Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Equine Assisted World.
I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson, New York Times best selling
author of The Horse Boy, The Long Ride Home, and The Healing Land.
Before I jump in with today's guest, I just want to say a huge
thank you to you, our audience, for helping to make this happen.
I have a request.
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It really helps us get this work done.
As you might know from my books, I'm an autism dad.
And over the last 20 years, we've developed several
equine assisted, neuroscience backed certification programs.
If you'd like to find out more about them, go to newtrailslearning.
com.
So without further ado, let's meet today's guest.
Welcome back to Equine Assisted World.
I've got a legend with me, Mary Wandless.
Those of you who grew up with riding through the 80s and into the 90s will
know her very well and her programs.
Those of you who came in more recently may not, and if you don't, you should.
Because Mary's been at the forefront of, I would say, the movement to
bring riding back into the humanities and to humanize the whole process
and make it more accessible.
And moving away from the old models of, you know, an instructor yelling
at a student and hoping that by increasing the decibel level,
things will somehow get better.
And actually looking at biomechanics, actually looking at what's going
on in the mind, actually looking at equine and human well being and
so on and putting that together.
And it's, one can think these days that that's, oh yeah, that's a no
brainer, of course we do all that.
But it wasn't always so.
And these conversations were a bit taboo, actually.
Back in the day, and it was pioneering people who were not afraid to be
snickered at and laughed at and perhaps a little bit even looked down upon for
taking an alternative approach, who of course are now the mentors that we
all look to, and Mary is one of them.
So let's find out about how she can help us with us and our endeavors in
the equine assisted world to provide wellbeing to humans and horses together.
So welcome Mary.
And can you tell us who you are and what you do?
Mary Wanless: Gosh, well, I'm a riding coach and I have had a big part in
creating the field of rider biomechanics, largely because I grew up with instructors
that kind of shouted louder at the natives and couldn't tell anybody how to do it.
You know, it was do it now, do it again, do it more, do it
better, do it because I said so.
And clearly I had no talent and that wasn't going to work.
So I was a passionate horse kid and Begged for riding lessons for 10 years.
And eventually when I was 14, got myself on the back of a horse and
it kind of went from there, but it became apparent to me, well, early
on, I just thought like I was stupid and incapable and not talented, which.
You know, I'm certainly not talented.
I'm not quite stupid.
And I, some fears, some spheres, I'm pretty incapable, but I set out to try and
find out what talented riders were doing that they didn't say they were doing, but
that only happened after I'd had a crisis where I actually gave up riding in despair
and it required that giving up for me to.
Look at it from first principles and look at it in a way with a physicist's brain.
I have a degree in physics and go, what's going on here?
There have to be rules of cause and effect.
How the heck does this work?
Rupert Isaacson: You sound like Elon
Mary Wanless: Musk.
Not quite.
No,
Rupert Isaacson: that's apparently his things.
First principles, you know, let's go back.
But, but you're right.
First principles are very useful.
And I think a physicist's eye.
in this is really helpful because what are we dealing with here, if not physics?
The natural world and how things move through time and space.
Talk to us about that despair and why did it come?
What did you do about it and how did it lead you to your present work?
Mary Wanless: So I you know, I hadn't done much more than hairy ponies
and muddy fields and a few riding holidays before I went to university.
And arrived at Bristol and with a friend, we, we sat about in our
second year, really trying to make the riding club more open to other people.
And the riding club gave me much more experience of different places,
different people, riding arenas.
And I did my AI during my first summer vacation, so that's the
assistant instructor's exam as it was then, for those of you who
aren't British and old enough to know and I just about passed that.
And it was a sequence of events that got me doing that.
Cause basically my mother had died when I was 16.
My dad died when I was 18 during my first term at university.
And so I actually had nowhere to go for the summer vacation.
Rupert Isaacson: Wow.
And
Mary Wanless: when my friend said, wow, well, why don't you go to the
place where I kept my pony and, and work and see if you can get your AI.
So I had nothing better to do.
And I loved the idea of being around horses.
So that was what I did.
And got to ride on some of the university teams, but it tended to be that we had
three in a team and I was number four.
But we were fairly, we, we divvied out these places in teams in
the unimportant competition.
So I did get to ride a bit.
And when I left university, I decided to take a year out and play with horses.
And I thought I'd quote, get it out of my system.
That was the plan.
And it didn't work.
I got a place to go back and do post grad teacher training.
Sorry.
Rupert Isaacson: I seem to remember saying that to myself once.
Yeah.
Mary Wanless: Yeah.
Get it out of my system.
So I took a year off after I graduated.
to play with horses and get it out of my system.
I had a place to go back to Bristol and do postgrad teacher training, which I did.
And I lasted about six weeks.
And during that time, I started getting headaches and I was
feeling pretty miserable.
And I had the biggest blinding flash of light experience I've ever had, which was,
I don't actually give a damn or a toss if kids don't understand Newton's laws.
And I quit and played around with youth schemes, working in youth
clubs and with unemployed youth.
Why?
Why did
Rupert Isaacson: you do
Mary Wanless: that?
I needed money.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, but you could have made money in a dozen ways.
You know, it
Mary Wanless: seemed do able.
Well, I think I already I mean, I was a pretty vulnerable young person, you know,
the whole situation of my upbringing and then my parents deaths cast a big shadow.
So I had a, an empathy with people who are vulnerable and
I guess I saw some ads somewhere.
I don't know.
You know, I could have tried working in a shop or something like that.
It was something I could do that was a shift here and a shift
there and largely evenings.
and a friend and I were owning a horse between us.
She was doing the post grad teacher training and it just wouldn't have worked
without me having more time actually.
We went into it incredibly optimistic in terms of how much you can study
and have a horse and make it work.
So that's a good question.
Why did I do that?
It, it just, I saw some ads, it felt like something I could do.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, how long did you do that for and what kind of work
with these young people did you do?
Mary Wanless: I did a couple of evenings a week in a youth club.
Rupert Isaacson: Doing what?
Mary Wanless: Hanging out with mostly the girls
Rupert Isaacson: talking.
Mary Wanless: I ended up with a little dance class going.
I'd done a lot of ballet in my youth and then some other dance and
expressive kind of non structured dance.
So I ended up with a little dance class.
With the girls.
Rupert Isaacson: What year is this?
Mary Wanless: It's 1970 75.
And then in the youth clubs it was just kind of hanging out
with the guys and playing snooker with them and things like that.
You know, it wasn't very helpful program, I don't think.
Rupert Isaacson: And you weren't terribly old, much older than them either.
Mary Wanless: No, I wasn't.
Rupert Isaacson: You were more of a contemporary
Mary Wanless: No, I was 22, 23.
Rupert Isaacson: And I'm just, I'm just casting my mind back to that.
And that's when I was at primary school, but you know, I'm, I'm thinking, Oh
yes, ABBA Queen is big in the charts.
People have the seventies haircuts.
Football hooliganism is suddenly a conversation.
But yeah, flared trousers, but there was disco.
But there was still a.
I feel there was still a kind of an optimism to that decade.
You
Mary Wanless: know, I never felt caught up in the 70s
Rupert Isaacson: pessimism.
Mary Wanless: You know, economically it was difficult.
I was doing my own thing in my own little world.
You know, I really wasn't listening to news and being, I didn't have
a very whole worldly perspective.
And in many ways I was taken up with myself as a somewhat troubled person.
Well,
Rupert Isaacson: okay.
Mary Wanless: And horses and kids and that was my world.
Rupert Isaacson: I'm also just thinking now, looking outside the window and seeing
the first punks coming by in 1977 and realising that the world had changed.
Perhaps in a better way.
Say what?
Mary Wanless: I missed, I missed the whole punk thing.
Rupert Isaacson: Oh, there's always time, there's always time Mary.
It's punk's not dead.
But why were you vulnerable growing up?
What, what were the vulnerabilities and what were you carrying with you?
Because I think this will really help us in this Equine Assisted
conversation to understand where we're
Mary Wanless: coming from.
I think part of it was being born into a family where my mum and dad
had very little education and thought education was the answer to everything.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: And
Rupert Isaacson: There's some pressure there.
Mary Wanless: There was a lot of pressure.
Now I'm very sure now that I'm dyslexic, at the time dyslexia didn't exist.
I was called careless if I got things.
back to front and upside down.
I'm left handed.
You had to write with a fountain pen in those days.
It's hard to write with a fountain pen and not get your hand over
the writing and make a mess.
You know, I was messy.
I got things back to front.
I think I may also be ADHD.
I'm not so sure on that, but I'm definitely capable of the hyper focus.
Part of that.
And I worked really hard in school.
I mean, I saw I have a very smart oldest brother, really seriously smart oldest
brother, and then a brother who was in his shadow and really wasn't very academic.
And I was kind of trying hard,
following up quite a few years behind seeing how well it didn't work out for
my middle brother who kind of went I'm not into this and you know, I did pretty
well, got loads of O levels and viable A levels, got into a good university.
I could do maths much better than I could do English and Arts.
Although I shocked myself and everybody, I think, by getting
A's in English Literature and English Language at O Level.
The spelling gods must have been with me on those days, I don't know.
But, that was an almighty shock.
But I got myself backed into a corner where Physics and Maths was what
I did at O Level, at A Level, and then it's what you do at University.
Rupert Isaacson: But,
Mary Wanless: so the pressure academically was really difficult.
And
You know, I, I did get a place at a direct grant school.
So I must have done well enough in the 11 plus.
Bristol's a top university.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Mary Wanless: But it was all a struggle.
It was a real struggle.
And it was a very rigid and very religious family.
And my mother used the whole religious thing in quite a nasty way.
There was a lot of shame.
Rupert Isaacson: Talk to
Mary Wanless: us
Rupert Isaacson: about that as best you can.
I presume this was, you know, Christianity, but what, what form, how
did the shame, how did the shame work?
She was
Mary Wanless: a Christian scientist, which is not well known.
And you know, if you were ill, you had to get your thinking straight.
And yeah, so, so there was a whole punitive level about
being ill or being not perfect.
I think she wanted to pretend she didn't have a body and bodies didn't exist.
