Ep. 76 Does your energy flow or leak?

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 76 for the summer of 2025.

I've been talking recently a lot about the mental and emotional challenges of riding and how they're really determined by the setting of your autonomic nervous system. We've talked as well about some of.

The physical issues, but I've not really.

Talked for a while about the energetic issues and challenges of riding. A good way to begin to recognise and understand this can start with us talking about bearing down and your torso strength. Bear down is my term for engaging your core. It's what you do when you pull.

Your stomach in to make a wall and push your guts against that wall.

You do this naturally when you clear your throat or make the sound. And what you're really doing is increasing the pressure in your insides. Now, we can make this a bit clearer by thinking of your torso like a metal rectangular water tank. So it will be a fairly tall tank, relatively wide, but not very deep. That's deep from back to front. And imagine the water coming in through your head and filling the tank. Now, the tank has such solid metal edges that as the tank gets full, the water pushes out against the edges of the tank and the edges push back in against the water. The edges are not like a balloon that would expand and deform as it fills up. It maintains its integrity and solidity. So the pressure in the tank increases as it fills. And the tank has one exit hole in the center of your bikini line, and it power hoses water out through that exit hole and it aims that power hose to the indentation just in front of the horses withers. So all the time your torso tank is filling up, it's at really high pressure. You're power hosing out, you're filling up, you're pressurized, you're power hosing out. Now, there's a number of ways that this can go wrong. Sometimes it's as if part of the torso tank is like a cheese grater with holes in it. And very often that happens in the rider's back. Sometimes they're front, very often they're back. So then the water's coming into the tank, but water's leaking out. The power hose is less. The pressure never really quite builds. That's often the person with rather low energy who struggles to be effective. For another variation on the theme, let's.

Come back to our image of the.

Bell that we had a while ago.

So this is like a church bell.

That hangs around your neck. It's curving at the Top and it has pretty much straight vertical sides that go down below your ribs, about to.

The level of your pelvis.

If you hollow your back, the front of the bell lifts, so the bell moves with you in any movement you make. Now let's imagining that instead of having vertical edges, the bell gets close ish.

To the bottom of your ribs and.

Then flares outwards so it ends up with a bigger circumference and a bigger diameter. And imagine yourself inside a bell of that shape. As you do this, you might really notice that especially at the back of you, your energy flares out along with the bell. It's more of a flare out way.

Of losing energy than a just dribbling.

Out of the holes in the cheese grater way of losing energy. Can you sense that? Imagine the bell again containing you with vertical edges. And maybe you'll feel your energy more contained in your body. And then go again to imagining the bell flaring out. I used to be like that energetically. I used to feel like if you took the shape of a swimming costume with a fairly low cut back, I couldn't get my body to feel like it had solid boundaries below that swimming costume. And over the years that changed, as did my ability to use my back.

Now we can embellish the image a.

Little bit more than this and make it even clearer. Perhaps this is one of the most.

Bizarre things you'll ever hear me say.

If you think about your back coming down to what we call your back.

Edge, that would be where we could.

Draw a line across the back of your torso as it contacts the saddle and inside you against your back edge and lined up with it. You can imagine a roller rather like the roller you'd have in a vacuum cleaner. It's as wide as your torso, it lies just inside the back of you and it's maybe 2 inches, about 5 centimeters in diameter. First of all, imagine that roller rolling.

Rotating, so that the underneath rotates up.

And back in your back. If you think of that, I think you might be able to sense your energy again flaring out very low down. Now imagine the roller rolling the other way from down your back into your underneath and then rolling around. This takes your energy more in underneath you.

It would be completely the wrong energy for you.

If you're somebody who pulls your tailbone towards your pubic bone and makes your underneath too short.

You might want to think of the.

Roller going backwards, if that's you.

But the majority of women would do.

Well thinking of the roller going forwards and with vertical edges to the bell and your roller. Going forwards, you might find you can begin to develop a much more solid sense of the boundary of your back and your energy contained in your body. And how you can really then put that energy to use in a way that begins your bear down in your back and creates a force from the back of you through your torso to the front of you.

