Latest / Equine Assisted World with Rupert Isaacson / Mary Wanless on Rider Biomechanics, Flow, and Feel | Equine Assisted World EP 23

Transcript

Mary Wanless on Rider Biomechanics, Flow, and Feel | Equine Assisted World EP 23 · Equine Assisted World with Rupert Isaacson

• 0:00
  Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Equine Assisted World.
• 0:02
  I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times best selling
• 0:05
  author of The Horse Boy, The Long Ride Home, and The Healing Land.
• 0:08
  Before I jump in with today's guest, I just want to say a huge
• 0:12
  thank you to you, our audience, for helping to make this happen.
• 0:15
  I have a request.
• 0:16
  If you like what we do, please like, subscribe, tell a friend.
• 0:22
  It really helps us get this work done.
• 0:24
  As you might know from my books, I'm an autism dad.
• 0:27
  And over the last 20 years, we've developed several
• 0:31
  equine assisted, neuroscience backed certification programs.
• 0:35
  If you'd like to find out more about them, go to newtrailslearning.
• 0:40
  com.
• 0:41
  So without further ado, let's meet today's guest.
• 0:44
  Welcome back to Equine Assisted World.
• 0:46
  I've got a legend with me, Mary Wandless.
• 0:49
  Those of you who grew up with riding through the 80s and into the 90s will
• 0:55
  know her very well and her programs.
• 0:57
  Those of you who came in more recently may not, and if you don't, you should.
• 1:01
  Because Mary's been at the forefront of, I would say, the movement to
• 1:08
  bring riding back into the humanities and to humanize the whole process
• 1:18
  and make it more accessible.
• 1:19
  And moving away from the old models of, you know, an instructor yelling
• 1:23
  at a student and hoping that by increasing the decibel level,
• 1:28
  things will somehow get better.
• 1:29
  And actually looking at biomechanics, actually looking at what's going
• 1:33
  on in the mind, actually looking at equine and human well being and
• 1:38
  so on and putting that together.
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  And it's, one can think these days that that's, oh yeah, that's a no
• 1:43
  brainer, of course we do all that.
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  But it wasn't always so.
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  And these conversations were a bit taboo, actually.
• 1:50
  Back in the day, and it was pioneering people who were not afraid to be
• 1:55
  snickered at and laughed at and perhaps a little bit even looked down upon for
• 2:00
  taking an alternative approach, who of course are now the mentors that we
• 2:03
  all look to, and Mary is one of them.
• 2:06
  So let's find out about how she can help us with us and our endeavors in
• 2:11
  the equine assisted world to provide wellbeing to humans and horses together.
• 2:15
  So welcome Mary.
• 2:17
  And can you tell us who you are and what you do?
• 2:20
  Mary Wanless: Gosh, well, I'm a riding coach and I have had a big part in
• 2:27
  creating the field of rider biomechanics, largely because I grew up with instructors
• 2:32
  that kind of shouted louder at the natives and couldn't tell anybody how to do it.
• 2:36
  You know, it was do it now, do it again, do it more, do it
• 2:39
  better, do it because I said so.
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  And clearly I had no talent and that wasn't going to work.
• 2:47
  So I was a passionate horse kid and Begged for riding lessons for 10 years.
• 2:52
  And eventually when I was 14, got myself on the back of a horse and
• 2:57
  it kind of went from there, but it became apparent to me, well, early
• 3:03
  on, I just thought like I was stupid and incapable and not talented, which.
• 3:07
  You know, I'm certainly not talented.
• 3:09
  I'm not quite stupid.
• 3:10
  And I, some fears, some spheres, I'm pretty incapable, but I set out to try and
• 3:16
  find out what talented riders were doing that they didn't say they were doing, but
• 3:21
  that only happened after I'd had a crisis where I actually gave up riding in despair
• 3:27
  and it required that giving up for me to.
• 3:31
  Look at it from first principles and look at it in a way with a physicist's brain.
• 3:35
  I have a degree in physics and go, what's going on here?
• 3:38
  There have to be rules of cause and effect.
• 3:40
  How the heck does this work?
• 3:42
  Rupert Isaacson: You sound like Elon
• 3:43
  Mary Wanless: Musk.
• 3:45
  Not quite.
• 3:46
  No,
• 3:47
  Rupert Isaacson: that's apparently his things.
• 3:47
  First principles, you know, let's go back.
• 3:49
  But, but you're right.
• 3:50
  First principles are very useful.
• 3:51
  And I think a physicist's eye.
• 3:54
  in this is really helpful because what are we dealing with here, if not physics?
• 3:59
  The natural world and how things move through time and space.
• 4:03
  Talk to us about that despair and why did it come?
• 4:09
  What did you do about it and how did it lead you to your present work?
• 4:15
  Mary Wanless: So I you know, I hadn't done much more than hairy ponies
• 4:19
  and muddy fields and a few riding holidays before I went to university.
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  And arrived at Bristol and with a friend, we, we sat about in our
• 4:29
  second year, really trying to make the riding club more open to other people.
• 4:34
  And the riding club gave me much more experience of different places,
• 4:39
  different people, riding arenas.
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  And I did my AI during my first summer vacation, so that's the
• 4:48
  assistant instructor's exam as it was then, for those of you who
• 4:51
  aren't British and old enough to know and I just about passed that.
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  And it was a sequence of events that got me doing that.
• 5:01
  Cause basically my mother had died when I was 16.
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  My dad died when I was 18 during my first term at university.
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  And so I actually had nowhere to go for the summer vacation.
• 5:12
  Rupert Isaacson: Wow.
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  And
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  Mary Wanless: when my friend said, wow, well, why don't you go to the
• 5:14
  place where I kept my pony and, and work and see if you can get your AI.
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  So I had nothing better to do.
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  And I loved the idea of being around horses.
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  So that was what I did.
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  And got to ride on some of the university teams, but it tended to be that we had
• 5:29
  three in a team and I was number four.
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  But we were fairly, we, we divvied out these places in teams in
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  the unimportant competition.
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  So I did get to ride a bit.
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  And when I left university, I decided to take a year out and play with horses.
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  And I thought I'd quote, get it out of my system.
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  That was the plan.
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  And it didn't work.
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  I got a place to go back and do post grad teacher training.
• 5:51
  Sorry.
• 5:52
  Rupert Isaacson: I seem to remember saying that to myself once.
• 5:54
  Yeah.
• 5:54
  Mary Wanless: Yeah.
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  Get it out of my system.
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  So I took a year off after I graduated.
• 6:00
  to play with horses and get it out of my system.
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  I had a place to go back to Bristol and do postgrad teacher training, which I did.
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  And I lasted about six weeks.
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  And during that time, I started getting headaches and I was
• 6:13
  feeling pretty miserable.
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  And I had the biggest blinding flash of light experience I've ever had, which was,
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  I don't actually give a damn or a toss if kids don't understand Newton's laws.
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  And I quit and played around with youth schemes, working in youth
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  clubs and with unemployed youth.
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  Why?
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  Why did
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  Rupert Isaacson: you do
• 6:34
  Mary Wanless: that?
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  I needed money.
• 6:38
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, but you could have made money in a dozen ways.
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  You know, it
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  Mary Wanless: seemed do able.
• 6:42
  Well, I think I already I mean, I was a pretty vulnerable young person, you know,
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  the whole situation of my upbringing and then my parents deaths cast a big shadow.
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  So I had a, an empathy with people who are vulnerable and
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  I guess I saw some ads somewhere.
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  I don't know.
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  You know, I could have tried working in a shop or something like that.
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  It was something I could do that was a shift here and a shift
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  there and largely evenings.
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  and a friend and I were owning a horse between us.
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  She was doing the post grad teacher training and it just wouldn't have worked
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  without me having more time actually.
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  We went into it incredibly optimistic in terms of how much you can study
• 7:27
  and have a horse and make it work.
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  So that's a good question.
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  Why did I do that?
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  It, it just, I saw some ads, it felt like something I could do.
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  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, how long did you do that for and what kind of work
• 7:41
  with these young people did you do?
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  Mary Wanless: I did a couple of evenings a week in a youth club.
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  Rupert Isaacson: Doing what?
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  Mary Wanless: Hanging out with mostly the girls
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  Rupert Isaacson: talking.
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  Mary Wanless: I ended up with a little dance class going.
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  I'd done a lot of ballet in my youth and then some other dance and
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  expressive kind of non structured dance.
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  So I ended up with a little dance class.
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  With the girls.
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  Rupert Isaacson: What year is this?
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  Mary Wanless: It's 1970 75.
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  And then in the youth clubs it was just kind of hanging out
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  with the guys and playing snooker with them and things like that.
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  You know, it wasn't very helpful program, I don't think.
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  Rupert Isaacson: And you weren't terribly old, much older than them either.
• 8:23
  Mary Wanless: No, I wasn't.
• 8:24
  Rupert Isaacson: You were more of a contemporary
• 8:25
  Mary Wanless: No, I was 22, 23.
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  Rupert Isaacson: And I'm just, I'm just casting my mind back to that.
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  And that's when I was at primary school, but you know, I'm, I'm thinking, Oh
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  yes, ABBA Queen is big in the charts.
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  People have the seventies haircuts.
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  Football hooliganism is suddenly a conversation.
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  But yeah, flared trousers, but there was disco.
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  But there was still a.
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  I feel there was still a kind of an optimism to that decade.
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  You
• 8:56
  Mary Wanless: know, I never felt caught up in the 70s
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  Rupert Isaacson: pessimism.
• 9:02
  Mary Wanless: You know, economically it was difficult.
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  I was doing my own thing in my own little world.
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  You know, I really wasn't listening to news and being, I didn't have
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  a very whole worldly perspective.
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  And in many ways I was taken up with myself as a somewhat troubled person.
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  Well,
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  Rupert Isaacson: okay.
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  Mary Wanless: And horses and kids and that was my world.
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  Rupert Isaacson: I'm also just thinking now, looking outside the window and seeing
• 9:28
  the first punks coming by in 1977 and realising that the world had changed.
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  Perhaps in a better way.
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  Say what?
• 9:36
  Mary Wanless: I missed, I missed the whole punk thing.
• 9:38
  Rupert Isaacson: Oh, there's always time, there's always time Mary.
• 9:41
  It's punk's not dead.
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  But why were you vulnerable growing up?
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  What, what were the vulnerabilities and what were you carrying with you?
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  Because I think this will really help us in this Equine Assisted
• 9:53
  conversation to understand where we're
• 9:55
  Mary Wanless: coming from.
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  I think part of it was being born into a family where my mum and dad
• 10:00
  had very little education and thought education was the answer to everything.
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  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 10:06
  Mary Wanless: And
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  Rupert Isaacson: There's some pressure there.
• 10:08
  Mary Wanless: There was a lot of pressure.
• 10:09
  Now I'm very sure now that I'm dyslexic, at the time dyslexia didn't exist.
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  I was called careless if I got things.
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  back to front and upside down.
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  I'm left handed.
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  You had to write with a fountain pen in those days.
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  It's hard to write with a fountain pen and not get your hand over
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  the writing and make a mess.
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  You know, I was messy.
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  I got things back to front.
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  I think I may also be ADHD.
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  I'm not so sure on that, but I'm definitely capable of the hyper focus.
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  Part of that.
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  And I worked really hard in school.
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  I mean, I saw I have a very smart oldest brother, really seriously smart oldest
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  brother, and then a brother who was in his shadow and really wasn't very academic.
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  And I was kind of trying hard,
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  following up quite a few years behind seeing how well it didn't work out for
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  my middle brother who kind of went I'm not into this and you know, I did pretty
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  well, got loads of O levels and viable A levels, got into a good university.
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  I could do maths much better than I could do English and Arts.
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  Although I shocked myself and everybody, I think, by getting
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  A's in English Literature and English Language at O Level.
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  The spelling gods must have been with me on those days, I don't know.
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  But, that was an almighty shock.
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  But I got myself backed into a corner where Physics and Maths was what
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  I did at O Level, at A Level, and then it's what you do at University.
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  Rupert Isaacson: But,
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  Mary Wanless: so the pressure academically was really difficult.
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  And
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  You know, I, I did get a place at a direct grant school.
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  So I must have done well enough in the 11 plus.
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  Bristol's a top university.
• 12:01
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
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  Mary Wanless: But it was all a struggle.
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  It was a real struggle.
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  And it was a very rigid and very religious family.
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  And my mother used the whole religious thing in quite a nasty way.
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  There was a lot of shame.
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  Rupert Isaacson: Talk to
• 12:17
  Mary Wanless: us
• 12:20
  Rupert Isaacson: about that as best you can.
• 12:21
  I presume this was, you know, Christianity, but what, what form, how
• 12:25
  did the shame, how did the shame work?
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  She was
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  Mary Wanless: a Christian scientist, which is not well known.
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  And you know, if you were ill, you had to get your thinking straight.
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  And yeah, so, so there was a whole punitive level about
• 12:39
  being ill or being not perfect.
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  I think she wanted to pretend she didn't have a body and bodies didn't exist.
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  She then, when I was 14, became quite ill and had cancer and didn't have.
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  treatment until it was too late.
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  I can imagine there were major arguments between my father and her.
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  Rupert Isaacson: He was not a Christian scientist.
• 12:58
  Mary Wanless: He towed the line.
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  And, and during, so it, there's more family history to this too.
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  During the First World War, my mother's mother, as I understand it, lost seven
• 13:12
  male members of the family or family friends, and she had a breakdown.
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  And then the second world war.
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  So my mom was a child during the first world war.
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  I was the child of their older age.
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  And during the second world war, my dad had his own business and
• 13:33
  he was firefighting at night.
• 13:37
  In the Blitz in London, and my mum took over running his shop.
• 13:41
  Rupert Isaacson: Which was what kind of shop?
• 13:43
  Mary Wanless: Sorry?
• 13:43
  Rupert Isaacson: What kind of shop was it?
• 13:44
  Mary Wanless: It was sports and leather goods.
• 13:46
  Nothing horsey, but sports, leather goods Sibutio football.
• 13:51
  Do you remember Sibutio football?
• 13:52
  I
• 13:53
  Rupert Isaacson: do remember Sibutio.
• 13:53
  Little footballers, and you'd stick to
• 13:56
  Mary Wanless: them.
• 13:56
  Yeah, football boots and shirts for the local schools.
• 14:00
  Fish and tackle.
• 14:01
  Fireworks at the right time of year.
• 14:03
  I have memories of being knee high to a grasshopper looking at the fireworks in
• 14:07
  the firework cabinet and we got to buy them with our pocket money at cost price.
• 14:12
  We had the best firework parties in our street.
• 14:16
  Rupert Isaacson: So, your mum, your dad was, okay, so he was
• 14:20
  firefighting in the blitz.
• 14:21
  He's a shopkeeper coming up through the blitz in the war.
• 14:25
  Yes.
• 14:25
  Older, when they have you, mum is Christian Scientist.
• 14:33
  Mary Wanless: So mum was in hospital during the war.
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  I think there was a Christian Science visitor and that got her
• 14:42
  into an OK functioning state.
• 14:44
  Kind of.
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  So I think my dad wouldn't challenge it because it was
• 14:50
  too fundamental to her OK ness.
• 14:55
  Yeah but it wasn't a very okay version of okay.
• 14:58
  Rupert Isaacson: Are there things, I don't know much about Christian science stuff,
• 15:00
  are there things you're not allowed to do, are there taboos, are there big no no's?
• 15:03
  Mary Wanless: Oh, there's no drinking no drugs, you know, no gods before me.
• 15:08
  Rupert Isaacson: No fun.
• 15:10
  Mary Wanless: Supposedly no coffee, my mum did have a cup of coffee every
• 15:12
  day, but supposedly no coffee, nothing that could be addictive or whatever.
• 15:17
  So it is a pretty strict regime by most people's standards.
• 15:21
  Rupert Isaacson: So not a bundle of laughs?
• 15:22
  Mary Wanless: Not a bundle of laughs.
• 15:23
  No, not a bundle of laughs.
• 15:25
  Rupert Isaacson: And then you And I had
• 15:26
  Mary Wanless: the odd moment where I felt like I got it,
• 15:29
  Rupert Isaacson: you know,
• 15:30
  Mary Wanless: I understood it.
• 15:32
  And nowadays, X years on, would have a philosophy which is not
• 15:38
  that different, but doesn't have the punitive element to it.
• 15:42
  Rupert Isaacson: Tell me about the punitive element.
• 15:44
  I mean, it's just Is it the standard Christian punitive element, i.
• 15:47
  e.
• 15:48
  tear the line or go to hell?
• 15:50
  Or something more than that?
• 15:52
  Mary Wanless: There wasn't more than, there wasn't a lot of talk about hell.
• 15:55
  I think my mum must have had a lot of this growing up in her childhood, and a lot of
• 16:02
  shame, and anything we did that, you know,
• 16:10
  cross the boundary for her.
• 16:11
  I mean, we got it.
• 16:12
  When her shame got triggered, we got it.
• 16:14
  Rupert Isaacson: And when you got it, that would be being screamed at?
• 16:16
  She'd hit you?
• 16:17
  No, there was
• 16:19
  Mary Wanless: nothing physical, but it was kind of being yelled
• 16:22
  at in get your thinking straight.
• 16:25
  I thought I knew you.
• 16:26
  Who do you think you are?
• 16:28
  La la la la la.
• 16:29
  Effectively
• 16:29
  Rupert Isaacson: you're a bad person.
• 16:31
  Yes.
• 16:31
  Yes.
• 16:32
  There
• 16:33
  Mary Wanless: was an awful lot of You are a bad person.
• 16:37
  And you know, there was nothing for it in the end.
• 16:39
  But to come back, capitulate, apologise and
• 16:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Appease.
