12/21/2025
Why contact?
Years ago, I was bought into the notion that anything worth doing should be done on a loose rein. I really struggled in my lessons to hear about contact because I had poor associations with it - people telling rider's to hold against the horse, like fighting a big fish on a line into a boat. It appeared to me a contest of wills, and I was completely uninterested in that feeling.
My teacher often talked about the connection being like dancing, but I had never felt anything like this. She talked about funneling the hind leg without ever trapping it, and keeping the full length of the neck intact in the contact. "Hold the horse's hand, but don't ever restrict the movement," she'd say.
It all sounded good, but every time I picked up the reins I just felt heaviness, resistance, or my horses hid from my hand. She would bring my awareness back to my seat every time and away from my hands.
"The fingers just capture what the seat creates" she would say -
But it was years of practicing with my seat before I would understand the contact.
A following seat, a directing seat, a seat that was soft but very stable: my teacher had this, and I spent years and years working toward it, understanding finally just what it meant to feel the hind leg through my seat but not always able to stay with it, and often blocking it.
But those times when the contact feels good is magical - unlike anything I've ever achieved on a loose rein. It was like being in close with someone you love very much - taking their hand and swinging in a dance. Feeling everything there is to know about them through your hand: their thoughts, their breathing, the way they feel about you and eveyrthing to do with you. There is no hiding from each other on the contact.
Exactly where the hind leg is in what phase of each stride - where it's going and how that connects to how they're feeling inside. Recieving the fullness of their trust from hind leg all the way into my hand.
You don't NEED contact for riding - you can walk trot and canter on a loose rein. But it's like any relationship - it can go as deep as you want it to go, as intricate, nuanced and beatiful as you'd imagine and more.
And like anything else, it can be poisoned. Like all tools, it can be flatted and cheapened, and downright misused. It can be weaponized against the horse or even against a student -
But it also bridges us into a flow, a beauty, a magic, available for anyone with the discipline to work toward this kind accurary - available to anyone who can be trusted with the power of having thr entirety of a horse's body in your hand and use it only to create art.e
