Locking the Core

One of the key parts of learning to ride a horse is learning how to stay on. (You also need to learn how to fall off, but that's a different story for a different day.)

People assume that you stay on by gripping with your legs and holding on with your arms. So they hop on, and they wrap their hands around the horn (if there is one) and they pull up when they start bouncing. Their legs come up as they try to squeeze, and their body curls down, and they end up basically in a fetal position on top of the horse as the horse goes faster and faster. (Squeezing a horse with your legs is fairly universally the way to make the horse go faster, and the horse, feeling the rider fall forward, tries to catch up and keep underneath the rider.) The harder the rider tries to do what seems instinctive, the worse the situation becomes.

You don't stay on the horse by gripping with your legs and holding on with your arms. You stay on by locking your core. You keep your legs long, and your back straight, and you use your arms not to pull yourself into the saddle, but to push off the saddle, up through the shoulders, down the back, and into the seat. We call it "pushing passenger". It's learning to keep the weight deep in the seat of the saddle, pinning your butt to the back of the horse, and locking your core muscles so that you don't flop. When you do it right, you feel immediately more secure.

It works. A couple of years ago, my horse spooked at a combine coming down the country lane. He galloped full speed back to the barn and to safety. For about two seconds, I tried to slow him down, but he had one thing on his mind: to get away from the horse-eating farm implement chasing him. I knew he was going to stop full-tilt at the gate, and I could just picture myself pinwheeling through the air over his head, and landing on my head on the other side of the gate, never to rise again. Everything in me wanted to grip with my legs, hold on with my hands, curl up in a little ball on his back and hide my head. Instead, I grabbed that saddle and pushed myself down in the seat with everything I had in me. I locked my core. And I stayed on. I knew I had done it right the next day when my abs were sore.

 But that fetal position is so instinctive. Life has a way of knocking us about, and the longer we live, the more instinctive it feels to curl up to avoid the blows. Adam and Eve did it in the garden. The Israelite slaves did it beneath the lash of the Egyptian taskmasters. Elijah took the fetal position when Jezebel was hunting for him. The disciples curled up in the boat in the storm, even as Jesus was curled up fast asleep. I have been in the fetal position for the last two years. I've been hunkering down, curling up, making myself small, trying to protect my head and my heart. Life hurts. It gallops away like a running horse, and, for fear of hurting even more, I have curled up in a little ball and hidden.

But the fetal position doesn't work. I know it, every time I get on my horse. I can feel it physically, that the more I try to protect myself, the more I bounce, the more I flop, the more vulnerable I feel. The higher my legs come, the more I pull on the saddle, the more I propel myself up and off, and this old body doesn't bounce as easily as it once did. If I insist on the fetal position, I end up not riding at all, because it feels so dangerous, and I miss the delight of the dance between human and horse, sunshine on my face and breeze on my cheek, mane in the wind, liquid eyes looking at me, the sheer joy of being on horseback.

Instead, I need to lock my core and ride.

Yes, life has a way of hurting. Blow can follow blow. Heartache follows heartache until it feels that there is more bruise than whole flesh. Life can run away with me, and I see the gates up ahead, and emotionally I flinch as I picture myself crashing into them, pinwheeling over them like a cartoon character, and leaving a crater on the other side.

So I need to lock my core. I need sit up straight and look where I am going. I need to plant myself deeply in what I know to be true.  I need to hold on to those beliefs that are central to all that I am. I am His. He knows me. He loves me. He is good, and He is God, and He is on the throne, no matter how fast it feels as though life is galloping away with me, no matter what gates may stand in the way.

Am I guaranteed then to not get hurt? To not fall? By no means. Every time I get on the back of my horse, I take the risk of falling. It's the nature of riding. Just as it is the nature of life. I can't eliminate the risks. I can only mitigate them. I either lock my core and get into the business of living, and live with the risk, or I curl up in a fetal position and emotionally and spiritually die. So I will straighten up and get back to the business of living. And then remember this:

"I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed unto him until that Day" (2 Tim. 1:12).