Ever since I got my first horse, the Anglo-Arab Hat Tricks, I have been trying to ride at as high a level as I can.  I faced repeated frustrations due to my undiagnosed MS as it affected my balance, coordination, and proprioceptive sense (I could not tell where parts of my body were.)  In spite of all this my riding gradually improved, and I got to riding reliably at a low to middle intermediate level in the Forward Seat system.  Even my jumping improved, not that I was ever that great over fences.

However, whenever I tried the hand technique that Littauer and others in the Foreward Seat system insisted was the core of advanced riding, using the fixed (and then releasing) hand to ask for jaw flexions, no horse that I rode would cooperate.  Hat Tricks, in his infinite wisdom, would just turn his normally relaxed and soft lower jaw into an unyielding iron bar (he would never give me anything until I did it exactly right.)  Then I would not try again for several months, working all the time on the security of my seat and the independence of my hands.  No matter how much I improved in these areas I always got the same result to my fixed hands, until I gave up on the idea of ever riding on a truly advanced level.  I just figured I was not good enough and that nothing I ever did would do anything but irritate my horse.  Meanwhile I was still reading, in many different systems, that the proper thing to do at an advanced level was to fix my hand and only release it when the horse obeyed my aid.  It just never worked for me.

When I finally got diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1993 it all became clear to me.  The reason that the horses would never respond to my fixed hand was because my hands were not sensitive enough to catch that magic first moment of the flexion of the jaw, therefore my hands never released at the proper moment.  Since I was physically so much worse than during my earlier riding days, I realized that if I was to ride softly at an advanced level I would have to find a different way.  As I described in my blog "One Way to an Educated Halt", (www.barnmice.com/one-way-to-an-educated-halt,) I had learned to time my hand aids to the movements of the horse's hind feet just before a head-on collision car wreck had triggered a huge MS attack.  A decade later, as I lay in my bed despairing after my diagnosis, I decided I was going to ride in spite of my MS, and that I WOULD find a way to get up to that unobtainable advanced riding level, at least on the flat.  The difficulty was in how I would overcome the limitations of my hands.

Then an idea came into my head.  Since I was timing my hand aids to the movement of the horse's hind legs anyway (which sort of nixes the idea of two fixed hands at a time except at a canter), maybe I should just ASSUME that the horse was going to obey my rein aid and release it immediately, not only release it but release it generously, moving my hand forward just a little bit more.  When I finally found the help I needed to ride on other people's horses I put my new plan into action and I got immediate results in spite of the truly awful state of my hands (tremors, and inability to tell exactly where my hands were.)  After a year or so of riding I started getting voluntary jaw flexions from the horses for the first time in my riding life.  My riding teachers told me the horse was licking, what my hands felt was the horse's tongue gently picking up the bit and sort of lightly chewing a few times.  The horses would only do this when my fingers were completely relaxed, never when my fingers or hands had any tension in them whatsoever.  Sometimes the horse would even gently "chew" the reins out of my hands while lowering their head.  THAT had only happened to me ONCE in over 20 years with Hat Tricks.  The first time it happened since I was diagnosed with MS was on an Arabian with an extremely sensitive mouth who was always ready to invert whenever I did anything wrong with my hands, but even he responded to my new method.

So here I am now, I am completely unable to DEMAND a flexion of the jaw from the horses I ride, but the horses often GIVE me a flexion of the jaw when I do everything right.  Since I am not careening around a jumping course at a gallop or riding dressage it is not so important that I am totally unable to demand a flexion of the jaw.  The mouths of the horses I ride quickly become softer no matter how hard the mouth is when I start riding them.  Even when the horse inverts its neck it rapidly responds to my hand aids both for turns and downward transitions, often flexing its jaw, relaxing its top line and lowering its head in response to my hand aids.  The horses have even responded immediately when they were going too fast and accelerating.  It does not seem to matter if my hands are too bad to keep contact with the mouth;  on contact, on sagging reins, on loose reins, even with every bitless system I've tried, if I time my hand aids right and use them gently enough the horses often give me flexions of the jaw.  On a few occasions I have even been given flexions of the poll by the horse when riding with a bit, something that had never happened to me before.

As I putter endlessly around the riding ring for a half hour at a time I find it utterly amazing that I can occasionally ride at an advance level in spite of the considerable damage to my nervous system caused by my MS.  Sometimes I am even able to get advanced movements from the horses I ride, and it is so sweet when my riding teacher tells me that she has never seen the horse do the movement, and that she never thought that the horse was even capable of doing such a movement.  These movements are again something I can never demand, whenever I try the horses resist, but occasionally the horses GIVE me these movements and I feel like the horse and I are dancing together.

I will never regret going my own way with this.

Never give up.  If the way you are taught to ride does not work for you find another way to your goal.  Your horse is waiting for you to learn to dance with him, and there are many ways of getting there.  Even severely disabled riders can learn to dance with their horses.  If you are disabled, you just have to learn how YOU can do it, and it may be necessary to ignore both the past masters of equitation and your present riding teachers.  It is your horse that will tell you when you are doing things right, and your horse is never wrong.

Have a great ride!

Jackie Cochran