“Aha!” I love those moments. Don’t you? When you suddenly GET IT? It’s such a rush when everything comes together and really works for the first time.

How do you create more “Aha Moments”? When Jane is riding me, they come when both sides of my brain kick in, along with the muscle memory of the new movement. And that comes with both intellectual understanding and physical practice. It happens when the left side of my brain, where logic and linear thought resides; meshes with the right side, where emotion and artistry lives, and then shows up in my physical body as the execution of perfect movement. My whole being responds to everything coming together with an exciting and satisfying “Aha!”

Learning to ride well doesn’t take good luck or exceptional talent. As the cowboys say, it just takes wet saddle blankets. In our case, it’s wet dressage pads. I learn something from Jane every time she rides me. And she learns from me too. Sometimes our progress is imperceptible, and sometimes it comes in huge Ahas. But we only have forward progress when we actually put what we’ve intellectually learned into physical practice. And that takes commitment and work.

Have you put what you’ve recently learned into your practice? Have you had some Ahas lately? Remember how it feels and look forward to creating that wonderful sensation again!

Now, get out to the barn! Your horse is waiting for you! Today just may be an “Aha” day!

Love, Moshi

From Indy:

I enjoyed hearing from so many of you, with your experiences relating to the story of my new friend who appeared to be a grump on the surface but turned out to be a really nice guy. It sounds like there are a bunch of you who have known folks like this.

There is value in everyone. Sometimes you have to look beyond the surface to find the good stuff, but it’s there. You just have to dig for it sometimes.

It’s like the story of the Buddha statue in Thailand. In the 1930s, a construction project required the dismantling of an old abandoned temple that housed a large plaster statue of Buddha. It was decided to move the statue to a storage building, were it sat for 20 years under a simple tin roof.

In 1955 a new building was built and the monks decided to install the statue inside. A crane was supposed to move the statue carefully, but the statue was much heavier than predicted, causing a cable to break. This dumped the plain, simple statue in the wet mud. This event was seen as a bad omen by the workers, who ran away from the place, leaving the damaged statue in the watery muck. At the dawn of the next day, the abbot of the temple came to evaluate the damage and started removing the mud and plaster, finding beneath the statue’s cracked clay exterior, a five ton statue made of solid gold!

Turns out, about three hundred years ago, the monks of that old temple heard that the Burmese Army was about to invade. Knowing they were about to be overrun, they covered their precious gold Buddha with plaster to hide what it was made of. The Burmese came but never bothered with the simple plaster statue. No one, for almost three centuries, had any idea there was a priceless gold statue under that cheap plaster!

Some folks are like that, too. You have to get beyond their damaged exterior to find that part underneath made of pure gold.

Let’s go dig for some gold! I’ll check you, and you can check me. Okay? You may like what you find. They don’t call me a “golden” retriever for nothing, ya know!

Love, Indy

Jane Savoie
1174 Hill St ext.
Berlin, VT 05602
Jane’s Website
DressageMentor.com