We all fall, right?

I fell off Mara for the first time yesterday. It was during a lesson, thankfully, and due to a big spook where suddenly there was no horse beneath me.

As I lay there on the ground I thought, "OK, I'm OK" then "NOOOooooooooooooooo! I cannot be falling off, I need confidence, not the opposite!"

Since I'd had this troublesome horse for over a year without falling off yet, some part of my mind had thought I'm done with falling off now. I'm careful and I don't put myself in situations where I could fall.

KT assured me the horse was more upset about it than I was. I said, "Oh, and you can say that because you can read my mind?"

Mara stood a couple meters from me, looking very worried. KT said, "You should have seen her face when she saw you hit the ground. She had no idea that could happen!"

For some reason my chest was hurting almost as if I'd had the wind knocked out of me, but not quite. Today I'm sore from shoulder to hip.

I sat there on the gritty, nearly-concrete-hard arena feeling sorry for myself, feeling this growing sense of dread, knowing that things will surely go much worse for me the rest of my life with horses.

I asked KT to hold my other stirrup and I got back on. KT was stroking Mara's face and talking to her how wonderful she is. I was not in the mood to chat with Mara, and I went into a silent place the rest of the lesson, where any communication at all was incredibly hard. She would ask me what a phrase was in English and I'd say, "I don't know" rather than think it up.

I was determined to just continue what I was doing, but Mara was absolutely terrified of something on that end, in the grass. KT said, "There is something there, you have to trust her - she senses it. You can't be mad at her, in fact, you should just leave that end of the arena and work somewhere else, because you're making it a bigger deal just by working down there."

I refused to listen and kept her in a 20 meter circle down there, bending away whenever she got to the scary side. It wasn't really working though, I couldn't get Mara's mind back. I stopped her right where she spooked, her body rigid, and we just stood there a while.

KT said "She's extremely anxious, but you've got a nice connection with her, just ignore what happened and keep on going. My she looks good when she's anxious." And I flashed back to Baasha, always looking spectacular when he was a jigging prancing freak. He used to growl when he jigged, have you heard a horse growl?

KT asked me to canter again. We'd already done our canter work and I am still not confident with it due to her throwing her head to the ground and sometimes crowhopping. When she said to canter, I pulled Mara up to a halt and peered over at her and said, "I'm not going to canter again. Would you like to get on and ride?" to which she replied, "That won't help anything. You keep going."

I was trying so hard not to cry, and realizing how ridiculous - I had the perfect fall. It wasn't the horse trying to dump me, I wasn't injured, I had people there (3) to make sure I was OK, and my horse had just stood there, not leaving me. I was only upset that I might lose more of what nerve I have left riding this horse, and that seemed worse than a broken arm.

Last night I dreamt about the fall - repeating it exactly as it happened.

KT said, "Your homework this week is not to think about your fall." Um, what? You can't tell someone NOT to think about something, that doesn't work.

And today I got an SMS - the Gelassenheit training course was cancelled - get this - because of the weather. It's the first non-sunny, non-humid day in weeks, and they cancel? I was so happy this morning to wake up and see an overcast sky and hear a gentle pattering of rain. Now the rain has stopped, of course, and the sun came out briefly, but no training course this weekend.

I really could have used that.