She then, when I was 14, became quite ill and had cancer and didn't have.
treatment until it was too late.
I can imagine there were major arguments between my father and her.
Rupert Isaacson: He was not a Christian scientist.
Mary Wanless: He towed the line.
And, and during, so it, there's more family history to this too.
During the First World War, my mother's mother, as I understand it, lost seven
male members of the family or family friends, and she had a breakdown.
And then the second world war.
So my mom was a child during the first world war.
I was the child of their older age.
And during the second world war, my dad had his own business and
he was firefighting at night.
In the Blitz in London, and my mum took over running his shop.
Rupert Isaacson: Which was what kind of shop?
Mary Wanless: Sorry?
Rupert Isaacson: What kind of shop was it?
Mary Wanless: It was sports and leather goods.
Nothing horsey, but sports, leather goods Sibutio football.
Do you remember Sibutio football?
I
Rupert Isaacson: do remember Sibutio.
Little footballers, and you'd stick to
Mary Wanless: them.
Yeah, football boots and shirts for the local schools.
Fish and tackle.
Fireworks at the right time of year.
I have memories of being knee high to a grasshopper looking at the fireworks in
the firework cabinet and we got to buy them with our pocket money at cost price.
We had the best firework parties in our street.
Rupert Isaacson: So, your mum, your dad was, okay, so he was
firefighting in the blitz.
He's a shopkeeper coming up through the blitz in the war.
Yes.
Older, when they have you, mum is Christian Scientist.
Mary Wanless: So mum was in hospital during the war.
I think there was a Christian Science visitor and that got her
into an OK functioning state.
Kind of.
So I think my dad wouldn't challenge it because it was
too fundamental to her OK ness.
Yeah but it wasn't a very okay version of okay.
Rupert Isaacson: Are there things, I don't know much about Christian science stuff,
are there things you're not allowed to do, are there taboos, are there big no no's?
Mary Wanless: Oh, there's no drinking no drugs, you know, no gods before me.
Rupert Isaacson: No fun.
Mary Wanless: Supposedly no coffee, my mum did have a cup of coffee every
day, but supposedly no coffee, nothing that could be addictive or whatever.
So it is a pretty strict regime by most people's standards.
Rupert Isaacson: So not a bundle of laughs?
Mary Wanless: Not a bundle of laughs.
No, not a bundle of laughs.
Rupert Isaacson: And then you And I had
Mary Wanless: the odd moment where I felt like I got it,
Rupert Isaacson: you know,
Mary Wanless: I understood it.
And nowadays, X years on, would have a philosophy which is not
that different, but doesn't have the punitive element to it.
Rupert Isaacson: Tell me about the punitive element.
I mean, it's just Is it the standard Christian punitive element, i.
e.
tear the line or go to hell?
Or something more than that?
Mary Wanless: There wasn't more than, there wasn't a lot of talk about hell.
I think my mum must have had a lot of this growing up in her childhood, and a lot of
shame, and anything we did that, you know,
cross the boundary for her.
I mean, we got it.
When her shame got triggered, we got it.
Rupert Isaacson: And when you got it, that would be being screamed at?
She'd hit you?
No, there was
Mary Wanless: nothing physical, but it was kind of being yelled
at in get your thinking straight.
I thought I knew you.
Who do you think you are?
La la la la la.
Effectively
Rupert Isaacson: you're a bad person.
Yes.
There
Mary Wanless: was an awful lot of You are a bad person.
And you know, there was nothing for it in the end.
But to come back, capitulate, apologise and
Rupert Isaacson: Appease.
Mary Wanless: And I think it was partly and in a way I do wonder if she was
pretty much a narcissist, you know, she never apologized for anything.
She didn't do anything wrong.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, people didn't in those days, did
Mary Wanless: we?
Rupert Isaacson: It was the culture, wasn't it?
I mean, nobody
Mary Wanless: was the culture.
Yes, it was the culture.
Parents were perfect.
Children were to be made in an image.
That wasn't me.
I mean, this This woman had two boys, desperately wanted a little girl.
Her story was she had to wait however many years before she could bear
the fact she might have a third boy.
I think that was a cover up story.
I think it was all an accident, probably.
She was 43 when I was born.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: And then she got the wrong little girl.
Rupert Isaacson: Why were you the wrong little girl?
Mary Wanless: I didn't like wearing dresses.
I didn't like, I, I, I was, I'd learned to sew, I learned to cook,
I was okay with all of those things.
Actually the place where my mother supported me the most was doing creative
things, even if what I was doing was gluing together cotton wool balls and
making little things and sticking feet on them, she'd go, Oh, that's lovely.
So she actually really supported me in doing things like that.
Crochet.
You know, I did lots, made my own clothes, did lots of those kinds of things and
actually would have been way more suited to doing something creative than trying
to be an academic, which I really wasn't.
And now I think I fall between two stools because the real academic horse world
doesn't think I'm academic enough and the average rider thinks I'm too academic.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, it's always, I think, a good sign if you're pissing
off both sides of the camp then it means you're probably doing something wrong.
Okay, so one of the reasons I would sort of go into this and start asking
you all these questions is because obviously, you know, I think this is
You know, something a lot of young people struggle with a lot, you know,
and, and when I say young people, we're all the same young people that we always
were, and we're all the same lost eight year old, and we're all the same, you
know, over anxious, wanting to please three year old, and we're all, and
we're also the joyful child, and we're also the curious kid and adolescent,
and we, I, we, I feel we always, we carry all of our past selves with us.
And then we hit adulthood and well, there they all are.
And so it's interesting to me that, you know, without thinking for those
listeners who obviously you couldn't hear our conversation before we hit record.
But, you know, Mary was saying, well, you know, I'm not really, you know, am I that
qualified to talk about equine assisted?
And I was like, yeah, I think you probably are, you know, and when you,
as soon as anybody begins to look up.
I think particularly in the horse world, if you kind of had to battle your way into
it a little bit like you did, I did too.
There's usually a reason and the, it, it's to do with the pursuit of a certain
kind of happiness and joy and freedom.
Which means that one's current situation perhaps isn't that.
And so I think a lot of people can relate to this.
And then there you are finding yourself doing this youth work in Bristol.
Synchronicities aren't always.
Conscious.
One doesn't always recognize them.
But I would say that your work has made life a lot better for a
lot of anxious, self questioning riders who are feeling lost.
And I don't think you would have had that empathy if you hadn't gone through.
Mary Wanless: Yes.
Something like you just described.
Rupert Isaacson: You would have had no reason to do it, right?
Mary Wanless: You know, and it's interesting the kids that
are born horse mad, isn't it?
I was one of them.
My family were appalled.
It was outside of their experience.
My father had a cousin, actually, who was very horsey and lived her
life being a cook or a housekeeper for some of the horsey known names,
actually, of that generation before me.
The family joke was you'll turn out like Auntie Minor if you get around horses.
She was probably saner than the rest of the family, but there you go.
But, you know, I just picked horses out of picture books as a kid.
I just, we, we, we had a budgerigar, but weren't really allowed animals otherwise.
I had a guinea pig.
You were
Rupert Isaacson: in North London, right?
Mary Wanless: No, I, I grew up in West London.
I grew up out near Uxbridge, the end of the Piccadilly and the Metropolitan line.
Okay,
Rupert Isaacson: well that's, back then that was effectively countryside.
I mean,
Mary Wanless: it's It was right on the edge.
You know, we had bikes, we could go out in woods.
I mean, we had lots of breeding.
But
Rupert Isaacson: there would have been horses
Mary Wanless: in fields around.
Sorry?
Rupert Isaacson: There would have been horses in fields around
Mary Wanless: you.
There were horses in fields around that I didn't get very near, but there
were horses in fields around, yes.
And I just love them.
And I mean, still do.
And the level of beauty and power and grace and willingness to let us
play with them and be around them.
It still moves me to tears.
I mean, that's
Rupert Isaacson: miraculous.
I agree.
Mary Wanless: It's, it's phenomenal.
Had there been horsey
Rupert Isaacson: people back in the day, even people, you know, previous
generations, people who'd been with working horses perhaps, or drovers, or
because back then, you know, even when I was a kid, in, in London, I grew up in
Islington, which is central north London.
There were a lot of horses around.
I mean, the Rag and Bone men were out.
Always with their horse and carts.
Handsome cab taxi drivers often kept still horses in muses in inner London
and you'd see them out in the early mornings exercising their horses.
A lot of riders on Hampstead Heath it wasn't just Hyde Park.
You know, it's dwindled now but there was it was around.
There were
Mary Wanless: ragged bow men that came past our school and we'd always try
and look out the windows which were so high you couldn't see out of them and a
friend and I had a diary of what horse came past at what time on what day.
Rupert Isaacson: That clip clop sound, the sound of freedom.
Yes.
Still to this day.
Okay, but as far as you know, you didn't have someone in the ancestry who
Mary Wanless: As far as I know, just my father's cousin
was the only horsey person.
I really don't know.
I don't think it would have happened in my mother's family.
If it had happened, it would have been my father's family, but I don't think so.
And I
Rupert Isaacson: presume you must have begged for riding lessons.
Mary Wanless: I begged.
Believe me, I begged.
Rupert Isaacson: Deaf ears.
Mary Wanless: Deaf ears.
And it kind of, I was fortunate.
A friend moved.
She and I used to play horses on two low brick walls that were the side
of her porch outside her front door.
And we made saddles and we made bridles and we rode these things.
She then moved away to the country and started riding and invited me to come
and stay and did I want to go riding?
And you bet I did.
So my parents capitulated on that one and went, Oh my
goodness, you better have a hat.
And by the time I got the hat, I'd kind of done the, the deal.
And the story always was, we can't afford it.
And then I had a cousin who was younger than me, who started having
lessons and clearly her family had less money than my family.
So that argument wasn't very sustainable any longer.
So I got to have writing
Rupert Isaacson: lessons.
Because as you know, now being a career in horses, like with me, you
know, that if a kid shows up, who's keen, most horsey people will go out
of their way to initiate them into the cult, you know, it's, we horsey
people are a bit evangelical that way.
