Yoga has shown me, how many tensions we have in our bodies and how much they can disturb us. Then I have noticed that we have a lot of tensions in our minds as well. At the beginning yoga was for me a tool which was supposed to help me to become better with horses, because we need to be in internal and external balance in order to become a good rider. Horses don’t understand our human emotions, getting angry, losing control, lack of patience, tensions in our bodies can put them out of a balance when we are riding them… Later yoga has become a part of my life. It happened thanks to ashtanga which I started to practice some time ago.
I had a lot of problems to connect with one of my horses, Zadora, and teach her a connected canter for some years. She was getting very quick or didn’t like to move forwards and sometimes I felt hopeless…I was taking both classical lessons and lessons with teachers from different methods (as Ttouch, Connected and Centered riding and Alexander Technique), but only after I started to practice ashtanga yoga the big change happened. Of course it wasn’t over he night, it was a process, but I see that the better ashtangi I become, the better rider I become.
There are people who have naturally batter or worse balance. I belong to the second group, but I have improved it and keep improving it with many exercises thanks to the ashtanga yoga which is a constant work on myself.
As in the case of people, there are horses with better or worse balance. I got a mare (Amiga) who didn’t have the best balance in the world. She could fall running on her own in the pasture, she is a little bit too long in her body, has pretty flat gaits. A lot of trainers were telling me that I would never teach her flying lead changes. Well, they were wrong. That’s way I don’t cross out any rider and any horse, I know that you can help everybody, sometimes it might require more or less work of course.
I can organize a „Yoga for riders workshop“ at your place during which you will learn both basics of the yoga practice which you can use every day in order to improve yourself and just to feel better both in your body and mind and practical aspects of it during the work with horses. We will practice it both during the ground work and riding.