• 16:47
  Mary Wanless: And I think it was partly and in a way I do wonder if she was
• 16:52
  pretty much a narcissist, you know, she never apologized for anything.
• 16:55
  She didn't do anything wrong.
• 16:57
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, people didn't in those days, did
• 16:59
  Mary Wanless: we?
• 17:00
  Rupert Isaacson: It was the culture, wasn't it?
• 17:01
  I mean, nobody
• 17:01
  Mary Wanless: was the culture.
• 17:02
  Yes, it was the culture.
• 17:03
  Parents were perfect.
• 17:06
  Children were to be made in an image.
• 17:08
  That wasn't me.
• 17:09
  I mean, this This woman had two boys, desperately wanted a little girl.
• 17:13
  Her story was she had to wait however many years before she could bear
• 17:16
  the fact she might have a third boy.
• 17:18
  I think that was a cover up story.
• 17:20
  I think it was all an accident, probably.
• 17:22
  She was 43 when I was born.
• 17:24
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 17:25
  Mary Wanless: And then she got the wrong little girl.
• 17:28
  Rupert Isaacson: Why were you the wrong little girl?
• 17:30
  Mary Wanless: I didn't like wearing dresses.
• 17:33
  I didn't like, I, I, I was, I'd learned to sew, I learned to cook,
• 17:38
  I was okay with all of those things.
• 17:40
  Actually the place where my mother supported me the most was doing creative
• 17:43
  things, even if what I was doing was gluing together cotton wool balls and
• 17:47
  making little things and sticking feet on them, she'd go, Oh, that's lovely.
• 17:52
  So she actually really supported me in doing things like that.
• 17:56
  Crochet.
• 17:56
  You know, I did lots, made my own clothes, did lots of those kinds of things and
• 18:00
  actually would have been way more suited to doing something creative than trying
• 18:05
  to be an academic, which I really wasn't.
• 18:07
  And now I think I fall between two stools because the real academic horse world
• 18:11
  doesn't think I'm academic enough and the average rider thinks I'm too academic.
• 18:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, it's always, I think, a good sign if you're pissing
• 18:18
  off both sides of the camp then it means you're probably doing something wrong.
• 18:22
  Okay, so one of the reasons I would sort of go into this and start asking
• 18:25
  you all these questions is because obviously, you know, I think this is
• 18:30
  You know, something a lot of young people struggle with a lot, you know,
• 18:32
  and, and when I say young people, we're all the same young people that we always
• 18:37
  were, and we're all the same lost eight year old, and we're all the same, you
• 18:42
  know, over anxious, wanting to please three year old, and we're all, and
• 18:47
  we're also the joyful child, and we're also the curious kid and adolescent,
• 18:52
  and we, I, we, I feel we always, we carry all of our past selves with us.
• 18:57
  And then we hit adulthood and well, there they all are.
• 19:02
  And so it's interesting to me that, you know, without thinking for those
• 19:07
  listeners who obviously you couldn't hear our conversation before we hit record.
• 19:11
  But, you know, Mary was saying, well, you know, I'm not really, you know, am I that
• 19:15
  qualified to talk about equine assisted?
• 19:17
  And I was like, yeah, I think you probably are, you know, and when you,
• 19:19
  as soon as anybody begins to look up.
• 19:24
  I think particularly in the horse world, if you kind of had to battle your way into
• 19:28
  it a little bit like you did, I did too.
• 19:30
  There's usually a reason and the, it, it's to do with the pursuit of a certain
• 19:35
  kind of happiness and joy and freedom.
• 19:37
  Which means that one's current situation perhaps isn't that.
• 19:41
  And so I think a lot of people can relate to this.
• 19:44
  And then there you are finding yourself doing this youth work in Bristol.
• 19:47
  Synchronicities aren't always.
• 19:51
  Conscious.
• 19:52
  One doesn't always recognize them.
• 19:54
  But I would say that your work has made life a lot better for a
• 20:00
  lot of anxious, self questioning riders who are feeling lost.
• 20:04
  And I don't think you would have had that empathy if you hadn't gone through.
• 20:08
  Mary Wanless: Yes.
• 20:09
  Something like you just described.
• 20:10
  Rupert Isaacson: You would have had no reason to do it, right?
• 20:13
  Mary Wanless: You know, and it's interesting the kids that
• 20:16
  are born horse mad, isn't it?
• 20:17
  I was one of them.
• 20:18
  My family were appalled.
• 20:20
  It was outside of their experience.
• 20:22
  My father had a cousin, actually, who was very horsey and lived her
• 20:28
  life being a cook or a housekeeper for some of the horsey known names,
• 20:31
  actually, of that generation before me.
• 20:36
  The family joke was you'll turn out like Auntie Minor if you get around horses.
• 20:39
  She was probably saner than the rest of the family, but there you go.
• 20:43
  But, you know, I just picked horses out of picture books as a kid.
• 20:47
  I just, we, we, we had a budgerigar, but weren't really allowed animals otherwise.
• 20:53
  I had a guinea pig.
• 20:53
  You were
• 20:54
  Rupert Isaacson: in North London, right?
• 20:55
  Mary Wanless: No, I, I grew up in West London.
• 20:57
  I grew up out near Uxbridge, the end of the Piccadilly and the Metropolitan line.
• 21:01
  Okay,
• 21:01
  Rupert Isaacson: well that's, back then that was effectively countryside.
• 21:03
  I mean,
• 21:03
  Mary Wanless: it's It was right on the edge.
• 21:05
  You know, we had bikes, we could go out in woods.
• 21:07
  I mean, we had lots of breeding.
• 21:09
  But
• 21:09
  Rupert Isaacson: there would have been horses
• 21:10
  Mary Wanless: in fields around.
• 21:11
  Sorry?
• 21:11
  Rupert Isaacson: There would have been horses in fields around
• 21:13
  Mary Wanless: you.
• 21:13
  There were horses in fields around that I didn't get very near, but there
• 21:17
  were horses in fields around, yes.
• 21:21
  And I just love them.
• 21:22
  And I mean, still do.
• 21:24
  And the level of beauty and power and grace and willingness to let us
• 21:29
  play with them and be around them.
• 21:31
  It still moves me to tears.
• 21:33
  I mean, that's
• 21:33
  Rupert Isaacson: miraculous.
• 21:34
  I agree.
• 21:35
  Mary Wanless: It's, it's phenomenal.
• 21:37
  Had there been horsey
• 21:38
  Rupert Isaacson: people back in the day, even people, you know, previous
• 21:41
  generations, people who'd been with working horses perhaps, or drovers, or
• 21:44
  because back then, you know, even when I was a kid, in, in London, I grew up in
• 21:49
  Islington, which is central north London.
• 21:51
  There were a lot of horses around.
• 21:53
  I mean, the Rag and Bone men were out.
• 21:55
  Always with their horse and carts.
• 21:57
  Handsome cab taxi drivers often kept still horses in muses in inner London
• 22:04
  and you'd see them out in the early mornings exercising their horses.
• 22:07
  A lot of riders on Hampstead Heath it wasn't just Hyde Park.
• 22:10
  You know, it's dwindled now but there was it was around.
• 22:16
  There were
• 22:16
  Mary Wanless: ragged bow men that came past our school and we'd always try
• 22:20
  and look out the windows which were so high you couldn't see out of them and a
• 22:23
  friend and I had a diary of what horse came past at what time on what day.
• 22:28
  Rupert Isaacson: That clip clop sound, the sound of freedom.
• 22:30
  Yes.
• 22:32
  Still to this day.
• 22:35
  Okay, but as far as you know, you didn't have someone in the ancestry who
• 22:40
  Mary Wanless: As far as I know, just my father's cousin
• 22:44
  was the only horsey person.
• 22:46
  I really don't know.
• 22:47
  I don't think it would have happened in my mother's family.
• 22:49
  If it had happened, it would have been my father's family, but I don't think so.
• 22:53
  And I
• 22:53
  Rupert Isaacson: presume you must have begged for riding lessons.
• 22:56
  Mary Wanless: I begged.
• 22:57
  Believe me, I begged.
• 23:00
  Rupert Isaacson: Deaf ears.
• 23:01
  Mary Wanless: Deaf ears.
• 23:03
  And it kind of, I was fortunate.
• 23:05
  A friend moved.
• 23:08
  She and I used to play horses on two low brick walls that were the side
• 23:14
  of her porch outside her front door.
• 23:16
  And we made saddles and we made bridles and we rode these things.
• 23:20
  She then moved away to the country and started riding and invited me to come
• 23:25
  and stay and did I want to go riding?
• 23:27
  And you bet I did.
• 23:28
  So my parents capitulated on that one and went, Oh my
• 23:31
  goodness, you better have a hat.
• 23:33
  And by the time I got the hat, I'd kind of done the, the deal.
• 23:38
  And the story always was, we can't afford it.
• 23:41
  And then I had a cousin who was younger than me, who started having
• 23:44
  lessons and clearly her family had less money than my family.
• 23:48
  So that argument wasn't very sustainable any longer.
• 23:52
  So I got to have writing
• 23:53
  Rupert Isaacson: lessons.
• 23:55
  Because as you know, now being a career in horses, like with me, you
• 24:00
  know, that if a kid shows up, who's keen, most horsey people will go out
• 24:05
  of their way to initiate them into the cult, you know, it's, we horsey
• 24:10
  people are a bit evangelical that way.
• 24:12
  So money's almost never a barrier.
• 24:15
  And, but what I do see so often, and I can feel it in the heart of the little
• 24:19
  girl that you were Is that crushing of the dream and giving somebody the
• 24:27
  message, Well, your dreams aren't
• 24:32
  worthy and are also not attainable.
• 24:37
  And then you either go like you did, where you say, Well, they jolly well
• 24:39
  are, I'm jolly well I am going to, Somehow, someway, and it feeds the fire.
• 24:43
  Or, quite often people Don't they give up and I often think that's incredibly
• 24:51
  sad one of the lines of work We do a lot with the more dressage side of what
• 24:56
  we do outside of the equine assisted side is a lot of people who come To
• 25:00
  riding late because they had had that dream as kids and had to wait 40 years
• 25:05
  to make some money to finally Do it and that hurt little person is always
• 25:14
  in there and I do think that that's one of the real Benefits of your work
• 25:19
  because I think by clarifying and making accessible this complex business of
• 25:27
  keeping a horse between you and the ground in some sort of sense of harmony
• 25:30
  which is usually so steeped in esoteric.
• 25:34
  badly communicated also punitive approaches you, you really do help.
• 25:39
  I think people perhaps unwittingly, I think you do help people.
• 25:44
  A lot of people heal those old wounds.
• 25:46
  Can you tell us now, talk to us about ride with your mind.
• 25:49
  Talk to us about, I want you to jump forward to kind of your mid career.
• 25:55
  Then I want you to dial back again and talk about the evolution into that.
• 26:02
  Mary Wanless: So in my mid career I'd written a couple of books.
• 26:05
  I was writing more books.
• 26:08
  I was teaching courses here and there.
• 26:12
  I'd got myself to Wiltshire by that time and was able to use a big
• 26:16
  competition centre there for my courses.
• 26:19
  And after that got my own place, but there was Winchwood before that.
• 26:24
  And really it was born of, people need to know this.
• 26:30
  This needs to be known.
• 26:31
  It needs to be known because it makes explicit what is otherwise
• 26:36
  implicit, can't be communicated.
• 26:39
  If a talented writer can't put words on what they do,
• 26:41
  Rupert Isaacson: they cannot.
• 26:43
  Mary Wanless: send that knowledge forward.
• 26:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 26:44
  They're not good teachers.
• 26:45
  Usually they're
• 26:46
  Mary Wanless: not good teachers and our traditional vocabulary is not helpful.
• 26:51
  And I just kept learning on the job, you know, by riding and trying
• 26:56
  to figure out my own body and what was going on and by teaching and by
• 27:01
  really asking people's questions.
• 27:02
  You know, what did I say that helped you the most?
• 27:05
  How would you, if you had to teach this to somebody, what would you tell them?
• 27:08
  What was the difference that made the difference?
• 27:12
  And by that time I'd done a psychotherapy training, I'd got
• 27:16
  involved with neuro linguistic programming, I had a training in that.
• 27:20
  So I had a pretty good idea of how to communicate in ways that were viable.
• 27:27
  And I just kept putting one foot in front of the other.
• 27:31
  Loving teaching, loving writing, loving writing.
• 27:34
  Writing less so, writing's always been the hardest of them in many ways.
• 27:39
  And just walking a path of following the next step.
• 27:43
  thing that really drew my attention.
• 27:45
  You know, in the reading I was doing and what I was learning outside of horses that
• 27:51
  then came back in to inform my coaching and my understanding of people and horses.
• 27:58
  Rupert Isaacson: What were the biggest thing you mentioned
• 27:59
  neuro linguistic programming, you mentioned psychotherapy there.
• 28:03
  Talk us through the things that you learned outside of horses.
• 28:05
  And then I'm going to go back through your classical education with horses, which is.
• 28:10
  quite impressive and I think will be useful for people in terms
• 28:13
  of types of mentor to look for.
• 28:17
  Let's go first to the things outside of horses that informed you being able
• 28:22
  to communicate and teach well this difficult esoteric thing called riding.
• 28:27
  Mary Wanless: I think neurolinguistic programming was probably
• 28:31
  the most important of them.
• 28:33
  Rupert Isaacson: Why did you learn it?
• 28:35
  Mary Wanless: Because I've been, I've been involved in psychotherapy
• 28:39
  and decided to train as a therapist.
• 28:41
  I didn't really think I would be a therapist.
• 28:44
  I'm not good at sitting still.
• 28:46
  But I came intrigued by that field and I found myself.
• 28:53
  Why?
• 28:53
  Rupert Isaacson: Because of your early grief?
• 28:55
  Losing your parents?
• 28:55
  Yes,
• 28:55
  Mary Wanless: I mean, I needed, I, when I quit riding in despair, I went to London.
• 29:00
  And I knew I needed to get involved in therapy.
• 29:03
  So my brother had done that.
• 29:05
  My best friend had done that.
• 29:07
  Rupert Isaacson: You needed it yourself.
• 29:09
  Sorry?
• 29:10
  You needed it yourself.
• 29:11
  Mary Wanless: I needed something to turn my life around.
• 29:13
  Yeah.
• 29:13
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 29:14
  Mary Wanless: I was just too miserable too much at the time.
• 29:17
  And got involved with this training.
• 29:19
  And, and what would happen would be there'd be a group of us.
• 29:23
  Sitting around this room and our therapist would do a demonstration with somebody
• 29:28
  on something and then say pair up go do it And everybody else will walk
• 29:33
  off thinking looking like they thought they knew how to do it And I was there
• 29:36
  going I've no clue how she did that.
• 29:38
  I haven't got the first clue am I the only stupid one here and anyway, I kept
• 29:44
  doing the training but It was really through that kind of, I don't get this.
• 29:50
  Am I in the stupid one?
• 29:52
  And I literally picked up a book, one of the NLP books in changes,
• 29:57
  book shopping Camden town one day.
• 30:00
  opened it to a page and it said, if you want to learn how to do something, go
• 30:05
  to somebody who struggled to learn it.
• 30:06
  Don't go to somebody who's the renowned expert.
• 30:09
  And I went, this book is for me, picked it up, read it,
• 30:16
  got myself to an NLP seminar and completed the psychotherapy program.
• 30:21
  But then started going to NLP.
• 30:26
  Rupert Isaacson: For those listeners who don't know what NLP is, because
• 30:28
  it used to be that everyone knew what it is, and it's, it's not
• 30:31
  quite as well known anymore.
• 30:33
  Can you give us the nuts and bolts, one, two, three, what is NLP?
• 30:35
  Mary Wanless: So it's Richard Bandler and John Grinder, when they
• 30:38
  started off this, Richard Bandler was trying to work out what made a few
• 30:44
  renowned therapists so successful.
• 30:47
  And he drew out patterns in how they used language, how they talked.
• 30:53
  how they heard other people.
• 30:57
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 30:57
  Mary Wanless: And
• 31:00
  came into understanding and being able to teach some of the nuts and bolts of
• 31:04
  that kind of process of thinking, how we think, what thinking is made up of.
• 31:10
  How to play with that kind of thing to change how you feel.
• 31:18
  Rupert Isaacson: Change the inner language in your head.
• 31:20
  Mary Wanless: Change the inner language in your head, yes.
• 31:23
  Also change your body to a degree.
• 31:26
  Now, what I love about the times we're in now is that embodiment is
• 31:31
  really coming more into mainstream, maybe not mainstream, but it's less.
• 31:37
  I'd say
• 31:38
  Rupert Isaacson: it is, yeah.
• 31:39
  It's on its way there.
• 31:40
  Yeah.
• 31:40
  Mary Wanless: Yeah.
• 31:40
  Yeah.
• 31:41
  Embodiment is a term that people have heard.
• 31:45
  The, the whole thing I would say with my riding life has been
• 31:48
  about becoming more embodied.
• 31:51
  How through horses and what I do, I have become so much more embodied.
• 31:56
  Rupert Isaacson: And let's assume we have a listener now going, what's
• 31:58
  embodied mean when it's at home?
• 31:59
  Yes.
• 32:00
  Mary Wanless: So what it means is, what is
• 32:02
  Rupert Isaacson: that?
• 32:02
  Mary Wanless: Able to really sense your body to, if you feel something
• 32:06
  emotionally to maybe able to track it back to, Oh, it's a heaviness in my heart.
• 32:12
  Oh, it's a tightness in my gut.
• 32:16
  Yeah.
• 32:17
  To realize that emotions come from physical and biochemical states.
• 32:24
  Candice Peart was a really important writer in this.
• 32:27
  field molecules of emotion by Candice Pert was a really big book in this.