So money's almost never a barrier.
And, but what I do see so often, and I can feel it in the heart of the little
girl that you were Is that crushing of the dream and giving somebody the
message, Well, your dreams aren't
worthy and are also not attainable.
And then you either go like you did, where you say, Well, they jolly well
are, I'm jolly well I am going to, Somehow, someway, and it feeds the fire.
Or, quite often people Don't they give up and I often think that's incredibly
sad one of the lines of work We do a lot with the more dressage side of what
we do outside of the equine assisted side is a lot of people who come To
riding late because they had had that dream as kids and had to wait 40 years
to make some money to finally Do it and that hurt little person is always
in there and I do think that that's one of the real Benefits of your work
because I think by clarifying and making accessible this complex business of
keeping a horse between you and the ground in some sort of sense of harmony
which is usually so steeped in esoteric.
badly communicated also punitive approaches you, you really do help.
I think people perhaps unwittingly, I think you do help people.
A lot of people heal those old wounds.
Can you tell us now, talk to us about ride with your mind.
Talk to us about, I want you to jump forward to kind of your mid career.
Then I want you to dial back again and talk about the evolution into that.
Mary Wanless: So in my mid career I'd written a couple of books.
I was writing more books.
I was teaching courses here and there.
I'd got myself to Wiltshire by that time and was able to use a big
competition centre there for my courses.
And after that got my own place, but there was Winchwood before that.
And really it was born of, people need to know this.
This needs to be known.
It needs to be known because it makes explicit what is otherwise
implicit, can't be communicated.
If a talented writer can't put words on what they do,
Rupert Isaacson: they cannot.
Mary Wanless: send that knowledge forward.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
They're not good teachers.
Usually they're
Mary Wanless: not good teachers and our traditional vocabulary is not helpful.
And I just kept learning on the job, you know, by riding and trying
to figure out my own body and what was going on and by teaching and by
really asking people's questions.
You know, what did I say that helped you the most?
How would you, if you had to teach this to somebody, what would you tell them?
What was the difference that made the difference?
And by that time I'd done a psychotherapy training, I'd got
involved with neuro linguistic programming, I had a training in that.
So I had a pretty good idea of how to communicate in ways that were viable.
And I just kept putting one foot in front of the other.
Loving teaching, loving writing, loving writing.
Writing less so, writing's always been the hardest of them in many ways.
And just walking a path of following the next step.
thing that really drew my attention.
You know, in the reading I was doing and what I was learning outside of horses that
then came back in to inform my coaching and my understanding of people and horses.
Rupert Isaacson: What were the biggest thing you mentioned
neuro linguistic programming, you mentioned psychotherapy there.
Talk us through the things that you learned outside of horses.
And then I'm going to go back through your classical education with horses, which is.
quite impressive and I think will be useful for people in terms
of types of mentor to look for.
Let's go first to the things outside of horses that informed you being able
to communicate and teach well this difficult esoteric thing called riding.
Mary Wanless: I think neurolinguistic programming was probably
the most important of them.
Rupert Isaacson: Why did you learn it?
Mary Wanless: Because I've been, I've been involved in psychotherapy
and decided to train as a therapist.
I didn't really think I would be a therapist.
I'm not good at sitting still.
But I came intrigued by that field and I found myself.
Why?
Rupert Isaacson: Because of your early grief?
Losing your parents?
Yes,
Mary Wanless: I mean, I needed, I, when I quit riding in despair, I went to London.
And I knew I needed to get involved in therapy.
So my brother had done that.
My best friend had done that.
Rupert Isaacson: You needed it yourself.
Sorry?
You needed it yourself.
Mary Wanless: I needed something to turn my life around.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: I was just too miserable too much at the time.
And got involved with this training.
And, and what would happen would be there'd be a group of us.
Sitting around this room and our therapist would do a demonstration with somebody
on something and then say pair up go do it And everybody else will walk
off thinking looking like they thought they knew how to do it And I was there
going I've no clue how she did that.
I haven't got the first clue am I the only stupid one here and anyway, I kept
doing the training but It was really through that kind of, I don't get this.
Am I in the stupid one?
And I literally picked up a book, one of the NLP books in changes,
book shopping Camden town one day.
opened it to a page and it said, if you want to learn how to do something, go
to somebody who struggled to learn it.
Don't go to somebody who's the renowned expert.
And I went, this book is for me, picked it up, read it,
got myself to an NLP seminar and completed the psychotherapy program.
But then started going to NLP.
Rupert Isaacson: For those listeners who don't know what NLP is, because
it used to be that everyone knew what it is, and it's, it's not
quite as well known anymore.
Can you give us the nuts and bolts, one, two, three, what is NLP?
Mary Wanless: So it's Richard Bandler and John Grinder, when they
started off this, Richard Bandler was trying to work out what made a few
renowned therapists so successful.
And he drew out patterns in how they used language, how they talked.
how they heard other people.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: And
came into understanding and being able to teach some of the nuts and bolts of
that kind of process of thinking, how we think, what thinking is made up of.
How to play with that kind of thing to change how you feel.
Rupert Isaacson: Change the inner language in your head.
Mary Wanless: Change the inner language in your head, yes.
Also change your body to a degree.
Now, what I love about the times we're in now is that embodiment is
really coming more into mainstream, maybe not mainstream, but it's less.
I'd say
Rupert Isaacson: it is, yeah.
It's on its way there.
Yeah.
Mary Wanless: Yeah.
Yeah.
Embodiment is a term that people have heard.
The, the whole thing I would say with my riding life has been
about becoming more embodied.
How through horses and what I do, I have become so much more embodied.
Rupert Isaacson: And let's assume we have a listener now going, what's
embodied mean when it's at home?
Yes.
Mary Wanless: So what it means is, what is
Rupert Isaacson: that?
Mary Wanless: Able to really sense your body to, if you feel something
emotionally to maybe able to track it back to, Oh, it's a heaviness in my heart.
Oh, it's a tightness in my gut.
Yeah.
To realize that emotions come from physical and biochemical states.
Candice Peart was a really important writer in this.
field molecules of emotion by Candice Pert was a really big book in this.
Rupert Isaacson: Candice who?
Mary Wanless: Pert P E R T.
Rupert Isaacson: Candice Pert molecules of emotion.
It was a
Mary Wanless: book of the possibly the 80s.
And Candice died rather young.
I mean, she was pretty crazy.
I actually met her.
She was pretty crazy and delightful.
But she did the science.
behind the neurochemicals and the lock and key mechanism in cells, that when those
neurochemicals get in, that there is that scientific background to what you would
then feel subjectively as an emotion.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: So NLP doesn't work as much with embodiment as I think people
deserve, and I think it adds something extra to the NLP, tinkering around with
language and the images inside your head, the things you say to yourself.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, most of us talk to ourselves appallingly.
I mean, we, we, we don't talk to ourselves like we talk to a friend.
Mary Wanless: No, we talk to ourselves like our parents
talked to us when we were three.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, we
Mary Wanless: Stop that, don't do that, you're stupid, what's wrong with you?
You know, it's sad but true, and I hope is less in more recent generations.
I don't know that it is, but it certainly was my growing up.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Mary Wanless: And I can remember being on a horse one day after I'd given up
riding, gone to London, started teaching again, and riding a horse for somebody.
And in my internal dialogue, I heard myself say, I'm going to get this
horse going well if it kills me.
And then I went, what?
If it kills me, is it that important?
You know, and, and there were real turning points in writing when I started to really
realise that there was this yatter on in the background that really wasn't helpful.
And learn how to switch that off.
And now I have very little internal dialogue, actually, whether
I'm writing or doing anything.
I don't talk to myself much at all.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
You said very glibly there, so I'm just going to make you back up.
You said, until I learned how to switch it off, now that is
a big thing to learn how to do.
I
Mary Wanless: can teach people how to switch it off.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so talk to us about that.
Mary Wanless: Okay.
How do you
Rupert Isaacson: switch off the negative little voice in your head
that's telling you shit all the time?
Mary Wanless: Alright, so there's lots of ways to do that.
One is, if you hear yourself, so you have to kind of tune into it and listen to it.
If you hear yourself saying something not helpful, to say to yourself,
next, and have the next thought be something that is helpful.
That works really well in writing, maybe it's more a writing strategy
than an everyday life strategy, but you go, God, I ought to be able to
do this by now, what's wrong with me, this is going so badly wrong.
Next, and the next thought could be something like breathe, you know, and
then I have a whole list of things that I might say to people that are little
bite size chunks of what makes it work.
So that would be one way.
Another way would be have the voice speak to you with an accent.
Or sing to you in a way that makes it less believable and serious.
So if it started to sing in opera, we think you're a really stupid woman,
what on earth is wrong with you?
How come after all these years?
Or it could be Mickey Mouse.
Rupert Isaacson: It's so funny you say that.
When I had to teach my son Rowan how to drive, he was 16.
And you've got to understand this was, he had been non verbal,
you know, severely autistic.
Okay, now doing amazingly well, but still, you know.
I'm going to teach you how to drive, you know, and I'm terrified.
He's terrified.
And I said to him, what, what can I do to make this non stressful?
He said, do it in a silly accent.
This came from him,
Mary Wanless: right?
Rupert Isaacson: And so we cooked up a variety of, I was kind of a redneck
teacher and I'd be like, well, we all going to come down there Junction Zayas
and I want you to put yo's, yo's as a Zayas on, on the road there and look
to the right Zayas and then the left Zayas and that's real good and then I
would switch to Henry VIII my lord and I was there in my liege and now we are
coming to indeed the traffic light and as you know, it's going to be a little
push in the clutch and and it was good.
It totally worked.
It like took the, it came from him.
I mean, and we'd always played around with this, obviously.
But it was genius.
So it's, yeah.
It's so interesting that you say that one and do it in a silly accent, because it
does, it just takes all the strings out.
It just, it takes
Mary Wanless: the edge off, you know, because so many people think that voice
in their head is God, you know, is, knows everything, and it really isn't.
