Most of our riders already had riding experience, and it was difficult to unteach them what their procedural memory had made them do for years on end. Our pupils stayed attached to their techniques: "I turn, I pull with my hands, I wedge with my inside leg, I lean back to stop…"

We wished to awaken both their bodily expression AND their artistic approach. How can one feel, and cause others to feel, emotion while keeping a lucid, participating attention to the space one occupies?

For a long time, man regarded emotion as an obstacle to cognitive functioning, and as the mark of a difficulty in raising himself up. This widespread conception of emotion rests on a dualist philosophy which leads us to think of the body as separate from the mind: the etymology of the word « emotion », with its privative é-, refers in fact to « that which is deprived of action ». This is not what we think…

Our pairs had to learn to act as « harmonious » units, in keeping with their bodily capacities and possibilities, so as to encourage the homeostatic balancing of enactive functions — a form of osmosis, in short. Enaction is a conception of cognition which emphasises the way organisms and the human mind organise themselves in interaction with their environment.

I therefore had to develop my pupils' cognitive capacities AND enrich their lived experience, so that the body-world dialogue should become fluid and their body the extension of their horse's. I repeat it to them like a mantra: "You are not "doing horse riding" — you must BE the horse…"

This cannot happen without the repetition of practical exercises with the help of facilitators. We introduced decoys for the rider's body, in order to simplify learning and to alter the body image. We appeal to our pupils' sensorimotor capacities, below the level of language: we believe it happens through the contact between their body and the horse's, in the practice itself. The body feels and learns to know. It will thereby develop a sense of the sensible.

We did not know it, but our experience meets that of the Montpellier school of sport psychology and the studies of José Louis Moraguès: « by studying high-level athletes capable of sporting performance, by seeking with some of them the psychological conditions that would optimise that performance, by helping others to reconnect with that state, they discovered and modelled an original mode of being-in-the-world which does not pass through the psychic activity of representation, but depends on a specific organisation of the bodily. The data gathered from these sportsmen and women show that in certain conditions bodily manifestation takes place at the margin of thinking, and that it is precisely there that performance arises » (Moraguès, 2003a, 23)

For example, we used paving stones (or thick boards) so that the weight of the object in the rider's hand would decoy the traction force he opposes to the horse's mouth; so that it would help him stabilise his shoulders and the parasitic movements of the hand; and so that both hands would stay together without ever being able to draw back. After a certain time the stone is removed, and the riders remain in the position their body has learnt to feel, and then to know, in order to be in delicate but precise connection with the horse.