Now there's a self fulfilling prophecy in this too. Neuroception is the unconscious way that your nervous system scans the world for threat. And if you've been somewhat hyper vigilant and you're really into scanning for threat, you miss cues of safety. And this is so interesting. There's been research recently that really says that if you feel safer, you are safer. That the actual objective value of your safety is not the determining factor. If you feel safer, you don't start doing the things that your body automatically resorts to when you think you're not safe. The hollow back, the breathing, the landau response, where you grow really tall and press in your stirrups, maybe curling your toes. So when you feel unsafe, your system responds in ways that make you more unsafe, literally more unsafe. Ironically, when you feel safer, you're much more likely to do unsafe things. But be safe doing them and you make way better assessments of risk. And you're trusting yourself and your trust in your horse makes a huge difference. Here's another dimension of safety. How do you feel about people watching you ride? Ideally, you're so engrossed in your riding with you and your horse in a bubble together in a way that you really barely notice what's going on outside you. But if you have a fear of judgment and you're going, oh my God, they're watching me. This can happen to a lot of people in warm up arenas and maybe it gets worse once they go into the dressage arena and they're there in front of the drudge. And as soon as you let the environment and the people around you steal some of your focus, you will not ride as well. And there will be another self fulfilling prophecy. Something that I rethought about recently that really interested me. Known as the Johari window, this is used a lot in business coaching. And if you imagine four equal panes of glass or a graph with a horizontal and a vertical axis and four quadrants starting with the top left quadrant. This is what the Johari window calls the open area. It's what is known to you and known to others about you. In other words, you're pretty transparent. You're a. What you see is what you get kind of person and it implies that you have plenty of self confidence and trust in the world below that. On the bottom left would be the hidden area. What is known to you but not known to others. And one can overshare and one can under share, but nobody will ever totally know everything about us. And there are going to be some things that are better not shared. We all have our secrets. In the bottom right quadrant we have the unknown area, what is not known to you and also not known to others. And maybe as your journey continues in planet Earth and you have some insights about yourselves, those kind of self discoveries make that unknown area becomes smaller. And by now you've probably guessed at the fourth area, the top right quadrant, which would be the blind area, what is not known to self but is known to others.

Now, these quadrants could be different sizes for different people.

And I reckon that within the horse world we are prone to a particularly big blind area. If you walk into the arena on your horse, it's going to be apparent to everybody watching you how will you ride? And they probably see things about you in the first few minutes that you don't even know about yourself. Here's an obvious one. Riders will come in front of me for a first lesson, ride around me, and I might say to them, where do you think you are compared to vertical? Do you think you're on it, ahead of it or behind it? And an awful lot of people will say to me, oh, I think I'm ahead of it, where the reality is that they're behind it. And perhaps once upon a time they really did tip forward, but in walk at least they've solved that. In canter it might be different, but they've got an outdated image of what it is that's actually happening. And so the people watching us ride, see us bobble around, lean here, do this, move our hands da di, da, in ways we might not even realise we're doing. And that's a big blind area. The most devastating story I ever heard of this was actually in Portugal, in a place where I used to go and train, where there was a guy who had a horse at livery there and would go across the diagonal on his horse in canter and get to the other end, make a massive deal out of patting it. And how wonderful it was thinking he'd ridden 151 time changes when he really hadn't ridden any flying changes at all. He was laughed at in that community, which is kind of understandable. Very sad. Sad but true. It's common in the horse world for riders to judge each other horribly, for people in barns or livery yards to want to put themselves one up and thus put other people one down. And there's huge judgments too, between different.

Sections of the horse world.

In fact, it's almost tribal and it interests me. I like to compare riding to a martial art.

I think if we thought of learning.

And actually riding like a martial art, it would change the culture in such a good way. Within martial arts, you have everything from Tai chi to Taekwondo, all sorts of different forms. But those different forms don't judge each other like dressage riders judge eventers or jumpers or endurance riders. Those different martial arts forms live happily beside each other, knowing that there's something for everyone and that there can be.

More energetic forms and less energetic forms, and that's okay.

