Take your horses out and Gallop them REGULARLY, GO HUNTING, DO CROSS COUNTRY, TRAIL RIDE.
Gain confidence, so that all you have to do is think 3rd gear.
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You’ve received lots of good advice. Alibi has nailed you as has netg no doubt. Lunge lessons on a steady eddie and close your darn eyes, let go and feel the rhythm and how your body matches it. Do this a lot with your ground person adjusting/critiquing your position. Exercises at the canter on the lunge with no reins/hands, just you riding the rhythm and adjusting the stride/tempo with your seat will help you identify what you do ‘wrong’ on your own. Too bad you don’t have an opportunity to gallop on the track at Carefree farms. Laura used to let me do it with my stallion (before their rules changed) and it took me back to being a kid ‘wind flying through my hair’ on my little stinker welsh/shetland cross that I started out on as a child. Of course I also held a jockey card and really did breeze at the track for a while as a young adult. I feel for you. Fear is a tough one and the mental games our mind plays with our body and psyche aren’t easy to overcome but I have faith you will.
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I will forever be baffled that people continue to ride when they’re apparently so afraid that they can barely manage it. Like, why? You shouldn’t need extensive psychotherapy and all these mechanics experts to ride. How is that supposed to be fun?
And yet there’s thousands of people so terrified of riding who continue to do it. Baffles me, truly.
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From your responses, OP, it seems like you consider you are stopping the horse because of your own tension. Two easy ideas that may help:
One thing when feeling nervous is to count the strides in your head or, even better, out aloud. It helps you breath, makes you think of something else, makes it easy for your horse to feel/find your rythmn. Canter is a nice steady, repetitive “One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four”. Personally I find I breath in or breath out on the “4” so I can’t do the classic final “four o’clock”.
Secondly, wrapping your arms around a horse’s neck in a moment of crisis is 100% normal. That reflex is what stopped our ancestors from falling out of trees a few million years ago and so it goes very deep! When next you ride, tie a bright colored piece of ribbon or thread into the mane or on the bridle crown piece so that every time it catches your eye you are reminded to SIT UP!.
My third suggestion is less quick to do. Take an equestrian vacation where you are in the saddle for hours a day, at all gaits, across different terraine. It is hard to hang on to tension when looking at great scenery, having a natter with your companions, riding a steady horse that knows it’s job. I’ve been on such trips with nervous friends and it is lovely to see their confidence grow.
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Lots of people have provided great tips, but I have a few more or a few nuances to also try.
When I was preparing to move up to third level, I gave myself a challenge to ride every medium/extended canter in schooling so big it made me want to squeal (I don’t love “speed”). Doing that down the long sides and proving to myself that we could still manage to canter around the corner without falling over helped a lot.
My trainer would have me ride a medium canter in the warm up, almost immediately after picking up the canter if we were too slow.
Also, ride a lot of medium canter and big forward and back - so much that the horse is always thinking a bigger canter is coming. You need to be able to feel that a bigger canter is always available and if you put your leg on, the horse will instantly go more in the canter. If you have a hard time with nerves/fear, try this in the pirouette, which has the smallest canter. Ride one step, then ask the horse to ride out in a bigger canter for a few strides, then one step turning, then out. The small canter really needs to feel like the big canter is right there.
Also, you probably need to refresh your horse’s response to the leg at the canter if you’ve been shutting him down. Take your leg off in the canter, if he breaks, back to a medium canter. Repeat a lot until a working canter can be maintained without leg every stride.
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They must get something out of it that you can’t see. Why do you care?
I used to ride with somebody that would only ride at the walk and a slow gain but not canter. She was afraid (not terrified) to canter. She loved to do Parelli ground work. She was perfectly happy to tootle around at the walk and slow gait. I never understood why she didn’t take regular weekly riding lessons rather than expensive natural horsemanship clinics a few times a year. On the other hand she went to a cow cutting clinic and had a blast. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Her horse is well taken care of and she enjoys being with him and riding him within her comfort level. Who am I to judge?
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I don’t know what the root of the OPs fear is but I’ve been there after a bad accident. I was visibly shaking the first five rides which were lead line at the walk. After about two weeks, I attempted riding W/T on the longe line. If my horse tripped I would immediately start shaking. It took about six months for me to be comfortable doing walk trot with her without my ex there watching or helping. It took me about a year to be comfortable cantering and jumping small cross rails.
What made me push through? The memory of not having that level of fear. Nerves? Sure. Fear? No. I wanted to be the rider I was. There is nothing wrong with dropping down several levels to deal with fear and there is nothing wrong with squashing the fear to be the rider one knows they can be.
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My first thought was do you have a concern about moving at speed? Does it make you nervous in some way when your horse covers ground?
