11/09/2026
Marie Gahan taught me to position by body first and then back up the position with a leg or rein aide if the horse didn’t turn or bend from a change in your seat. Her lessons were technical but explained in a million different ways til you understood and we spent months at walk getting feel of how and when to place your body/weight/leg position/timing of hand and her eagle eye always watching you didn’t do it tension creeping into your body. Her lessons are ingrained into my every day rides and no matter which horse i am riding they help make training and improving lateral work so very easy without tension. What I would give to have her here today x
A horse perceives your weight aids first-
They weren’t born with legs around their sides or hands attached to their mouth. They have to learn how to understand and respond to those. But they were born inherently tuned in to the sensory world. A rider’s weight is the first thing they feel, before the leg and the rein, and the first thing they adapt to.
As riders, we must take great care that the weight aid, intentional or not, is not countering the hand or leg. If we aren’t aware of our bodies, our hands and legs will be forever in opposition to our weight. A horse has to make sense of this confusing cacophony of signaling, and decide which to ignore. Ultimately, a hand or leg become stronger, and the horse is forced to ignore the seat. It’s then that riders begin describing a horse as dull, not forward, or disobedient- when they are obeying exactly what we told them- which was a load of nothing.