Rupert Isaacson: And
Mary Wanless: to demote it with a, by singing it or with a silly accent is a
really great Now would you say that's
Rupert Isaacson: neuro linguistic, would you say that's NLP?
Mary Wanless: That's, that's an NLP.
Did I get that originally from NLP?
Possibly.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: Next didn't come from NLP.
That might have come from NLP.
Another one, I think this one did come from NLP, is if you just maybe close your
eyes and listen to something that voice might say, and notice where, whereabouts
inside your head does it come from?
Oh,
Rupert Isaacson: that's good.
Like, geographically, where in the hell?
Mary Wanless: Geographically, whereabouts.
So for me, if I did that, it would be fairly far back on the left.
Rupert Isaacson: Mmm,
back in the limbic system there, yeah.
Okay,
Mary Wanless: and then if you move that voice to the midline
Rupert Isaacson: Go on.
Mary Wanless: It's almost certainly going to change.
Rupert Isaacson: Just trying it now.
It does.
It does, it changes.
I, I, I, I said to myself, you silly bastard.
In my back left, and I moved it to the midline,
and the word bastard went away.
That's interesting.
Silly spade, which is good, I like silly.
Mary Wanless: Yeah, it changes it when you move it to the midline.
Rupert Isaacson: Interesting, now why the midline?
Mary Wanless: Well it's where both brain hemispheres maximally overlap, you know?
It's where we've got the porous colosum.
I can't tell you anything more neurologically than that.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
But
Mary Wanless: there is, it seems to work for everybody that the
voice either goes away or changes
Rupert Isaacson: and
Mary Wanless: you go to the midline.
And then I also have an exercise that involves blowing up
balloons in a rather unusual way.
It's on YouTube.
And if you blow up, if you blow up balloons in this way, you end up virtually
always with total quiet inside your head.
Rupert Isaacson: Can you be more specific?
Take us through this balloon thing.
Mary Wanless: When you blow up a balloon normally, you put it in your
mouth to breathe into it, and you take it out of your mouth, take the
next in breath, put it back in your mouth and breathe into the balloon.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
Mary Wanless: Okay?
In the version that we do, you have to keep the balloon in your
mouth the whole time, and you're not allowed to pinch it off.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
Mary Wanless: Okay?
And you're not allowed to stick your tongue in the hole.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: So you have to breathe in through your nose, and that
involves, you have to put your tongue, the tip of your tongue up against
the roof of your mouth to block off.
the back of your mouth and your throat,
and then you blow into the balloon.
So as you do that, the pressure in the balloon is getting bigger
and bigger with each in breath.
You need pretty big balloons.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: And you have to make sure the balloon does
not empty itself into you.
That means you have to have the same pressure in your insides as the balloon.
So when you breathe into the balloon, your internal pressure mustn't get less.
You've got to hold your ribs expanded.
Rupert Isaacson: You're doing this as an imaginary exercise.
Mary Wanless: This is a real exercise.
We do it with real balloons.
Rupert Isaacson: You do it with an actual balloon.
I was going to say because
Mary Wanless: it's
Rupert Isaacson: complex without one.
Okay, neurologically, what does this do?
Mary Wanless: That's a very good question, and I don't really know the answer to
it, but that level of internal pressure gets people quiet inside their head.
So in other words, blowing up balloons like that is a
shortcut to learning to meditate.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so it's circular pranic breathing, effectively,
without, but in a practical context.
Mary Wanless: In a practical context.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, that could, now how did you end up with that one?
Mary Wanless: It actually didn't originate with me, it originates with
a group called Postural Restoration.
The originator of that is a physical therapist, they're
based, I think, in Wisconsin.
And Postural Restoration, they came up with Blowing Up Balloons.
As a way of helping people increase the pressure in their insides and breathe more
and maybe into one side of their ribs.
So there's a whole load there that can really change the body.
Rupert Isaacson: Why did you find them?
I found
Mary Wanless: them through somebody who is a physical therapist, trained
in their method, very experienced in it, who came to my clinic with me.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Ah, right.
Mary Wanless: Actually, I found it before then.
Somebody came on a clinic with me who had somehow done it.
and showed it to me there.
And we were doing it for years.
And then I met somebody who was really active as a physical therapist and a
practitioner of postural restoration.
And for anyone who only in the US probably can get themselves access
to a physical therapist that does this, it is a super way to work with
your body to become more functional.
Rupert Isaacson: So for dealing with anxiety effectively.
Mary Wanless: That's not their main aim, but that could be a good byproduct.
Their main aim is to get people more symmetrical, breathing better,
spine more functional, out of pain, able to do what they want to do.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Postural, postural
Mary Wanless: restoration,
Rupert Isaacson: restoration.
Thank you.
I learned a lot doing these podcasts as you can imagine.
Mary Wanless: Yes.
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What I love is that you learn from your students.
For me, this is a massive thing.
I'm always learning as much, if not more, from anyone I'm working with.
And I think in our, particularly with writing, so often the
power dynamic is toxic.
Similarly, honestly, in therapy, it can be, you know, I'm God,
I'm imparting wisdom to you.
And it just isn't.
Optimal?
Yes.
Ah.
It
Mary Wanless: is, it is vital to the skills I have and what I know now, that
they were developed in concert with the people in writing arenas with me.
You know, the questions, the questioning, what did I say that helped the most?
How would you explain this?
What was the difference that made the difference?
So your
Rupert Isaacson: students are your mentors to some degree?
My
Mary Wanless: students are my mentors, yes, and you know, the, the cutting
out the feedback loop from the student.
Yes.
back to the teacher is lethal.
And it is writing's tradition.
You know, I stand in front of you and you do what I say.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, it comes out of the military.
So yes, it
Mary Wanless: comes out of the military.
And the most extreme modern day example I heard was of somebody, a
very well known coach in a different country who used to coach sitting
in the gallery with a headset that allowed him to talk to the student, but
didn't allow the student to talk back.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: that's
Mary Wanless: the ultimate isn't it in I was
Rupert Isaacson: attending a dressage seminar not so long ago with a very
very well known person and Hearing that person say things in that mock jokey
way that isn't jokey It's actually shaming but you're now not allowed to
come back and say hey, dude, that it's not nice because oh, no It's a joke.
That was disgusting that that transition was disgusting like wow You
know, how much you paying to be told that, you know, how useful is that?
As you say,
Mary Wanless: useful information being given about how to do it better.
Rupert Isaacson: Indeed.
You, in your,
Mary Wanless: actually, can I say something else too?
So whilst tradition cuts out the feedback loop from the student to
the teacher, it also largely cuts out the feedback loop from the horse.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, that's true too.
Mary Wanless: So, so a lot of what I do is amplify that feedback loop.
Like I'm, I talk to it sometimes, like if you wanted to become a wine taster,
you'd need labels on the bottles because you'd need to know this is a Chardonnay.
This is a Riesling.
This is this country.
This is America.
And this is New Zealand.
This is 2000 and whatever.
Yeah.
Somebody's got to put labels on the bottles.
Rupert Isaacson: It's
Mary Wanless: kind of like that with what the rider's feeling there on the horse.
This isn't worth going for.
This is not a great feeling.
Do a bit more of that.
You're getting closer.
That's it.
Go for that.
Okay.
Now you just hit it.
That's what you want.
So we're playing hotter, colder on going for a feeling and really trying
to get the rider getting to know what to do through the horse's feedback.
Rupert Isaacson: Right,
Mary Wanless: but if you're just a rider going, okay, my horse must do this.
He needs to learn this I need to show him how to this come on horse.
You're not doing it.
Rupert Isaacson: You're dominant.
So there's no
Mary Wanless: feedback.
Rupert Isaacson: No, absolutely
Mary Wanless: Take away either of those feedback loops and you have a very
unhelpful Potentially cruel system
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely cruel to everybody and of course with the military
cruelty is built in because you actually need it if you're training people to
go and be desensitized to dying in cavalry charges screaming at them and
making them fall off, you could argue.
Is useful, but hopefully that's not what we're trying to do anymore, but it's what
we've inherited you mentioned in what you didn't mention I read in your bio.
This also intrigued me and I want to go into your equestrian mentors in a
minute and I also want to go back to this profound despair that we Almost hit on
and then went away from but in your bio talking about other methodologies that
have helped you I noticed Feldenkrais was in there and it's interesting how often
this comes up I also like it because when chat GPT tries to do something
with it for our subtitling It always comes back with failed in Christ, which
Mary Wanless: That's
Rupert Isaacson: something
Mary Wanless: rather
Rupert Isaacson: You know you Like me know the great Linda Tellington Jones
and for those listeners who don't know her tune into our podcasts with her
She has a lot of amazing insights.
She also Learned and took a lot from Feldenkrais talk to us a little bit
about that because a lot of people don't know about Feldenkrais and how
that's actually influence so many modalities that a lot of people use in,
inside the equestrian world and out.
How was it for you?
How did you discover it and what's it given
Mary Wanless: you?
I discovered the Feldenkrais when I went to America.
So, I gave up, I went to London and a year later My very good friend from
university, we had danced a lot together.
She said, why don't you come with me?
I want to do the San Francisco dancers workshop, which we did for three months.
And it's not exactly dance therapy, but it's, it's a lot about
unstructured dance, using dance to.
Dance your life story, you know, whatever it may be.
And we had a Feldenkrais teacher on the staff there.
So we were doing a Feldenkrais awareness through movement
lessons a couple of times a week.
And, you know, I think a lot of my problems as a rider stemmed from just so
much fight or flight energy being covered over by the give up collapse energy.
You know, I was not body aware.
I was not very functional.
And this was a very good inroad into body work.
And I've got friends who are Feldenkrais teachers.
One of my friends described it, I think, rather well as almost like, you'll
take a movement and tinker with it.
You know, much as you might tinker with something if you can't get a
key to turn on a lock, just little movements that tinker with it.
And in the tinkering with it, you will find other ways
than your habitual pattern.
And Feldenkrais is based a lot on getting people doing non
habitual movement and therefore increasing your movement vocabulary.
And once you start doing stuff in performance and non stylized
dance, you start to realize that your movement vocabulary is
actually really quite limited.
You know, 30 seconds is a long time in dance.
