Sometimes if I’m having trouble with something, I think of a practical application for it to stop my over-thinking and let my body take over with what it knows to do.
Does your arena have a gate that you can open from Sydney’s back? I find opening a gate to be a good TOF exercise. First, I point straight at the gate, essentially with the nose to the gate. Then I do a TOF to get me sidled up to the gate with whatever side is better for me to open it. To do this I do “inside” leg to push over in the direction toward the gate. “Outside” rein to hold steady or “catch” the horse’s movement. “Inside” rein doesn’t do much - maybe help focus in the direction a little toward the inside of the arena, but I’m not hanging on it.
Then once I’m at the gate, I have a new inside and outside rein - the inside rein is the one closest to the gate, and the outside rein is the one away from the gate and it catches or steadies the horse; I use outside leg to make sure the horse doesn’t move out faster than I want it to go when opening the gate. I put my reins in my outside hand and hold the top of the gate with my inside hand. I swing the gate into me a bit. [Guess I should have mentioned first that my gate swings in, not out.] Horse has to step over to move away and make space for the gate.
You can use this two ways. If you’re standing at the corner of the gate which is the part that is opening, you can position yourself such that you do another TOF and move the horse’s haunches over and swing the gate by you. Or, you can do sort of a leg yield if you stand lengthwise parallel to the gate. This is more of the step over-go straight-step over-go straight sort of leg yield as you reposition yourself along the opening gate.
Sometimes we get too caught up in the mental aspect of something, but if you can practice it with a practical application you sort of get it and then you can go back and polish it up. Of course the exercises above aren’t going to be show-ring pretty, but they force you to separate your aids to get something done and then maybe you can see or feel when you need to add leg versus hand and what that gets your horse to do.
On another note related to leg yield . . . my first instructor would have people to the head-to-wall leg yield as noted above. She’d also have people switch posting diagonals when leg yielding so that the it was easier to feel and easier to apply the leg aid in the sitting phase.
