I'm reading Dominique Barbier's book 'Dressage For The New Age' and he writes about the "Power of the Mind as the Most Important Aid" and the importance of thinking and feeling, within yourself, what you want the horse to do and giving him a chance to respond to your mind, before using your body to reinforce the mental aid.

He writes, when he trained with Nuno Oliviera and rode his horse, Nuno told him to ride on the buckle and bring the horse up into collection without using his hands or his legs. He says that he managed to do so by thinking and feeling; by bringing himself up into collection, and the horse followed his idea.

He says the following;

"It seems to me that the great ecuyers, or riding masters of the past - Francios Robichon de la Gueriniere (1688-1751), Francois Baucher (1796-1873), and others - were all looking for the same thing:"descente de main et descente de jambe." This French expression means "the relaxing of the hands and the legs"; in other words, a cessation of action.

Baucher expressed it another way; "Make yourself understood and let it happen." This achievement resembles a state of grace, of ultimate perfection, because it lets the horse move and perform on it's own, from within himself. The horse cannot understand this refinement of the aids that makes use of only slight leg pressure and no hands, unless the mental relationship, the mental harmony between rider and horse, has first been established.

Man is supposed to be the most perfect animal because he thinks. However, communicating mentally with horses is actually far easier than doing so with other humans, because the latter have learned to use so many faces, to play many roles. In other words, people cheat....... Horses don't do this."

I'm still not convinced that a lot of this mental communication isn't actually the horse noticing physical changes that happen within our bodies when we think of what we want; the subconscious micro-movements that occur, but if it works, and this level of communication is achievable (and I'm convinced that it is), the whys and wherefores are, to me, academic - I just want to ride like this, and only like this, for the rest of my life.

I also watched Sally Tottles DVD 'Revolutionise Your Riding With Bodysense' and she speaks of using the Alexander Technique to stop the micro-movements that occur whenever you think of something when riding, so that your horse doesn't pick up on them and they don't affect performance. I could hear what she was saying, but I couldn't help thinking how much more attractive the idea of making use of them seemed to me.