It really is.
So
getting to be able to do things in different ways.
I, there's a lovely quote in a book I don't know if it's still in print,
Denise McGluggage, The Scented Skier, one of my favorite quotes,
she talks about breaking up clods of habitual movement, like a gardener
breaks up clods of earth with a hoe.
That's what Feldenkrais does, it breaks up clods of habitual movement.
And you know, we've all got our habit patterns and.
Sometimes I think of it like, the, that neurological
connection would be like buses.
Buses only go on certain routes, you know?
The 128 takes a certain route and that's all it ever does.
Backwards and forwards on that route.
But Feldenkrais would be like, you've got taxis, you've got many more
ways, many more minute adjustments.
Yeah.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
And as a
Mary Wanless: rider, you, you want really fine body control of your pelvic area.
You know, that is so badly represented in the brain compared to your hands.
No wonder we want to do everything with our hands.
Rupert Isaacson: There's so
Mary Wanless: much neurology between your hands and your brain
and so little neurology between your pelvis and your brain.
And so learning to develop that neurology and that awareness.
is a big part of it.
So I met Feldenkrais in America, came back, discovered there were
two Feldenkrais lessons in, two Feldenkrais teachers in London.
And this was then in the early eighties and started having lessons.
And I've done a lot of different body work and Feldenkrais has
been one of the most helpful.
They do one on one sessions, but the class sessions, the awareness through movement
sessions, make it affordable for anybody.
There are lots of.
lessons on the internet, some pay for some free put out by the Throne Christ Guild.
So it's something anybody can access.
And it's really helpful.
Rupert Isaacson: One of the things I love about it is that it really
emphasises also subtle movement that
Mary Wanless: you can
Rupert Isaacson: find.
So much variation in really, really small variations, you know, and then
what those do neurologically Now with the work that we've done we sort
of have to know this so it helps to create what's called BDNF Which is a
brain derived neurotrophic factor the protein in the brain that becomes a stem
cell that then becomes a neuron which fires when you move and problem solve
Which is why we have optimal cognitive function when we have a novel movement.
Because we're hunter gatherers and that's what it requires to be on high
alert when you're gathering wild foods or hunting wild animals because they're
dangerous activities, variety of reasons.
And one needs really sharp focus.
And of course, as you say, you know, modern life, sedentary life, but also
just modern life, repetitive life, we tend to get into these repetitive forms
of movement because actually they're functional in terms of earning money
and that sort of thing because we have a job and we move in this way for this
job and we walk to the job to go that way or we travel to the job in this
way and in school we're told to move in this way or that and then we're robbed.
Yeah, we become very
Mary Wanless: limited in our movements and our body perception.
Rupert Isaacson: Right, and we don't play anymore.
So dance, of course, is a form of play.
And this intrigues me because if you had a shaming mum who's not a
barrel of laughs Christian scientist, where did dance come into this?
Mary Wanless: There was a ballet school in Ickenham where I grew up.
Lovely ballet teacher.
My ballet teacher was one of the lovely adults of my childhood.
And so I think most little girls in, in Econome went to that ballet school.
Rupert Isaacson: But if dance, if dance wasn't, you know, a feature of
Christian science and partying, why were you allowed to go to a dance school?
Mary Wanless: That's a good question.
I think ballet is traditional enough and classical enough.
that it passed muster and disciplined enough that it passed muster.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Okay.
There was enough suffering involved that it was There was enough
Mary Wanless: suffering involved, I think, yes.
Only it turned out that it was a teacher where there was very
little suffering involved.
But I think, I think it could have been that there was enough suffering
involved that made the grade.
Rupert Isaacson: It's so interesting that this whole thing that things are only Only
worth doing if there's suffering involved.
And of course, that's the equestrian tradition we've inherited.
Mary Wanless: Indeed, yes, if my mother had known how much suffering
was going to be involved in my writing, she might have been all for it.
She'd
Rupert Isaacson: have subsidized it completely.
That's hilarious.
Let's go back to this.
This despair that made you give up riding.
Okay, talk us through that process, that period, because I think, I think
many of us have been through that.
And of course this could be in any walk of life.
Mary Wanless: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: How did it hit you with the thing that you
love the most in life, and why?
Mary Wanless: So I, you know, after university and, and That year where
I didn't do the post grad teacher training, I went full time into horses
and ran a yard and struggled with my intermediate instructor's exam.
I failed that four times before I passed it.
At that time, you had to pass every module on the same day, which I then changed.
What was the block?
Rupert Isaacson: What was the thing?
Was there something you failed at each time?
Mary Wanless: I think first of all, I failed the flatwork and
the jumping, and then I failed the jumping, and then I failed the
flatwork, and then I passed all of it.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: And I wanted to take my eye, you know, so I was sort of ambitious,
like I wanted to get these exams and I knew I wasn't a talented writer.
And I ended up working for somebody nobody's ever heard of, but he was one
of the few continentally trained dressage writers in the UK in the mid 1970s.
His name was Dan Aharoni.
He was originally Israeli.
And
Rupert Isaacson: was that just by fluke that you ended up working for him?
Mary Wanless: He advertised, I think, in Horse and Hound.
I'd been being a working student for Mrs.
Sturrock, who was one of the fellows of the British Horse Society
and renowned for being good at getting people through their exams.
I'd been working for her.
I'd been eventing in that job and previously.
And when this job came up, I thought, Oh, maybe I should apply to that.
And Mrs.
Sturrock said, This guy's really good news.
Go do it.
So I got that job.
And it was kind of funny because in the interview, I rode Dan's horse and
at one point I did a half hold and I knew it was it, yeah, did that on that
horse, complete fluke, quite possibly got the job on the back of that, I
don't know, didn't do another one in the whole two years I was there.
It was the second one I'd ever done.
I did one when I was a student when we, we went.
before a competition, a couple of us, and had a lesson at Fulmer Riding
School, which was owned by Robert Hall, who'd been to the Spanish school,
and going round a corner on the right rein at the end of the short side on a
grey horse called Balego, it happened.
And I knew that was it.
Yeah.
Didn't happen again until that job interview, which was
probably about four years later.
Didn't happen again for, I can't tell you how long until I got where
I could kind of knock those out.
I can knock those out now, but.
and have been for a large number of years.
But anyway, so I got that job and it was clear to me immediately that he
had a level of skill I had not seen.
And he taught me a lot on the lunge.
And I had what should have been a brilliant learning opportunity.
You know, he would lunge me This doesn't sound like a road to despair
Rupert Isaacson: here.
Mary Wanless: Sorry?
Rupert Isaacson: This does not sound like a road to despair.
Mary Wanless: No, it wasn't despair at that point.
But during that time, it kind of was that he said the same things.
And guess what?
He said them louder.
In response to which I did the same things, and guess what?
I did them harder.
And so we kind of were like ships that passed in the night.
You know, so it was a double whammy.
He showed me what a really good rider could do, but he couldn't teach me to do
Rupert Isaacson: couldn't communicate it.
Yeah.
Mary Wanless: So I learned a lot.
Rupert Isaacson: So you learned what you couldn't do, basically.
I learned
Mary Wanless: what I couldn't do.
And a lot of horses came into our yard, you know, and I saw these ugly
ducklings get transformed into swans.
And basically, I couldn't do it.
Now, while I was there, I did pass my I.
Fortunately, that was a lot less traumatic than the intermediate.
So, I did pass that while I was there.
I was very scared I would fail the jumping because I wasn't
really jumping at that point.
I gave up inventing to sit at the feet of the great master.
And it was two years into that where it became really clear
that he was losing faith in me.
He was teaching me less.
I was losing faith in myself and I actually went, I had two weeks off
and I went to Greece on a holiday for young singles and while I was there,
I thought, I have to stop doing this.
I can't do this any longer.
And it was me going, this is the end of my dream.
And I did sell my horse and I quit and I went to live in London.
Rupert Isaacson: And how long did that period of despair last?
Mary Wanless: So I worked for that guy for two years.
Rupert Isaacson: But then the period after that, you've sold the horse, you're
in London, you don't think I sold the
Mary Wanless: horse, I was in London, I got involved in
psychotherapy pretty quickly.
The trips to San Francisco and the dancers workshop.
That was also really important.
It showed me that I, I, that there was a really serious approach to the body.
Rupert Isaacson: Learning
Mary Wanless: about the body.
When I was in America, I read, I think the first of Timothy Galway's
books, The Inner Game of Tennis.
And I started reading some of the early books on visualisation and healing.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Mary Wanless: Right?
So those books I found in the US possibly before I would have found them in the UK.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
Especially if you're in Northern California.
Yeah.
Mary Wanless: Yes.
And by then I'd, I got back into writing again, I'd gone to London, I didn't
write or teach for about six months, and then I got talked into it, and I
started with a really blank slate of a beginner's mind, and went to the
dancer's workshop, discovered a few things just in the early days of starting
again that were really biomechanics.
It's absolutely crucial that I hadn't understood or been doing.
And while I was in America, I went, okay, I'm not just an eccentric writing teacher.
There's really something in this.
And at some point I'm going to write a book.
Rupert Isaacson: Why at that stage, did you feel ready to, or did you
feel the book bubbling inside you?
Because I'm sure at that stage, you were still with a lot of questions and
Mary Wanless: I had lots of questions, but essentially When I
started riding again after I'd given up, I discovered core strength.
Now I called it bearing down and still do, but I discovered how to switch on my core.
And I discovered that on a horse I was riding for somebody that jogged a lot.
And most of the time it would jog and I would pull on the reins and it would
pull on the reins and it kept jogging.
And then every now and again I could stop it jogging but
I didn't know what I'd done.
And when it happened it was, you know, it was like that.
It was in a moment.
Rupert Isaacson: And if you were to put that into a few short words now, what
did you do that stopped it jogging?
Mary Wanless: I caught up to the balance point rather than being behind it.
Essentially being the water skier to the horse's motorboat.
Rupert Isaacson: I
Mary Wanless: caught up to the balance point and I found how to activate my core.
Rupert Isaacson: How did you activate your core?
