Fear of Riding, Part II: Overcoming Fear & Feeling Safe

Today’s video is part one of a month-long series about how to overcome the fear of riding.

Like our previous video: Fear of Riding: How to Avoid Accidents, Part I: Proper Preparation, this one will focus on learning how to slow down, pause, or stop, attune, or tune in, and pay attention. The difference is I will be giving you specific exercises to use that will help assist in your recovery process.

Learn to connect to what’s around you, not what’s in your head. Slowing down and paying attention to what you feel will not only teach you emotional agility, but it will also teach you how to respond appropriately to any given situation.

You can achieve this through the following 3 steps:
1. Meditative breath techniques.
2. Feeling your horse’s movement underneath of you until you feel it inside of you.
3. Connect often to your horse by pausing, stopping, touching, talking to them.

Horses pause when they sense danger or a threat. This pause allows them to tune into their senses, their true guttural instincts and safety barometer.

Too often a horse’s pause, or hesitation, is revered as something negative such as disobedience, disrespect, attitude, refusal, cowardness.

If your horse pauses, they’ve either hit an emotional threshold or they sense a threat. The last thing we should do is push them through it.

You’ll never build trust, confidence, or a willing attitude in your horse if you fight their instincts. Instincts are intrinsic to horses for their survival. I want my horse to be aware and engaged in their surroundings. I also want them to trust me and feel safe enough with me to let me know when things are getting too scary.

Here are my suggestions, recommendations, to handling the situation:
1. Respect and allow the hesitation, pause, or stop in your horse and offer calm, connection to relationship and positive reinforcement.
2. Retreat from the area or get off and offer the same.
3. When your horse has calmed down and reconnected to you, that’s the right time to work with your horse and the scary place or thing.

The opposite would be to push, fight, make the experience horrible for you both so that your horse never wants to go there again.

Here are a few quotes that I thought would help you along your journey with this topic.

“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves is based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)” ― Rollo May,

“Practice the pause. Pause before judging. Pause before assuming. Pause before accusing. Pause whenever you're about to react harshly and you'll avoid doing and saying things you'll later regret.”
― Lori Deschene

“Patience is an inner pause, a brief stillness, a moment we give ourselves to breathe through our initial reaction so we can move to the place where a calm, thoughtful response is born. Patience is a gift of time we give ourselves so we can give the gift of peace to others.” ― L.R. Knost

If you would like to learn how to develop your horse, from ground to riding, start to finish, you can learn how and so much more in my universally proven MasteryMembership Riding Foundation Program.