As a re-rider (first horse retired for 10 years, didn’t want to have to afford a second), it has taken me some getting used to the big steps that my horse can take. He’s 17hh and his canter feels HUGE to me. Doesn’t help that it’s a bit unbalanced. But I found I wasn’t riding him forward enough. It felt ‘relaxed’ to me, but in reality it was more slo-mo. For me, the solution was lots of forward trotting. Posting. Leg yielding. Then the canter doesn’t feel like such a big change.
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Who pissed in your cheerios?
If you were able to appreciate the joy of others and had seen RHRT ride, you would get that the often subconscious thoughts which frustrate are nothing compared to her joy when things go well… But I suspect the idea of applauding the successes and joys of others is also hard to understand.
Anyway, for those who don’t know, RHRT is TALL. Long limbs, torso, etc. And therefore thoughts easily get transmitted to the horse as any slight change in muscle use makes such a huge difference. When she gets it right she has no boundaries, the plus size of being a beautiful tall rider - the challenges to getting it right being the negative.
So as she noted, I reminded her it is normal for humans to want to go fetal when they feel tension and anxiety. Almost everyone feels tension and anxiety in their lives during this pandemic and political environment. Which means the knees come up / hip angle closes. With my short legs I generally don’t have blocks get in my way even then, but still end up more on my crotch. Also, attempting to keep myself toned still makes me close my hip angle and arch my back. Since RHRT mentioned movement in upper body I suspect that comes into play, too.
Also, most people I know alternate between easy canter and losing the canter. In that, RHRT is no different from most of us! While I was home trying to ensure my high risk mother didn’t get sick for 10 weeks, my trainer was riding my young horse. I came back out of shape, and since my horse was now used to no blocking from a professional seat, every time I tried to control my upper body from moving I ended up tipping onto my crotch, and she introduced the canter halt to our work. Not needed at training level. Today I got to have a lesson on a friend’s FEI horse, who is WAY too wide for me and we ended up doing a bunch of collected trot/ medium trot transitions to get me sitting on my AR instead of tipped, and boy do I look forward to how easy riding my more appropriately sized horse will feel tomorrow. 🤣😂
So the specific advice I have is, yes, find your AR. Try to scoot the tail bone forward under you toward the pommel. I’ve never seen you with a driving seat, and don’t think you’ll get one now either. Try not to throw your reins away while you do it, because if you’re not changed in that way, you’re more likely to throw them away and let your horses fall on their forehand, which will also make them drop the canter, rather than pull on them. We finally reached a place my trainer sometimes has to tell me to shorten my reins after 7 1/2 years of telling me to lengthen them.
Off horse, if you have a big yoga ball, do the exercise someone posted on there forums long ago. (If whoever posted it reads this, THANK YOU. I don’t remember who shared it, but it’s great.) Lie on your back and put your feet on the equator with your legs straight. With feet there, roll up tailbone first and one vertebrae at a time until your first point of contact with the floor is your shoulder blades. Then roll back down. More than about 3 on the first day will likely give you trouble walking! This will help you feel the back of your core muscles you need to engage riding. Right now the front of your core is stronger, and you need to help balance so you can keep your seat forward in the saddle instead of sliding back and getting on your crotch. I suspect that will be harder for you than it was for me just due to your height, too.
I do find riding one handed and riding with one hand straight up tends to really help me get the right feeling, too. It prevents my rib cage from blocking me.
You’ve got this. You’ll get this. And if it stresses you out too much while dealing with things outside of riding, no harm in putting away the canter and letting your trainer do it until you find not cantering boring and feel you MUST canter again. You’ll find increased enthusiasm makes it easier, too. 
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Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0R5KBrmbeQ
One thing that really helps me is to exaggerate whatever physical motion I’m getting wrong for a bit. In my case, I was mucking up a walk-canter transition in warm-up yesterday. To compensate for my horse not being totally in front of my leg, I was lightening my seat and bringing my shoulders forward as I felt him strike into canter. In my subconscious, I was encouraging him and making room for his back to lift up under my seat.
Besides getting my horse in front of my leg, my trainer had me seriously exaggerate the leaning back in the transition to keep my weight down through his hind legs. It felt so bad, but in reality I was probably only 1 degree behind the vertical. And it drove the idea home and let me get the feeling right in a normal way afterwards. It really helps to have a trainer that can use language to help you in the moment, as opposed to saying things that are correct all the time. In just the last week I’ve heard lean back, hands up to your eyeballs, floppy ankles, sit like a pogo stick, etc. None of those are right, but they were all what I needed in the moment to correct something that had gone too far the other direction.
You may have to force your body to canter for a bit. To create something that looks like the natural following motion of scooping your seat and letting your shoulders stay back - you may have to think lean back on my pockets, shove my hips forward to my hands, etc.