A rider's blind area is going to be so much smaller if that rider has access to mirrors and better still, videos. And when we look in a mirror, we often distort what we see. You might look in a mirror and just see your fat thighs or your hands that move and the two or three things you least like about yourself. In fact, I remember a friend of mine, another coach, saying that she had to halt herself parallel to her mirror, just turn her head, because as soon as you rotate your body, you distort what you see. Look in the mirror and say to herself out, if this person came up in front of me for a lesson, what would I say to them? Tell herself what she'd say and then ride on, giving herself those reminders. That was what it took to get her ego and her squeamishness and her confusions out of the way, to enable herself, to give herself really clear feedback. And when you look at videos, you could be tempted to just see your fat thighs, your moving hands, whatever it is, your wobbly this, your disorganized that. And learning to look at videos, to look at that person on the screen as if that person was your best friend. And hopefully you wouldn't say to your best friend, look how fat your thighs are, oh my gosh, hopefully you'd be supportive and you'd help her look in a non judgmental way. And if within video you have the ability to add a vertical line to see, are you on vertical ahead of it or behind it? Are you in the shoulder, hip, heel line? That puts your heel under your pelvis, under your shoulder in a way that you'd land on the riding arena on your feet. If you can steal a video and put lines on, it really helps you to be objective, and that objectivity so helps to reduce that blind area. And that makes it easier for you to live and breathe more comfortably in the riding world. I met a new rider earlier this year who almost, as her first word says to me, I'm a researcher. I think she was involved in biochemistry, something along those lines. I'm a researcher and I really like protocols. I think she'd seen some of my work and really appreciated that I have a map, a model of the rider horse interaction and how it works according to general principles and how to find the place to change what goes on for each individual horse and rider according to their age and stage and temperament and type. And I teach quite a lot of scientists and they find me and they forgive me for having what, in effect is practice based evidence, where the gold standard in research is evidence based practice. And this woman said to me, you know, in research you fail 90% of the time. So I guess I'm well suited to dressage now. I like to think that we can succeed and become more right and righter than right and righter than righter than right on a much better basis than failing 90% of the time. But for many people, there's too much guessing and not enough progressing. But what she was really saying was that when she fails, she can cope. She can stoically just go on. She doesn't panic, she doesn't freeze, she doesn't spiral down into collapse. And she's a pretty confident rider too, with a very suitable horse. Perhaps she'd wobble on a bigger horse with bigger paces and a bigger agenda, but she's really well suited for her horse. And her energetics hold together pretty well too. In fact, she arrived in my arena basically saying, this is how I am, this is how we are. Just give me some feedback, get me going, help me. She was a kind of blank slate, which, from a coach's point of view, is as good as it gets. When she started Talking about failing 90% of the time, it got me thinking again about the gap and the gain and how much the dressage world of all the equestrian disciplines tends to put people into the gap. And I was talking recently to someone who's currently doing judge training who was saying that they're taught to put at least one positive comment on a test sheet. And we found ourselves joking about well managed as potentially a really good positive comment for somebody who's proceeding valiantly in a test on a difficult horse. But so often it's about not enough X needs more Y, and essentially that's the gap. And of course, the dressage judge didn't see you in the warm up arena or at home yesterday or last week or last month or last year.

So she can't judge the gains that you've made.

She can only see how what you're doing fall short of the ideal. Now, when riders are going round and round and feeling like they're not making a huge amount of progress, I think it's very tempting for them to think of going more away from what they don't want than towards what they do want. It possibly takes a certain skill level or I would say some really good information from a really good map to be able to go more towards what you do want, to stop guessing, to start progressing. And a really good map allows you to do the equivalent of throwing a six, which allows you to start taking part in a board game. Otherwise you could be kind of cossing the dice, trying to get a six and you just don't get one. And once you've got to a certain level, it's way easier to go towards what you want. And actually, I think what I'm proudest of is creating a map that is valid from the very novice levels of riding, through the people trying to increase their skills through to elite levels, because the principles of physics and biomechanics don't change. They're a given wherever you are in the world, whatever horse you ride, whatever your ambitions, the bottom line is that as riders, we keep bringing ourselves and our horses back to a better neutral. Oh, oh, lost it. Find it again. Oh, oh, lost it again. Find it again. And every time you find it, there's a little dopamine reward for you and maybe for your horse too. We want him to buy into that idea, of course, and to play that game with us and to get engrossed in it, like we can get engrossed in it. Bringing yourself back to balance every time you lose it, that's the cake. And it has to be close to as much fun as the kind of occasional magical ride that transcends that cake, where rightness just happens. There's barely a thought in your brain.

That's the cherry on the cake.

The more present, the more noticing you can be, the more easily you get feedback, the more you get to bake the cake, enjoy the cake and sometimes add the cherry. Have fun with your horses this week. Enjoy riding. I'll be back soon.