• 32:32
  Rupert Isaacson: Candice who?
• 32:33
  Mary Wanless: Pert P E R T.
• 32:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Candice Pert molecules of emotion.
• 32:38
  It was a
• 32:38
  Mary Wanless: book of the possibly the 80s.
• 32:42
  And Candice died rather young.
• 32:44
  I mean, she was pretty crazy.
• 32:45
  I actually met her.
• 32:46
  She was pretty crazy and delightful.
• 32:48
  But she did the science.
• 32:50
  behind the neurochemicals and the lock and key mechanism in cells, that when those
• 32:55
  neurochemicals get in, that there is that scientific background to what you would
• 33:01
  then feel subjectively as an emotion.
• 33:04
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 33:04
  Mary Wanless: So NLP doesn't work as much with embodiment as I think people
• 33:10
  deserve, and I think it adds something extra to the NLP, tinkering around with
• 33:15
  language and the images inside your head, the things you say to yourself.
• 33:21
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, most of us talk to ourselves appallingly.
• 33:23
  I mean, we, we, we don't talk to ourselves like we talk to a friend.
• 33:27
  Mary Wanless: No, we talk to ourselves like our parents
• 33:29
  talked to us when we were three.
• 33:30
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, we
• 33:31
  Mary Wanless: Stop that, don't do that, you're stupid, what's wrong with you?
• 33:35
  You know, it's sad but true, and I hope is less in more recent generations.
• 33:41
  I don't know that it is, but it certainly was my growing up.
• 33:45
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 33:46
  Mary Wanless: And I can remember being on a horse one day after I'd given up
• 33:49
  riding, gone to London, started teaching again, and riding a horse for somebody.
• 33:56
  And in my internal dialogue, I heard myself say, I'm going to get this
• 34:00
  horse going well if it kills me.
• 34:02
  And then I went, what?
• 34:05
  If it kills me, is it that important?
• 34:08
  You know, and, and there were real turning points in writing when I started to really
• 34:13
  realise that there was this yatter on in the background that really wasn't helpful.
• 34:18
  And learn how to switch that off.
• 34:21
  And now I have very little internal dialogue, actually, whether
• 34:24
  I'm writing or doing anything.
• 34:25
  I don't talk to myself much at all.
• 34:27
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 34:28
  You said very glibly there, so I'm just going to make you back up.
• 34:31
  You said, until I learned how to switch it off, now that is
• 34:35
  a big thing to learn how to do.
• 34:37
  I
• 34:37
  Mary Wanless: can teach people how to switch it off.
• 34:38
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so talk to us about that.
• 34:40
  Mary Wanless: Okay.
• 34:41
  How do you
• 34:41
  Rupert Isaacson: switch off the negative little voice in your head
• 34:44
  that's telling you shit all the time?
• 34:46
  Mary Wanless: Alright, so there's lots of ways to do that.
• 34:49
  One is, if you hear yourself, so you have to kind of tune into it and listen to it.
• 34:55
  If you hear yourself saying something not helpful, to say to yourself,
• 35:01
  next, and have the next thought be something that is helpful.
• 35:06
  That works really well in writing, maybe it's more a writing strategy
• 35:09
  than an everyday life strategy, but you go, God, I ought to be able to
• 35:12
  do this by now, what's wrong with me, this is going so badly wrong.
• 35:15
  Next, and the next thought could be something like breathe, you know, and
• 35:22
  then I have a whole list of things that I might say to people that are little
• 35:26
  bite size chunks of what makes it work.
• 35:30
  So that would be one way.
• 35:32
  Another way would be have the voice speak to you with an accent.
• 35:40
  Or sing to you in a way that makes it less believable and serious.
• 35:46
  So if it started to sing in opera, we think you're a really stupid woman,
• 35:49
  what on earth is wrong with you?
• 35:50
  How come after all these years?
• 35:53
  Or it could be Mickey Mouse.
• 35:56
  Rupert Isaacson: It's so funny you say that.
• 35:58
  When I had to teach my son Rowan how to drive, he was 16.
• 36:03
  And you've got to understand this was, he had been non verbal,
• 36:06
  you know, severely autistic.
• 36:08
  Okay, now doing amazingly well, but still, you know.
• 36:13
  I'm going to teach you how to drive, you know, and I'm terrified.
• 36:18
  He's terrified.
• 36:19
  And I said to him, what, what can I do to make this non stressful?
• 36:28
  He said, do it in a silly accent.
• 36:33
  This came from him,
• 36:35
  Mary Wanless: right?
• 36:35
  Rupert Isaacson: And so we cooked up a variety of, I was kind of a redneck
• 36:41
  teacher and I'd be like, well, we all going to come down there Junction Zayas
• 36:45
  and I want you to put yo's, yo's as a Zayas on, on the road there and look
• 36:50
  to the right Zayas and then the left Zayas and that's real good and then I
• 36:54
  would switch to Henry VIII my lord and I was there in my liege and now we are
• 36:58
  coming to indeed the traffic light and as you know, it's going to be a little
• 37:01
  push in the clutch and and it was good.
• 37:04
  It totally worked.
• 37:05
  It like took the, it came from him.
• 37:07
  I mean, and we'd always played around with this, obviously.
• 37:10
  But it was genius.
• 37:11
  So it's, yeah.
• 37:12
  It's so interesting that you say that one and do it in a silly accent, because it
• 37:17
  does, it just takes all the strings out.
• 37:19
  It just, it takes
• 37:19
  Mary Wanless: the edge off, you know, because so many people think that voice
• 37:22
  in their head is God, you know, is, knows everything, and it really isn't.
• 37:27
  Rupert Isaacson: And
• 37:28
  Mary Wanless: to demote it with a, by singing it or with a silly accent is a
• 37:34
  really great Now would you say that's
• 37:34
  Rupert Isaacson: neuro linguistic, would you say that's NLP?
• 37:36
  Mary Wanless: That's, that's an NLP.
• 37:38
  Did I get that originally from NLP?
• 37:40
  Possibly.
• 37:41
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 37:42
  Mary Wanless: Next didn't come from NLP.
• 37:43
  That might have come from NLP.
• 37:45
  Another one, I think this one did come from NLP, is if you just maybe close your
• 37:50
  eyes and listen to something that voice might say, and notice where, whereabouts
• 37:55
  inside your head does it come from?
• 37:57
  Oh,
• 37:59
  Rupert Isaacson: that's good.
• 38:01
  Like, geographically, where in the hell?
• 38:02
  Mary Wanless: Geographically, whereabouts.
• 38:04
  So for me, if I did that, it would be fairly far back on the left.
• 38:07
  Rupert Isaacson: Mmm,
• 38:10
  back in the limbic system there, yeah.
• 38:13
  Okay,
• 38:13
  Mary Wanless: and then if you move that voice to the midline
• 38:18
  Rupert Isaacson: Go on.
• 38:20
  Mary Wanless: It's almost certainly going to change.
• 38:23
  Rupert Isaacson: Just trying it now.
• 38:28
  It does.
• 38:29
  It does, it changes.
• 38:30
  I, I, I, I said to myself, you silly bastard.
• 38:33
  In my back left, and I moved it to the midline,
• 38:39
  and the word bastard went away.
• 38:40
  That's interesting.
• 38:43
  Silly spade, which is good, I like silly.
• 38:45
  Mary Wanless: Yeah, it changes it when you move it to the midline.
• 38:48
  Rupert Isaacson: Interesting, now why the midline?
• 38:50
  Mary Wanless: Well it's where both brain hemispheres maximally overlap, you know?
• 38:54
  It's where we've got the porous colosum.
• 38:56
  I can't tell you anything more neurologically than that.
• 39:00
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 39:00
  But
• 39:00
  Mary Wanless: there is, it seems to work for everybody that the
• 39:03
  voice either goes away or changes
• 39:06
  Rupert Isaacson: and
• 39:06
  Mary Wanless: you go to the midline.
• 39:10
  And then I also have an exercise that involves blowing up
• 39:13
  balloons in a rather unusual way.
• 39:15
  It's on YouTube.
• 39:16
  And if you blow up, if you blow up balloons in this way, you end up virtually
• 39:22
  always with total quiet inside your head.
• 39:25
  Rupert Isaacson: Can you be more specific?
• 39:26
  Take us through this balloon thing.
• 39:28
  Mary Wanless: When you blow up a balloon normally, you put it in your
• 39:30
  mouth to breathe into it, and you take it out of your mouth, take the
• 39:34
  next in breath, put it back in your mouth and breathe into the balloon.
• 39:37
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
• 39:37
  Mary Wanless: Okay?
• 39:38
  In the version that we do, you have to keep the balloon in your
• 39:43
  mouth the whole time, and you're not allowed to pinch it off.
• 39:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
• 39:47
  Mary Wanless: Okay?
• 39:47
  And you're not allowed to stick your tongue in the hole.
• 39:50
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 39:51
  Mary Wanless: So you have to breathe in through your nose, and that
• 39:53
  involves, you have to put your tongue, the tip of your tongue up against
• 39:57
  the roof of your mouth to block off.
• 39:59
  the back of your mouth and your throat,
• 40:03
  and then you blow into the balloon.
• 40:06
  So as you do that, the pressure in the balloon is getting bigger
• 40:10
  and bigger with each in breath.
• 40:11
  You need pretty big balloons.
• 40:13
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 40:14
  Mary Wanless: And you have to make sure the balloon does
• 40:16
  not empty itself into you.
• 40:20
  That means you have to have the same pressure in your insides as the balloon.
• 40:27
  So when you breathe into the balloon, your internal pressure mustn't get less.
• 40:34
  You've got to hold your ribs expanded.
• 40:41
  Rupert Isaacson: You're doing this as an imaginary exercise.
• 40:44
  Mary Wanless: This is a real exercise.
• 40:45
  We do it with real balloons.
• 40:46
  Rupert Isaacson: You do it with an actual balloon.
• 40:47
  I was going to say because
• 40:48
  Mary Wanless: it's
• 40:49
  Rupert Isaacson: complex without one.
• 40:51
  Okay, neurologically, what does this do?
• 40:53
  Mary Wanless: That's a very good question, and I don't really know the answer to
• 40:56
  it, but that level of internal pressure gets people quiet inside their head.
• 41:04
  So in other words, blowing up balloons like that is a
• 41:06
  shortcut to learning to meditate.
• 41:09
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so it's circular pranic breathing, effectively,
• 41:12
  without, but in a practical context.
• 41:14
  Mary Wanless: In a practical context.
• 41:16
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, that could, now how did you end up with that one?
• 41:18
  Mary Wanless: It actually didn't originate with me, it originates with
• 41:22
  a group called Postural Restoration.
• 41:26
  The originator of that is a physical therapist, they're
• 41:29
  based, I think, in Wisconsin.
• 41:32
  And Postural Restoration, they came up with Blowing Up Balloons.
• 41:38
  As a way of helping people increase the pressure in their insides and breathe more
• 41:44
  and maybe into one side of their ribs.
• 41:46
  So there's a whole load there that can really change the body.
• 41:50
  Rupert Isaacson: Why did you find them?
• 41:52
  I found
• 41:54
  Mary Wanless: them through somebody who is a physical therapist, trained
• 41:59
  in their method, very experienced in it, who came to my clinic with me.
• 42:03
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 42:03
  Ah, right.
• 42:04
  Mary Wanless: Actually, I found it before then.
• 42:06
  Somebody came on a clinic with me who had somehow done it.
• 42:10
  and showed it to me there.
• 42:13
  And we were doing it for years.
• 42:15
  And then I met somebody who was really active as a physical therapist and a
• 42:19
  practitioner of postural restoration.
• 42:21
  And for anyone who only in the US probably can get themselves access
• 42:28
  to a physical therapist that does this, it is a super way to work with
• 42:32
  your body to become more functional.
• 42:36
  Rupert Isaacson: So for dealing with anxiety effectively.
• 42:38
  Mary Wanless: That's not their main aim, but that could be a good byproduct.
• 42:44
  Their main aim is to get people more symmetrical, breathing better,
• 42:50
  spine more functional, out of pain, able to do what they want to do.
• 42:55
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 42:56
  Postural, postural
• 42:57
  Mary Wanless: restoration,
• 42:58
  Rupert Isaacson: restoration.
• 42:59
  Thank you.
• 43:00
  I learned a lot doing these podcasts as you can imagine.
• 43:03
  Mary Wanless: Yes.
• 43:03
  Rupert Isaacson: If you're in the equine assisted field, or if you're
• 43:06
  considering a career in the equine assisted field, you might want to consider
• 43:10
  taking one of our three neuroscience backed equine assisted programs.
• 43:14
  Horseboy method, now established for 20 years, is the original
• 43:21
  Equine assisted program specifically designed for autism, mentored by and
• 43:27
  developed in conjunction with Dr.
• 43:30
  Temple Grandin and many other neuroscientists.
• 43:33
  We work in the saddle with younger children.
• 43:37
  Helping them create oxytocin in their bodies and neuroplasticity in the brain.
• 43:42
  It works incredibly well.
• 43:44
  It's now in about 40 countries.
• 43:46
  Check it out.
• 43:47
  If you're working without horses, you might want to look at movement
• 43:52
  method, which gets a very, very similar effect, but can also be
• 43:55
  applied in schools, in homes.
• 43:57
  If you're working with families, you can give them really tangible exercises to do
• 44:02
  at home that will create neuroplasticity.
• 44:05
  when they're not with you.
• 44:07
  Finally, we have taquine equine integration.
• 44:10
  If you know anything about our programs, you know that we need a
• 44:13
  really high standard of horsemanship in order to create the oxytocin
• 44:17
  in the body of the person that we're working with, child or adult.
• 44:22
  So, this means we need to train a horse in collection, but this
• 44:25
  also has a really beneficial effect on the horse's well being.
• 44:30
  And it also ends your time conflict, where you're wondering, oh my gosh, how
• 44:34
  am I going to condition my horses and maintain them and give them what they
• 44:37
  need, as well as Serving my clients.
• 44:41
  Takine equine integration aimed at a more adult client base
• 44:45
  absolutely gives you this.
• 44:47
  What I love is that you learn from your students.
• 44:51
  For me, this is a massive thing.
• 44:54
  I'm always learning as much, if not more, from anyone I'm working with.
• 44:58
  And I think in our, particularly with writing, so often the
• 45:02
  power dynamic is toxic.
• 45:06
  Similarly, honestly, in therapy, it can be, you know, I'm God,
• 45:10
  I'm imparting wisdom to you.
• 45:13
  And it just isn't.
• 45:16
  Optimal?
• 45:17
  Yes.
• 45:17
  Ah.
• 45:18
  It
• 45:18
  Mary Wanless: is, it is vital to the skills I have and what I know now, that
• 45:23
  they were developed in concert with the people in writing arenas with me.
• 45:29
  You know, the questions, the questioning, what did I say that helped the most?
• 45:33
  How would you explain this?
• 45:34
  What was the difference that made the difference?
• 45:36
  So your
• 45:36
  Rupert Isaacson: students are your mentors to some degree?
• 45:38
  My
• 45:38
  Mary Wanless: students are my mentors, yes, and you know, the, the cutting
• 45:44
  out the feedback loop from the student.
• 45:47
  Yes.
• 45:47
  back to the teacher is lethal.
• 45:50
  And it is writing's tradition.
• 45:52
  You know, I stand in front of you and you do what I say.
• 45:54
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, it comes out of the military.
• 45:56
  So yes, it
• 45:56
  Mary Wanless: comes out of the military.
• 45:57
  And the most extreme modern day example I heard was of somebody, a
• 46:02
  very well known coach in a different country who used to coach sitting
• 46:07
  in the gallery with a headset that allowed him to talk to the student, but
• 46:11
  didn't allow the student to talk back.
• 46:14
  Yeah,
• 46:15
  Rupert Isaacson: that's
• 46:15
  Mary Wanless: the ultimate isn't it in I was
• 46:18
  Rupert Isaacson: attending a dressage seminar not so long ago with a very
• 46:21
  very well known person and Hearing that person say things in that mock jokey
• 46:29
  way that isn't jokey It's actually shaming but you're now not allowed to
• 46:33
  come back and say hey, dude, that it's not nice because oh, no It's a joke.
• 46:37
  That was disgusting that that transition was disgusting like wow You
• 46:42
  know, how much you paying to be told that, you know, how useful is that?
• 46:46
  As you say,
• 46:47
  Mary Wanless: useful information being given about how to do it better.
• 46:50
  Rupert Isaacson: Indeed.
• 46:51
  You, in your,
• 46:52
  Mary Wanless: actually, can I say something else too?
• 46:54
  So whilst tradition cuts out the feedback loop from the student to
• 46:59
  the teacher, it also largely cuts out the feedback loop from the horse.
• 47:05
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, that's true too.
• 47:07
  Mary Wanless: So, so a lot of what I do is amplify that feedback loop.
• 47:10
  Like I'm, I talk to it sometimes, like if you wanted to become a wine taster,
• 47:15
  you'd need labels on the bottles because you'd need to know this is a Chardonnay.
• 47:19
  This is a Riesling.
• 47:21
  This is this country.
• 47:22
  This is America.
• 47:23
  And this is New Zealand.
• 47:24
  This is 2000 and whatever.
• 47:27
  Yeah.
• 47:27
  Somebody's got to put labels on the bottles.
• 47:29
  Rupert Isaacson: It's
• 47:29
  Mary Wanless: kind of like that with what the rider's feeling there on the horse.
• 47:34
  This isn't worth going for.
• 47:35
  This is not a great feeling.
• 47:37
  Do a bit more of that.
• 47:38
  You're getting closer.
• 47:39
  That's it.
• 47:39
  Go for that.
• 47:40
  Okay.
