Ep. 79 Ways of knowing

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 79 for the summer of 2025. So it was something one of the coaches said to me about ways of knowing that got me to look this up and to discover that there are five ways of knowing, referring to different methods or sources of information through which humans acquire knowledge. And they're commonly discussed in philosophy and education and they seem pretty sensible to me, so I'm going to use them as my baseline here. And the first way of knowing is through language, the communication of the spoken and written word that allows us to transmit and share knowledge. Now, most of the knowledge we hear in riding arenas has been handed down from person to person and probably from generation to generation. And essentially it would be valid to call it hearsay. The fact that it's been handed down in this way doesn't necessarily mean it's accurate, useful or helpful. And my search over the last 40 plus years has been to find more helpful words whenever words are handed down. Neuro linguistic programming tells us, and my experience tells us too, that there will be deletion, distortion and generalization. So all the words we hear in riding arenas have gone through this. I've told you before, my favourite example of deletion, when somebody arrived in arena in front of me, their horse was rather lazy, they didn't have a stick, it would have helped them to be able to whip tap behind their leg. And I said to this person, is there a reason why you don't carry a stick? And she looked me in the eye and said, but Mary Wanlis doesn't allow people to carry a stick. And I looked back and said, really? Well, I'm Mary Wandlis and that's news to me. And I suspect she'd had a friend who'd come on one of my courses before her and maybe I'd taken her friend's stick away, maybe her horse was nervous, maybe I felt she wasn't using it well. And somehow that had become generalised to all riders, all horses, all occasions. Here's a couple of stories of distortion and they're actually quite profound. So Egon von Neindorff is actually part of my history, the teacher who drove me to giving up in my mid-20s. And I actually went and rode for a couple of weeks with von Neindorff in Germany, in Karlsruhe during the 90s. And he was charming. Now, he was one of the German aristocrats that survived the Holocaust. He was a keeper of knowledge from before the Second World War, from what we might call classical German Teaching. Now, I haven't been able to validate this and I actually am not sure where it came from. But one story goes that von Neindorff's understanding of the staying your hips should be parallel to your horse's hips and your shoulders parallel to his shoulders were that his hips should be perpendicular to the ground and so should yours. His shoulders should be perpendicular to the ground and so should yours. Now that's a totally different understanding to the understanding I grew up with, which is questionable, but says on a circle with your horse's body bent in the shape of the circle, his inside hip would be ahead of his outside hip, so yours should be like that. And his inside shoulder will be behind his outside shoulder, so yours should be like that. And that I think is the modern day understanding of that term. So there could be mega levels of distortion here. And one that I've talked about before that I really wonder about. I can't prove it, but when people hear the term sit deep, they tend to sit on the back of their butt, press down heavily, think about being heavier on the horse's back. Maybe they add, drive him forward to the notion of sit deep. And I'm not sure that sit deep doesn't refer to the other meaning of deep. So in every language we've tested, which is about eight languages, the word for deep, as in deep ocean, is the same as the word for deep as in the height, width and depth of furniture. And the depth between the back and the front of your torso box is something that we end up talking about with every rider at some stage. So many people ride like they're two dimensional, like they're only a front. But when you can really perceive your back and what lies in front of your back and make a solid back and a solid front with solid depth in your torso box, you change the game. But this is not how people think of deep. And that distortion would not be a bigger distortion than the distortion from von Neindorff to the current understanding of your shoulders parallel to your horse's shoulders and your hips parallel to his hips. Most of these words that are hearsay are about declarative knowledge. They tell us what should be. They're knowledge that can be expressed by an armchair expert. Well, the horse should track up, his nose should be on or ahead vertical. The rider should grow up tall and stretch her legs down and so on. There's not a lot of how to knowledge there. And of course armchair experts may not have a lot of skill. The second way of knowing is through our Senses, the. The perception via sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell that are our primary ways of experiencing the world. Now, touch doesn't quite say the proprioception, which is the ability to know where our body is in space. This is a big deal to riders. Are you vertical when you think you're vertical? Are you in a shoulder, hip, heel line when you think you're in a shoulder, hip, heel line? Many people's proprioception is not very accurate, and it develops hugely through learning in this way. But as well as proprioception, we also have interoception, and that's your sense of your insides. An obvious example of that would be being hungry or sensing that you're thirsty. But there's much more to it than that, because your perception of your insides could be about the tension in your fascial net, the way things link together and transmit force. Well, or don't. The way you might feel twists in your insides, as in reality. You straighten yourself out of your natural pattern and its kinks. Your interoception, as that develops, makes you more embodied. And the more embodied you are as a rider, the more accurate your awareness, the more subtle your noticing skills, the more effect you have. You can do magic whilst appearing to do nothing. This could also include the edges of your torso box being clear to you, your front, your back, your sides. And often for riders, they're fuzzy, or one of them is fuzzy, or one leg is fuzzy. And when you have fuzzy edges, you haven't really got your fascia net to function in the right way. So interoception and embodiment are really big ways of refining skill. In fact, I often think that I teach embodiment through the medium of learning riding skills. In the very early days of developing my work, it really all started because the conflict that I sensed between my felt experience as I developed skill within my own body and my horse's body and the words I was used to hearing. And that set me on the path of creating the map that I've been developing for over 40 years now. And I've redefined how the term procedural knowledge is used. So we talked about declarative knowledge, the what, the procedural knowledge is really the how. And procedural knowledge is often considered unknowable in language. If I ask you, how do you ride a bicycle? It's hard to answer, but in riding, we can find words to describe the how to's that have not been described before because they weren't clear to elite, talented riders who were so skilled they could just do it. And discovering Good words over time that really speak to people and make the impossible possible has been my mission. The next way of knowing is through our emotions, which can shape our understanding of the world and, and ourselves, and influence our beliefs and our decisions. Our