How to effectively fall off a horse
in 5 steps you are probably already working on.
I mistakenly thought that eight years practicing aikido made me somehow invulnerable to hurting myself from a fall. But before we get to what happened and how a horse is involved, we need to have some background.
For those of you who haven’t heard of this martial art, it was born in Japan in approximately early 20th century. It focuses on harmonizing with your opponent’s intention and thus earned the name of “the art of peace.” From a practical point of view this translates into avoiding injuring people, therefore throwing or immobilizing is preferred to kicking or punching the attacker.
While training aikido techniques, people usually perform one of two roles: nage or uke. From a practical point of view, nage is the one practicing the technique and uke is the one receiving the technique. That is to say, uke attacks and nage throws or immobilizes uke. If the attack is not sincere, nage will not develop any skills, yet a sincere attack usually involves a sincere reaction to the attack, so you have to be prepared. This makes it essential for training with other people to learn how to properly take a fall without getting hurt.
At first, learning this causes a lot of physical and psychological pain and discomfort; many students give up on this phase and abandon aikido. It’s only natural, it hurts your body and soul so you cease. The really crazy ones are those who stay, hoping that after all the painful technique “recipiency” and “harmonization” with nage something would actually change.
Eventually you discover that constantly harmonizing yourself with the floor has had a weird chronic effect: the more you fall, the less it hurts. And you find yourself actually enjoying it. As confidence embraces you, it gradually stops being an issue and turns into a habit. Repetition has told your body that you can do it, and because it doesn’t hurt anymore your soul is at ease.
The thing is… this is usually the moment when you enter the “danger zone.”
The result is… neither your body nor your soul are aware and in consequence you hurt yourself badly.
Most of the time, these circumstances are cyclic rather than a straight line. You train, get confident, get injured, recover, go back and keep learning. Even though it’s painful, you get really valuable lessons on what you were doing wrong and subsequent practice focuses on becoming better about that.
Life is very similar. Lessons we learn at different times of our paths teach us what we were lacking or exceeding. And we follow the same cycle: we train, get confident, get injured, recover, go back and keep learning.
And here is where we get to the horse
I was finally taking horse riding lessons on spring 2017. Being one of my childhood dreams, I was really proud that successful adulting could allow me to afford it.
Normally I would ride Syrana. She is a gorgeous, strong and tenacious chestnut mare. Riding her made me feel alive and present. Each and every moment I devoted to feel her movements and harmonizing with her; otherwise I knew I would end up in the ground. She even reared or bucked several times but because I was fully aware, I was able to maintain balance and avoid being thrown. The lessons go by and it kept getting better and better. Before I could even notice, I entered the danger zone.
As foretold, the fatal day arrived for the cycle to continue. That day Syrana wasn’t available and I took my lesson with Bandero. He is an adorable, calm and lazy whitish horse.
And he kicked my ass and soul as I never had experienced before.
Here are the five life lessons I learned on how to accomplish an effectively embarrassing fall.
1. Definitely starve and sleep poorly.
Breakfast that morning wasn’t possible because I was late, neither was dinner the night before because I was tired and just wanted to sleep. Therefore I was neither energized nor awake. Later in time I noticed that food starvation and sleep deprivation was a cycle repeating over and over again way before that day. The greatest difference was that being tired or hungry for daily life activities wasn’t putting my life in danger; maybe my work, though.
The non apparent threat worked funny in my brain. Routine had focused so much on getting work done, planning a wedding and getting a house, that caring about being constantly tired wasn’t important. Which may seem absurd, but I guess that’s the power of getting used to feeling bad.
This was the first thing that let me fall that day.
2. Underestimate the gentle horse.
Obviously, Bandero didn’t seem as threatening as Syrana. If you took a look at them, you could see a fluffy panda versus a fierce grizzly. Yet, a panda can still kick your ass because, guess what? It’s still a bear. Today this makes perfect sense, but that day my hypoglycemic brain told myself to let my guard down, and I did.
Just like the first lesson, this wasn’t a one-off thing, I had been letting my guard down way before. Resting on my laurels, I had the confidence of having been doing things right in every aspect of my life.
I found out that it’s a tricky state of mind, that I easily fall for.
Somehow, if I’m not constantly surrounded of threatening or challenging situations I tend to let my guard down, and bad… When that happens, I enter not just the danger zone, but the Silence Zone.
Geographical metaphor parenthesis…
The Silence Zone is an area located between the mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Durango. Where the legend says that radio waves are not transmitted in a normal way because an accident happened in 1970 involving a rocket transporting Cobalt 57, or aliens (depending on who you ask.)
So, when I enter this zone, no warning signals enter. They are there, I can see them afterwards, but on the run they are invisible and therefore unavoidable. I keep doing things normally but don’t anticipate the effect of arising situations. Basically, when the storm hits after a period of calm it’s harder to respond effectively because I haven’t been training, working, planning, living… in awareness.
3. Think about future nonexistent stuff.
While I was riding Bandero, I couldn’t help thinking in a lot of alternative, future, useless, nonexistent possibilities. One of the ridiculous, prepotent and now embarrassing things I remember crossing my head was how a good rider I was going to become. (Today me — “Really?”)
As much as I’m embarrassed of past Rosario, I have to admit that imagining myself as a better self is a practice that has helped before. Taking it to an extreme and uncontrolled situation, though, as is practicing it while you’re riding a horse… It is a really, really bad idea.
Again, I have been constantly doing something without being AWARE.
(Yes, this is about awareness).
4. Don’t fight back.
Hearing a strong sound is the first thing I remember. It later turned out that some people were working moving sawdust in an area surrounding the training pen, and a wheelbarrow accidentally fell on a pile of rocks.
