Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Half halts and balance

A few musings on the half halt from tonight's lesson.

We worked on my tests, and on balancing to do the movements. I realized I needed to do the following continuously:

Balance, forward, collect, forward, repeat.

Then I realized that this is the ‘balancing half-halt’ and the ‘collecting half-halt’. But it makes no sense trying to think of it as a half-halt. I have always thought, oh, I need to do a half-halt, and ended up just slowing Odin down, or tensing up my body. Tonight I didn’t think half-halt, I just thought, ‘I need to balance him and them push him forward’, or' ‘I need to collect before starting the stretchy circle’. I thought about what result I wanted from the half-halt, instead of just doing a half-halt.

It made me think that maybe the half-halt is a bad name? It feels more like ‘all the little things we do to make the horse do actual dressage’.

Or maybe it just is me that needs to think about it this way, but I now know I need to focus on the result of my actions; how do I want Odin to go? How do I get there?

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