider and said to her, how do you get a horse on the bit? And she, to her credit, said, well, I don't blooming well know, do I? Or in other words, I really know in my brainscape, but don't ask me to tell you in language in the wordscape. And someone else I know was having a lesson with this person one time and really struggling to do shoulder in and not getting a lot of help. She was getting told what shoulder in should look like and how she needed to bring the shoulders more in off the track and do this, that the other, and keep the pen to the inside and not let the quarter swing out. And things weren't working well. And eventually this same teacher said, look, before your lesson tomorrow, will you just go away and read a book about it? And of course that wasn't going to help, was it? It was only going to fill her minds with more should at the level of the wordscape, but not more helpful neurological patterns at the level of the brainscape. Someone I know asked one of our top show jumping riders once, who was about to go and do a clinic, I believe, in Japan, what are you going to say to these riders? This was a conversation over a pint in a pub one night, and the elite show jumping rider, again, a name you would know, came back and said as little as possible. In other words, I'll put the jumps up and I'll build courses and I'll set them good exercises, but don't ask me in language to say things to them that might make a difference. I'm going to say as little as possible. And I think he was a man of few words but many skills. So both of these riders had a disconnect between the phenomenal neurological patterning of fabulous skill in the brainscape, but not much language in the wordscape. There's a story that one of my friends told me once of going to a lecture demonstration done by an elite show jumper. To know this name, you'd have to be on the older side of the spectrum, but within the uk he was a very big name in his day and he said to the audience, look, it's really Simple. You all try and make it so complicated, but it's so simple. You kick to go and you pull the reins to stop, and you pull the right rein to go right, and you pull the left rein to go left. It's simple. What is your problem? Meanwhile, he rode a horse into a fence. He had the most brilliant slingshot. He was organized perfectly. When the horse hesitated, he's able to whip tap in just the right moment. His bear down was amazing, the way his thighs were organized, the foot light but stable in the stirrup. He had so much in his body working right that he was totally unaware of. So when he pulled the right rein, he didn't really pull it. He did whatever he did that caused the horse to go right. Yet 95% of his audience would pull on the right rein, the horse's nose would go right and its withers would go to the left, and they wouldn't get round the corner. And the other 50% of the audience would pull the left rein and the nose would go left and the withers would go to the right, and the horse wouldn't steer that way. But he could steer both ways. And when he pulled the reins, he didn't lean back, he didn't water ski, he didn't push in his feet, he didn't lose bear down. He kept doing all the right things to make a halt happen. So he was able to have this very simple description, which, as far as he was concerned, described the truth of his reality. But unconsciously, there was so much working right that he couldn't describe. So he had a total disconnect again between the words of the wordscape and the patterns in the brainscape. And of course, less elite riders could have all the words that they've heard and read and been to the lectures and listen to the podcasts and watch the webinars and all the rest of it taken to the lessons, paid their money, and. And somehow or other, none of those words ever filter through to the brainscape. And you may have had the experience, which I think is a fascinating experience, like my friend in America, of hearing the words and go, oh, I've heard those words before. Now I know what they mean. So she had that experience with me talking about sitting over the hind legs. And I've had that experience before with many other people's words. And in a previous podcast, I told you the story of me going, oh, my goodness, I could feel like I'm tall. I could feel like I'm stretching my legs down. Whoa, this is weird. I've spent the last 25 years not doing this and teaching people to not do this. Oh, my goodness. Maybe I'm experiencing the feeling of what those words were really supposed to mean on the pqr, that they really were. But that was presented as an ABC and nobody could possibly do the right thing when told those words. They're just going to grow tall, hollow, make their stirrups too long, push in their stirrups, do the things everybody does. I have that with my own words sometimes the sitting over the hind legs. Oh, my goodness, yes, there we are. I've forgotten that it fell out of my repertoire. Here it is again. And sometimes, like the whole thighs on thighs off story. I hear things and really understand them in a new way, at a new level of the onion. That happens with Bear down, pare down, mark 1, mark 2, mark 3, mark 4, mark 5, which changes a little bit how it happens and also changes it from pushing the baby buggy