Ep. 60 The last and final one!

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 60, our very last one. I want to start this with two exercises which are related to exercises you've done before. The first of them relates to the exercise that Sarah did in that lesson where she took her hand and spiraled it around her side from, from just above the top of her pelvis around to under her bosom. And we talked about this like, we talked about this like a wire spiraling around in one of those pop up garden bags that helps it keep its shape. That muscle is the middle one of the three lamb chop muscles. And now we're going to target the outer one, which is like a wire going on the opposite spiral. So between them they make a helix. So to begin with, put your hands in front of you in a riding position and just feel how that feels. And now the starting position for this exercise is a little bit tricky for a lot of people. You obviously can't do this driving your car. And you may struggle to find the position just sitting normally, hopefully on a hard chair in neutral vertical. The length of your front matches the length of your back. We need to get your hands up near your shoulder blades and actually as close to your spine in between your shoulder blades as you can. Now, if you can't get them that high up and that close together and the hands are on your ribs just under your shoulder blades, that will be good enough. But from this starting position, your aim is to take your hands and drag the tissue with you. And as you drag your hands around and down past your ribs and into your front, as if you'd put your hands in your pockets. And we'll do this three times. So you have to kind of turn your hand over as you go, and it might end up being the edge of your hand that does much of the dragging. You're taking your hands down into your pockets, as it were, on the same side, no crossing your midline. And when you've done that three times, put your hands out in front of you again in a riding position. And I think you'll find that your arms feel different, like they're stronger, more connected into your back, and would more easily just push your hands forward against a resistance without you even trying to do that. And this is because your arms actually connect into that area between your shoulder blades and your spine. And the connection there of what's known as the deep back arm line, actually from your little finger along the side of your hand, the underside of your arm, and through your upper arm to those muscles is how your arms connect into your back at the deepest level. So it will be worth doing this, too when you're riding, although it would need you to just have your reins in one hand and go one side at a time. But I would recommend you do our previous exercise with the opposite spiral wire first and especially on your tricky, more collapsed side. Our next exercise relates to the boards exercise, and I hope you've done that in a previous podcast and I hope you've really practiced it because it's so powerful. And we did one side on, one side off, one side on one side off, one side on, one side off before we did both sides on. This time, we're going to get to the same place in a different way by thinking of the boards from top to bottom. So as a quick review, it's as if there's a board that went through you, joining your back and your front, starting from a shoulder strap, going down your front, over your bosom, down your back, over the outer edge of your long back muscles, and then down your front on the outer edge of your abdominal muscles. And if they would join together through you, and the bottom of the board would come down to where your thigh comes out of your pubic bone and down to the seat bone and the sled runner that we've also called your fake foot. So we're going to think of the boards from top to bottom, almost as if a guillotine blade could go down through you. So please don't make this gory. Just imagine it as a way of from the top to the bottom, can you follow that line down? And the chances are that on one side your body will go. Yep, goes top to bottom. I can do that. And on the other side, it might go not quite so easy. It might get slightly stuck and go fuzzy between your ribs and your hips. Or maybe it gets down through that part of you, but doesn't get right down to the bottom. And you've got to find a way to somehow push it right down to the bottom to the sled runner. So you're trying to find what little difference. Maybe it will involve that middle muscle of the spiral line as it goes from above your pelvis, around to under your bosom. That might help you connect the one that doesn't want to connect. So getting your boards, both, what I call as blades from top to bottom, and in the original version that we did, it both have value. And I recommend doing it both ways. And you can practice driving your car with both boards. I think the off horse exercises that we have in this work are one of its big strengths. You can prepare your body for what will come off horse in everyday tasks like driving your car. And maybe you can practice those exercises in walk out on a hack, even if you can't do them when the chips are down and you're moving faster and sweating more and being more dishevelled by the horse's movement, but you're priming your system. The various pushes, pulls, resistances on the saddle that we've done through these podcasts are invaluable as well. But in general, I think people are rather slow to latch onto the value that they have because they really show you what has to change within your muscle chains and within your muscle tone. You to just firm up the wobbly bits and stack you up in the way you want to be. As you keep coming back to these exercises and you're really prioritizing the learning of skills. Do your best throughout this process, wherever you are, to keep separating your behaviour female identity. Knowing that you're a good person working on your riding skills, it is a really big downer to get into that behaviour identity slide that starts, I rode a bad transition, I'm having a bad day, I can't ride transitions. I'm a bad rider, I'm a bad person. Don't do that. Just say to yourself, cancel or next and give yourself a next useful thought like bear down. And it is I think dressage riders that fall most prey to this. And I do like that definition of dressage, which we've said before as the passionate pursuit of perfection by the obsessively imperfect. And you really want to honour your comfort play stretch and panic zones, really trying to keep yourself getting the learning that comes from your stretch zone, getting to play in your play zone, resorting every now and again to your comfort zone, but really staying out of your panic zone and giving yourself those little successes that come when you can stay in the flow channel. So flow is so much about your attention and your energy, and I make no apology for coming back to flow as the bottom line. Our conscious mind filters out the myriad bits of information we could be paying attention to almost by asking the question, is this important? And the thing you're paying attention to has to be worthy of your energy. And learning is only going to happen when you're paying attention to it in a profound way. And that's where flow really comes in. It has six psychological characteristics. Complete concentration is one. The merger of action and awareness in which the sense of self vanishes and the sense of Time is altered to what has been called the deep. Now you're unaware of time passing, although you have to be a little bit careful not to work your horse for too long. You have the paradox of being able to control experiences which others would consider uncontrollable. And the whole flow experience is intrinsically, really rewarding. There are