OP, you need to discover how to “find” your hips (get awareness of them), and relax them. That’s the mechanical thing that will help you stay closer to your horses’s back and softer. It’s the kinesthetic skill you need to develop in order to ride well on whatever trot you have.
For this equitation problem, I think the keys are to find a position or exercise that puts you into the right dynamic position and then lets you feel it while you are there. Once you have that, you have a chance in hell of recreating it in your body, on demand. One way we get this feel is via contrast and movement in our body creates contrast that we can feel.
So if I were in the ring with you, I’d pick an exercise that asked you to continually change how your hips had to move on your horse. You have to “jar them loose” of doing what they always do so that you can feel something different. My two suggested moves:
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Switch diagonals on the “up” part of the post, every six strides. It will be hard at first. You will need some core to do it. The beauty of this movement is that your hips don’t get a chance to fall into a rut where they stiffen and relax in a predictable, rhythmic way. Also, you will need to engage your core, whether you like it or not, because (all but the most rank beginners) end up relaxing our hip muscles when we are in the “up” position. Or, rather, we need to open our hips in the way we always want them to be at the top of the post. In any case, you want that core engagement because you will not be able to find and relax stiff hips if your body has worked it out that those muscles around your hips are what is keeping you in balance. In other words, you need to teach your body to keep you upright and centered on your horse from your belly, not your hips. Easier said than done; ask me how I know.
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Along the same lines of creating contrasting movements in your body that you can perceive and then replicate: Try switching from posting to two point, to posting, to switching diagonals to sitting every 3 or 4 strides. They idea, again, is that those postural muscles of your body which you don’t feel very well never get a chance to settle into a predictable rhythm of contractions and relaxation that leaves you with that lack of perception about what they are doing. What you are feeling for here is a leg that is relaxed and unchanging from about the middle of your thigh down to your heel. If you have a deep heel or come from H/J world the way I do, you’ll be able to feel a little spring in your stirrup. Feel for that, because it’s a good sign that your knee (which I think lots of us stiffen and can’t feel) is relaxed.
If you relax your ankle and hip, and maintain feeling, dynamic tension in your belly instead, I think you will necessarily have also relaxed your hips enough that your seat can be deeper and more following. That’s what lets you post on a bigger trot-- hips that stay relaxed in a large range of motion, rather than getting “beyond” the biggest range your flat-moving quarter horse gave you and then automatically stiffening up.
For your horse, when you do this exercise, don’t worry a ton about making him give you his back. If he’s a schoolmaster who won’t mind you asking him to do that while you work on changing your equitation, go ahead. If, on the other hand, this horse is young and can’t help you out, your best bet is to not harp on him about how his back feels and “ride what you have” while you work on yourself. Again, make the decision that you are just working on you and all he has to do is just keep cruising around. It is nice for a green dressage horse to experience a ride that doesn’t put him and his body at the center of attention. It’s also a good thing for a green horse to work on being tolerant of how he’s ridden. And I think you will find that as you get into an exercise that has you counting strides, you’ll find a very rhythmic, even trot. Even if the quality of his engagement is mediocre, he will come to enjoy the unpressured rhythmicity of it. You might not be giving him physically the best ride, but you also aren’t demanding much from him mentally and that’s like coming into work on Friday when the boss is away. Trust me, your horse won’t mind you feeling different on his back so long as you don’t pressure him to be perfect while you change your ride.
When you are doing any of the exercises, they will come a point where you discover by accident or maybe a stride after the fact, that your seat was deep and soft-- just the way you wanted it. This is the same as taking your hands off the handlebars of your bike and, then, while you are there discovering that you can ride no hands. There’s no discovering that you can ride no hands without actually riding no hands. So when you get to that magic moment, where you say, “Look, ma, I’m riding with soft hips!” just stay in that-- the post or the sitting or the deep two point for another stride or two and “take inventory” of your body. Notice what you feel and describe it to yourself in whatever words make sense. Then change it up (sit if your were posting or in a two point, switch diagonals, etc.) and see if you can find that same feeling in your hips. Or go back to what you were doing when they were soft, after the change, and see if you can decide to recreate that feeling in your hips (or wherever you felt it in your body) in your own language. In other words, that “Look, ma, I’m doing it!” statement that you make to yourself is actually really important. It’s like using high lighter pen on the felt experience of having soft hips, so that you can find it again from all the other ways of using your body that you feel.
To me, this bit-- circumscribing kinesthetic experience-- is the money shot. You can read, say, Sally Swift’s language for this stuff, but that means that you are still directing attention from the real of language to your body. It works if her images give you a new thing to do with your body that you can do, then hopefully feel, and then reliably repeat. But what if your body remains closed to whatever language works for for her and other people?
Working the other way-- from the body “up” to conscious thought (or not), we can do the exercise and have our body just live it. If you are a talented athlete, you don’t need the more cognitive or linguistic part of your brain to get in on that deal. Those guys are the wonderful, natural riders that say unhelpful things like “just relax and sit!” that don’t help the rest of us for whom that simple command doesn’t have so, so many physical nuances. If we don’t already have their body, how is that language going to help us make our body into theirs?
What I find for myself is that I can teach myself body awareness and control if I can make the experience definable and conscious. But the nice thing is that you can do some or all of this by yourself. Put yourself on horseback in a different position that you can feel, feel it and feel how the horse seems to respond, and then recreate or even exaggerate what was working. There really is a lot of changing our equitation that we can do by ourselves. That’s because developing kinesthetic awareness and control is, at bottom, a completely private experience.
Also, if I could have one person help me with my dressage equitation, it would be Susan von Dietze. She is the Man of dressage equitation. If there were a Big Eq of Dressage, you’d want her to be your trainer. She has written books and so if you are a better student than I, I’ll bet you can find lots of help in those. If you ever get to ride with her or even audit, Do It.