Realizing that it was too late to firmly hold from something, was the next one. By this time, Bandero was scared and bucking really hard. As I was training balance, I was holding only with one hand. Which, by the time I noticed something was wrong, had already loosened.
Knowing I was going to fall was the last thing to hit me (just before the ground.) But curiously, the worst part wasn’t falling, the worst part was realizing that I didn’t even want to fight back. I just accepted the fall as an unavoidable and deserved defeat. Fortunately, my body acted by itself and diminished the damage. There was still damage though (see the last lesson.)
This time it wasn’t that much about awareness, as it was for giving up. When an uke gives up, the technique is over. As nage you need an active uke to develop an effective resolution. You need uke to react sincerely to what you are doing, so you can know if it’s effective or not. We call this a “live” uke.
Life is the same.
When facing a problem at work, while planning a wedding or buying a house, I was passively accepting things that I didn’t like because I was tired of fighting back. I wasn’t even trying to find a way to come to a resolution I was comfortable with. It was easier, I thought, to let things happens.
I wasn’t being a live uke at all, inside nor outside the tatami.
And I had been doing that for a looong time.
5. Treat your own wounds.
Two people helped me “walk” to a bench nearby as I felt a great deal of pain on my right leg and couldn’t stand up on my own. Hypoglycemia worsened because of the pain-shock, and after the adrenaline rush I was starting to feel nauseated and light headed. A coke brought me back to life.
I was worried because my mother was going to need the car so I decided to drive myself to the hospital and tell my mom to meet me there. Even though several people offered driving me to a hospital, I refused.
Obviously, she knows me better than myself, so she assumed something was wrong (the way moms do.) Because in other situations I wouldn’t call at all before the problem was solved. The thing is, at the time I didn’t realize I KNEW something was wrong. That’s how vicious this situation of unawareness and obstinacy was.
As before, I had being doing that for a long time. Solving my problems without involving or asking opinion of other human beings was my comfort zone, because if it was only my opinion I didn’t had to fight about anything, because fights were the only nonexistent possibility possible to resolve anything. See how everything connects?
Now I reckon that it was affecting my work and personal life. I managed project teams in an environment where project management knowledge is not common at all. Most of the time I approached them thinking I was right in the tools and techniques I proposed and not asking for opinions. For the other part, I wasn’t involving the people I love in the wedding and house decision process. Fortunately, nobody took it in a bad way at work, and the people I love, love me back enough to forgive my stupidity (lucky and grateful me.)
Continuing with the story, on the initial assessment at the emergency department it seemed that it was only a minor injury that required rest, pain killers and physical therapy. Long story short, I was released after a few hours and after attending ten therapy sessions I could walk “normally” and with a lot less pain. Yet, on checkup, the doctor didn’t like the way my hip moved, so he sent me to take a MRI. After which we discovered that I had been living the past three weeks with three hip fractures, two annulus fibrosus ruptures (spongy part of a vertebrae), a dangerously high tolerance to pain and an equal amount of stubborness.
What happened? Well…
As told, I wanted to believe everything was fine, I wanted to believe I was going to be able to walk after ten therapy sessions, I wanted to believe that it shouldn’t be hurting that much because it was a minor injury. And believing, for me, can do powerful things.
But to be honest, at the same time, I knew that pain wasn’t normal, I knew walking was worsening the injury sometimes, I knew something was off. Yet, it was way easier to believe the message given by outsiders than the one I was trying to give myself because being aware was too uncomfortable.
Conclusions
I thought breaking your hip and spine was hitting rock bottom, but no… I was wrong. Looking back, the period after the fall was the worst one. Sleep deprivation and starvation continued, I kept underestimating the gentle horse, imagining future nonexistent stuff (obviously about how I was going to have an heroic comeback to riding), I didn’t fight back and got in trouble at work/with my loved ones and insisted on treating my own wounds, not depending on anyone. All of which, along with other things, eventually lead me to a major depression (but that is another story.)
Eventually the pain subsided and I was able to walk normally again. But it was until several months later when I returned to practice aikido that something clicked: it was just another training cycle, and this time the lesson was about awareness and obstinacy. Somehow I was more conscious about what I was aiming and fighting for in life. I realized, for example, that I didn’t believe in my goals at work, that’s why discussing things or trying to defend my decisions was so frustrating. I was trying to defend something I didn’t even believe could work to solve what was needed to solve.
I also realize that I was giving too much thinking in the material repercussions of planning a wedding, so when receiving suggestions or confronting changes, it was much more stressful than needed. I proceeded to choose a few things that were really important to me to have in my wedding (like opening the dance floor with Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters”) and definitely stick to them, everything else I decided I didn’t care if it was changed.
Falling off a horse wasn’t a magical hollywood event after which I learned my lessons and everything was solved. It took me more that one year to actually learn this lessons. Fortunately, without permanent consequences, so far, except for being able to predict the weather sometimes. But the more I think about that moment and the way I was doing things, I reaffirm that it was a matter of time and that it was unavoidable at that point.
With everything that is happening around us, I think it is easy to be working in how to fall off your horse without even realizing it. My hope is that this insight into my fall may help you avoid or mitigate unpleasant situations or maybe just laugh a little.
I wanted to open the year with this story because I decided that a goal for 2020 is to try to learn at least five lessons after failing at something. So, never being too late, my two years later five lessons about falling off a horse are:
- take care of your body,
- appreciate the gentle horse and learn from it,
- think about the future only to meditate or mentalize but avoid self praise,
- beware of what are you aiming and fighting for in life,
- continuously try to know your present self (we all change over time) so you can identify when you need help.
Ros, out.