• 47:41
  Now you just hit it.
• 47:41
  That's what you want.
• 47:42
  So we're playing hotter, colder on going for a feeling and really trying
• 47:50
  to get the rider getting to know what to do through the horse's feedback.
• 47:56
  Rupert Isaacson: Right,
• 47:56
  Mary Wanless: but if you're just a rider going, okay, my horse must do this.
• 47:59
  He needs to learn this I need to show him how to this come on horse.
• 48:01
  You're not doing it.
• 48:02
  Rupert Isaacson: You're dominant.
• 48:03
  So there's no
• 48:03
  Mary Wanless: feedback.
• 48:04
  Rupert Isaacson: No, absolutely
• 48:06
  Mary Wanless: Take away either of those feedback loops and you have a very
• 48:12
  unhelpful Potentially cruel system
• 48:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely cruel to everybody and of course with the military
• 48:18
  cruelty is built in because you actually need it if you're training people to
• 48:24
  go and be desensitized to dying in cavalry charges screaming at them and
• 48:32
  making them fall off, you could argue.
• 48:34
  Is useful, but hopefully that's not what we're trying to do anymore, but it's what
• 48:40
  we've inherited you mentioned in what you didn't mention I read in your bio.
• 48:44
  This also intrigued me and I want to go into your equestrian mentors in a
• 48:48
  minute and I also want to go back to this profound despair that we Almost hit on
• 48:52
  and then went away from but in your bio talking about other methodologies that
• 48:57
  have helped you I noticed Feldenkrais was in there and it's interesting how often
• 49:00
  this comes up I also like it because when chat GPT tries to do something
• 49:04
  with it for our subtitling It always comes back with failed in Christ, which
• 49:09
  Mary Wanless: That's
• 49:11
  Rupert Isaacson: something
• 49:13
  Mary Wanless: rather
• 49:15
  Rupert Isaacson: You know you Like me know the great Linda Tellington Jones
• 49:20
  and for those listeners who don't know her tune into our podcasts with her
• 49:26
  She has a lot of amazing insights.
• 49:28
  She also Learned and took a lot from Feldenkrais talk to us a little bit
• 49:33
  about that because a lot of people don't know about Feldenkrais and how
• 49:38
  that's actually influence so many modalities that a lot of people use in,
• 49:43
  inside the equestrian world and out.
• 49:45
  How was it for you?
• 49:45
  How did you discover it and what's it given
• 49:47
  Mary Wanless: you?
• 49:47
  I discovered the Feldenkrais when I went to America.
• 49:50
  So, I gave up, I went to London and a year later My very good friend from
• 49:57
  university, we had danced a lot together.
• 50:00
  She said, why don't you come with me?
• 50:02
  I want to do the San Francisco dancers workshop, which we did for three months.
• 50:08
  And it's not exactly dance therapy, but it's, it's a lot about
• 50:13
  unstructured dance, using dance to.
• 50:18
  Dance your life story, you know, whatever it may be.
• 50:21
  And we had a Feldenkrais teacher on the staff there.
• 50:27
  So we were doing a Feldenkrais awareness through movement
• 50:29
  lessons a couple of times a week.
• 50:33
  And, you know, I think a lot of my problems as a rider stemmed from just so
• 50:40
  much fight or flight energy being covered over by the give up collapse energy.
• 50:47
  You know, I was not body aware.
• 50:49
  I was not very functional.
• 50:51
  And this was a very good inroad into body work.
• 50:54
  And I've got friends who are Feldenkrais teachers.
• 50:56
  One of my friends described it, I think, rather well as almost like, you'll
• 51:01
  take a movement and tinker with it.
• 51:03
  You know, much as you might tinker with something if you can't get a
• 51:06
  key to turn on a lock, just little movements that tinker with it.
• 51:10
  And in the tinkering with it, you will find other ways
• 51:14
  than your habitual pattern.
• 51:16
  And Feldenkrais is based a lot on getting people doing non
• 51:20
  habitual movement and therefore increasing your movement vocabulary.
• 51:26
  And once you start doing stuff in performance and non stylized
• 51:29
  dance, you start to realize that your movement vocabulary is
• 51:32
  actually really quite limited.
• 51:34
  You know, 30 seconds is a long time in dance.
• 51:37
  It really is.
• 51:39
  So
• 51:42
  getting to be able to do things in different ways.
• 51:47
  I, there's a lovely quote in a book I don't know if it's still in print,
• 51:51
  Denise McGluggage, The Scented Skier, one of my favorite quotes,
• 51:54
  she talks about breaking up clods of habitual movement, like a gardener
• 51:59
  breaks up clods of earth with a hoe.
• 52:02
  That's what Feldenkrais does, it breaks up clods of habitual movement.
• 52:07
  And you know, we've all got our habit patterns and.
• 52:09
  Sometimes I think of it like, the, that neurological
• 52:12
  connection would be like buses.
• 52:14
  Buses only go on certain routes, you know?
• 52:16
  The 128 takes a certain route and that's all it ever does.
• 52:19
  Backwards and forwards on that route.
• 52:21
  But Feldenkrais would be like, you've got taxis, you've got many more
• 52:24
  ways, many more minute adjustments.
• 52:28
  Yeah.
• 52:28
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 52:29
  And as a
• 52:30
  Mary Wanless: rider, you, you want really fine body control of your pelvic area.
• 52:38
  You know, that is so badly represented in the brain compared to your hands.
• 52:42
  No wonder we want to do everything with our hands.
• 52:44
  Rupert Isaacson: There's so
• 52:45
  Mary Wanless: much neurology between your hands and your brain
• 52:48
  and so little neurology between your pelvis and your brain.
• 52:53
  And so learning to develop that neurology and that awareness.
• 52:57
  is a big part of it.
• 52:58
  So I met Feldenkrais in America, came back, discovered there were
• 53:02
  two Feldenkrais lessons in, two Feldenkrais teachers in London.
• 53:06
  And this was then in the early eighties and started having lessons.
• 53:11
  And I've done a lot of different body work and Feldenkrais has
• 53:14
  been one of the most helpful.
• 53:16
  They do one on one sessions, but the class sessions, the awareness through movement
• 53:21
  sessions, make it affordable for anybody.
• 53:24
  There are lots of.
• 53:25
  lessons on the internet, some pay for some free put out by the Throne Christ Guild.
• 53:32
  So it's something anybody can access.
• 53:35
  And it's really helpful.
• 53:39
  Rupert Isaacson: One of the things I love about it is that it really
• 53:40
  emphasises also subtle movement that
• 53:43
  Mary Wanless: you can
• 53:43
  Rupert Isaacson: find.
• 53:45
  So much variation in really, really small variations, you know, and then
• 53:50
  what those do neurologically Now with the work that we've done we sort
• 53:54
  of have to know this so it helps to create what's called BDNF Which is a
• 53:59
  brain derived neurotrophic factor the protein in the brain that becomes a stem
• 54:04
  cell that then becomes a neuron which fires when you move and problem solve
• 54:08
  Which is why we have optimal cognitive function when we have a novel movement.
• 54:13
  Because we're hunter gatherers and that's what it requires to be on high
• 54:16
  alert when you're gathering wild foods or hunting wild animals because they're
• 54:20
  dangerous activities, variety of reasons.
• 54:23
  And one needs really sharp focus.
• 54:26
  And of course, as you say, you know, modern life, sedentary life, but also
• 54:29
  just modern life, repetitive life, we tend to get into these repetitive forms
• 54:33
  of movement because actually they're functional in terms of earning money
• 54:36
  and that sort of thing because we have a job and we move in this way for this
• 54:39
  job and we walk to the job to go that way or we travel to the job in this
• 54:42
  way and in school we're told to move in this way or that and then we're robbed.
• 54:45
  Yeah, we become very
• 54:46
  Mary Wanless: limited in our movements and our body perception.
• 54:49
  Rupert Isaacson: Right, and we don't play anymore.
• 54:51
  So dance, of course, is a form of play.
• 54:53
  And this intrigues me because if you had a shaming mum who's not a
• 54:57
  barrel of laughs Christian scientist, where did dance come into this?
• 55:00
  Mary Wanless: There was a ballet school in Ickenham where I grew up.
• 55:04
  Lovely ballet teacher.
• 55:05
  My ballet teacher was one of the lovely adults of my childhood.
• 55:09
  And so I think most little girls in, in Econome went to that ballet school.
• 55:16
  Rupert Isaacson: But if dance, if dance wasn't, you know, a feature of
• 55:20
  Christian science and partying, why were you allowed to go to a dance school?
• 55:24
  Mary Wanless: That's a good question.
• 55:26
  I think ballet is traditional enough and classical enough.
• 55:29
  that it passed muster and disciplined enough that it passed muster.
• 55:34
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 55:34
  Okay.
• 55:35
  There was enough suffering involved that it was There was enough
• 55:37
  Mary Wanless: suffering involved, I think, yes.
• 55:40
  Only it turned out that it was a teacher where there was very
• 55:43
  little suffering involved.
• 55:44
  But I think, I think it could have been that there was enough suffering
• 55:47
  involved that made the grade.
• 55:49
  Rupert Isaacson: It's so interesting that this whole thing that things are only Only
• 55:53
  worth doing if there's suffering involved.
• 55:54
  And of course, that's the equestrian tradition we've inherited.
• 55:58
  Mary Wanless: Indeed, yes, if my mother had known how much suffering
• 56:00
  was going to be involved in my writing, she might have been all for it.
• 56:02
  She'd
• 56:02
  Rupert Isaacson: have subsidized it completely.
• 56:04
  That's hilarious.
• 56:05
  Let's go back to this.
• 56:07
  This despair that made you give up riding.
• 56:10
  Okay, talk us through that process, that period, because I think, I think
• 56:14
  many of us have been through that.
• 56:16
  And of course this could be in any walk of life.
• 56:19
  Mary Wanless: Yes.
• 56:19
  Rupert Isaacson: How did it hit you with the thing that you
• 56:21
  love the most in life, and why?
• 56:24
  Mary Wanless: So I, you know, after university and, and That year where
• 56:28
  I didn't do the post grad teacher training, I went full time into horses
• 56:34
  and ran a yard and struggled with my intermediate instructor's exam.
• 56:38
  I failed that four times before I passed it.
• 56:41
  At that time, you had to pass every module on the same day, which I then changed.
• 56:46
  What was the block?
• 56:46
  Rupert Isaacson: What was the thing?
• 56:47
  Was there something you failed at each time?
• 56:49
  Mary Wanless: I think first of all, I failed the flatwork and
• 56:52
  the jumping, and then I failed the jumping, and then I failed the
• 56:54
  flatwork, and then I passed all of it.
• 56:57
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 56:58
  Mary Wanless: And I wanted to take my eye, you know, so I was sort of ambitious,
• 57:01
  like I wanted to get these exams and I knew I wasn't a talented writer.
• 57:05
  And I ended up working for somebody nobody's ever heard of, but he was one
• 57:10
  of the few continentally trained dressage writers in the UK in the mid 1970s.
• 57:16
  His name was Dan Aharoni.
• 57:18
  He was originally Israeli.
• 57:19
  And
• 57:22
  Rupert Isaacson: was that just by fluke that you ended up working for him?
• 57:25
  Mary Wanless: He advertised, I think, in Horse and Hound.
• 57:27
  I'd been being a working student for Mrs.
• 57:31
  Sturrock, who was one of the fellows of the British Horse Society
• 57:33
  and renowned for being good at getting people through their exams.
• 57:37
  I'd been working for her.
• 57:39
  I'd been eventing in that job and previously.
• 57:43
  And when this job came up, I thought, Oh, maybe I should apply to that.
• 57:47
  And Mrs.
• 57:47
  Sturrock said, This guy's really good news.
• 57:49
  Go do it.
• 57:51
  So I got that job.
• 57:53
  And it was kind of funny because in the interview, I rode Dan's horse and
• 58:00
  at one point I did a half hold and I knew it was it, yeah, did that on that
• 58:06
  horse, complete fluke, quite possibly got the job on the back of that, I
• 58:11
  don't know, didn't do another one in the whole two years I was there.
• 58:16
  It was the second one I'd ever done.
• 58:18
  I did one when I was a student when we, we went.
• 58:21
  before a competition, a couple of us, and had a lesson at Fulmer Riding
• 58:25
  School, which was owned by Robert Hall, who'd been to the Spanish school,
• 58:28
  and going round a corner on the right rein at the end of the short side on a
• 58:32
  grey horse called Balego, it happened.
• 58:35
  And I knew that was it.
• 58:37
  Yeah.
• 58:38
  Didn't happen again until that job interview, which was
• 58:40
  probably about four years later.
• 58:42
  Didn't happen again for, I can't tell you how long until I got where
• 58:46
  I could kind of knock those out.
• 58:47
  I can knock those out now, but.
• 58:49
  and have been for a large number of years.
• 58:51
  But anyway, so I got that job and it was clear to me immediately that he
• 58:56
  had a level of skill I had not seen.
• 59:00
  And he taught me a lot on the lunge.
• 59:04
  And I had what should have been a brilliant learning opportunity.
• 59:07
  You know, he would lunge me This doesn't sound like a road to despair
• 59:10
  Rupert Isaacson: here.
• 59:10
  Mary Wanless: Sorry?
• 59:11
  Rupert Isaacson: This does not sound like a road to despair.
• 59:13
  Mary Wanless: No, it wasn't despair at that point.
• 59:16
  But during that time, it kind of was that he said the same things.
• 59:21
  And guess what?
• 59:21
  He said them louder.
• 59:23
  In response to which I did the same things, and guess what?
• 59:26
  I did them harder.
• 59:28
  And so we kind of were like ships that passed in the night.
• 59:31
  You know, so it was a double whammy.
• 59:32
  He showed me what a really good rider could do, but he couldn't teach me to do
• 59:36
  Rupert Isaacson: couldn't communicate it.
• 59:38
  Yeah.
• 59:38
  Mary Wanless: So I learned a lot.
• 59:40
  Rupert Isaacson: So you learned what you couldn't do, basically.
• 59:42
  I learned
• 59:42
  Mary Wanless: what I couldn't do.
• 59:43
  And a lot of horses came into our yard, you know, and I saw these ugly
• 59:47
  ducklings get transformed into swans.
• 59:51
  And basically, I couldn't do it.
• 59:54
  Now, while I was there, I did pass my I.
• 59:57
  Fortunately, that was a lot less traumatic than the intermediate.
• 59:59
  So, I did pass that while I was there.
• 1:00:02
  I was very scared I would fail the jumping because I wasn't
• 1:00:04
  really jumping at that point.
• 1:00:06
  I gave up inventing to sit at the feet of the great master.
• 1:00:11
  And it was two years into that where it became really clear
• 1:00:14
  that he was losing faith in me.
• 1:00:15
  He was teaching me less.
• 1:00:17
  I was losing faith in myself and I actually went, I had two weeks off
• 1:00:23
  and I went to Greece on a holiday for young singles and while I was there,
• 1:00:26
  I thought, I have to stop doing this.
• 1:00:28
  I can't do this any longer.
• 1:00:31
  And it was me going, this is the end of my dream.
• 1:00:35
  And I did sell my horse and I quit and I went to live in London.
• 1:00:43
  Rupert Isaacson: And how long did that period of despair last?
• 1:00:47
  Mary Wanless: So I worked for that guy for two years.
• 1:00:53
  Rupert Isaacson: But then the period after that, you've sold the horse, you're
• 1:00:56
  in London, you don't think I sold the
• 1:00:57
  Mary Wanless: horse, I was in London, I got involved in
• 1:01:00
  psychotherapy pretty quickly.
• 1:01:03
  The trips to San Francisco and the dancers workshop.
• 1:01:06
  That was also really important.
• 1:01:09
  It showed me that I, I, that there was a really serious approach to the body.
• 1:01:16
  Rupert Isaacson: Learning
• 1:01:16
  Mary Wanless: about the body.
• 1:01:17
  When I was in America, I read, I think the first of Timothy Galway's
• 1:01:22
  books, The Inner Game of Tennis.
• 1:01:25
  And I started reading some of the early books on visualisation and healing.
• 1:01:30
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:01:30
  Mary Wanless: Right?
• 1:01:31
  So those books I found in the US possibly before I would have found them in the UK.
• 1:01:36
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
• 1:01:37
  Especially if you're in Northern California.
• 1:01:38
  Yeah.
• 1:01:38
  Mary Wanless: Yes.
• 1:01:40
  And by then I'd, I got back into writing again, I'd gone to London, I didn't
• 1:01:44
  write or teach for about six months, and then I got talked into it, and I
• 1:01:49
  started with a really blank slate of a beginner's mind, and went to the
• 1:01:55
  dancer's workshop, discovered a few things just in the early days of starting
• 1:02:00
  again that were really biomechanics.
• 1:02:04
  It's absolutely crucial that I hadn't understood or been doing.
• 1:02:08
  And while I was in America, I went, okay, I'm not just an eccentric writing teacher.
• 1:02:13
  There's really something in this.
• 1:02:16
  And at some point I'm going to write a book.
• 1:02:21
  Rupert Isaacson: Why at that stage, did you feel ready to, or did you
• 1:02:25
  feel the book bubbling inside you?
• 1:02:27
  Because I'm sure at that stage, you were still with a lot of questions and
• 1:02:33
  Mary Wanless: I had lots of questions, but essentially When I
• 1:02:37
  started riding again after I'd given up, I discovered core strength.
• 1:02:41
  Now I called it bearing down and still do, but I discovered how to switch on my core.
• 1:02:47
  And I discovered that on a horse I was riding for somebody that jogged a lot.
• 1:02:52
  And most of the time it would jog and I would pull on the reins and it would
• 1:02:54
  pull on the reins and it kept jogging.
