You can give a voice to the nonverbal

It seems like every week we’ve added another veteran to our morning lesson.  In fact, we’ve been so busy that our videographer has been recruited to help handle the ever-growing group (meaning no video the past two weeks).  So, what have our veterans been up to lately?

At the beginning of the program each rider worked with a horse handler and two sidewalkers, a team designated to keep everyone safe around and on the horses.  Over the past 4 weeks the riders have progressed to the point where they’re now spending part of the lesson completely independent, no leader, no sidewalkers.  Initially riding alone only at the walk, last week’s lesson introduced everyone to the challenging (and thrilling!) experience of trotting without help.  Our adaptive riding instructor, Corie, had the servicemen and women whooping it up through a barrel racing pattern.

Watching the riders maneuver through the course was a lesson in humility.  One of the most challenging life lessons is learning to let those you care about take chances.  It’s tempting to lend a helping hand, to be the little voice on a shoulder offering assistance.  As a horse handler, the moment when you unclip your leadrope and turn to the rider saying, “You have your horse,” is difficult.  It’s offering ownership of the situation to a student who is less experienced than yourself.  Part of you wants to stay clipped on forever, ensuring that your lessons are nearly risk-free.  However, the act of taking chances is the only process by which we grow.  We teach everyone who leads our therapy horses to allow each student the opportunity to succeed, which conversely means offering them the chance to fail.  If a student forgets to ask their horse to turn, their leader will slowly let the horse bump into the rail.  “What happened?” Corie will exclaim, “Did you forget to tell Valentine to go left?”  It’s this process that teaches both patients and students that their actions have consequences.  If we’re always catching someone before they begin to fall, they never learn to tread carefully.

In many ways, letting kids begin to lose their balance is a vital aspect of hippotherapy.  Thankfully, we have the ability to do this while keeping our patients safe, with sidewalkers maintaining light contact but resisting the urge to help out too much.  For those with neuromuscular or sensory disorders, it can be difficult to feel asymmetries or imbalances.  Instead of helping a child each time they begin to drift off midline, perhaps leaning to the right, the therapist may ask for a small left circle from the horse.  The centrifugal force of the schooling figure encourages the rider to fall even more to the right, or outside of the circle.  It takes this greater sensation of imbalance to teach them to find midline, helping the rider learn where the center is and how to stay there.  Taking away support is often the only way to encourage someone to support themselves.

Many wonderful people have summed up the above in less than a sentence.  From Kenneth Boulding who said “nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it.  We learn only from failure,” to Robert Allen, “There is no failure.  Only feedback.”  A great many men and women have expounded the virtues of missteps, errors, and flops.  However, Henry Ford may have said it best, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”  Each moment of our lives is an opportunity, whether for success or otherwise, it is an instant in which anything is attainable.

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