We are officially back to work!

Phinn and I visited Virginia Equine Imaging in late October and were sent home to resume full flat work.

I reached out to Mogie Bearden-Muller of http://foxhilleventing.com/default.aspx for help getting started on the right path.  It quickly became apparent that 8 months off hadn't done either of us any favors and I was thankful that we were able to connect with Mogie pretty quickly. Her farm is located just over two hours north of us and we had to figure out when we could match our schedules.

Mogie sorted us out right away. Basically, we were both pretty rusty and needed to concentrate on reestablishing the basics, starting with connection.  Mogie hopped on and worked with Phinn first, establishing a true connection with the outside rein, sounds simple, but its our homework for the next two weeks. 

Once Mogie had worked with Phinn I hopped back on to get the feeling right.  Mogie's approach really worked well and I felt like we were very connected. I knew Phinn wasn't connected over the last few weeks, but I couldn't quite reach out to him the way I knew I was supposed to.  I had tried several schooling techniques that had worked in the past and they produced results, but they weren't having a long term affect.  


Mogie's approach was simple, instead of correcting the negative (leaning on an inside rein for example), affirm a positive - connection, pure and simple.  A few simple fixes, moving the bit, raising the nose band, and raising my hands with more bent elbows, and we were headed in the right direction. Mogie's analogy for me was that I showed up with my tools spread out all over the rooms of my 'house', and when we finished, they were neatly organized back in a box, and I was using the correct ones, and geting the correct response.

The result was a fluid, connected mustang with swing in his trot.