 If we go to our horse and our seats in balance and we're quiet as a rider, the easier it is for our horse to understand our aides because when we use them, they're very clear. We haven't been busy making a lot of noise. We've been a quiet rider. So now when we say something quietly, our horse goes, oh, they're saying something. We're going to be working on the us part first and the feel part. I think people get a little intimidated sometimes because you've got riders out there that seem like they've got a ton of feel and they're natural and it's very easy for them to do things and you think, well, boy, I don't quite have that and I would really like to get it. And it seems like it's an elusive thing but it's actually something that we can be working on in our everyday life and we can make huge gains away from our horse. So then when we get on our horse, we're not thinking, oh, my poor horse or I'm not doing this right but we're always having to question ourselves because we've already organized our body and our emotions and our feel in a way that's going to be advantageous in our ride. And the cool thing about horses is they are, and as I'm sure you all know, they are the most forgiving animals and they're so cool because if you get like one to 5% of it, they're really good at filling in. So that takes the pressure off. We don't have to have perfect feel. We don't have to be perfect riders but we just have to get a little bit better, offer our horses a little more and they will start to fill in and pick up the pieces that we maybe are not bringing to the ride. So let's have everybody on your feet. And I want, you're gonna count in your head. So like 1001, 1002, 1003, and so on and so forth. And you can do it with eyes closed, eyes open. I don't really care but we're going to stand on one foot, figure out how many seconds we can stand on that foot and then we're gonna stand on our other foot and figure out how many seconds we can stand on that foot. So it'll just look something like this and you're gonna also notice when you stand on your foot, where the weight is, you're counting the seconds as well, you're gonna notice if you grip with your toes, just try to feel what's going on in your whole entire body and see how long and then you're gonna switch feet and then you're going to see how long on the other foot. So let's go ahead and let's just do that to begin with. And you'll also notice what you have to do with the rest of your body, how your arms are, how you're holding your head, your focus, your breathing, those sorts of things. What we're working on developing here as we move forward is we're gonna work on our posture position, stability, balance, that sort of thing. And it always is very useful to be able to make observations and make comparisons so that then as we experiment and try new things, we can figure out is it helping, is it hindering, what is showing up different? And because we are all different and we've had different injuries and we have different biomechanics in our body due to maybe having different lengths of femurs or the way everything's set in our body, we're all different. So we need to through this be able to become kind of our own trainer in a way so that we're able to reflect internally on what's going on in our body because what works for you may not work for you. Maybe someday it will though. So we need to, as we progress in our riding different things are going to work more effectively as other pieces come together. Let's go ahead, let's have you all sit in a chair and we're gonna talk about the pelvis because really this area in our pelvis is where much of our stability comes from and especially when we're riding, that's our point of contact, it's our place where we communicate. So as you're sitting, I want you to just kind of be aware of where your weight is at and actually everybody's sitting pretty good. When I did this weekend, we had some people sitting like this and I had done this on the second day and so people were kind of relaxed but just feel where your seat is at. If that's home base, so what's our home base? And this is something that we do, I would say a large portion of our day, especially those of us that work on like a computer or do a lot of driving, we end up sitting down a lot. So what if we could take that seated position and actually do something with it where we're creating some awareness, some feel and we're developing the patterns and habits in our own bodies that are gonna be useful and beneficial to us when we're riding our horse. And the more time we spend in good patterns, the easier it is then for us to be on our horse. If we go to our horse and our seats in balance and we're quiet as a rider, the easier it is for our horse to understand our aids because when we use them, they're very clear. We haven't been busy making a lot of noise. We've been a quiet rider. So now when we say something quietly, our horse goes, oh, they're saying something. Whereas if we're coming to the ride and we're slouchy and sloppy and we don't have a lot of balance, then we're gonna be busy kind of trying to stay with our horse and then our communication doesn't come through nearly as well as it would if we were a quiet rider. So I want you to now sit at the edge of your chair. And when we sit at the edge of our chair, what it