to push starting a car up a hill. One of my favourite stories actually comes from a friend of mine, and in a workshop many years ago, I was talking about how you have your two thighs on each side of the horse. You have your lower arm and the rein. It's like that makes the walls of a corridor. You're creating a channel. You're aiming the Bear down through that chann. You have this corridor made by your thighs, your arms, the reins. And one of my friends who was listening went. And I went, what's the matter? And she said it was the corridor of aids. And she then proceeded to tell the following story. When she graduated from school and got the place she wanted at vet school, her grades were good enough. As a thank you and an acknowledgement of this great achievement, her friends sent her to a very well known upmarket riding centre with her horse to do a course for a couple of weeks. And she arrived there. This is an American story. She was from the South. This school was more in the North. She felt she had the wrong accent. She tells me she was very introverted and insecure as a teenager, which is hard to believe given the adult she is now, but I'll believe her. So she rode along at the back of the ride and kept her mouth shut. And she kept hearing, you must ride your horse down the corridor of eggs. She kept thinking, what? You must ride your horse down the corridor of eggs. And all she could make this mean in her head was, you should ride the horse down the corridor of eggs. So she imagined all these eggs stacked up on each side of a corridor and she had to ride her horse down the gap in the middle without breaking any of the eggs. You have to say, she has a very wonderfully creative brain. Then 30 years later, in this workshop, I say, you have to ride your horse down this corridor made by of each thigh, the lower arm and the rein. And she went. It was the corridor of AIDS, not the corridor of AIDS. And suddenly something she'd misheard 30 years ago made sense to her. And I forever will congratulate her on her ingenuity on dealing with this. And I love the way that the brain, however many years later, will go. That's what she meant. I've read that in a book. I saw that in a demo. When suddenly, within your brainscape, you get a pattern which resonates with words you've previously heard in the wordscape, and the two become linked. And of course, for me as a coach, I know that if my words don't link into the person's brainscape and they just stay as so many words, then there's really no value in that. It's more shoulds more of a rod to beat yourself with. The rider should be like this, the horse should be like this. The hand should give forward, you should be relaxed, you should be this, you should be that. That's all information staying in the wordscape, staying in the left brain, the conscious, rational language brain, making no difference to the neurological patterns operating below the surface. So I hope these stories make sense to you. They make lots of sense to me if. And they're fun as well, and they really kind of say how it happens. And all of us lose the plot sometimes. And I am rather upset with myself for losing the plot on that sitting over the hind legs for so many years. But now I've come back to it in a way that certainly it's a great feeling for some of the horses that are a bit stuck and don't work well in the back end as well as the front end. And I'm not thinking that you should be able to go away and make that feeling from listening to this podcast. And if you can go away and make the feeling of slingshot, you'd be doing really well. You really need more help in that from dressage training, TV or the books or whatever else you can find a ride with your mind coach to turn that feeling and those words into a feeling. But it's a great illustration of the thrills, spills, pitfalls of the learning process and the massive schism between language and experience which every rider and every coach has to cross in order for learning to work. Okay, I will be back with you soon and all the best to you. Have fun with your riding and your horses. These podcasts are linked to two other Internet sites. One is dressagetraining tv which hosts a whole variety of webinars taught by myself, Mary Wanlis and my colleague Ali Wakelin, where we're working live with a variety of horses and riders, showing them the basics of biomechanics and helping them build their skill and train their horses, and explaining to the audience as we do this. There's also a groundwork certification course on that site based on the work of Dr. Andrew MacLean and Equine Learning Theory and this too gives you a step by step guide to building your skills. We'd also love you to take a look at Just Giving and then to search Overdale to find the Just Giving page for Overdale Equestrian Centre, which is my UK home base here in this time of lockdown in 2020 we have 10 school horses eating of course, and pooping and doing all the things that horses do and no income to support those horses. And whilst they're having a wonderful time for us, this is something of a stress and if you've enjoyed these webinars or enjoyed these podcasts and benefited from them and you're willing to give any small or large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.