Denny Emerson gave a short and extremely powerful speech to the attendees of the 1997 Annual Conference in Brattleboro, VT last August. Following are Denny's notes
from that lecture. Denny opened with a Judy Richter's quote from Churchill, "Teachers have powers at their disposal with which prime ministers have not been invested."
Centered Riding has a
mission - probably a number of missions - and it is by clearly articulating the missions that the powers Churchill speaks of can do a lot of good for a lot of riders and by extension, for a lot of horses.
I'm not a Centered Riding teacher, per se, but I've been around Sally Swift for enough years to know a lot of the things that I think Centered Riding has to offer the American riding public:
1. An awareness
of how the human body, which is a vertical body, can best interact with the essentially horizontal body of the horse - this meshing of the two systems is not very perfect in most cases. Centered Riding explains how that
mesh can be brought about. A good seat meshes the vertical body of the rider with the horizontal body of the horse to give a good picture. In the old days, the cavalry method taught riding by longeing you for 6-8 months
on 4-5 horses per day. Lots of people washed out. The ones that could take it became good riders. The horses bludgeoned the riders body and the instructor bludgeoned their mind. At the end the riders could sit on the
back of a horse and all the muscle groups meshed with the horse. These instructors only knew how to teach riding with this system which was inaccessible to the average rider. Centered Riding explains how to shortcut
this process through understanding. These folks (the old military instructors) did not understand the mechanics - Centered Riding does.
2. A sense of obligation on the part of the rider to the horse. Many
systems of riding ignore this - that when you thump - you are causing pain and discomfort to the horse. So a tenet of Centered Riding is that when you mesh you are a better and more humane rider. If you are able to do
these Centered Riding things then there is an automatic lessening of pain to the horse. Also, we as Centered Riding instructors are coaches as well as teachers. Physical fitness needs to be stressed. Fit people are more
agile. This is not about body type or weight but about fitness, being an athlete. And while you may be too scared, unfit or insecure, you are not too old. I have a 74 year-old student doing Preliminary level eventing.
So this sense of obligation to the horse is important.
3. Centered Riding is a gift. When it starts to work what I see is a sense of heightened self-esteem on the part of the rider. There is no lower
posture than that of the fetal position as a sign of insecurity. The fetal position is the antitheses of self-esteem. Centered Riding opens you up in all directions. When you do that, it is the anthesis of low
self-esteem. This is an unspoken tenet of Centered Riding. When you get through to people in that way (like the Indian in the book) energy flows up and out not down and in.
4. All these things pale in
comparison to the exuberance and joy that Sally Swift brings to her teaching. That is what we all have to learn from Sally. Of all the legacies of Sally, of all the systems, the specifics, never forget that what has
made Centered Riding grow outward and beyond just Sally, is the exuberance and joy which springs from expanding limits - usually self limits. What Centered Riding has to give is a huge amount of material not given by
most systems. If you teach the system, but even more importantly, convey the enthusiasm, excitement and joy - Centered Riding will be around well beyond any of us in this room.