• 1:02:57
  And then every now and again I could stop it jogging but
• 1:02:59
  I didn't know what I'd done.
• 1:03:00
  And when it happened it was, you know, it was like that.
• 1:03:03
  It was in a moment.
• 1:03:04
  Rupert Isaacson: And if you were to put that into a few short words now, what
• 1:03:08
  did you do that stopped it jogging?
• 1:03:09
  Mary Wanless: I caught up to the balance point rather than being behind it.
• 1:03:13
  Essentially being the water skier to the horse's motorboat.
• 1:03:16
  Rupert Isaacson: I
• 1:03:16
  Mary Wanless: caught up to the balance point and I found how to activate my core.
• 1:03:23
  Rupert Isaacson: How did you activate your core?
• 1:03:25
  Mary Wanless: Well the simple way to answer that is to say if you clear your
• 1:03:28
  throat and just go and put your hands on your abdominals while you do it,
• 1:03:34
  you will be feeling and doing what good riders do when they use their core.
• 1:03:41
  Rupert Isaacson: And one of the things that does is increase the
• 1:03:43
  Mary Wanless: pressure in your insides, which is why the balloon
• 1:03:47
  blowing exercise is so useful.
• 1:03:53
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:03:56
  Mary Wanless: And that was just one piece, but it's the pivotal piece.
• 1:04:00
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:04:00
  You're not
• 1:04:00
  Mary Wanless: doing that, and you're riding and pulling on the reins, and
• 1:04:03
  most people are sucking their stomach in at that point, and you're going
• 1:04:06
  to be the victim of what happens.
• 1:04:09
  You will not be able to be proactive.
• 1:04:15
  You will always be reactive.
• 1:04:18
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:04:19
  It's
• 1:04:19
  Mary Wanless: very interesting.
• 1:04:20
  So I've turned it round.
• 1:04:21
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:04:22
  So, yeah, it, because core is such a, particularly in riding,
• 1:04:26
  it's such a esoteric, you know, people throw that word out there.
• 1:04:32
  Mary Wanless: They do.
• 1:04:33
  Rupert Isaacson: Without saying what it is.
• 1:04:34
  Mary Wanless: Yes, we teach people to do it.
• 1:04:36
  Rupert Isaacson: In your Okay, so listeners, Mary Wondless is going
• 1:04:40
  to tell you what is your core.
• 1:04:42
  What is your core?
• 1:04:43
  What is the rider's core, Mary?
• 1:04:45
  Mary Wanless: Alright, well there are two versions of that.
• 1:04:47
  You've got the Pilates version of the core, which is the layers
• 1:04:51
  of muscle around your torso, from your spine round to your front.
• 1:05:00
  Especially the deep layers of muscle.
• 1:05:02
  Now I think of the core a little differently, but I wouldn't have
• 1:05:05
  thought of it in the way I think of it now, when I learned how to do that.
• 1:05:12
  So now I would think of the core, like if you cut an apple in half from the
• 1:05:18
  end with the stalk to the end with the little thing on it, what you see
• 1:05:23
  is a line and then it bulges out.
• 1:05:26
  And then the line continues to the other end of the anvil.
• 1:05:28
  Rupert Isaacson: So
• 1:05:29
  Mary Wanless: my version of the core now would be it starts under your feet, under
• 1:05:33
  your instep, goes through deep muscles of your calf, the inside muscles of your
• 1:05:38
  thigh, your pelvic floor, through your organs, up to the, the psoas muscles.
• 1:05:46
  and also the slings and bags and sacks that contain your organs.
• 1:05:51
  Psoas muscles take you to diaphragm and QL and up through the trachea
• 1:05:58
  and your lungs and so on into your neck, your throat and your tongue.
• 1:06:01
  Your
• 1:06:02
  Rupert Isaacson: tongue, interesting.
• 1:06:03
  Mary Wanless: Yes.
• 1:06:04
  Rupert Isaacson: Does jaw, jaw come into this as well?
• 1:06:06
  Mary Wanless: Not really.
• 1:06:07
  Okay.
• 1:06:08
  No, not TMJ, but tongue.
• 1:06:10
  And, and also to agree chin and roof of your mouth.
• 1:06:13
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:06:14
  So yeah, up through the palate.
• 1:06:17
  Mary Wanless: So, so that would be Tom Myers definition of the core.
• 1:06:20
  And he's a guy who's written a book called Anatomy Trains, which is about to
• 1:06:24
  come out in its fourth edition, I think.
• 1:06:26
  And what Tom has done for understandings of how muscle and connective
• 1:06:31
  tissue work in chains is fabulous.
• 1:06:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Tom who?
• 1:06:36
  Mary Wanless: Myers.
• 1:06:37
  M Y E R
• 1:06:38
  Rupert Isaacson: S.
• 1:06:38
  M Y E R S.
• 1:06:40
  Yes,
• 1:06:40
  Mary Wanless: Tom Myers.
• 1:06:41
  Rupert Isaacson: Tom Myers.
• 1:06:43
  So what you've described really is the inside of a taurine structure, right?
• 1:06:46
  You know, we're all taurine structures, meaning we've got, you know, a hole
• 1:06:51
  here, we've got a hole at the other end, and there's something in between, and
• 1:06:53
  basically we get through life by passing one to the other and That's what we do.
• 1:06:58
  But that's a complex, simple concept, complex process.
• 1:07:03
  As you say, many chains of muscles.
• 1:07:05
  Mary Wanless: But it is possible to learn to really feel those chains of muscles.
• 1:07:10
  How does it come on in a really helpful way?
• 1:07:14
  But when I first stopped that horse jogging, it was just much more
• 1:07:18
  about my abdominals and my internal pressure within the abdominal cavity.
• 1:07:26
  Rupert Isaacson: What did you do within that abdominal cavity
• 1:07:29
  that stopped the jogging?
• 1:07:32
  Mary Wanless: Or as if I had done that.
• 1:07:33
  I didn't do that, but I just hit on being on the right balance point
• 1:07:39
  with enough internal pressure and was able to get my seat bones, as it
• 1:07:45
  were, to not be moved by the horse.
• 1:07:48
  But to take on the slower movements of walk and therefore
• 1:07:55
  walk the horse underneath me.
• 1:07:57
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:08:02
  That process
• 1:08:06
  is of course dependent on a certain amount of
• 1:08:14
  rider experience.
• 1:08:15
  You've got to feel pretty comfortable up there.
• 1:08:19
  It's got, it's dependent on a certain amount of physical fitness.
• 1:08:24
  Not crazy, but a certain amount and strength.
• 1:08:27
  And it's also dependent on, as you say, a certain amount of physical
• 1:08:32
  cognition, given that most of us are not brought up to be that embodied, as
• 1:08:38
  you say, that to be that in awareness of, of our bodies, those three things.
• 1:08:44
  Let's say you now take a, what we call in Germany, a Wieder Einsteiger,
• 1:08:48
  so a, you know, a late rider, late comer to rider, or someone who rode
• 1:08:53
  in youth and then took a break and is coming back, which is often.
• 1:08:59
  Is now perhaps out of touch with their body.
• 1:09:01
  Maybe they're not in great shape.
• 1:09:03
  They're certainly nervous up there.
• 1:09:06
  Worried about falling.
• 1:09:07
  And are going to be at the mercy of the horse's movement.
• 1:09:13
  What would be the one, two, three over a certain period of time where
• 1:09:20
  you could bring them to that kind of awareness where they could access
• 1:09:23
  that call in that ahem ahem way and actually make it work for them?
• 1:09:27
  Mary Wanless: If you're talking about somebody who has some riding
• 1:09:29
  experience, they might not be very fit.
• 1:09:32
  They may not have ridden for a few years.
• 1:09:35
  I would say in lesson one, they will pretty certainly
• 1:09:38
  get a glimpse of this working.
• 1:09:41
  They won't be strong in it.
• 1:09:42
  They won't be able to hold it.
• 1:09:45
  Learning to do that and breathe at the same time is the critical thing.
• 1:09:49
  And it's part of what balloon bleeding teaches as well as that quiet mind.
• 1:09:54
  And so I would say in, in lesson one, people start to get an inkling of this.
• 1:10:00
  If you're talking a total beginner, we would still probably early on in
• 1:10:05
  lesson one, introduce the concept.
• 1:10:07
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so at least intellectually they know it exists.
• 1:10:10
  Mary Wanless: Yeah.
• 1:10:11
  Yes.
• 1:10:11
  And working in walk and walk halts is where people begin to get it.
• 1:10:16
  Right.
• 1:10:17
  And if they've got a difficult horse that really has spent its life pulling
• 1:10:20
  on the rein and going which encourages the rider to pull back and lean
• 1:10:23
  back and press in their feet and do all the wrong things, then it's not
• 1:10:28
  going to be as smooth and easy as if you've got a horse that will stop.
• 1:10:32
  If you do the right thing.
• 1:10:33
  I mean, all horses will stop if you do the right thing, but you may
• 1:10:36
  need to be righter than right on a horse that where you've got to go.
• 1:10:40
  Sorry, honey, we're retraining how you think about the bit.
• 1:10:42
  I know you thought it was for leaning on, but it's for something different.
• 1:10:46
  Yeah.
• 1:10:47
  So you don't really want to be doing your first lessons with somebody
• 1:10:50
  in that situation, but sometimes that's the horse they arrive on.
• 1:10:54
  And that's what you're doing.
• 1:10:55
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, no, I got it.
• 1:10:56
  I mean, that's why I'm a great believer in putting people on good
• 1:10:58
  school master horses and creating those horses for your students.
• 1:11:02
  If, if you can.
• 1:11:03
  One of the, one of the other things I know about your methods, which I really
• 1:11:08
  believe in, is giving people stuff to do when they're not on the horse.
• 1:11:12
  Absolutely.
• 1:11:13
  I do half my teaching, I'd say, is not with a pony.
• 1:11:17
  It's just with the monkey.
• 1:11:19
  And if you're getting certain muscle memories, whether it's for in hand
• 1:11:23
  work or whether it's for ridden work, so that when you're presented with
• 1:11:26
  the pony, either at your side or underneath your butt, you can access.
• 1:11:32
  These muscle memories talk to us about what are your main go tos with this?
• 1:11:38
  Mary Wanless: Gosh with dismounted work.
• 1:11:40
  Well, we there's lots of dismounted.
• 1:11:42
  Well, I mean dismounted
• 1:11:44
  Rupert Isaacson: without a horse
• 1:11:45
  Mary Wanless: Without a horse.
• 1:11:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Non pony involvement.
• 1:11:48
  Mary Wanless: So the, the real origin of this was, I believe
• 1:11:53
  it was 1982, I'd arrived in London it was a horrible winter.
• 1:11:57
  Everywhere was frozen.
• 1:11:59
  I got good at giving lessons in walk on frozen arenas.
• 1:12:03
  My ability to pay my rent was on the line.
• 1:12:06
  Right.
• 1:12:06
  And after that winter I thought I need something up my sleeve
• 1:12:09
  in case this happens again.
• 1:12:11
  And I invented the idea that one group of clients in South London,
• 1:12:15
  somebody had a big house, we'd use her big house, her sitting room.
• 1:12:18
  Group of clients in North London, somebody else had a big house.
• 1:12:21
  And then we do a series of winter workshops on a
• 1:12:23
  Tuesday evening or whatever.
• 1:12:25
  Rupert Isaacson: The arena is the living room, right?
• 1:12:27
  Mary Wanless: Yeah.
• 1:12:28
  And so I set that up and people bought it and it was all great.
• 1:12:32
  And then I thought, shit, what am I going to do?
• 1:12:35
  So I had to come up with some exercises and I
• 1:12:38
  one of them was, you know, just sitting in chairs and bearing down and.
• 1:12:42
  We didn't have balloon breathing there, but did a whole load with breathing
• 1:12:45
  and body awareness and noticing.
• 1:12:47
  And I had some sort of martial arts ish exercises and some Feldenkrais exercises,
• 1:12:54
  and I taught mental rehearsal as well.
• 1:12:57
  And I put together these workshops.
• 1:13:01
  And that was the beginning of the dismounted element of this work.
• 1:13:04
  It came out of adversity, as so much does.
• 1:13:07
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:13:07
  Mary Wanless: And I've just kept added to dismounted exercises.
• 1:13:11
  There's so much you can do driving your car, you know, sitting
• 1:13:14
  on two seat bones, pushing.
• 1:13:15
  If anybody pulls on the steering wheel driving their car, I will guarantee
• 1:13:19
  you they're going to be someone that pulls on the reins, you know,
• 1:13:21
  push on the steering wheel, learn to bear down, bear down and breathe.
• 1:13:25
  Notice what's happening in your mid back.
• 1:13:28
  You know, if you're a woman, it's probably push your mid back
• 1:13:30
  back into the seat of the chair.
• 1:13:32
  Most women are hollow backed.
• 1:13:33
  Not everyone, but most.
• 1:13:35
  And there's so much you can practice off horse that feeds into on horse.
• 1:13:41
  And you can also do exercises that are ahead of where you are in your riding
• 1:13:45
  to prepare you for where you're going.
• 1:13:48
  Rupert Isaacson: I so agree.
• 1:13:49
  I so agree.
• 1:13:50
  Mary Wanless: It's so valuable.
• 1:13:51
  Rupert Isaacson: It's fun.
• 1:13:54
  It's, it's, it's Often I think the key between success and failure for riders,
• 1:14:01
  because as soon as you add the pony, it gets complicated for the monkey.
• 1:14:08
  Mary Wanless: Yes.
• 1:14:09
  Rupert Isaacson: Cap if we can simplify things down, take away that pressure, take
• 1:14:13
  away that fear, take away the judgment, take away the lot, and just say, this is
• 1:14:18
  just having a bit of fun with this thing.
• 1:14:21
  But so few, so few writing instructors think this way.
• 1:14:27
  Mary Wanless: Yes, but they also wouldn't know what exercises to break it down into.
• 1:14:31
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:14:32
  Mary Wanless: But the value of it is enormous.
• 1:14:34
  Rupert Isaacson: I, I so agree.
• 1:14:35
  I couldn't agree more.
• 1:14:36
  Okay, you sold me.
• 1:14:37
  I'm coming on your next course.
• 1:14:39
  All right.
• 1:14:39
  So let's talk about mentors.
• 1:14:41
  So when I was having to go down my dressage path and my, it was because
• 1:14:47
  of autism and because of finding that working collection with a child.
• 1:14:51
  In front of me or not, that the collection was the key and then what
• 1:14:57
  I found out from neuroscientists are the collection rocks your hips.
• 1:15:00
  In this particular way, if it's soft, that's oxytocin, that's what's calming
• 1:15:04
  down the nervous system, that's what's opening up the communication.
• 1:15:08
  Because oxytocin's not just a feel good hormone.
• 1:15:11
  It's Hormone of Communication and, oh gosh, okay, so now I need to learn
• 1:15:16
  more about this collection thing.
• 1:15:18
  Not a dressage rider coming in in my 40s, you know, oh shit,
• 1:15:22
  I've got to learn this thing.
• 1:15:23
  Going and talking to all the dressage people say, Oh, well, it takes 500
• 1:15:26
  years to learn this and it's not really possible anyway and someone like you
• 1:15:29
  probably can't wear it and it's really just for a higher priesthood, am I?
• 1:15:33
  It's got to be possible.
• 1:15:34
  What
• 1:15:34
  Mary Wanless: country were you in at that point?
• 1:15:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Many I've always been but between the UK and America mostly.
• 1:15:39
  And so then of course I tried dressage lessons and ran into the same wall.
• 1:15:43
  Everyone runs into of, you know, utter confusion on and realizing that the
• 1:15:48
  horses actually didn't know how to do it and that they were putting me on.
• 1:15:51
  So it was all a moot point anyway.
• 1:15:53
  And then I, then I started asking, I asked a few Professionals who I really trusted.
• 1:16:00
  What would you do in my shoes?
• 1:16:02
  And interestingly, I got the same answer from three of
• 1:16:04
  them, which is go to Portugal.
• 1:16:06
  And I said, why there?
• 1:16:07
  And they said, because it's the last place left where they still produce the
• 1:16:10
  dressage horse with the original purpose.
• 1:16:12
  And I said, well, what's that?
• 1:16:13
  And they said, war.
• 1:16:13
  And I said, but they're not at war with anyone.
• 1:16:15
  They said, no Rupert, it's the bullfight.
• 1:16:17
  Portuguese bullfight almost entirely on horseback.
• 1:16:19
  You're not trying to kill the bull, you're dancing around it.
• 1:16:22
  If there's any hesitation between horse and rider, they're dead in 10 seconds.
• 1:16:25
  So they train all their riders on schoolmaster horses from day one.
• 1:16:30
  And they train the horses to know everything on the ground
• 1:16:34
  before they put the rider on.
• 1:16:35
  I'm like, that makes perfect sense to me.
• 1:16:36
  So I went down there, found it was true.
• 1:16:39
  And then, of course, being on these schoolmaster horses, I kept hearing
• 1:16:43
  this name, Valencia, Valencia, Valencia.
• 1:16:46
  And through that family, of course, Nuno Olivera, who created that family,
• 1:16:53
  and then since then, through all the you know, journey that I've had to do
• 1:16:59
  with this, the other great mentors of that age coming up, such as Egon von
• 1:17:03
  Neindorf, and so on and so on, and you have had a really similar trajectory,
• 1:17:07
  which I find massively interesting.
• 1:17:11
  And because you were, I think,
• 1:17:15
  Half a generation back or so, you got to ride with some of the
• 1:17:21
  people that produced my mentors.
• 1:17:23
  You know, who produced Luis Valenza, Von Neindorf, who produced a lot
• 1:17:27
  of the best riders here in Germany.