Mary Wanless: Well the simple way to answer that is to say if you clear your
throat and just go and put your hands on your abdominals while you do it,
you will be feeling and doing what good riders do when they use their core.
Rupert Isaacson: And one of the things that does is increase the
Mary Wanless: pressure in your insides, which is why the balloon
blowing exercise is so useful.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: And that was just one piece, but it's the pivotal piece.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
You're not
Mary Wanless: doing that, and you're riding and pulling on the reins, and
most people are sucking their stomach in at that point, and you're going
to be the victim of what happens.
You will not be able to be proactive.
You will always be reactive.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
It's
Mary Wanless: very interesting.
So I've turned it round.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So, yeah, it, because core is such a, particularly in riding,
it's such a esoteric, you know, people throw that word out there.
Mary Wanless: They do.
Rupert Isaacson: Without saying what it is.
Mary Wanless: Yes, we teach people to do it.
Rupert Isaacson: In your Okay, so listeners, Mary Wondless is going
to tell you what is your core.
What is your core?
What is the rider's core, Mary?
Mary Wanless: Alright, well there are two versions of that.
You've got the Pilates version of the core, which is the layers
of muscle around your torso, from your spine round to your front.
Especially the deep layers of muscle.
Now I think of the core a little differently, but I wouldn't have
thought of it in the way I think of it now, when I learned how to do that.
So now I would think of the core, like if you cut an apple in half from the
end with the stalk to the end with the little thing on it, what you see
is a line and then it bulges out.
And then the line continues to the other end of the anvil.
Rupert Isaacson: So
Mary Wanless: my version of the core now would be it starts under your feet, under
your instep, goes through deep muscles of your calf, the inside muscles of your
thigh, your pelvic floor, through your organs, up to the, the psoas muscles.
and also the slings and bags and sacks that contain your organs.
Psoas muscles take you to diaphragm and QL and up through the trachea
and your lungs and so on into your neck, your throat and your tongue.
Your
Rupert Isaacson: tongue, interesting.
Mary Wanless: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: Does jaw, jaw come into this as well?
Mary Wanless: Not really.
Okay.
No, not TMJ, but tongue.
And, and also to agree chin and roof of your mouth.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
So yeah, up through the palate.
Mary Wanless: So, so that would be Tom Myers definition of the core.
And he's a guy who's written a book called Anatomy Trains, which is about to
come out in its fourth edition, I think.
And what Tom has done for understandings of how muscle and connective
tissue work in chains is fabulous.
Rupert Isaacson: Tom who?
Mary Wanless: Myers.
M Y E R
Rupert Isaacson: S.
M Y E R S.
Yes,
Mary Wanless: Tom Myers.
Rupert Isaacson: Tom Myers.
So what you've described really is the inside of a taurine structure, right?
You know, we're all taurine structures, meaning we've got, you know, a hole
here, we've got a hole at the other end, and there's something in between, and
basically we get through life by passing one to the other and That's what we do.
But that's a complex, simple concept, complex process.
As you say, many chains of muscles.
Mary Wanless: But it is possible to learn to really feel those chains of muscles.
How does it come on in a really helpful way?
But when I first stopped that horse jogging, it was just much more
about my abdominals and my internal pressure within the abdominal cavity.
Rupert Isaacson: What did you do within that abdominal cavity
that stopped the jogging?
Mary Wanless: Or as if I had done that.
I didn't do that, but I just hit on being on the right balance point
with enough internal pressure and was able to get my seat bones, as it
were, to not be moved by the horse.
But to take on the slower movements of walk and therefore
walk the horse underneath me.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
That process
is of course dependent on a certain amount of
rider experience.
You've got to feel pretty comfortable up there.
It's got, it's dependent on a certain amount of physical fitness.
Not crazy, but a certain amount and strength.
And it's also dependent on, as you say, a certain amount of physical
cognition, given that most of us are not brought up to be that embodied, as
you say, that to be that in awareness of, of our bodies, those three things.
Let's say you now take a, what we call in Germany, a Wieder Einsteiger,
so a, you know, a late rider, late comer to rider, or someone who rode
in youth and then took a break and is coming back, which is often.
Is now perhaps out of touch with their body.
Maybe they're not in great shape.
They're certainly nervous up there.
Worried about falling.
And are going to be at the mercy of the horse's movement.
What would be the one, two, three over a certain period of time where
you could bring them to that kind of awareness where they could access
that call in that ahem ahem way and actually make it work for them?
Mary Wanless: If you're talking about somebody who has some riding
experience, they might not be very fit.
They may not have ridden for a few years.
I would say in lesson one, they will pretty certainly
get a glimpse of this working.
They won't be strong in it.
They won't be able to hold it.
Learning to do that and breathe at the same time is the critical thing.
And it's part of what balloon bleeding teaches as well as that quiet mind.
And so I would say in, in lesson one, people start to get an inkling of this.
If you're talking a total beginner, we would still probably early on in
lesson one, introduce the concept.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so at least intellectually they know it exists.
Mary Wanless: Yeah.
Yes.
And working in walk and walk halts is where people begin to get it.
Right.
And if they've got a difficult horse that really has spent its life pulling
on the rein and going which encourages the rider to pull back and lean
back and press in their feet and do all the wrong things, then it's not
going to be as smooth and easy as if you've got a horse that will stop.
If you do the right thing.
I mean, all horses will stop if you do the right thing, but you may
need to be righter than right on a horse that where you've got to go.
Sorry, honey, we're retraining how you think about the bit.
I know you thought it was for leaning on, but it's for something different.
Yeah.
So you don't really want to be doing your first lessons with somebody
in that situation, but sometimes that's the horse they arrive on.
And that's what you're doing.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, no, I got it.
I mean, that's why I'm a great believer in putting people on good
school master horses and creating those horses for your students.
If, if you can.
One of the, one of the other things I know about your methods, which I really
believe in, is giving people stuff to do when they're not on the horse.
Absolutely.
I do half my teaching, I'd say, is not with a pony.
It's just with the monkey.
And if you're getting certain muscle memories, whether it's for in hand
work or whether it's for ridden work, so that when you're presented with
the pony, either at your side or underneath your butt, you can access.
These muscle memories talk to us about what are your main go tos with this?
Mary Wanless: Gosh with dismounted work.
Well, we there's lots of dismounted.
Well, I mean dismounted
Rupert Isaacson: without a horse
Mary Wanless: Without a horse.
Rupert Isaacson: Non pony involvement.
Mary Wanless: So the, the real origin of this was, I believe
it was 1982, I'd arrived in London it was a horrible winter.
Everywhere was frozen.
I got good at giving lessons in walk on frozen arenas.
My ability to pay my rent was on the line.
Right.
And after that winter I thought I need something up my sleeve
in case this happens again.
And I invented the idea that one group of clients in South London,
somebody had a big house, we'd use her big house, her sitting room.
Group of clients in North London, somebody else had a big house.
And then we do a series of winter workshops on a
Tuesday evening or whatever.
Rupert Isaacson: The arena is the living room, right?
Mary Wanless: Yeah.
And so I set that up and people bought it and it was all great.
And then I thought, shit, what am I going to do?
So I had to come up with some exercises and I
one of them was, you know, just sitting in chairs and bearing down and.
We didn't have balloon breathing there, but did a whole load with breathing
and body awareness and noticing.
And I had some sort of martial arts ish exercises and some Feldenkrais exercises,
and I taught mental rehearsal as well.
And I put together these workshops.
And that was the beginning of the dismounted element of this work.
It came out of adversity, as so much does.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Mary Wanless: And I've just kept added to dismounted exercises.
There's so much you can do driving your car, you know, sitting
on two seat bones, pushing.
If anybody pulls on the steering wheel driving their car, I will guarantee
you they're going to be someone that pulls on the reins, you know,
push on the steering wheel, learn to bear down, bear down and breathe.
Notice what's happening in your mid back.
You know, if you're a woman, it's probably push your mid back
back into the seat of the chair.
Most women are hollow backed.
Not everyone, but most.
And there's so much you can practice off horse that feeds into on horse.
And you can also do exercises that are ahead of where you are in your riding
to prepare you for where you're going.
Rupert Isaacson: I so agree.
I so agree.
Mary Wanless: It's so valuable.
Rupert Isaacson: It's fun.
It's, it's, it's Often I think the key between success and failure for riders,
because as soon as you add the pony, it gets complicated for the monkey.
Mary Wanless: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: Cap if we can simplify things down, take away that pressure, take
away that fear, take away the judgment, take away the lot, and just say, this is
just having a bit of fun with this thing.
But so few, so few writing instructors think this way.
Mary Wanless: Yes, but they also wouldn't know what exercises to break it down into.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Mary Wanless: But the value of it is enormous.
Rupert Isaacson: I, I so agree.
I couldn't agree more.
Okay, you sold me.
I'm coming on your next course.
All right.
So let's talk about mentors.
So when I was having to go down my dressage path and my, it was because
of autism and because of finding that working collection with a child.
In front of me or not, that the collection was the key and then what
I found out from neuroscientists are the collection rocks your hips.
In this particular way, if it's soft, that's oxytocin, that's what's calming
down the nervous system, that's what's opening up the communication.
Because oxytocin's not just a feel good hormone.
It's Hormone of Communication and, oh gosh, okay, so now I need to learn
more about this collection thing.
Not a dressage rider coming in in my 40s, you know, oh shit,
I've got to learn this thing.
Going and talking to all the dressage people say, Oh, well, it takes 500
years to learn this and it's not really possible anyway and someone like you
probably can't wear it and it's really just for a higher priesthood, am I?
It's got to be possible.
What
Mary Wanless: country were you in at that point?
Rupert Isaacson: Many I've always been but between the UK and America mostly.
And so then of course I tried dressage lessons and ran into the same wall.
Everyone runs into of, you know, utter confusion on and realizing that the
horses actually didn't know how to do it and that they were putting me on.
So it was all a moot point anyway.
And then I, then I started asking, I asked a few Professionals who I really trusted.
What would you do in my shoes?
And interestingly, I got the same answer from three of
them, which is go to Portugal.
And I said, why there?
