Centered Groundwork with Sparky

Yesterday I had my first opportunity to work with both Sparky and her owner in the same training session.  We began with some basic techniques from Centered Riding, to put ourselves and the horse in the right relaxed mindset for communicating effectively.

There are four basics in the Centered Riding program, and I often incorporate them into riding instruction, training horses, and especially ground work with a horse.  Sparky with her heightened sensitivity and great intelligence is a classic example of a horse who needs her handler to be very self-aware and calm.  Breathing is particularly important, since in her sensitivity she cues dramatically off of the human's breathing patterns and body language.  Her owner and I began by working on our own awareness of where we hold tension and how we breathe.  If the human is breathing quickly or shallow, Sparky will do the same.  Fast irregular breathing stresses her out, and makes it much harder for her to concentrate because she interprets the quick breathing as a danger indicator and it puts her on high alert, making her distractable and frustrated.

To start, the owner and I both found our "centers", also called the center of gravity.  This can be found by placing one hand on your belly, with your thumb on your bellybutton.  Your hand will be quite low.  Then you place your other hand on your low back, across from the first hand.  The space between your hands is where your center of gravity is located.  Anatomically it's a little higher in men than in women, but you can change the height and stability of your center of gravity merely by thinking about it.  It's a weird phenomenon but it works.  Once the space between our hands was mentally located, we both practiced some deep breathing, with the exhale moving the hand on our low back.  Breathing is a beneficial practice for a lot of reasons.  (I had a 6 year old girl come for a lesson today, and when I told her she was good at breathing she replied, "yes, I do breathe a lot.")  For Sparky it's important because she needs her handler breathing deeply and staying balanced to keep her attentive and calm.

Once we had located centers and developed some deep diaphragmatic breathing, we "grounded" our feet.  This is a process which essentially draws your brain's attention to where your feet are in space.  It's done by locating a spot on the bottom of your foot, and stimulating it with a specific series of tapping.  This spot is called the "bubbling spring" in Tai Chi, or for those who are more biomechanically oriented it is  a nerve bundle that is the balance point for your foot.  By doing this "grounding", the brain basically "wakes up" your foot, or becomes more aware of the balance point in your foot.  Grounding the owner's feet caused her to have a much greater awareness of her entire body, and increased her ability to perceive her posture.  These are very important things for working with Sparky, because she is so super vigilant with regard to her handler's balance, breathing, and posture.

We had a great session in the round pen for having done some of this horseless work on ourselves first.  Sparky was much calmer and slower moving than normal, and it was a direct result of us humans being more centered and stable in how we communicated with Sparky.  The owner's homework was to practice breathing, centering, and grounding.  All these things will be our foundation for improving the owner's communication and relationship with Sparky.