• 1:17:29
  Can you talk to us about how you found them?
• 1:17:33
  Because back then, there wasn't an internet.
• 1:17:35
  And, Dressage in the UK, I remember growing up in the Humpfield in
• 1:17:39
  Leicestershire, people mistrusted anything that was European.
• 1:17:44
  The hangover from World War II was still very strong.
• 1:17:47
  We don't like what they do over there, you know.
• 1:17:49
  There was kind of a bit of that attitude.
• 1:17:52
  So to find your way into that world was not easy back then.
• 1:17:57
  How did you do that?
• 1:17:59
  That's a great question.
• 1:18:00
  Yeah, talk us through it.
• 1:18:02
  Mary Wanless: So, Dan, my teacher who drove me to giving
• 1:18:05
  up, he had ridden with Nuno
• 1:18:08
  Rupert Isaacson: Oliveira,
• 1:18:09
  Mary Wanless: and then had what was going to be his horse for the
• 1:18:13
  Olympics, who subsequently went lame, with Egon von Leindorff.
• 1:18:16
  So I knew those names, and Were you
• 1:18:19
  Rupert Isaacson: aware of those names before you went to work for Dan?
• 1:18:21
  Or did he introduce No, I
• 1:18:22
  Mary Wanless: don't think so.
• 1:18:22
  I might have been aware of Nuno.
• 1:18:23
  I wasn't aware of Egon von Leindorff, but I was aware of Nuno Oliveira.
• 1:18:29
  I think, I don't know when his first book came into English.
• 1:18:33
  That would be an interesting one to know, but I think it was
• 1:18:36
  probably the 70s, early 70s.
• 1:18:39
  Rupert Isaacson: I would say the early 70s probably, yeah, but even
• 1:18:41
  then only a fraction of the English writing public would have read them.
• 1:18:44
  Yeah,
• 1:18:45
  Mary Wanless: well I had, so there was J.
• 1:18:46
  A.
• 1:18:46
  Allen, the bookshop in London.
• 1:18:48
  I remember J.
• 1:18:49
  A.
• 1:18:49
  Allen.
• 1:18:50
  I used to hang out in there.
• 1:18:51
  Rupert Isaacson: Me too.
• 1:18:52
  Mary Wanless: And I think I probably found my first New Law of Error book in there.
• 1:18:58
  Rupert Isaacson: Ah, that would make sense.
• 1:19:00
  Mary Wanless: I also found another really important book by somebody Polish,
• 1:19:05
  I think, that was older than that.
• 1:19:07
  That gave me some really good clues.
• 1:19:09
  I can't remember the name of the guy.
• 1:19:10
  Not Podjasky.
• 1:19:12
  Sorry?
• 1:19:12
  Rupert Isaacson: Not Podjasky at the,
• 1:19:13
  Mary Wanless: No, no, no,
• 1:19:14
  Rupert Isaacson: no.
• 1:19:16
  Mary Wanless: So, I'd given up.
• 1:19:18
  I'd gone to London.
• 1:19:19
  I was coaching again.
• 1:19:20
  I'd done the San Francisco Dancers Workshop.
• 1:19:25
  You know, I was trying to get my head around What writing really was and
• 1:19:32
  somehow I got an address for Nuna Olivera.
• 1:19:34
  I don't know how I got the address, who I got it through,
• 1:19:38
  Rupert Isaacson: but
• 1:19:38
  Mary Wanless: somehow I did and I wrote and I said, I would like to come and
• 1:19:44
  his daughter, I believe, worked as his secretary and spoke good enough
• 1:19:47
  English and wrote good enough English.
• 1:19:49
  So I had a booking, you know, I made a booking and went for two weeks.
• 1:19:55
  Rupert Isaacson: That must have been pretty life changing.
• 1:19:57
  Mary Wanless: Sorry?
• 1:19:58
  Rupert Isaacson: That must have been pretty life changing.
• 1:20:00
  Mary Wanless: It was it was a funny journey.
• 1:20:03
  It didn't go brilliantly well.
• 1:20:05
  On the day one, I rode the horse at the back of the ride, and
• 1:20:10
  it really shook its head a lot.
• 1:20:13
  And I thought this, it was, maybe it was a head shaker, you know,
• 1:20:17
  it was a bit pathological and I kind of dealt okay with that.
• 1:20:23
  And Nuno asked about my background and I talked about Dan and he remembered Dan.
• 1:20:28
  Then the next day I rode the horse that was back but one of the ride.
• 1:20:33
  And as we walked up the hill to the riding arena, it was clear to me that
• 1:20:35
  this horse was very old and pretty cronky.
• 1:20:40
  And my spirits just went, Oh, I've graduated on to.
• 1:20:45
  The really old decrepit one.
• 1:20:47
  And I didn't do such a great job on that horse.
• 1:20:50
  And at that point I was really hopeless at the lateral work, which was one
• 1:20:53
  reason why I wanted to go there.
• 1:20:54
  Cause I knew it would be lateral work, lateral work and natural
• 1:20:57
  work in walk and trot and,
• 1:21:01
  and after that, I didn't do terribly well, and then we all got invited along with,
• 1:21:08
  you know, I guess to go to the school in.
• 1:21:12
  Is it Ericeira?
• 1:21:14
  Where there's a Portuguese, maybe military school still.
• 1:21:19
  Rupert Isaacson: In Mafra.
• 1:21:20
  Mary Wanless: Mafra.
• 1:21:20
  It was in Mafra.
• 1:21:21
  We all got to go to Mafra.
• 1:21:23
  And the horse I rode, we all rode.
• 1:21:27
  And then I was in my familiar territory on some five year old A&
• 1:21:31
  R the horse, you know, and everybody said to me, Oh, you got the nice one.
• 1:21:35
  You got the And I just kind of went, don't think that's true.
• 1:21:39
  But I knew what to do up here.
• 1:21:42
  And so that went really well.
• 1:21:44
  But the rest of the time I was struggling and I didn't feel I got
• 1:21:48
  told anything that was very helpful.
• 1:21:51
  And actually got more help from
• 1:21:53
  Rupert Isaacson: Joao,
• 1:21:55
  Mary Wanless: I would say I got more help from Joao Nuno's son
• 1:21:58
  than I did from Nuno himself.
• 1:22:01
  But somewhere there, did I hear the name Luís Valencia?
• 1:22:06
  I'm not sure.
• 1:22:07
  But next time I went to Portugal, I'd found out the right address for
• 1:22:11
  Luis and I wrote and I was able to make a booking and I went there.
• 1:22:16
  And over the next few years, I probably spent over three months in Portugal.
• 1:22:22
  Went quite a number of times.
• 1:22:24
  Yeah.
• 1:22:24
  Luis was delightful.
• 1:22:26
  Rupert Isaacson: Yes, he is.
• 1:22:26
  Yeah.
• 1:22:27
  Mary Wanless: And as long as you could uncode four languages.
• 1:22:31
  So I think one of the frequently, I remember the sentence shortened
• 1:22:34
  the escudos and Wechslen are gauche.
• 1:22:38
  Yes.
• 1:22:38
  Escudos being Portuguese, Wechslen being German and gauche being French.
• 1:22:43
  Yes.
• 1:22:43
  You
• 1:22:43
  Rupert Isaacson: know, shortened
• 1:22:44
  Mary Wanless: the being English.
• 1:22:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Yes.
• 1:22:48
  If you're a horse nerd, and if you're on this podcast, I'm guessing you are, then
• 1:22:53
  you've probably also always wondered a little bit about the old master system.
• 1:22:59
  of dressage training.
• 1:23:00
  If you go and check out our Helios Harmony program, we outline there step by step
• 1:23:09
  exactly how to train your horse from the ground to become the dressage horse
• 1:23:15
  of your dreams in a way that absolutely serves the physical, mental and emotional
• 1:23:21
  well being of the horse and the rider.
• 1:23:24
  Intrigued?
• 1:23:25
  Like to know more?
• 1:23:27
  Go to our website, Helios Harmony.
• 1:23:32
  Check out the free introduction course.
• 1:23:34
  Take it from there.
• 1:23:35
  Mary Wanless: So if you could decode four languages.
• 1:23:37
  You could kind of get some help and, and we did work on the
• 1:23:41
  ground too, which was great.
• 1:23:43
  And, and I felt like I got to ride some nice horses, some interesting horses.
• 1:23:47
  I remember one day, I think they were desperate for horses and I got to ride
• 1:23:53
  the horse that was the Capriol horse.
• 1:23:54
  And I knew this thing hadn't been out of its stable for quite a few days.
• 1:23:59
  So I'm thinking, okay, here we go.
• 1:24:01
  Back to the eventing days.
• 1:24:04
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:24:04
  Yep.
• 1:24:05
  Mary Wanless: And it grabbed the right rein like there's no tomorrow.
• 1:24:07
  And I managed, during the course of the thing, to kind of undo
• 1:24:11
  that and get it a lot straighter.
• 1:24:12
  And I can remember all the young guys there going, Merida de Capriola!
• 1:24:16
  Merida de Capriola!
• 1:24:17
  I thought, oh God, this is good, isn't it?
• 1:24:19
  And then we got to Piaf.
• 1:24:21
  And we got to Piaf, and the horse stood up on its back legs, and I did what
• 1:24:26
  English people did, which was lean forward and put my hands round its neck.
• 1:24:29
  And it came back down again, and Louis looked me in the eye and said,
• 1:24:33
  I think we know Capriole today.
• 1:24:40
  Rupert Isaacson: He's a sweet man.
• 1:24:41
  Mary Wanless: He's a very sweet man.
• 1:24:43
  So I felt like I was kind of working things out, getting to learn the work
• 1:24:47
  on the ground, working things out from the horses, getting a few helpful hints.
• 1:24:51
  And that's about as good as it ever got.
• 1:24:55
  Yeah.
• 1:24:56
  With Egon von Neindorf when I went there, I spoke no German, he spoke
• 1:25:01
  no English, but he was charming.
• 1:25:04
  I tried to collect Jawohl Frau Mary.
• 1:25:08
  That was my, that was when I realized what I had to do was
• 1:25:10
  try and collect Yavor Fraumeri.
• 1:25:12
  My verse, my, there were maybe four of us in the arena at a time.
• 1:25:17
  And my worst moment was when he told everybody to halt and I didn't understand
• 1:25:21
  and I'm riding a stallion and it sort of marches its way into sticking its
• 1:25:25
  nose up the bum of the horse in front.
• 1:25:27
  Always a good bummer.
• 1:25:27
  That was my worst moment there.
• 1:25:32
  But it was lovely to ride the horses.
• 1:25:34
  There were some really nice horses that I learned a lot from there.
• 1:25:37
  So I think it was the situation of riding some nicer horses
• 1:25:45
  in a situation where things go slowly enough that you can work things out,
• 1:25:53
  learning to do the work on the ground
• 1:25:56
  and just enjoying Portugal.
• 1:25:58
  I still love Portugal.
• 1:26:00
  Yeah,
• 1:26:01
  Rupert Isaacson: absolutely.
• 1:26:01
  Me, too.
• 1:26:02
  It's I stood in that arena with Luis.
• 1:26:07
  Writing everything down and filming everything and asking everything I could
• 1:26:11
  think of to ask and I realized oh my gosh It's a complete system and What you one
• 1:26:18
  needed to do was learn the system by which the horse was built not the riding Because
• 1:26:23
  then the riding would come as a result of having built this horse It was to some
• 1:26:27
  degree almost independent of the rider.
• 1:26:29
  Oh my gosh, that's gold and for us that was the game changer, you know with
• 1:26:34
  with horse by method and so on but I've seen so many riders, unfortunately,
• 1:26:45
  hit the glass ceiling, not because they can't get through it, but because
• 1:26:49
  the only set of tools is the riding.
• 1:26:53
  And it's just not enough, you know, if one wants to get through that thing into
• 1:26:58
  Narnia there's these other tools as well.
• 1:27:01
  And so you going and looking at how these guys were building these
• 1:27:07
  horses even if in certain cases you maybe came away with less, i.
• 1:27:12
  e.
• 1:27:12
  with Nuno, or with more, perhaps by the time you got to Von Neindorf too, you had
• 1:27:17
  some inkling of how this old 18th century system was sort of put together because
• 1:27:24
  you'd been seeing it and seeing it and seeing it, and then being one of the first
• 1:27:27
  people to bring this kind of systematic approach back to the uk, I think has, I
• 1:27:32
  think a lot of UK writers owe you a debt for bringing that systematized way of
• 1:27:40
  doing things rather than get on and kick.
• 1:27:45
  Yes.
• 1:27:46
  Which is what we all grow.
• 1:27:46
  You've
• 1:27:47
  Mary Wanless: gotta go beyond, get on and kick.
• 1:27:48
  You've gotta go
• 1:27:48
  Rupert Isaacson: beyond get on, and you gotta go beyond kick and pull.
• 1:27:50
  Yes.
• 1:27:50
  And,
• 1:27:50
  You've also got to see that your instruct that your mentor can actually produce
• 1:27:55
  these horses and can put you on them You know when I whenever I'm asked to
• 1:28:00
  give it is advice to someone if they are looking for dressage Instructors say
• 1:28:05
  there's actually there's two questions.
• 1:28:06
  You always need to ask one is how did you teach your horse?
• 1:28:10
  Piaf and it's got to be an answer that you can kind of get Not some esoteric wall of
• 1:28:18
  words, but I put the leg, hind leg here and then I put the hind leg here and then
• 1:28:23
  I straighten him and it happens like that.
• 1:28:26
  And can, the second part of the question is the most important.
• 1:28:28
  Can I ride him?
• 1:28:30
  And if the answer is no, well, then that person has not produced
• 1:28:35
  a universal horse that is happy to show you for 15 minutes what to do.
• 1:28:39
  I think the answer can
• 1:28:41
  Mary Wanless: be no, until I've seen you.
• 1:28:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
• 1:28:45
  Mary Wanless: Or something else.
• 1:28:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah,
• 1:28:47
  Mary Wanless: because there are certainly people and people doing stuff.
• 1:28:51
  I wouldn't want to subject my horse to
• 1:28:53
  Rupert Isaacson: well No, but but for example with us We've got say here in
• 1:28:57
  Germany seven schoolmaster horses pretty much anybody could come but I know the
• 1:29:01
  tolerance level of each horse and So if we're showing people say, okay, PF And
• 1:29:08
  that would be on day one so that you can feel in your body just what it is
• 1:29:12
  how long are you doing that for you're doing that for a few minutes and You
• 1:29:16
  are choreographing it and you're right there at the shoulder and you help
• 1:29:19
  everything You don't just sort of stand in the center there and say ride go
• 1:29:22
  round and rounder And no, I would never do that to my horse and my horse would
• 1:29:26
  put up its middle finger at me if I did.
• 1:29:28
  But it doesn't have to be done that way, and so it's
• 1:29:31
  basically assisted in handwork.
• 1:29:34
  That assisted in handwork creates a sort of generosity in the horse.
• 1:29:37
  And of course we need that from the horse when we're working with our Clientele
• 1:29:40
  with our autistic kids and so on they're going to sit on that same horse in Piaf
• 1:29:45
  and Passage And that horse is going to be very happy to give that up because
• 1:29:48
  for them It's an easy thing to do
• 1:29:50
  Mary Wanless: and I mean that's really impressive And I think
• 1:29:53
  there'd be hardly anywhere in the world where that happens, you know
• 1:29:56
  Maybe that is a lot of your legacy.
• 1:30:00
  I mean Nuno Trained everything every horse in Nuno school have
• 1:30:04
  been trained to Grand Prix by him.
• 1:30:06
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm
• 1:30:06
  Mary Wanless: Then he put the horse in the school and he never ever rode it again.
• 1:30:11
  So the inevitable death downhill happened.
• 1:30:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:30:15
  And then it's always the rider's fault.
• 1:30:16
  Mary Wanless: And then you've got the horses at the front of the
• 1:30:18
  ride, which are the better horses and the horses at the back of the
• 1:30:20
  ride that are really losing it.
• 1:30:22
  And
• 1:30:24
  Rupert Isaacson: yeah, no, sadly, that's the same old punitive
• 1:30:26
  thing just with more education.
• 1:30:29
  And, you know, a lot of people I know who knew, knew, know,
• 1:30:32
  you know, said what he was.
• 1:30:34
  You know, a difficult character, a genius, brilliant, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:30:37
  But one of the things I love about Luis is that he never does that.
• 1:30:42
  Mary Wanless: No, he is.
• 1:30:43
  He is a generous and delightful soul.
• 1:30:45
  There's no two ways about that.
• 1:30:47
  Rupert Isaacson: And he'll set you up for success.
• 1:30:49
  The reason we do the thing with, OK, day one, put you on Piaf
• 1:30:54
  is very simple outside of the therapeutic model, which is, of
• 1:30:57
  course, we're doing it for oxytocin.
• 1:31:00
  But on the.
• 1:31:05
  One of the first pages of La Guérinnaise.
• 1:31:08
  You know, Cavalerie, which is supposedly what we're all trying to do.
• 1:31:12
  And on, I think, page three of Gustave Steinbrecht, they say, Take your
• 1:31:17
  beginner rider, and on the first day, put them on your best horse, in Piaf.
• 1:31:24
  So that they can feel in their body how it should feel.
• 1:31:27
  And then little by little over the coming years, you will bring them
• 1:31:30
  up to the level of that horse.
• 1:31:32
  And that's just struck me as so much common sense, because if you think
• 1:31:36
  about it, when we're learning to jump, you don't put someone on a horse
• 1:31:38
  that's never jumped before, right?
• 1:31:39
  You don't, you don't, you put them on the best schoolmaster horse you
• 1:31:41
  can, because it's life or death.