And they said, because it's the last place left where they still produce the
dressage horse with the original purpose.
And I said, well, what's that?
And they said, war.
And I said, but they're not at war with anyone.
They said, no Rupert, it's the bullfight.
Portuguese bullfight almost entirely on horseback.
You're not trying to kill the bull, you're dancing around it.
If there's any hesitation between horse and rider, they're dead in 10 seconds.
So they train all their riders on schoolmaster horses from day one.
And they train the horses to know everything on the ground
before they put the rider on.
I'm like, that makes perfect sense to me.
So I went down there, found it was true.
And then, of course, being on these schoolmaster horses, I kept hearing
this name, Valencia, Valencia, Valencia.
And through that family, of course, Nuno Olivera, who created that family,
and then since then, through all the you know, journey that I've had to do
with this, the other great mentors of that age coming up, such as Egon von
Neindorf, and so on and so on, and you have had a really similar trajectory,
which I find massively interesting.
And because you were, I think,
Half a generation back or so, you got to ride with some of the
people that produced my mentors.
You know, who produced Luis Valenza, Von Neindorf, who produced a lot
of the best riders here in Germany.
Can you talk to us about how you found them?
Because back then, there wasn't an internet.
And, Dressage in the UK, I remember growing up in the Humpfield in
Leicestershire, people mistrusted anything that was European.
The hangover from World War II was still very strong.
We don't like what they do over there, you know.
There was kind of a bit of that attitude.
So to find your way into that world was not easy back then.
How did you do that?
That's a great question.
Yeah, talk us through it.
Mary Wanless: So, Dan, my teacher who drove me to giving
up, he had ridden with Nuno
Rupert Isaacson: Oliveira,
Mary Wanless: and then had what was going to be his horse for the
Olympics, who subsequently went lame, with Egon von Leindorff.
So I knew those names, and Were you
Rupert Isaacson: aware of those names before you went to work for Dan?
Or did he introduce No, I
Mary Wanless: don't think so.
I might have been aware of Nuno.
I wasn't aware of Egon von Leindorff, but I was aware of Nuno Oliveira.
I think, I don't know when his first book came into English.
That would be an interesting one to know, but I think it was
probably the 70s, early 70s.
Rupert Isaacson: I would say the early 70s probably, yeah, but even
then only a fraction of the English writing public would have read them.
Yeah,
Mary Wanless: well I had, so there was J.
A.
Allen, the bookshop in London.
I remember J.
A.
Allen.
I used to hang out in there.
Rupert Isaacson: Me too.
Mary Wanless: And I think I probably found my first New Law of Error book in there.
Rupert Isaacson: Ah, that would make sense.
Mary Wanless: I also found another really important book by somebody Polish,
I think, that was older than that.
That gave me some really good clues.
I can't remember the name of the guy.
Not Podjasky.
Sorry?
Rupert Isaacson: Not Podjasky at the,
Mary Wanless: No, no, no,
Rupert Isaacson: no.
Mary Wanless: So, I'd given up.
I'd gone to London.
I was coaching again.
I'd done the San Francisco Dancers Workshop.
You know, I was trying to get my head around What writing really was and
somehow I got an address for Nuna Olivera.
I don't know how I got the address, who I got it through,
Rupert Isaacson: but
Mary Wanless: somehow I did and I wrote and I said, I would like to come and
his daughter, I believe, worked as his secretary and spoke good enough
English and wrote good enough English.
So I had a booking, you know, I made a booking and went for two weeks.
Rupert Isaacson: That must have been pretty life changing.
Mary Wanless: Sorry?
Rupert Isaacson: That must have been pretty life changing.
Mary Wanless: It was it was a funny journey.
It didn't go brilliantly well.
On the day one, I rode the horse at the back of the ride, and
it really shook its head a lot.
And I thought this, it was, maybe it was a head shaker, you know,
it was a bit pathological and I kind of dealt okay with that.
And Nuno asked about my background and I talked about Dan and he remembered Dan.
Then the next day I rode the horse that was back but one of the ride.
And as we walked up the hill to the riding arena, it was clear to me that
this horse was very old and pretty cronky.
And my spirits just went, Oh, I've graduated on to.
The really old decrepit one.
And I didn't do such a great job on that horse.
And at that point I was really hopeless at the lateral work, which was one
reason why I wanted to go there.
Cause I knew it would be lateral work, lateral work and natural
work in walk and trot and,
and after that, I didn't do terribly well, and then we all got invited along with,
you know, I guess to go to the school in.
Is it Ericeira?
Where there's a Portuguese, maybe military school still.
Rupert Isaacson: In Mafra.
Mary Wanless: Mafra.
It was in Mafra.
We all got to go to Mafra.
And the horse I rode, we all rode.
And then I was in my familiar territory on some five year old A&
R the horse, you know, and everybody said to me, Oh, you got the nice one.
You got the And I just kind of went, don't think that's true.
But I knew what to do up here.
And so that went really well.
But the rest of the time I was struggling and I didn't feel I got
told anything that was very helpful.
And actually got more help from
Rupert Isaacson: Joao,
Mary Wanless: I would say I got more help from Joao Nuno's son
than I did from Nuno himself.
But somewhere there, did I hear the name LuÃ­s Valencia?
I'm not sure.
But next time I went to Portugal, I'd found out the right address for
Luis and I wrote and I was able to make a booking and I went there.
And over the next few years, I probably spent over three months in Portugal.
Went quite a number of times.
Yeah.
Luis was delightful.
Rupert Isaacson: Yes, he is.
Yeah.
Mary Wanless: And as long as you could uncode four languages.
So I think one of the frequently, I remember the sentence shortened
the escudos and Wechslen are gauche.
Yes.
Escudos being Portuguese, Wechslen being German and gauche being French.
Yes.
You
Rupert Isaacson: know, shortened
Mary Wanless: the being English.
Rupert Isaacson: Yes.
If you're a horse nerd, and if you're on this podcast, I'm guessing you are, then
you've probably also always wondered a little bit about the old master system.
of dressage training.
If you go and check out our Helios Harmony program, we outline there step by step
exactly how to train your horse from the ground to become the dressage horse
of your dreams in a way that absolutely serves the physical, mental and emotional
well being of the horse and the rider.
Intrigued?
Like to know more?
Go to our website, Helios Harmony.
Check out the free introduction course.
Take it from there.
Mary Wanless: So if you could decode four languages.
You could kind of get some help and, and we did work on the
ground too, which was great.
And, and I felt like I got to ride some nice horses, some interesting horses.
I remember one day, I think they were desperate for horses and I got to ride
the horse that was the Capriol horse.
And I knew this thing hadn't been out of its stable for quite a few days.
So I'm thinking, okay, here we go.
Back to the eventing days.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
Yep.
Mary Wanless: And it grabbed the right rein like there's no tomorrow.
And I managed, during the course of the thing, to kind of undo
that and get it a lot straighter.
And I can remember all the young guys there going, Merida de Capriola!
Merida de Capriola!
I thought, oh God, this is good, isn't it?
And then we got to Piaf.
And we got to Piaf, and the horse stood up on its back legs, and I did what
English people did, which was lean forward and put my hands round its neck.
And it came back down again, and Louis looked me in the eye and said,
I think we know Capriole today.
Rupert Isaacson: He's a sweet man.
Mary Wanless: He's a very sweet man.
So I felt like I was kind of working things out, getting to learn the work
on the ground, working things out from the horses, getting a few helpful hints.
And that's about as good as it ever got.
Yeah.
With Egon von Neindorf when I went there, I spoke no German, he spoke
no English, but he was charming.
I tried to collect Jawohl Frau Mary.
That was my, that was when I realized what I had to do was
try and collect Yavor Fraumeri.
My verse, my, there were maybe four of us in the arena at a time.
And my worst moment was when he told everybody to halt and I didn't understand
and I'm riding a stallion and it sort of marches its way into sticking its
nose up the bum of the horse in front.
Always a good bummer.
That was my worst moment there.
But it was lovely to ride the horses.
There were some really nice horses that I learned a lot from there.
So I think it was the situation of riding some nicer horses
in a situation where things go slowly enough that you can work things out,
learning to do the work on the ground
and just enjoying Portugal.
I still love Portugal.
Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: absolutely.
Me, too.
It's I stood in that arena with Luis.
Writing everything down and filming everything and asking everything I could
think of to ask and I realized oh my gosh It's a complete system and What you one
needed to do was learn the system by which the horse was built not the riding Because
then the riding would come as a result of having built this horse It was to some
degree almost independent of the rider.
Oh my gosh, that's gold and for us that was the game changer, you know with
with horse by method and so on but I've seen so many riders, unfortunately,
hit the glass ceiling, not because they can't get through it, but because
the only set of tools is the riding.
And it's just not enough, you know, if one wants to get through that thing into
Narnia there's these other tools as well.
And so you going and looking at how these guys were building these
horses even if in certain cases you maybe came away with less, i.
e.
with Nuno, or with more, perhaps by the time you got to Von Neindorf too, you had
some inkling of how this old 18th century system was sort of put together because
you'd been seeing it and seeing it and seeing it, and then being one of the first
people to bring this kind of systematic approach back to the uk, I think has, I
think a lot of UK writers owe you a debt for bringing that systematized way of
doing things rather than get on and kick.
Yes.
Which is what we all grow.
You've
Mary Wanless: gotta go beyond, get on and kick.
You've gotta go
Rupert Isaacson: beyond get on, and you gotta go beyond kick and pull.
Yes.
And,
You've also got to see that your instruct that your mentor can actually produce
these horses and can put you on them You know when I whenever I'm asked to
give it is advice to someone if they are looking for dressage Instructors say
there's actually there's two questions.
You always need to ask one is how did you teach your horse?
Piaf and it's got to be an answer that you can kind of get Not some esoteric wall of
words, but I put the leg, hind leg here and then I put the hind leg here and then
I straighten him and it happens like that.
And can, the second part of the question is the most important.
Can I ride him?
And if the answer is no, well, then that person has not produced
a universal horse that is happy to show you for 15 minutes what to do.
I think the answer can
Mary Wanless: be no, until I've seen you.