the small micro flow experiences and the really profound macro flow experience will verge on the mystical. And when you have a mystical experience with your horse and you think it and it happens, it is, as we all know, one of life's great wonders and joys. So in flow you're actually using less of your brain than you were in normal consciousness because it shuts out what is not needed. In his book the Art of Impossible, Stephen Kotler says the energy used for higher cognitive functions functions is traded for heightened attention and awareness. So you stop thinking about any extraneous thoughts and you stop being self conscious. And there lies a lot of the value of flow. What's interesting is we've heard about 10,000 hours to get mastery. And I've talked about this and I do believe in writing, it's really true. And it's going to be more than 10,000 hours. That number got publicized by Malcolm Gladwell from the original research of Anders Ericsson. And Gladwell chose the number of repetitions that a 20 year old top violinist would have done. It would have been a different number for an 18 year old violinist or for a 22 year old violinist. And we know that 25,000 hours makes a good concert pianist. We have no idea what the numbers really are for riders. But what is interesting is that in a lot of action sports, 10,000 hours is not possible. And those sports tend to be really about instant gratification more than dedicated, determined discipline practice. So I heard an interview a while ago with one of the coaches of the British skeleton team. Now, skeleton is one of the sports in the Winter Olympics. It involves going headfirst on a sledge down a course carved out of solid ice. And you've probably seen it on the tv. Well, there are no skeleton courses here in the uk. All training has to be done on a course abroad. And the most you ever get is two runs a day. And each run lasts about 90 seconds. So you could not possibly ever clock up 10,000 hours. And it's the same for people who do crazy high risk activities like leaping off mountains in Batman suits, which people do do a mixture of that and skiing down the mountain. And so 10,000 hours are not possible. And current thinking is that the learning really happens not so much because of the repetitions, but but because of the brain chemicals that are created and utilized in flow in that state of total absorption. And essentially that chemistry relates to pleasure and is addictive and helps to wire things into your brain so much more effectively that learning is more than doubled. Its rate and productivity can be amplified by 500%. The flow experience can outlast the chronological time of the activity, so it can heighten your life. The triggers of flow drive attention into that present moment and the triggers are clear goals, immediate feedback and that balance between challenge and skills that we need to keep us in the flow channel. The challenges are too great, it could become frustration or anxiety. The challenges are too small, it could become boredom and just generally quitting. For the more risk averse amongst us, it's considered generally that the challenge should be greater than the skills by about 4%. For the thrill seekers, that can go up to 20, 30 or 40%. Now, I think 40% and maybe 30% is a bit much where there's a horse involved and therefore ethics in the situation. But imagine you're an event rider and you've qualified for badminton. However many top class events you've done, badminton is a whole other ball game from the sides of the crowds, when we are not locked down, the size of the crowds, the enormity of the fences, the particular kudos of the situation is probably really going to up the challenge level by 20%. For a first timer, the challenge skills balance can create high consequences and environments can create high consequences. And in cross country, it's the risk of physical harm that creates a high consequence. If you're public speaking, it's a different set of risks. That's my personal, preferred, risky environment. And that environment for me is a flow trigger. It wouldn't be for everyone. It depends on the match quality of the person to the skill. And match quality is also considered a really big deal in terms of finding flow and the learning quality. So match quality, along with the chemicals of this heightened awareness are critical to learning and maybe more critical than the number of hours. But any elite rider will have done a large number of hours and hopefully any elite rider will have had a sampling period in their childhood riding. So in sports the sampling period is considered that it should go from netball to hockey to trampolining to gymnastics to everything you can think of. Maybe for a horse mad child, it's just going to be the difference between hacking and going up and down hills and jumping and riding with other people and doing gymkhana games and not just being put in a riding arena at the age of seven and made to ride circles. I remember reading recently about one of the very successful female jump jockeys saying, my brain is a total mess. It goes 90 miles an hour. It's just diabolical. The place I get peace is when I'm riding a horse in a pack in a race. My brain slows down and time slows down. Well, that would not be good match quality for me. I would be overwhelmed by the horses around me and the speed. So match quality is different for all of us. The loading stage of flow is the stage of being consciously competent. It involves struggle and frustration. It's the skill acquisition that's happening before. You have at least a level of automization which allows flow to happen more. And three or four pieces of data fill working memory. And trying to load more into it can lead to frustration from the person on the other end. But pushing to the edge of overload actually maximizes the learning process. And flow involves, to a degree, the flight circuits. Flow involves, to a degree, the fight circuit of fight and flight. It's like the brain goes, this takes a ton of energy. Do you really want to do this? Do you want to fight back? Or do you want to back off and look for other options? And every time you, I take my stand, I stand for this. I going to do it. Your frustration gets channeled into courage, and you cultivate the ferocity and the grit to find that courage every day. And so you begin to automise having that level of courage. And actually where some people sample my work and go, this is great. And I'm really happy to learn about shoulder, hip, heel and support my body weight and plugging in and being a burden that's easier for my horse to carry and becoming a bit more effective. But the idea of ferocity and grit and how many calories you burn when you're trying to get your body to be stable, your muscles into hydraulic amplification, that's more than they want to commit to. And I can understand that. And there are days when I'm warming up my horse, thinking, am I up for it today? And as I progress a little bit, I find that I'm up for it. I want to finish with two quotes again, that quote from Gretchen Baylor, the snowboarder, who said, you do the things you love and try to get to their essence and allow things to emerge. And finally, a quote that I love from T.S. eliot in the poem The Four Quartets. He says, we shall not cease from exploration and at the end of our exploring we'll arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. I love that how many times we just cycle through coming back to basics and knowing the place for the first time. You might even want to go back to the beginning of these podcasts. Take with you a beginner's mind to find what you hear and how it resonates with you. From the skills you have a year on or more. From where we started and from me, Merry Wanlis, this is over and out and over to you.