• 1:31:44
  But in dressage and flatwork, we have this idea that you're
• 1:31:47
  supposed to kind of hammer at it somewhat blindly, failing a lot.
• 1:31:53
  Until somehow you get it.
• 1:31:56
  I don't think that's much fun for the horse I don't think that's much fun
• 1:31:59
  for the rider and it's inefficient.
• 1:32:01
  It just doesn't have to be that shit But one needs to be shown that other way and
• 1:32:07
  it was Luis who showed me that, you know So he showed me create your horse in
• 1:32:12
  the piaf on the ground put your rider on and off you go But I think by the time I
• 1:32:18
  was lucky enough to be working with him.
• 1:32:21
  He had systemized it Perhaps even more than he had back in the earlier days and I
• 1:32:28
  definitely profited from that, you know So
• 1:32:30
  Mary Wanless: something that might well be true, but I mean that's it's
• 1:32:33
  interesting I mean that would happen to hardly anybody in the horse world it As
• 1:32:40
  in, getting to sit on Piaf on day one.
• 1:32:44
  Rupert Isaacson: It's how we teach all our riders.
• 1:32:46
  Yes, it
• 1:32:47
  Mary Wanless: absolutely is.
• 1:32:48
  If you come back to Stephen Covey and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Riders,
• 1:32:51
  this is to begin with the end in mind.
• 1:32:53
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:32:54
  Mary Wanless: Yeah?
• 1:32:55
  So if you've had a sense of that, and in Piaf it's not so hard to sit, is it?
• 1:33:00
  Absolutely.
• 1:33:00
  It's not like it's throwing you around.
• 1:33:01
  There aren't big forces throwing you around.
• 1:33:04
  And if you're not getting in your knickers in a twist and trying to generate it
• 1:33:08
  and start wiggling and doing all the things that people do, then you just
• 1:33:12
  Because the horse is just going to
• 1:33:14
  Rupert Isaacson: do it because we're on the ground making it happen and all we
• 1:33:16
  need to say is sit still, relax and smile.
• 1:33:20
  Mary Wanless: Yes.
• 1:33:20
  Rupert Isaacson: And just enjoy this.
• 1:33:22
  This, back to where we began with this, and I think this is why it's such a
• 1:33:26
  great conversation for Equine Assisted work is, it's this element of suffering
• 1:33:33
  that things are not worth having unless you suffer, and And therefore creating
• 1:33:38
  suffering where suffering does not have to be, whether it's in your kid as a
• 1:33:43
  Christian scientist mum, or, you know, and as you say, to the point of, well, okay,
• 1:33:47
  maybe you can dance if it's a suffering enough form of dance, as you said, she'd
• 1:33:53
  known how much suffering you were going to have to go through with writing.
• 1:33:55
  She might well have subsidized it.
• 1:33:58
  Ironically.
• 1:33:59
  And, you know, punitive thing has done to us as a culture.
• 1:34:05
  It's blah, you know, doesn't have to be that way.
• 1:34:08
  Mary Wanless: And, you know, it needs explicit how to information.
• 1:34:13
  And, and, and, and you're, Justin and Piaf on day one is, is putting
• 1:34:17
  some information into the nervous system of this is your end goal.
• 1:34:21
  And you can't
• 1:34:22
  Rupert Isaacson: do this because the, here you are doing it.
• 1:34:26
  Okay.
• 1:34:26
  I'm creating it for you, but I won't always.
• 1:34:29
  Mary Wanless: Yeah,
• 1:34:30
  Rupert Isaacson: this is now within your remit of experience.
• 1:34:34
  It's not just in your imagination.
• 1:34:36
  Yes
• 1:34:38
  These things have to happen for all sorts of life skills, right?
• 1:34:41
  You know, you you you mentioned that you're very modest you
• 1:34:46
  saying well I don't know so much about the equine assisted thing.
• 1:34:48
  And I think you've talked us through really really solid Models, I'll just
• 1:34:55
  recap what you've been saying So you were brought up with some suffering
• 1:35:00
  you found that horses were a way out of suffering you knew this instinctively
• 1:35:04
  But then like many riders you found actually When you add monkeys who are
• 1:35:08
  suffering to the thing, they bring their suffering, sadly, to the thing that
• 1:35:14
  one is looking to not suffer with, i.
• 1:35:16
  e.
• 1:35:16
  horses.
• 1:35:17
  What to do about that profound despair?
• 1:35:20
  There you are also in grief, you lose your parents at this very young age.
• 1:35:24
  You're lost, you've got nowhere to go.
• 1:35:26
  You end up working with youth.
• 1:35:28
  And then you discover dance as well, and what is the joy within that?
• 1:35:32
  And also embodiment, and then you start to bring that to people who are suffering.
• 1:35:37
  With riding and help unlock the suffering.
• 1:35:42
  Mary, you've been doing equine assisted work your whole life.
• 1:35:45
  Mary Wanless: Yes, I mean, you could certainly say that.
• 1:35:48
  And it is true that the work I teach is life changing.
• 1:35:52
  For a lot of riders, it is life changing.
• 1:35:56
  And it is certainly life changing for the coaches who get involved.
• 1:36:00
  And just being able to learn it step by step and have it be more explicit and have
• 1:36:06
  a guide on the journey, you know, like between you, you have two perspectives.
• 1:36:10
  You have the rider's internal perspective, what's going on in their body, their mind.
• 1:36:15
  You have the coach's external viewpoint.
• 1:36:20
  and how they're thinking about it and communicating about it.
• 1:36:23
  And if you put those together to solve a problem, then that's very
• 1:36:27
  different to, I tell you what to do and you do your best to do it.
• 1:36:31
  I haven't given you good information, but do it anyway.
• 1:36:34
  Now.
• 1:36:34
  Rupert Isaacson: And I can't actually get up on your horse and do it for you
• 1:36:37
  and show you because I've just learned to say I haven't really learned to do it.
• 1:36:39
  Mary Wanless: Yes.
• 1:36:40
  Rupert Isaacson: And it's easier to blame you than to admit that and go and learn.
• 1:36:43
  Mary Wanless: And, and having patterns in your neurology and really trying to
• 1:36:48
  bridge the gap between that neurological knowing and knowing in language.
• 1:36:55
  If I was The gap between language and experience is such an interesting one.
• 1:37:00
  NLP really got me interested in that.
• 1:37:03
  Yeah.
• 1:37:03
  The gap between
• 1:37:04
  Rupert Isaacson: language and experience.
• 1:37:06
  Mary Wanless: Or experience and language.
• 1:37:09
  Yeah, yeah, ways to find language to cross that gap and as well find,
• 1:37:16
  you know, sitting on a more trained horse and having the experience
• 1:37:19
  of X can help to cross that gap.
• 1:37:23
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so now we move to the present.
• 1:37:26
  You are, you know, one of the people who sits on the right hand of God
• 1:37:29
  of the, you know, equestrian world in the UK and internationally now
• 1:37:35
  and you've Arrive there through this process of seeking answers to
• 1:37:42
  questions, answers to suffering, looking for the right mentors, and so on.
• 1:37:48
  Now, there you are.
• 1:37:51
  If somebody wants to engage with Ride With Your Mind, and Mary Wanless stuff,
• 1:38:00
  how should they begin?
• 1:38:03
  What are they going to learn?
• 1:38:05
  You might think, well that's obvious given the conversation we have, but
• 1:38:09
  actually it's not necessarily obvious.
• 1:38:11
  If someone, so for example, I might now after this conversation with
• 1:38:15
  you, say to all our horse boy people, particularly in the UK, Why don't
• 1:38:18
  you go on a Mary Wanless course?
• 1:38:20
  It's going to open up some new ways of thinking, it's going to
• 1:38:23
  open up some new ways of looking at things, it's going to, there's
• 1:38:26
  going to be all sorts of parallels.
• 1:38:28
  We're going to come away with definitely a toolkit.
• 1:38:30
  I will totally come on one of your courses.
• 1:38:32
  What other?
• 1:38:34
  You start with somebody here.
• 1:38:36
  You take them through a journey.
• 1:38:38
  Ideally, let's say they stick with you for a bit Or with
• 1:38:41
  one of your people for a bit.
• 1:38:43
  You take them to a journey, where?
• 1:38:46
  And what's that midpoint?
• 1:38:47
  So what's the beginning, the middle and the end of your programme
• 1:38:51
  and how do you get them there?
• 1:38:53
  Mary Wanless: The beginning would be being on, usually it's their horse, I
• 1:38:58
  don't have school horses any longer.
• 1:39:00
  Usually it's somebody's horse.
• 1:39:02
  They might have begged, borrowed or stolen a horse, but I watched
• 1:39:04
  somebody for a little while.
• 1:39:09
  See what my priorities are, but you know, the, the ABCs of good
• 1:39:13
  biomechanics stay the same.
• 1:39:14
  Rupert Isaacson: Which are?
• 1:39:16
  Mary Wanless: How you line up your body.
• 1:39:18
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:39:18
  Mary Wanless: Shoulder, hip, heel.
• 1:39:20
  How you support your body weight.
• 1:39:23
  That means the thigh works as a lever.
• 1:39:25
  The thigh is on the saddle and the thigh works as a lever.
• 1:39:29
  How the foot gets to just rest and not press.
• 1:39:33
  and how you get to bear down and breathe.
• 1:39:36
  Those are the initial kind of things.
• 1:39:40
  And doing that often changes the rider and the horse.
• 1:39:44
  You know, we're halfway through the first lesson and it's dramatically different.
• 1:39:47
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:39:49
  Mary Wanless: And if it's hard work, it'll be because it's hard work to sell to
• 1:39:52
  somebody the idea of doing it different.
• 1:39:54
  You know, yes, but my other teacher said, yes, but I've always done this.
• 1:39:57
  Yes, but surely that can't be right.
• 1:40:00
  You know, if it's hard work, that's why it's hard work.
• 1:40:02
  If somebody's willing to play with me, it's not hard work
• 1:40:05
  at all, from my perspective.
• 1:40:07
  And it's a lot more fun from theirs.
• 1:40:08
  Rupert Isaacson: And do they find it, as long as they're not
• 1:40:11
  mentally resisting, it's actually surprisingly easy and accessible?
• 1:40:14
  Mary Wanless: It's very accessible.
• 1:40:16
  It's doable.
• 1:40:16
  It's hard to maintain.
• 1:40:18
  There's always a pull back into old habits.
• 1:40:21
  There's always a pull back into old habits.
• 1:40:24
  So people start to get the idea that all you do is go,
• 1:40:27
  Oh, lost it again and redo it.
• 1:40:29
  Oh, lost it again.
• 1:40:30
  Rupert Isaacson: Not to panic, not to tense up, not to try and
• 1:40:33
  Mary Wanless: bust your way.
• 1:40:33
  And every time that happens, they're changing them.
• 1:40:37
  pretty soon get to feel how that changes the horse.
• 1:40:41
  So that's kind of a beginning point.
• 1:40:43
  And, and we get people doing a good job in walk, walk, halt, rising trot
• 1:40:48
  mechanism that gives a kind of baseline.
• 1:40:52
  They're then sane and safe and sensible in some areas, we hope.
• 1:40:57
  And it's, it's how to do what you have to do to take away the
• 1:41:01
  temptation to pull on the reins.
• 1:41:03
  Yeah.
• 1:41:04
  So you're basically getting people out
• 1:41:05
  Rupert Isaacson: of kick and pull.
• 1:41:06
  Yes,
• 1:41:06
  Mary Wanless: we're getting them out of kick and pull.
• 1:41:10
  Then in the mid stages of this, it's learning to do it going faster and
• 1:41:14
  do it during transitions and just peeling away patterns, peeling away
• 1:41:19
  patterns, both rider patterns and horse patterns, and trying to get a
• 1:41:25
  more wholesome interaction and ways of talking about that and understanding
• 1:41:28
  it and turning change into bite sized chunks, what I call next step fixes.
• 1:41:33
  Mm hmm.
• 1:41:37
  and really getting the rider doing what I call riding on interface,
• 1:41:40
  which would be the rider discovering for themselves the cause effect
• 1:41:45
  rules of the rider horse interaction.
• 1:41:47
  So kind of when I do A, the horse does B.
• 1:41:49
  When I do C, the horse does D and that's reliable.
• 1:41:52
  And if the horse does X, I do Y.
• 1:41:55
  Shoots out from underneath me, I lean back and pull on the reins.
• 1:41:58
  I support my body weight better.
• 1:42:00
  It comes up through his back, all these kinds of things.
• 1:42:04
  So, so there are rules.
• 1:42:06
  You know, my first sense as a physicist, there have to be rules
• 1:42:10
  of cause and effect, there has to be a science under the art, there is.
• 1:42:13
  is well hidden, but it's there and talented elite riders stumble across
• 1:42:18
  it by magic, but can't talk about it.
• 1:42:23
  And as that process goes on, I don't know that there's an end, but it becomes
• 1:42:28
  more that I fix something in me and feel how that fixes in the horse to where
• 1:42:33
  you can go, Oh, my horse needs more X and fix you in a way that changes.
• 1:42:40
  The horse, right?
• 1:42:42
  So it can become, it's, it's being able to feel and sense your way
• 1:42:48
  into the entirety of your body and the entirety of your horse's body.
• 1:42:56
  Rupert Isaacson: Do you have exercises psychologically and emotionally
• 1:43:02
  for accessing away from the horse, the thing we're trying to get to
• 1:43:06
  on the horse, which is joy, right?
• 1:43:08
  The only reason any of us ever got on a horse was because we thought it might
• 1:43:13
  make us feel better or good or something.
• 1:43:16
  Very rarely did any of us get on a horse because we actually
• 1:43:19
  needed to ride to Edinburgh.
• 1:43:21
  You know, there was a time in life when that was going on, but not anymore.
• 1:43:25
  So, we, we, everyone who gets involved with horses is coming in for joy.
• 1:43:33
  We know then that can get lost.
• 1:43:37
  Through, obviously, dance, NLP, the work you've done with Feldenkrais,
• 1:43:41
  psychotherapy, and so on.
• 1:43:42
  These are all, of course, ameliorative.
• 1:43:46
  Although dance actually can be just very joyfully expressive of that.
• 1:43:50
  Do you actively try to help people just plain old access joy and then say okay
• 1:44:01
  now you've got that thing can we bring that thing into the saddle with you?
• 1:44:05
  Mary Wanless: I would say it starts more in the saddle with that.
• 1:44:09
  Okay.
• 1:44:09
  What I'm trying to get people to access is flow.
• 1:44:12
  Rupert Isaacson: All right.
• 1:44:12
  Definitely joy.
• 1:44:13
  Yeah, so
• 1:44:14
  Mary Wanless: joy is a subset of flow.
• 1:44:17
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm . I would agree.
• 1:44:18
  Mary Wanless: And flow is the state where you're totally absorbed
• 1:44:21
  in a task you're doing, you're having no extraneous thoughts.
• 1:44:24
  Mm-hmm . Time is going by, you may be unaware of time, and my
• 1:44:30
  aim when I go in a writing arena is to get myself into that state.
• 1:44:34
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
• 1:44:34
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:44:35
  Mary Wanless: To help the rider get into that state.
• 1:44:37
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm
• 1:44:39
  . Mary Wanless: To, this is maybe sticking my neck out anthropomorphically, but
• 1:44:42
  to get the horse into that state.
• 1:44:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Or at least have that intention, yeah.
• 1:44:45
  Yeah,
• 1:44:46
  Mary Wanless: so that's my intention when I go in a riding arena.
• 1:44:49
  And I think everybody's greatest joy in life actually comes from being in flow.
• 1:44:54
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I would say, I'd say that's pretty true.
• 1:44:57
  You must be working with a lot of instructors too.
• 1:45:00
  Yes.
• 1:45:00
  What's your mechanism with them to help them access that sense of
• 1:45:06
  flow and also to prioritize flow?
• 1:45:10
  Mary Wanless: I teach them what flow is,
• 1:45:11
  Rupert Isaacson: you
• 1:45:12
  Mary Wanless: know, as I talk about it in workshops, as well as they've started to
• 1:45:17
  experience it on a horse and in teaching.
• 1:45:19
  So I'm really trying to get people there in their teaching as well as their riding.
• 1:45:23
  And I think quite often it gets people there more there in life.
• 1:45:27
  I mean, I think I live my life to a large extent in flow.
• 1:45:31
  And when I can do that in everyday menial tasks as well, that's great.
• 1:45:38
  So flow is, I think the bottom line on that.
• 1:45:41
  And, and I also do encourage people to ride out as well as ride in the arena.
• 1:45:45
  And, you know, when I ride out, I, always have something I'm working on, but
• 1:45:49
  it'll just be something in my body and my horse's body, just quietly, even if
• 1:45:52
  we're just hacking along and there's no pressure in that, you can take your time.
• 1:45:58
  And, and one of the biggest things in this, I think, is teaching the noticing
• 1:46:02
  skills of teaching people to check in.
• 1:46:05
  Yeah, innate riders never check out, but teaching the average rider
• 1:46:10
  to check in, what's happening now?
• 1:46:13
  Oh, I hollered my back again,
• 1:46:16
  right?
• 1:46:16
  Yeah, and then not having to do a whole self beating up thing.
• 1:46:20
  Rupert Isaacson: Say that again.
• 1:46:21
  Mary Wanless: People think they ought to be able to ride
• 1:46:22
  by the seat of their pants.
• 1:46:23
  And yet, so many people come back to riding as adults after however many years.
• 1:46:28
  And maybe as a kid they did ride by the seat of their pants and they did
• 1:46:30
  have a lovely pony and it all worked.
• 1:46:33
  Or you come back at 50 something, with many more what ifs in your
• 1:46:37
  brain, and the seat of your pants doesn't work any longer.
