The Importance of Rest

When Eating An Elephant

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Life is a balance between rest and movement. ~ Rajneesh

Everyone needs a break now and then, people and horses alike. When riding horses, a break may be everything from what my long time mentor, Eddo Hoekstra, used to call a virtual break, ( a few strides on a loose rein to reward an effort without completely relinquishing the momentum of the work) to a momentary release of a demanding posture to a full-on vacation. Yes, even horses benefit from a week or two off now and then. More often than not, they come back better after a break, just like us.

When working with a horse on a new challenge, it is not much different than with a human. You can only focus on it for so long before it becomes counterproductive and everyone gets frustrated. Twenty minutes is about as long as one can spend on teaching a horse new skills after which everyone is better served going back to practicing things already known. This, too, is a kind of break.

Just dropping the reins for a minute and letting the horse walk is a break, both physical and mental. If we’ve been engaging our posture firmly to inspire a corresponding posture in the horse, a minute softening of our stance can be interpreted as a break by the horse, allowing relaxation and microscopic changes to occur as the nervous system finds space within the softening to reorganize that held, perhaps a little too tightly, moments before.

When training for long term goals, it is always good to remember that small, repetitive steps with minute pauses and breaks in between, lead to great things. Ballerinas practice the small, apparently insignificant poses incessantly; pianists practice the scales daily; body builders build strength through endless repetition with increasingly heavy loads. Switching from one exercise to another, gives different sets of muscle groups, as well as parts of our brain…a break. Even when we don’t actually stop working, but simply switch how we organize and engage our bodies.

Over time, all those little steps broken down into tiny programs in our brain will connect and blend into one overarching program that allows us to erase the necessary breaks between the parts and suddenly be able to perform whole sequences as one, with complete ease.