beliefs have a way greater influence over what we do and don't do in life, how we are or are not, than the vast majority of people realise. One example of emotion being relevant would be the idea that if you feel safer, you are safer because you don't fill in for your lack of safety by doing the instinctive things that you think are going to make you safer. But actually don't they make you less safe? In the same way, we could say that when you feel more capable, perhaps you really are more capable because you're not doing things to fill in for your perceived lack of ability. And actually those things are not the right things and they're perhaps even making you less capable. There's another level of that too, because it's also true when people don't know, they don't know, they think that they know. At that point they've stopped learning. They don't have a sense of what there is to discover. And you have the people whose beliefs actually really put a brake on their learning. So I've told you the story before of the woman that had been coached by a couple of coaches I've trained. And when she eventually came in front of me, she was still doing a teeny, tiny, soggy little rise. And when I finally got her to the top of the rise, she wailed, but I'm supposed to make it small and tiny. So she had been a small and tiny rider trying to get to the top of the rise. And she couldn't actually do it until we really smoked out the belief that she was living by. She was kind of a flat earther, professing that the earth was round, trying to make the earth be round, but underneath not going there. She had taken those hearsay words of keep the rise small and tidy and held them as gospel truth, as a belief. And that took a little bit of working through. More than a little bit, I think. I'd say. So many students are paying lip service to what they hear from their coaches or instructors. And when that's happening, it will be a belief that lies in the way. Our fourth way of knowing is reasoning, logical thinking and rational analysis. And this includes deduction, which goes from the general to the specific. That's often called top down ways of thinking, and induction, which goes from the specific to the general. It's a bottom up way of thinking. Now, I often think our traditional medicine is top down. You have this issue, you take this drug. If you went to a naturopathic doctor or a homeopath or a functional medicine doctor, that person's likely to work from bottom up, asking you so many more questions about your system and your experience and tailoring a treatment very specifically to your body. I would say our general model of riding the one handed down from generation to generation, the hearsay terms will work from the top down. An elite rider said, that's what we should do. And it got handed down, down, down, down to you. And that's what you try to do, but it might not be relevant to you and your system. And the map that I've built was very much built from the bottom up, from working it out in my own experience and saying to riders things like, what did I say that helped you the most? How would you teach somebody to do this? And getting words to describe this from so many riders and figuring out what works for most people from first principles. And I think that way of figuring it out from the bottom up is really something I'm so proud of. It's created a map that works for so many more riders, has so fewer pitfalls and blind alleys and miss interpretations and is eminently able to be tailored to each individual. Our next way of knowing is imagination, the ability to form new ideas and concepts or images not directly drawn from the senses. It plays a role in creativity, innovation and empathy. Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge and I really get that. I think he's absolutely right. Teaching people who are really good at coming up with images using their imagination is so much more fun than people who don't want to go there. They just want to stay very left brain and logical. They may not validate a particular image, they may not validate images at all. They just kind of want strict science and logic that doesn't work half so well. And they could be really smart people in other contexts, but without imagination, it's really hard for them to learn and become embodied. When ideas just pop into your head, it's hard to know where they come from. Some people favour the idea of downloads. Quote from the collective unconscious. Perhaps. Maybe we just figure the neurons in our brain to wire in a different way. Certainly for me, there have been occasions where a rider didn't get it. When I gave explanation A or explanation B or explanation C. And with my back up against the wall, I came up with explanation D. That turned out to be the Best of the lot. And to say it in a better way to a lot of riders. On top of that, we have the way that a more skilled rider can imagine her way into the horse's body and affect his abs, his back legs, how his three thirds communicate with each other. But first of all, she has to be able to imagine her way into her own body and learn to feel that well. Some models expand from these five ways of knowing, adding another three, one of which is faith. And faith is largely a question of acting as if I love the faith, knows it's already received and acts accordingly. In other words, it has the person act as if their new reality is a reality. And what can happen is that their new reality becomes a reality. It's a self fulfilling prophecy that works to that person's benefit. And sometimes people in their faith are seriously delusional, but it can work very positively. That's a part of feeling safer means you actually are safer because you don't do the fill in things that make you actually less safe. Another way of knowing is intuition. This is different, perhaps from the kind of downloads we talked about, where your brain just puts something together in a new way. And I think it has a lot to do with embodiment, because there are a lot of neurons in your gut. You have a gut brain that communicates with your head brain, and there are neurons in your heart, and you have a heart brain that communicates with your head brain. And your gut brain and your heart brain know things that your head brain doesn't. If there isn't that communication and more embodiment, more ability to sense the wisdom of those brains, I think is invaluable. Lastly, we have memory, which is interesting because more and more research has said that memory is unreliable, because when we bring back a memory, we tend to embellish it rather like a fisherman's tale. So it gets less accurate as time goes by. And you've also got the question of how much generalisation there is within memory. So if you think of a farrier not doing a good job with a horse, does the horse just keep it as that farrier or in the horse's brain, does this generalise to all farriers or all men, or does it stay with just that farrier or just that foot, or just that farrier and that particular foot? The way we generalise or not is really significant. And the biggest generalization is what's known as one trial learning. A balloon bursts in your face and you then have a phobia of balloons and there is a huge amount of motion involved in that, and you won't go near a balloon again if you can possibly avoid it. So these are our various ways of knowing. And in the next podcast, I'm going to build a case for not knowing. But right now, let me leave you with those ways of language, our senses, our emotions, the top down and the bottom up. Reasoning, imagination, to which we could add faith, intuition, memory. Have those in the back of your mind, perhaps, as you interact with your horses this week. Have fun with them, enjoy riding. I'll be back again soon.