• 1:46:41
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:46:42
  Mary Wanless: And often people are shocked by this.
• 1:46:45
  So, you know, getting to check in, to keep checking in.
• 1:46:51
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, without negative self beating up language, yeah.
• 1:46:54
  Mary Wanless: Yeah, not beating yourself up, but just checking in.
• 1:46:57
  In a non judgmental way.
• 1:46:59
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, oh there's that thing.
• 1:46:59
  Non
• 1:47:00
  Mary Wanless: judgmental awareness.
• 1:47:01
  Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 1:47:03
  It's it's the difficulty about sport instruction, because sport instruction
• 1:47:07
  always, always has the implicit, the implication that there's a judge.
• 1:47:13
  You know, and of course you will never meet that judges expectations and it's,
• 1:47:17
  I agree with you so much about being outside in nature while you do it.
• 1:47:20
  It's actually gotten to the point outside of our therapeutic work,
• 1:47:23
  which we almost entirely do in nature, unless weather forces us inside.
• 1:47:29
  Just because arenas are relatively sterile environments, you know,
• 1:47:32
  in terms of introducing a brain.
• 1:47:35
  You two things you want the outside world.
• 1:47:39
  I've now gotten to the point with dressage.
• 1:47:40
  I almost never teach in an arena anymore i'll do almost the entire thing in the
• 1:47:45
  forest because i've just noticed that people and horses are happier there and
• 1:47:50
  then occasionally if there's something where okay, we could benefit from the
• 1:47:55
  wall, or we could benefit from the fence, or we could benefit from a corner here.
• 1:47:59
  Okay, let's go back to the arena for that one thing.
• 1:48:02
  But it's, it's so interesting how just the very presence of an arena brings pressure.
• 1:48:06
  Yes, yes, it's
• 1:48:07
  Mary Wanless: true.
• 1:48:08
  Rupert Isaacson: You know, gladiatorial.
• 1:48:10
  Mary Wanless: And it's sad, certainly in the UK, you know, we have
• 1:48:13
  increasingly little safe riding.
• 1:48:16
  Rupert Isaacson: So true.
• 1:48:17
  Mary Wanless: Off road riding, you know, to have access to the
• 1:48:20
  outdoors without tying yourself up in a juggernaut, you know.
• 1:48:24
  Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely, no, you're absolutely right.
• 1:48:25
  Not,
• 1:48:26
  Mary Wanless: not, not to be taken for granted.
• 1:48:28
  No, it's true.
• 1:48:29
  Rupert Isaacson: When, when I was when I was a boy, you know, we would
• 1:48:32
  hack to a meat of hounds that was.
• 1:48:35
  Anything up to an hour away and might finish.
• 1:48:38
  after dark and hack the lanes home for two hours.
• 1:48:42
  You couldn't think about doing that now.
• 1:48:45
  You'd be killed.
• 1:48:47
  I used
• 1:48:47
  Mary Wanless: to ride out hunters for somebody when I
• 1:48:50
  was at university in Bristol.
• 1:48:51
  We rode along the A38, which is one of the main roads from Bristol
• 1:48:54
  going north up to Gloucester.
• 1:48:56
  I, I You know, brushed with some of my nine lives along that road,
• 1:49:01
  but you wouldn't dare do it now.
• 1:49:03
  Rupert Isaacson: No, you wouldn't.
• 1:49:03
  You wouldn't.
• 1:49:04
  And back
• 1:49:05
  Mary Wanless: then,
• 1:49:07
  Rupert Isaacson: yeah, it, and you're right.
• 1:49:08
  There isn't the public access in the UK.
• 1:49:10
  I'm lucky here in Germany because you can basically ride any, you can ride.
• 1:49:15
  There's tracks everywhere and you can just go.
• 1:49:17
  But it's, I've never experienced that outside of places like the
• 1:49:20
  Welsh borders or areas of open Hills.
• 1:49:23
  Mary Wanless: And then there are places, I mean, I.
• 1:49:25
  Rode a lot on Exmoor in my university days and God, I love it there.
• 1:49:29
  It's one of UK and probably the world.
• 1:49:33
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I agree.
• 1:49:34
  So yes, there's, and it's true that one then needs ways to
• 1:49:39
  kind of humanize the arena.
• 1:49:40
  And we do that with autistic kids.
• 1:49:43
  We will create forests in the arena.
• 1:49:45
  We'll have trees that we bring in and like you're setting up jumps,
• 1:49:48
  we'll set up a forest or Right, okay.
• 1:49:50
  We'll turn it into a beach, you know, and we'll have couches
• 1:49:52
  and even a little fire going.
• 1:49:54
  And, you know.
• 1:49:56
  A sofa will bring that, you know, and anything we can think
• 1:49:59
  of to kind of humanize it.
• 1:50:01
  But It's so easy to just think in terms of I am doing this task here.
• 1:50:07
  I'm working my horse.
• 1:50:09
  I'm not playing with my pony.
• 1:50:10
  So even that language of, you know, it's always serious.
• 1:50:14
  It's always a horse.
• 1:50:14
  It's never a pony.
• 1:50:15
  It's always a rider.
• 1:50:16
  So I try to use the word monkey, you know, got sky monkey, ground monkey, front
• 1:50:20
  monkey, back monkey, anything to just sort of take the seriousness out of it.
• 1:50:25
  Because of this pressure that the arena is a place where you go to sort of suffer
• 1:50:30
  and die on the sand and either Caesar puts his thumb up or puts his hand down.
• 1:50:34
  Yes, it's
• 1:50:34
  Mary Wanless: kind of like that, yes.
• 1:50:36
  I mean, thank God that is on the way out.
• 1:50:39
  It is
• 1:50:39
  Rupert Isaacson: on the way out.
• 1:50:40
  Mary Wanless: There is not enough really good, sane understanding
• 1:50:43
  and coaching on the way in.
• 1:50:45
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
• 1:50:46
  Mary Wanless: There is some, but not enough.
• 1:50:49
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, you've been, I think, one of the big forces
• 1:50:51
  for humanising the entire thing.
• 1:50:53
  And I think that one of the reasons why the UK is where we are,
• 1:50:58
  actually, with sport riding, that suddenly we can beat the Germans.
• 1:51:02
  I think it's largely down to people like you making these processes.
• 1:51:06
  available to people, but outside of the sport riding just to help people
• 1:51:11
  connect joyfully with their horses.
• 1:51:14
  I, I do think there's a whole generation of riders, two generations of riders
• 1:51:18
  in the UK who owe you a great debt.
• 1:51:20
  So it's, it's been massively educational for me, but also a great honor for
• 1:51:25
  me to have you on here because, you know, you've, you've really contributed
• 1:51:29
  in this massively positive way.
• 1:51:33
  Mary Wanless: Yeah, I think there's been a level of me kind of pushing up
• 1:51:35
  from the bottom And some of the big name really good riders It's pulling up
• 1:51:40
  from the top and inspiring from the top.
• 1:51:43
  And I think there could be some truth in that, that my influence is bigger
• 1:51:47
  than I probably realise in terms of
• 1:51:50
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I think you should savour that truth, because it's good
• 1:51:54
  work that you've done and continue to do.
• 1:51:56
  So if people want to come and learn with you how do they do that and then how
• 1:52:00
  can they find your books and can they learn with you online as well as live?
• 1:52:04
  Mary Wanless: Yes, so my website is meri onelist.
• 1:52:06
  com Is that Lower,
• 1:52:09
  Rupert Isaacson: please.
• 1:52:10
  Mary Wanless: mary oneless.
• 1:52:12
  com mary
• 1:52:13
  Rupert Isaacson: oneless W A N L
• 1:52:16
  Mary Wanless: E double S
• 1:52:18
  Rupert Isaacson: com
• 1:52:19
  Mary Wanless: that's got information on the courses I teach in the UK and the US
• 1:52:23
  Rupert Isaacson: alright
• 1:52:24
  Mary Wanless: and it's got information on coaches who are accredited in
• 1:52:28
  this work, mostly in the UK and the US, but Australia, New Zealand,
• 1:52:33
  a little bit in Europe, too.
• 1:52:35
  The website DressageTraining.
• 1:52:36
  tv, which is a membership site, DressageTraining,
• 1:52:41
  Rupert Isaacson: all one word,
• 1:52:43
  Mary Wanless: DressageTraining, all one word, dot
• 1:52:45
  Rupert Isaacson: TV.
• 1:52:46
  Okay.
• 1:52:47
  Mary Wanless: Puts my work online.
• 1:52:49
  Rupert Isaacson: What can people do on there?
• 1:52:51
  Mary Wanless: They can watch webinars.
• 1:52:54
  They can watch what we call the rider biomechanics course, which is
• 1:52:57
  broken down into bite sized chunks of what it is that the rider needs to
• 1:53:02
  do with their body to make it work.
• 1:53:04
  There are other courses on things like steering, straightness and sideways,
• 1:53:09
  the baselines of on the bit and what that really means and how to influence
• 1:53:13
  a horse's posture and movement.
• 1:53:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
• 1:53:16
  Mary Wanless: There's also the groundwork that we do based on giving
• 1:53:21
  the horse a conscious understanding of the legs as go and the reins as woe.
• 1:53:25
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm
• 1:53:25
  . Mary Wanless: Equine learning theory is where we start in groundwork.
• 1:53:30
  And you can send in little bits of video if you're doing some of the courses,
• 1:53:35
  you can send in lots of little bits of video and get feedback on them.
• 1:53:39
  Rupert Isaacson: Right.
• 1:53:40
  And I've met people
• 1:53:41
  Mary Wanless: who've really taught themselves to ride on the internet.
• 1:53:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah,
• 1:53:45
  Mary Wanless: it's never sure that could happen at the
• 1:53:47
  beginning, but it really can.
• 1:53:48
  I so agree
• 1:53:49
  Rupert Isaacson: with you.
• 1:53:50
  They've
• 1:53:50
  Mary Wanless: taught themselves to ride on the internet.
• 1:53:52
  Rupert Isaacson: I was very sceptical about that and I've absolutely
• 1:53:55
  seen people who've done it.
• 1:53:56
  How much, what does it cost to be a member on your website?
• 1:53:59
  Mary Wanless: It's, it's going to be, it's going up fairly soon to 25 quid a month.
• 1:54:05
  And you get access to a huge amount for that.
• 1:54:09
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, great.
• 1:54:11
  And then your books, tell us about the books.
• 1:54:12
  Mary Wanless: Yeah, so there are I've written seven books,
• 1:54:15
  three are still in print.
• 1:54:18
  So there's Ride With Your Mind Essentials, Ride With Your Mind Clinic.
• 1:54:22
  and Rider Biomechanics.
• 1:54:24
  Okay.
• 1:54:24
  And sometimes people find the older books in, in car boot sales.
• 1:54:28
  There's a couple of people I know who've got very involved in my work that found
• 1:54:32
  one of the early books in a car boot sale.
• 1:54:34
  So there's probably find them
• 1:54:37
  Rupert Isaacson: online too.
• 1:54:37
  I mean, there will be
• 1:54:39
  Mary Wanless: there and other places that might work better than that nowadays.
• 1:54:42
  But those three books are a good trilogy.
• 1:54:44
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:54:45
  Just give us the titles again for those who didn't get to ride
• 1:54:47
  Mary Wanless: with your mind essentials,
• 1:54:48
  Rupert Isaacson: right?
• 1:54:49
  With your mind essentials.
• 1:54:50
  Mary Wanless: That's the place to start.
• 1:54:51
  That's the sort of beginning ABC.
• 1:54:53
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:54:55
  Mary Wanless: Ride With Your Mind Clinic, which is a series of lessons.
• 1:54:58
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:54:59
  Mary Wanless: And talking about it through the experience of the rider in the lesson.
• 1:55:03
  So there's a lot of photographs in that book.
• 1:55:05
  Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
• 1:55:07
  Mary Wanless: And Rider Biomechanics comes in through the model of The
• 1:55:12
  fascial net and fascial lines and like that understanding of the core
• 1:55:18
  of the body and how to access your own fascial lines and how that helps
• 1:55:22
  you organize the horse's fascial lines and how that whole system works.
• 1:55:29
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:55:30
  And fascia for the listeners.
• 1:55:31
  Fascia
• 1:55:32
  Mary Wanless: would be the connective tissue.
• 1:55:34
  So in the history of dissection, like everything, they kind of cut
• 1:55:39
  it into little pieces and when, Oh, this muscle begins here and
• 1:55:42
  it goes to there and it does this.
• 1:55:44
  But if you turn the scalpel on its side, you could go, okay, so here's the joint
• 1:55:47
  capsule and here's the ligament, and here's the tendon and here's the muscle.
• 1:55:51
  And there at the other end is another tendon and another
• 1:55:53
  ligament and another joint capsule.
• 1:55:55
  And if you keep going, turning the scalpel on its side, you can create chains of
• 1:56:01
  muscle and con and connective tissue, some of which go from head to toe.
• 1:56:07
  So they're almost like guy ropes within the body.
• 1:56:10
  And getting those guy ropes to have an appropriate and balanced tension
• 1:56:16
  makes a huge difference.
• 1:56:18
  Rupert Isaacson: Biotension.
• 1:56:18
  Rider
• 1:56:19
  Mary Wanless: actually is using her own fascial net to change the horse's
• 1:56:23
  fascial net when it goes really well.
• 1:56:26
  Rupert Isaacson: Perfect.
• 1:56:27
  Okay.
• 1:56:28
  And fascia, I think is something which used to be one of those words you'd hear
• 1:56:32
  and it's now becoming more familiar.
• 1:56:34
  Mary Wanless: It is.
• 1:56:34
  So, so Tom has done a lot to bring that into public awareness and There are
• 1:56:41
  more and more people looking at this sort of systems approach to the body.
• 1:56:45
  And then there was actually a medic who started talking about fascia
• 1:56:48
  because there's some talk about how cancer cells migrate through
• 1:56:52
  the body through the fascial net.
• 1:56:54
  Rupert Isaacson: And
• 1:56:54
  Mary Wanless: that became the medical discovery of it.
• 1:56:57
  Whereas outside of Directly medical circles.
• 1:57:00
  There was a lot of research already going on,
• 1:57:02
  Rupert Isaacson: right?
• 1:57:04
  And if dysfunctional cells can move through the fascial net, then
• 1:57:07
  presumably functional things can too.
• 1:57:10
  Yeah, so the
• 1:57:11
  Mary Wanless: fascial net is actually the basis of our feel sense.
• 1:57:14
  It has way more receptors that send information to the brain
• 1:57:19
  about feel than muscles do.
• 1:57:22
  And it has to be taught.
• 1:57:24
  It's also the organ of force transmission in the body.
• 1:57:27
  And to transmit force well, it has to be taught.
• 1:57:32
  Rupert Isaacson: TAUT as in T A U T.
• 1:57:34
  Mary Wanless: T A U T.
• 1:57:36
  Rupert Isaacson: I can see another podcast coming on.
• 1:57:38
  Mary Wanless: So it has to be taught.
• 1:57:40
  So anyone who's told to relax and just goes, Ugh!
• 1:57:42
  Rupert Isaacson: You're not
• 1:57:43
  Mary Wanless: going to do a good job because that's too
• 1:57:45
  soggy and too like a rag doll.
• 1:57:46
  Rupert Isaacson: Right, so what you're talking about is
• 1:57:47
  relaxation in tension, right?
• 1:57:49
  Like a dancer.
• 1:57:50
  Mary Wanless: Enough
• 1:57:50
  Rupert Isaacson: tension.
• 1:57:51
  But not so much tension that it's rigid, enough relaxation.
• 1:57:54
  Mary Wanless: Enough tension but you're not uptight.
• 1:57:55
  Indeed.
• 1:57:56
  Rupert Isaacson: But you're
• 1:57:56
  Mary Wanless: not too down loose either.
• 1:57:58
  Rupert Isaacson: Yep.
• 1:57:59
  Which is rather difficult when your amygdala is firing and you're
• 1:58:02
  sitting on a horse that you're worried is going to unload you.
• 1:58:04
  Yes.
• 1:58:05
  So there lies the art.
• 1:58:07
  And I think you help people get there.
• 1:58:10
  I'm really grateful that you came on.
• 1:58:12
  I'd like to have you back actually, now that you've opened
• 1:58:15
  up this thing about fascia.
• 1:58:16
  And fascia and feel, because I'm a great believer that a lot of rider
• 1:58:20
  feel comes through the fascia.
• 1:58:23
  And that this is something that can help people, because you know,
• 1:58:26
  when you and I were growing up, there was this myth that, oh, feel
• 1:58:29
  can't be taught, and it can totally.
• 1:58:30
  Yes,
• 1:58:30
  Mary Wanless: no, this is definitely not true.
• 1:58:32
  Feel can be taught.
• 1:58:33
  Rupert Isaacson: I so agree, and I'm so happy.
• 1:58:35
  It's easier
• 1:58:35
  Mary Wanless: for some people than others, but feel can be taught.
• 1:58:38
  Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely, like a language.
• 1:58:40
  Well, fantastic, mary wanlis.
• 1:58:44
  com, dressagetraining.
• 1:58:47
  tv, the membership education site.
• 1:58:50
  We have the books.
• 1:58:52
  Mary, thank you.
• 1:58:54
  I've learned a lot.
• 1:58:55
  I hope you'll come back on because I think there's further things we could explore.
• 1:58:59
  And we tend to get a fair amount of questions coming
• 1:59:01
  through from the listeners.
• 1:59:02
  So, Perhaps with your permission I'll collate some of those and then maybe
• 1:59:08
  we could regroup in a few months and
• 1:59:10
  Mary Wanless: yes I'd be happy to do that.
• 1:59:13
  My pleasure.
• 1:59:13
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• 1:59:17
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• 1:59:22
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