Transformation – Commentary by Hans Michael Schoebinger

So not expecting anything else but another entertaining hobby, I decided to start riding at the, for a beginner, rather old age of twenty-eight. Twenty-three years later I know that I have become a very different person than I was at the time when I started. And I know that it is the horse that was and continues to be the linchpin for that change.

And the change feels just great. From a tight ass money-driven founder of a soon booming software company I turned into a not so money-driven founder of an old, definitely not booming software company whose single employee is me and who spends most of his time working as a temporary worker in the non-core workforce of a medium sized corporation.
“Great, huh?”, you may ask.
“Yes, great indeed.” I answer and my thanks goes to the horse for being able to wholeheartedly come up with that answer.

Interestingly, I have little talent for riding. Being clumsy by nature I encountered many difficulties from the get-go:
“Your legs are dangling like a pair of sausages”, one of my first riding-instructors would comment on this state of affairs. 

Had I had talent, had everything worked fine, I would certainly have had less impetus to adapt and to start looking for and implementing changes that I deemed necessary to improve the situation.

First I tried to adapt my riding. I tried to harden the “sausages” and turned to many a brute force approach my riding instructors suggested to me. Fortunately to no avail as over the years it became ever clearer that I was a hopeless case in that regard. So I did not have to go down that route forever.

To make the long story short, I did continue to look for better ways and slowly but surely turned from pupil to student, sceptic, dissident and nowadays to “traitor”, the title I am referred to in my former riding community, as one of my riding instructors of old told me lately. I took it as a compliment, for I feel so much better now, for change for the better I did, once I had turned my fullest attention inwards.

“The goal of becoming a horseman has much less to do with tools and aids than it does with the refinement of self” , as one of my most valued teachers, Mark Rashid, put it.

This commentary is presented as part of  The Inner Rider course and contains some of the most profound statements I heard from Mark and other people of significance along my long and winding road to the happy horse person I am today. I hope these statements and their discussion prove as valuable to you as they have to me in refining your relationship with yourself and your horse.

Last but not least I have learned from Wayne Dyer that it is very useful to supply a few lines of instructions on how to apply these statements for everyday use at the end of each topic. So here we go for Lesson 1: