The 2009 Clinics and Workshops have been uploaded to the Dressage in the Fourth Website where there is alot of new information. The Site is four pages deep, so keep clicking your way through it! We hope to see you at some of these great events!These events have been designed to raise consciousness in the mainstream equestrian community where, unfortunately, materialism, competition, consumerism and egoistic I-ness have been uninvited guests for far too long. The 2009 Fourth Dimension Clinics and Workshops have been structured to provide forums where conscious riders and interested horse men and women can come together to learn skills for co-creating a new paradigm where Love leads the Way.
The horse teaches us Love....the discipline of dressage teaches us the Way. Sherry has been teaching the discipline of dressage to riders from all over the world for three decades. By now, some of you have attained a level of mastery sufficient to "take the next step"...that is, to begin to integrate the inner elements of dressage with life-at-large. Unleashed!! Now that you know how to do a shoulder-in, what does it really mean? Who is that "you" that "does" shoulder-in? Or, maybe even more importantly, who is that "you" that is "struggling" to learn shoulder-in? Nobody leashes us. We leash ourselves...and we can unleash ourselves. In the words of Alan Watts, we can stop getting in our own Way.
In the Fourth Dimension, we will explore becoming more mindful of the ways that re-connecting with animals and nature, through an ancient system of horsepersonship called dressage, can contibute to unleashing ourselves from the unconsciousness that is destroying the Planet. "Mindfulness remains possible, provided our minds are capable of focus. In fact, and here's the paradox, the secret of spiritual practice is that our limits may become our strengths if we learn to work with them skillfully." (Ram Dass, Still Here, pg. 48). Similarly, as our bodies present us with challenges as we explore riding, we can use these roadblocks to increase our mindfulness.
Western philosophy is rooted in the Socratic Imperative to Know Thyself (to gignoskein auton heauton; gnothi seauton!). Dressage originated with Xenophon, who was, like Plato, a student of Socrates. Let the circle be unbroken. We're going back to the beginning. One Life, One Love!
Mounted Clinics will be held around the US and in Canada in 2009. You and your horse may attend as equal partners who work together in The Tao Dance. These Area Mounted Clinics will deliver a systematic, in-depth insight into what Sherry calls “her teaching method”. She is going to teach “how she sees what she sees” and “how she develops her instructional delivery vehicle" so that a diverse number of students all “get it”. If someone is interested in teaching, this will provide a solid teacher-training certification. If someone simply wants to train and ride, they will come away with a super system for doing just that! The program is geared to the WHOLE rider, not just the technical aspects. All dressage “truth” is preserved in the human soul. It is exposed as riders access their “inner knowing”. The current paradigm of lies and falsehoods cannot survive for any length of time. Misconceptions, as Dr. van Schaik called them, constantly need new disguises to survive. That is why contemporary “competitive” dressage is constantly changing it’s structure, trying to find the truth it has lost, yet only distancing itself from truth even more. We all know, within, what is “truth”…and the horses, likewise, show us “the right way”. The “truth” shows itself through our clarified feelings, our Emotional Guidance Systems…in the body, in the mind, in the psyche and in the spirit.
Suppose riders today were taught to ride in one certain way, that being only the contemporary model of “push and pull”. Over a matter of time, real dressage would be gone! For those of you who have experienced Sherry’s teaching, you know that she truly “drops the penny” of Classicism and Consciousness in each and every lesson…and now she is going to share the secrets of how she does it in an ordered system. Wow!
