How To Stay Focused During Your Ride

Many times when I hear riders communicate to me that they have a hard time focusing, what they are really saying is that they have a hard time being present and quieting their mind.

When we “try” to think our way into focusing, it often fails. By consciously trying, we are actually moving further away from present time awareness and into our thinking state which is very busy and not quiet.

Once we are in our heads, lots of different thoughts start to come up including feelings, and these can often be limiting or negative, which pulls us further away from being present.

Being present is not a “personal” subjective experience. It is an expanded spacial experience and therefore includes everything that surrounds you in your awareness. It is entirely objective. It is the ability to be aware of “space”. Becoming aware of the air that is all around you. This is spacial awareness.

When you are thinking, you are being subjective. You are thinking about your problems and challenges and while doing so, your world shrinks and becomes very small and every experience you have is filtered through your personal beliefs, thoughts and feelings. Let’s call this process “your colored glasses”.

Spacial awareness, on the other hand, is awareness of everything that’s happening but from a completely neutral point of view and this is a very expanded state of mind. It includes a much bigger area than just your mind and your world of thoughts.

In spacial awareness – problems, challenges and obstacles melt away and you start to see things as they really are in the present (without filtering them through your colored glasses), you start to see things clearly without judgement. This also means you quit taking things personally and you are able to observe and study something with an objective mindset and then apply the right action to it.

Most training issues are incorrectly diagnosed because the rider is stuck in their head and not observing things objectively from the outside.

I experience this all the time with riders. Instead of actually paying attention to what the horse is doing and then adjusting the correct aid to get the correct response or maintain the response. Riders often do something completely different or, more commonly, they tune out the horse and don’t pay attention to the subtle changes the horse is making to the frame, the speed, the engagement, direction, gait, etc.

This happens when riders don’t stay present in the now but instead think about the past or worry about the future. Staying present means that you are consciously observing what’s happening every second.

Present means Now, Now, Now and Now. The present is constant if you pay attention to it.

Just because you asked the horse to frame itself two minutes ago doesn’t mean that you can now let it all go and expect the horse to maintain what you yourself are not maintaining.

Ultimately you are the picture frame and the horse is the picture. If the picture frame doesn’t stay constant, the picture will fall out of the frame.

Staying constant means constantly feeling in your body and the body of the horse for little changes. Little or big deviations from balance, speed, direction, lightness, frame, gait, etc. and making adjustments before things fall apart.

This doesn’t mean micromanaging; it just means not losing focus on maintaining the structures that you create. Once I set up my horse, I don’t touch with my aids for a minimum of 5-10 seconds to allow the horse to learn how to do things on their own at least for a little while. However, in that 10 second space I don’t disconnect and start thinking about other things or forget to observe or feel the horse, I stay focused.

Some people call this “one pointed focus”. One pointed focus is when you zero in on something and you do it with such extreme focus that everything else falls away. In this case your focus should zero in on the horse.

This type of focus is not subjective, it’s not personal, it is still based in expanded spacial awareness, which allows you to go out of your personal thoughts and really tune into your senses, the body of the horse and the goal you want to arrive at.

·        To develop feel you must first have spacial objective awareness.
·        To have feel you have to stay out of your head.
·        To have feel you have to take that objectiveness and put it to work for you when you focus on that “one thing”.

As you get better at focusing on one thing without thinking about it, just feeling it and adjusting your actions according to it, then you can add more things and still be able to focus.

When you focus on “space” and your awareness of space, you instantly become fully present.

Try it now to quiet your mind:

Step 1: Close your eyes or keep them open. Put your attention on the space and air between you and other objects around you, then put your attention on your awareness of that space.

Step 2: Feel the quiet and the peace that starts to settle into your mind and your body (your chest area) when you focus on awareness of space. Listen to the sounds, the sensations, the smells etc, but without taking your attention off the space.

There are more steps to developing this type of present focus further, but let’s start with those two steps above.

I’ve come to realize that when I’m with horses, I instantly switch into spacial awareness. This allows me to observe the horse with fresh eyes every time and easily see what’s really going on and how to fix it.

I quickly started noticing and wondering why I wasn’t accessing the same type of clarity in other areas of my life as I was with the horses. it took me a while to realize that the key was a lack of spacial awareness. Without it, my personal view point was too narrow, I wasn’t able to see clearly because I wasn’t able to see the bigger picture. Everything was colored through my own thoughts and emotions.

I now know that to be successful in any area, you have to be able to see the big picture and step out of the box. Your mind needs to be in present time and have an expanded awareness. If you’re stuck in the maze you can’t see the exit. If you look at it from the outside the way out becomes obvious. This is what an expanded present mindset feels like.

Increase your awareness beyond your body and mind/thoughts and suddenly a world of possibilities open up to you.

Now you can really focus and stay present and aware with your horse and observe what is happening in the body and mind of the horse.

You’re no longer busy talking or thinking or fixing or blaming; solutions just come to you.

The trick is you need to practice this awareness, otherwise it doesn’t last for longer than a few seconds. Meditation is one way of doing that (I meditate AM and PM for about 30 minutes). Another way is to ride your horse and be consciously paying attention the whole time, but this should be done gradually. It can also be wonderful to meditate with your horse by just focusing on looking at the horse or placing your gaze close to the horse’s body with a soft eye and just observing everything the horse does without evaluating why he’s doing it, unless you observe cause and effect objectively without involving your personal emotions.

You will start to feel a true quiet, peaceful or even loving feeling. Stay with that feeling for as long as possible and when it leaves you, your meditation is finished.

Riding consciously is a bit more involved, and I’ll go into what you should be feeling and looking for to achieve that same state of mind in one of my next articles.

However, you can start with just being with your horse or sitting somewhere quietly and observing the space (go back to step one and two) and your awareness of that space around you. Even if it’s just for 5 minutes…

Ride with Lightness
Celie xo

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