Why Won’t My Horse Go Forward?

Why my horse won't go forward? Can you imagine just for a second, just have a visualization of you riding a perfect ride with your horse.

So you're riding you have connected, you have a true forward, you have the willingness from your horse. And you can see so clearly how you can trot and you can canter in perfect harmony, and your horse is also singing along with you.

You can feel your horses thought, you can feel your horse power and the body underneath you. And you've worked really hard for many years to accomplish this.

Now it comes to the part where you want to make more progress, you want to reach higher goals than what you already have.? You want to maybe go to higher levels of dressage, you want to maybe be an endurance rider, and maybe a trail rider and you have it all set up.

You have a plan, what happens, your horse puts the brakes on, your horse doesn't want to go forward anymore. So here's the thing, we actually want our horses to get lazy, or to not go forward. And I'll tell you why in a second.

In our Harmony For the Horse Program we hold you through these powerful ways so you can use your mind and movement to communicate clearly and connect with your horse in your own uniqueness.

CLICK HERE to discover more about how we can help you to reach freedom, achievement, oneness and joy that you most seek with your horse.

We want our horses to get lazy, but we just don't want them to do it when we are planning to start reaching our goals, do we? We don't want it at that time in our training, we want it a little bit later.

So I'm going to share with you the steps that we go through to help our students help their horses, when they find themselves saying to themselves, "Oh, my horse is so lazy".

Here are three questions to consider...

1.  What is it that irritates you most about your horse?

2.  Why do we want our horses to get lazy?

3.  Are you truly open to learning?

 Because that sounds totally opposite of what we want, doesn't it? But we want that because we want communication.

Horses communicate through movement.

And when they're not moving forward, that is communication for you to listen to. That is them talking to you. That is telling you, you need to listen to something, you need to listen to yourself and what the horse is saying.

Movement is life.  Movement is survival.

Everybody needs movement. Movement is survival, especially for horses.

I don't feel we can classify our horses as lazy.  Horses cannot be classified as lazy like we can classify humans as lazy.

If you find yourself saying my horse is so lazy, that's where we need to dig really deep and find out why that's happening and why you're saying that in the first place... and, what is it that irritates you most about your horse!

Are you truly open to learning?

One of my favorite sayings is either you're open to learning, or you're defending something.

How do you know if you're defending something?

And if you don't know what it is you're defending, how can you be truly open to learning?

That's where the problem arises.

What is the optimal moving forward for you and your horse?

There's a lot of frustration when our horses are not optimally moving forward.

And then that's why we start to think they're lazy, and what it all comes down to, is a misunderstanding. 

We have a student in our program who's been working really hard with her horse.  She's worked for several years with her horse very hard.  All appears to be going pretty well.  What she really wanted to do was get to high levels of classical dressage. She had the goals of doing this but she didn't want to do it in a way that would destroy her partnership with her horse. 

She wanted a horse who was willing to go forward with her and she knew that her horse had a really smooth fun trot.

So she was constantly searching for that trot.  She explored things like bodywork, saddle fit, all kinds of different training methods, from one extreme to the other, she explored all of this and she ruled out a lot of things. 

And still, her horse had the brakes on.  Everything felt way too hard, harder than it should have felt.

It wasn't fulfilling for her, it obviously wasn't fulfilling for her horse. And she started to feel a lack of inspiration with going out to her horse. And she also felt that her horse wasn't inspired with her.

What happened then was that she became mad.  Her anger sometimes would get the better of her. Then what happened is she became deeply sad, she was very sad that her horse didn't want to be with her and she didn't know why.

Her horse didn't want to move forward with her and do what she wanted to do.

So what we found within our program was the thing that was holding her back from having her willing partner, and where she wanted to feel like she was being an inspiration for her horse was that she was defending.

She wanted desperately to learn.

And she'd already learned a tremendous amount of stuff. But she was defensive and that defensive block showed up in her movement.

So it was no wonder why her horse would not move forward.

We have to to clear out those blocks and clear out those deepest fears that she had.

What those fears did was led to a misunderstanding.

And now she has the confidence to move forward with her horse - her horse has the confidence to move forward.

Because the rider has no longer mental emotional blocks. And the rider has no longer physical blocks relating to those mental and emotional blocks.

So we help them to make a huge shift in their riding, in confidence in understanding and in clarity. 

And one of my favorite sayings is either you're open to learning, or you're defending something, but how do you know if you're defending something, if you don't know what it is you're defending?

How can you be truly open to learning?  And that's where the problem arises. That's where it happens is because people don't know what they are defending. They just don't have an idea or have an inkling of what it is.

What we do in our program, is we start with the rider.

And we sort out where it is that the rider:

What is it that's holding them back specifically uniquely to them?

And then we go to the horse, and we find out what it is that the horse is dealing with. A lot of the times, there's a huge physical component with the horse.  So we have to look first of all of the physical components with our horse. 

Remember we mentioned that...

...we want our horses to not move because we want communication and we want a conversation. If you get that to that point where your horse is not moving forward, that means you've got to look really serious about what you're doing with your horse.

That's the only way they have to communicate with you is through their movement. And if they're not moving and if movement is life, and movement is survival for a horse then that means there's something pretty critical that you need to look at. 

CLICK HERE to discover more about how we can help you to reach freedom, achievement, oneness and joy that you most seek with your horse.

If you get a chance to work with us, we go deep into your horses, physical state, and mental and emotional state because they are linked.

Physically, we start with what we call the strategic warm up, and we're looking for quality movement, we're looking for those places where your horse has blockages. Because if there's a block there, there's probably pain. And so we look for quality movement by doing this process. And we use the whole body not just parts, but we always are looking at the whole body.

And we're looking to work towards balance, that's our end result. Because probably your horses are not balanced if they're not moving forward. But this is and I have to say getting back to where you we look at the rider. And that example of the student who was not able to get her horse to move forward because she had a mental block there.

She was not being with her horse she was doing to her horse, there's a certain amount of letting go that you have to do with your horse. You have to let go, to allow the horse to do what the horse knows how to do, which is to move.

If we get into that making it happen, and we do that for long enough, then it'll come to the point where your horse just will not move forward.

And they're just talking to you. And they're telling you. So your job is to find out why.

Why is the horse not moving forward?

Is it because I am holding something back myself?

Is it because I'm not being a good guide?

Is it because I'm not leading my horse?

I'm not saying we don't have boundaries, and we don't keep ourselves safe. I'm saying that yes, we do have boundaries.

And sometimes we do have to get very assertive, very clear in our boundaries for safety reasons. But what I'm saying is that when the horse does not move forward, it's time for us to really listen up.

So that then we can get to the place where we have a flow in the movement. That's what we all want. We want flow when we ride, we want to get to that place where we can imagine where we're in connection.

And we have forward and we have a willingness from our horse. So we have the partnership that we're looking for. 

And now when we put the horse and rider together, and we have our goals, and our horses ready, and we're ready to go for our goal, and ramp up the training...

...our horse will be there - where your horse can feel your thoughts and you can feel the power and it's power that's controlled power, ... that's empowering.

You can change the power with two fingers or just with a tiny body movement or tiny use. You can change all that power, the rhythm and the possibility are there for you. And the willingness of this being, this horse who wants to be with you, and do what you want to do, as much as you want to do it because it's fun, and it feels good to them. There's no pain, there's no misunderstandings anymore.

If this is something you want to get support with, you can apply to work with us in our program where you can get help to reach your equine goals. 

CLICK HERE to schedule a call with us!

MORE RESOURCES TO HELP YOU BUILD YOUR DREAM HORSE

*Why Am I Stuck With My Horse?

*How to Motivate Your Horse