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I began riding as a 35-year-old adult at a H/J barn on horses no beginner should have ridden. My balance was/is terrible. I was overweight. I had a fear of heights. Many would say there was no way I should ever have been on a horse. The fetal position became my friend. Why did I continue taking lessons and falling? Because cantering, providing the horse wasn’t cray-cray, brought such joy to my heart. I eventually switched to dressage to develop a better seat. I lost weight, got over my fear of heights. Even though my balance is still terrible, cantering still brings a smile to my face. I don’t like to feel the wind in my hair, though. Should I stop riding because I’m afraid to gallop? I don’t mind pace, but I admit, too many horses have taken off with me and the thought of galloping terrifies me.
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I gotta ask - what is AR?
I struggle w/ canter departs as well and holding a nice canter as well. Most of it can be attributed to a OTTB who would launch hurriedly into canter because I did not set him up properly, and it would just turn into a cycle of 2 tense mammals trying to hold it together with legs failing wildly from both parties. It wasn’t pretty. Neither one of us could relax into it. It took a long time for me to realize how much unconscious tension I was holding in my thighs. I anticipated the launch start so much that I was unknowingly gripping with my thighs and bringing up my heels starting a whole chain reaction of unbalance.
Off-horse exercises and stretching have helped. Riding a smaller horse with a much easier to sit canter has helped as well. It was fun to ride a friend’s little QH who had a nice smooth canter - it helped take the ‘scary’ out of the depart. So much of this is a mental thing with my body tensing muscles that I was not aware were tensing! Its still a work in progress, so I feel your pain OP!
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Come join a distance rider for some conditioning work. After many, many miles of posting, you’ll be begging to canter Seriously though, get out of the ring and go have some fun on someone’s steady- eddy.
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I had a similar issue that a trainer really helped me fix. I too would get on my crotch when tense, tight thighs. Not something that encourages a horse to want to canter. This trainer was the first to really get it into my head how unstable that position is, and how much more secure position I am in when sitting back and riding on my pockets, looser legs and using however strong an aid I need then relaxing the aid. She said no one ever falls off the back of a horse! Anyway, she kept after me in lessons, and I decided I was going to trust her and just do what she said. I eventually began to feel more confident sitting back than tipping forward. And then I was able to feel the gas pedal in the canter and how much I had been blocking with my position.
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What is EMDR? Would like to hear more.
Others have given specific physical exercises; I’ll offer a couple of suggestion aimed at getting out of one’s head, assuming that might possibly be contributing.
I try to reframe situations, as in the ol’ “it’s not scary, it’s exciting.” Lol, right?
If on a trail ride, with the chance to canter on a steady eddy (accompanied by another of the same ilk), I suggest saving the canter for uphill situations for a defined (fairly short) distance. IME, the horse is much less likely to put forth the effort required to bolt when cantering up hill, if that is a consideration.
If a hill is not available, then I would choose a less than wide open (“Whee!”) spot – if the horse doesn’t have a clear shot at a long view, but rather a more twisting path (also for a relatively short distance with a natural spot to slow down), it’s also less likely to go for broke, IME. These opportunities can provide the “wind in one’s hair” feeling.
I also found singing out loud to be quite helpful in managing tension.
And then there is the book “A Soprano on Her Head: Right-Side-Up Reflections on Life and Other Performances,” by Eloise Ristad.
Best wishes for cracking this nut – your horses sound like wonderful souls!
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@soloudinhere do I dare say you’ve never pushed yourself beyond your limits? I will say yes from your post history and the fact that you have zero sympathy for the OP. Shit happens and it’s not all about shows. It’s the journey. I can tell by your comment you are a RIDER working within your means. You are not a horsewoman.
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We are not alone. I can get rather lovely canter departs. Too bad I get judged on only the first one, not the three or four extra when I can’t keep my horse* cantering. Doh.
In short, I am following this thread with interest.
*Like the OP, every horse upon which I sit. At least I don’t have to worry about runaways. Double doh.
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I mentioned the JJ Tate video in my first post on this thread which is the far better way to learn about it, but essentially more back toward your tailbone and less on the pubic bone.
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I’ve used it myself after a trauma when I witnessed some thing absolutely horrendous that involved a fatality not in the hospital, which I’m used to. This was some thing I witnessed/saw in a situation I wasn’t expecting to see it, on my way home from work when I stopped at a crash.
I’m happy to talk to you more about it off-line, but it was pretty disturbing and I don’t really want to share it here. But the images Of what I saw/experienced came coursing through my mind and my vision from left to right, as pictures, that would not go away.
I did the therapy the next morning and it went away.
My therapist described it as my brain was not able to categorize these images into a story because it didn’t make sense. Because it was so horrendous that it didn’t make sense to any normal human being.
I am very experienced with trauma/managing trauma, but this was different, unexpected, and not in my Workplace.
Here’s a link… I’ve referred lots of people and I don’t know anyone who has not had success.
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