Highs and Lows (part II)

Things have been a little hectic recently hence it has taken me a while to add anything new to the blog (although there is me assuming that people have been reading this thing in the first place!). Anyway, following from my last post my nerves and general stress about my hopelessness got worse and worse. As I said the book started to help but the real break through came through a combination of a wonderful woman called Jo Cooper and my ever brilliant instructor. I found out about Jo via the Horse & Hound forum when I posted a feeling sorry for myself note. She is a thoughtfield therapy practioner which involves tapping on acupressure points while focusing on worries in order to remove them. It sounds daft but the effect is incredible - for each worry you have to say from 0 to 10 how bad it made you feel (10 being the worst). Then you go through the tapping sequence and then say what the number is again. I found that a number would just swim into my view at the end of the tapping and it only took a couple of goes to come down to zero on most of my worries. I won't say that it has turned me into miss positive (will take a miracle for that) but it has stopped the downward spiral that had been happening where I worried that Sam would spook and then (not surprisingly) he would. He is still on his toes but now I feel much better about it and accept the fact that 99% of the time I can handle him fine whatever he does. This has also rubbed off on our cantering on the gallops - I now feel much better about it which means I am much more in control. It is certainly true what they say about positive mental attitude.

So the combination of Jo and my instructor being as positive as ever has meant that I am feeling really good about my riding at the moment and Sam and I seem much happier together. My big lesson out of all of this is the realisation that there will always be better riders than me but that it doesn't matter. Sam is my beasty and he is happy whatever we do as long as I keep giving him the carrots!

By the way, for those interested Jo's contact details and more info can be found at www.jo-cooper.com