ONCE AGAIN…LOVE YOUR POST, F!! Literally, you should write about this stuff! This is EXACTLY what I love about good horsemanship.
You have hit the nail on the head about this “thinking” part of the horse, and that “mentally turned loose”, “clarity and understanding”, withyouness" “okay-ness” 
THANK YOU for sharing this with others!!!
[QUOTE=Fillabeana;7405830]
Aw, fancy, what a nice thing to say. (Blushing)
I’ll be sure to let my own five horses give me sloppy kisses on your behalf this afternoon
So many people never find the REAL meaning of Ray Hunt’s often quoted ‘make the right thing easy, and make the wrong thing difficult’.
Bill Dorrance said, ‘You don’t ever want any part of making things difficult for your horse.’ And yet he means exactly the same thing as Ray Hunt does.
You can set it up so the horse believes he has no other choices than the two you present him with, and he will indeed choose the ‘easier’ one. But if he isn’t ‘turned loose’ mentally (Ray Hunt), ‘with you’ (Harry Whitney), having ‘inner OK-ness’ (Dr. Deb)…he will still seek another option eventually. Because the ‘easier’ choice does not feel OK, good, right to him…it just sucks less than the difficult one.
But if you set it up so the horse, doing the ‘difficult’ thing, has just enough motivation to go search for the ‘easy’ thing…and he finds inner peace with the ‘easy’ thing…he won’t ‘come untrained’ or ‘all of a sudden for no reason out of the blue’ buck you off.
What most people don’t realize, is that most horses need pressure taken OFF them while they are doing the ‘wrong’ thing, so they can begin to check out other options.
Showing the horse how to release his physical braces, usually leads to release of mental braces.
But if you don’t know what muscle group you want the horse to release, and that you don’t stop working with that ‘exercise’ until the horse is releasing his mental brace as well…the horse is just complying and you won’t make any deep changes mentally. There are forty-twelve ways to have the horse ‘laterally flex’ his neck or ‘one-rein-stop’…where the horse learns to retain his physical brace in poll, loins and ribcage, and never gives over mentally. I can promise that an athletic, motivated-enough horse can go directly from the middle of a one-rein-stop, where his hind leg is stepping across ‘properly’ but he isn’t releasing a brace…right to a rearing, bucking bronc ride.
Martin Black talks about ‘pressure and relief’, rather than ‘pressure and release’. Same thing, meaning that simply taking physical pressure away does not automatically mean that the horse is no longer mentally pressured. You have to find out how to get that horse in a state of mental relief when he does as you ask. You get that horse where he is OK, with-you, and you hardly need pressure at all…that is where lightness comes from.[/QUOTE]
