I told myself I was going to blog every Tuesday. I fumbled last week, dragging heels because I couldn’t think of any valuable horse thing to send off into the world. The faulty premise one, that one would be reading me, scrolling this page for solo horse information. It is a myriad art form, the functional cohesion of collision with horse qua horse and as well as the ability to isolate the particular parts of singular and very specific body control. Real talk, riding is hard. The emotional toll, the fear of falling and the fear of failing working simultaneously with the haphazard duolingo of translating horse to english and vice versa. Let’s say these minor things are taken care of and yet the compounded difficulty of applying said principles to mechanics of one’s body and physically executing. Insert my fascination with yoga. I’m a gym rat, I beat the shit out of my body 5 days a week. I drown out the sorrows and inevitable back pain with some IPAs and choice wines so I’m no diehard health influencer but in short speak, my body is my money-maker. My phone gyroscensor clocks in a rough 20,000 steps on an average day, turning out horses, feeding horses, riding horses, bringing in horses, moving and setting jumps and all those steps I take for warmth or demo when I am teaching (12 years of teaching strong and I have never sat for a lesson). I have to go to the gym to keep it functional but the squats, dumbbell reps, etc. were a pressure for time and focus that I rarely was able to carve out and hold myself accountable to. Hence insert the yoga studio. I have been doing some sort of yoga since college, Casey’s mother took me to some blue-blood, member only club on the blue-line in PA and I fell in love with the quiet. Since that moment of made into a happy body burrio via a myriad of blocks and blankets, I have found solace, substance and meaning on the corners of the mat. Dirga breathing (lets just use sanskrit to make me sound learned) essentially box breathing is the habit that helped me kick lexapro. For good. No shit, yoga dropped the beta blockers. There will be upcoming revelations on how mobility exercises can develop feel and fluidity in the saddle but for now its important enough to start with pranayama, breath control as the foundational aspect to redeveloping our relationship with our bodies and through which, our horses. Horse training is the simple, repetitive recentering of the horse from flight response to thought response. Likewise training our breath to be slower, to originate in the belly and extend through the ribcage and chest, recenters our parasympathetic nervous system. We can train our body to relax instead of automatic levels of tension and stiffness. And through this we can unlock mobility of the hips and shoulders (spoiler alert - our major “stress holding areas” ) and actually follow the myriad of motion of the neck, head and back. But like training the horses, I’ll ease myself into using this particular muscle and quit while I’m ahead.