When they really get their first pieces in place, riders so often say ‘I feel much more solid /in place/safer’. They have deepened their breathing, learnt how to activate their core, and become more stable. This is instantly effective, and it trumps various attempts to ‘relax’. It is only the beginning of changes which yield more ‘brain-space’, and the reassuring sense that time goes more slowly.
A journey of learning surely beats being stuck on a plateau, and/or bemoaning your lack of talent! As you ‘learn how to learn’, you start to crack the code of ‘talent’ and thus replicate it. As your biomechanics and feel improve, you discover the excitement of finding new solutions to old problems, via the tool that is so rarely explained: how to fix/adjust your own body to adjust his.
Supporting your body weight well, and being on the ideal balance point, help your horse to carry you. You spare him from experiencing you as dead weight, and from having to drag you along. As you cut down the ‘white noise’ in your sitting, your meaning becomes much clearer to him, simultaneously making you more ‘horse-friendly’, and a fairer task-master.
‘Fun’ means different things to different people, and could mean everything from leading your horse more safely and having happier hacks, to the thrill when your improved performance is rewarded with higher scores. ‘Fun’ can happen in everyday riding whenever you feel your increasing skills yielding the influence that helps you ‘hold it together’ in situations where you would have ‘lost it’.