does is it puts us in a place where we have to actually use ourself. And when we're using ourself, we need to find center so that we can stack up our skeleton on top of our centered pelvis so that our muscles can have some tone in carrying us, but they don't actually have to physically hold us. So we're going to do an exercise that I'm gonna call rock the chair. So we're gonna pretend like we're in a rocking chair and our pelvis is going to have the rockers and you're going to feel your seat bones and we're going to go from a rock forward where we rock onto the front of our seat bones and then we're going to roll back and rock back. And I want you to be able to go from one extreme to the other and as you're doing this, you can pause places and notice what the different position causes you to do. Now, when you're in the saddle, and you guys can continue doing this, when you're in the saddle, I'm going to be talking about having flashlights on our seat bones. And we want our flashlights on our seat bones to be approximately pointing straight down. When we're rocking the chair here and we go into this position where I'm kind of back and my lower back kind of has a hunch in it and I'm rolling my shoulders a little here, that would be my flashlight pointing straight in front of me or towards the horse's front feet. When I roll into this position, now my flashlights are pointing behind me. And what I want you to do as you're working this exercise and you can close your eyes if you'd like to because I think that does help us feel even more. But as you're doing it, I want you to notice what it does to your back, to your spine, to your breathing, to your head and neck, how your muscles are working. And we're going to all now go together and we're going to go into that flashlight's pointing out behind us position. And I want you to pretend like you're on your horse, you're riding this way with those flashlights pointing out behind you and you want to keep the flashlights out behind you right now and your instructor tells you to sit up. What are you going to do? Yeah, do you feel how, and everybody pretty much did it, you feel how you lift your sternum and your lower back gets hollow? And now try breathing and feel what it feels like as you breathe. Where can you breathe into as your instructor says, sit up, your flashlights are out behind you. You can breathe into your chest, right? Upper chest maybe, but can you breathe into your lower back? Not really, right? So this would be a hollow backed perky position. So our back is hollow or perky, we're trying to sit up, but our horse is going to feel like we're very, very tight. And like maybe we're nervous because our breathing has become very, very shallow. It's just up in our lungs and that type of breathing is more of like a nervous type of breath. Our goal is to be able to fill the entirety of our lung as we're breathing. Okay, so now let's try the opposites. We're going to rock onto the back of our chair. Flashlights are going to point straightforward and we're going to get kind of slouchy and you're going to think about dropping your sternum and almost looking at your belly button with your head. This is a posture that I see guys ride in a lot. Perky tends to be a little bit more women, guys tend to be a little more like this and make sense anatomically and now try breathing. And when you breathe, you might feel like you can breathe into your back but you can't really fill your whole lung, right? And horses, again, they feel these things. And so in this position, if I were to have to use my legs, they're going to be way out in front of me, right? Whereas in the other position, my legs are probably going to swing back a little ways. So the clarity of our aids is not going to be there. Now we're going to find our own center and we're going to be doing this in the saddle but I prefer to do this without the feedback of the horse because I think it makes it just easier for us to really focus in and work on developing our feel. This is something I would recommend you do when you're sitting. But you're going to now roll forward and back with your eyes closed and you're going to just point your pelvis out behind you or those flashlights out behind. Then you're going to slowly roll through the middle. I want you to feel the sensations of your seat bones rolling and then you're going to go back and forth like a buoy in the water until you can find that very middle position. And as you find the middle position, I want you to start thinking about lengthening through your spine and growing tall and then you're going to start thinking about breathing into the entirety of your lungs. So not only your lower back, the middle part of your lung but also your chest as well. That'll lift your sternum a little bit. But we want to keep our spine growing out of our pelvis in a very neutral manner. And then we're going to stretch up through the top of our head and then I want you to notice how this feels. So this would feel maybe a little more stacked. Like we have arranged our body and our skeleton in a way where it's carrying itself, it's in a balanced position and therefore it's easy. The position is facilitating you being able to hold yourself here without as much effort as it would take if you had your pelvis out behind you or in front of you.