Rupert Isaacson: Hmm.
Mary Wanless: Or something else.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah,
Mary Wanless: because there are certainly people and people doing stuff.
I wouldn't want to subject my horse to
Rupert Isaacson: well No, but but for example with us We've got say here in
Germany seven schoolmaster horses pretty much anybody could come but I know the
tolerance level of each horse and So if we're showing people say, okay, PF And
that would be on day one so that you can feel in your body just what it is
how long are you doing that for you're doing that for a few minutes and You
are choreographing it and you're right there at the shoulder and you help
everything You don't just sort of stand in the center there and say ride go
round and rounder And no, I would never do that to my horse and my horse would
put up its middle finger at me if I did.
But it doesn't have to be done that way, and so it's
basically assisted in handwork.
That assisted in handwork creates a sort of generosity in the horse.
And of course we need that from the horse when we're working with our Clientele
with our autistic kids and so on they're going to sit on that same horse in Piaf
and Passage And that horse is going to be very happy to give that up because
for them It's an easy thing to do
Mary Wanless: and I mean that's really impressive And I think
there'd be hardly anywhere in the world where that happens, you know
Maybe that is a lot of your legacy.
I mean Nuno Trained everything every horse in Nuno school have
been trained to Grand Prix by him.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm
Mary Wanless: Then he put the horse in the school and he never ever rode it again.
So the inevitable death downhill happened.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And then it's always the rider's fault.
Mary Wanless: And then you've got the horses at the front of the
ride, which are the better horses and the horses at the back of the
ride that are really losing it.
And
Rupert Isaacson: yeah, no, sadly, that's the same old punitive
thing just with more education.
And, you know, a lot of people I know who knew, knew, know,
you know, said what he was.
You know, a difficult character, a genius, brilliant, blah, blah, blah.
But one of the things I love about Luis is that he never does that.
Mary Wanless: No, he is.
He is a generous and delightful soul.
There's no two ways about that.
Rupert Isaacson: And he'll set you up for success.
The reason we do the thing with, OK, day one, put you on Piaf
is very simple outside of the therapeutic model, which is, of
course, we're doing it for oxytocin.
But on the.
One of the first pages of La GuÃ©rinnaise.
You know, Cavalerie, which is supposedly what we're all trying to do.
And on, I think, page three of Gustave Steinbrecht, they say, Take your
beginner rider, and on the first day, put them on your best horse, in Piaf.
So that they can feel in their body how it should feel.
And then little by little over the coming years, you will bring them
up to the level of that horse.
And that's just struck me as so much common sense, because if you think
about it, when we're learning to jump, you don't put someone on a horse
that's never jumped before, right?
You don't, you don't, you put them on the best schoolmaster horse you
can, because it's life or death.
But in dressage and flatwork, we have this idea that you're
supposed to kind of hammer at it somewhat blindly, failing a lot.
Until somehow you get it.
I don't think that's much fun for the horse I don't think that's much fun
for the rider and it's inefficient.
It just doesn't have to be that shit But one needs to be shown that other way and
it was Luis who showed me that, you know So he showed me create your horse in
the piaf on the ground put your rider on and off you go But I think by the time I
was lucky enough to be working with him.
He had systemized it Perhaps even more than he had back in the earlier days and I
definitely profited from that, you know So
Mary Wanless: something that might well be true, but I mean that's it's
interesting I mean that would happen to hardly anybody in the horse world it As
in, getting to sit on Piaf on day one.
Rupert Isaacson: It's how we teach all our riders.
Yes, it
Mary Wanless: absolutely is.
If you come back to Stephen Covey and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Riders,
this is to begin with the end in mind.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Mary Wanless: Yeah?
So if you've had a sense of that, and in Piaf it's not so hard to sit, is it?
Absolutely.
It's not like it's throwing you around.
There aren't big forces throwing you around.
And if you're not getting in your knickers in a twist and trying to generate it
and start wiggling and doing all the things that people do, then you just
Because the horse is just going to
Rupert Isaacson: do it because we're on the ground making it happen and all we
need to say is sit still, relax and smile.
Mary Wanless: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: And just enjoy this.
This, back to where we began with this, and I think this is why it's such a
great conversation for Equine Assisted work is, it's this element of suffering
that things are not worth having unless you suffer, and And therefore creating
suffering where suffering does not have to be, whether it's in your kid as a
Christian scientist mum, or, you know, and as you say, to the point of, well, okay,
maybe you can dance if it's a suffering enough form of dance, as you said, she'd
known how much suffering you were going to have to go through with writing.
She might well have subsidized it.
Ironically.
And, you know, punitive thing has done to us as a culture.
It's blah, you know, doesn't have to be that way.
Mary Wanless: And, you know, it needs explicit how to information.
And, and, and, and you're, Justin and Piaf on day one is, is putting
some information into the nervous system of this is your end goal.
And you can't
Rupert Isaacson: do this because the, here you are doing it.
Okay.
I'm creating it for you, but I won't always.
Mary Wanless: Yeah,
Rupert Isaacson: this is now within your remit of experience.
It's not just in your imagination.
Yes
These things have to happen for all sorts of life skills, right?
You know, you you you mentioned that you're very modest you
saying well I don't know so much about the equine assisted thing.
And I think you've talked us through really really solid Models, I'll just
recap what you've been saying So you were brought up with some suffering
you found that horses were a way out of suffering you knew this instinctively
But then like many riders you found actually When you add monkeys who are
suffering to the thing, they bring their suffering, sadly, to the thing that
one is looking to not suffer with, i.
e.
horses.
What to do about that profound despair?
There you are also in grief, you lose your parents at this very young age.
You're lost, you've got nowhere to go.
You end up working with youth.
And then you discover dance as well, and what is the joy within that?
And also embodiment, and then you start to bring that to people who are suffering.
With riding and help unlock the suffering.
Mary, you've been doing equine assisted work your whole life.
Mary Wanless: Yes, I mean, you could certainly say that.
And it is true that the work I teach is life changing.
For a lot of riders, it is life changing.
And it is certainly life changing for the coaches who get involved.
And just being able to learn it step by step and have it be more explicit and have
a guide on the journey, you know, like between you, you have two perspectives.
You have the rider's internal perspective, what's going on in their body, their mind.
You have the coach's external viewpoint.
and how they're thinking about it and communicating about it.
And if you put those together to solve a problem, then that's very
different to, I tell you what to do and you do your best to do it.
I haven't given you good information, but do it anyway.
Now.
Rupert Isaacson: And I can't actually get up on your horse and do it for you
and show you because I've just learned to say I haven't really learned to do it.
Mary Wanless: Yes.
Rupert Isaacson: And it's easier to blame you than to admit that and go and learn.
Mary Wanless: And, and having patterns in your neurology and really trying to
bridge the gap between that neurological knowing and knowing in language.
If I was The gap between language and experience is such an interesting one.
NLP really got me interested in that.
Yeah.
The gap between
Rupert Isaacson: language and experience.
Mary Wanless: Or experience and language.
Yeah, yeah, ways to find language to cross that gap and as well find,
you know, sitting on a more trained horse and having the experience
of X can help to cross that gap.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, so now we move to the present.
You are, you know, one of the people who sits on the right hand of God
of the, you know, equestrian world in the UK and internationally now
and you've Arrive there through this process of seeking answers to
questions, answers to suffering, looking for the right mentors, and so on.
Now, there you are.
If somebody wants to engage with Ride With Your Mind, and Mary Wanless stuff,
how should they begin?
What are they going to learn?
You might think, well that's obvious given the conversation we have, but
actually it's not necessarily obvious.
If someone, so for example, I might now after this conversation with
you, say to all our horse boy people, particularly in the UK, Why don't
you go on a Mary Wanless course?
It's going to open up some new ways of thinking, it's going to
open up some new ways of looking at things, it's going to, there's
going to be all sorts of parallels.
We're going to come away with definitely a toolkit.
I will totally come on one of your courses.
What other?
You start with somebody here.
You take them through a journey.
Ideally, let's say they stick with you for a bit Or with
one of your people for a bit.
You take them to a journey, where?
And what's that midpoint?
So what's the beginning, the middle and the end of your programme
and how do you get them there?
Mary Wanless: The beginning would be being on, usually it's their horse, I
don't have school horses any longer.
Usually it's somebody's horse.
They might have begged, borrowed or stolen a horse, but I watched
somebody for a little while.
See what my priorities are, but you know, the, the ABCs of good
biomechanics stay the same.
Rupert Isaacson: Which are?
Mary Wanless: How you line up your body.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: Shoulder, hip, heel.
How you support your body weight.
That means the thigh works as a lever.
The thigh is on the saddle and the thigh works as a lever.
How the foot gets to just rest and not press.
and how you get to bear down and breathe.
Those are the initial kind of things.
And doing that often changes the rider and the horse.
You know, we're halfway through the first lesson and it's dramatically different.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: And if it's hard work, it'll be because it's hard work to sell to
somebody the idea of doing it different.
You know, yes, but my other teacher said, yes, but I've always done this.
Yes, but surely that can't be right.
You know, if it's hard work, that's why it's hard work.
If somebody's willing to play with me, it's not hard work
at all, from my perspective.
And it's a lot more fun from theirs.
Rupert Isaacson: And do they find it, as long as they're not
mentally resisting, it's actually surprisingly easy and accessible?
Mary Wanless: It's very accessible.
It's doable.
It's hard to maintain.
There's always a pull back into old habits.
So people start to get the idea that all you do is go,
Oh, lost it again and redo it.
Oh, lost it again.
Rupert Isaacson: Not to panic, not to tense up, not to try and
Mary Wanless: bust your way.
And every time that happens, they're changing them.
pretty soon get to feel how that changes the horse.
So that's kind of a beginning point.
And, and we get people doing a good job in walk, walk, halt, rising trot
mechanism that gives a kind of baseline.
They're then sane and safe and sensible in some areas, we hope.
And it's, it's how to do what you have to do to take away the
temptation to pull on the reins.
Yeah.
So you're basically getting people out
Rupert Isaacson: of kick and pull.
Yes,
Mary Wanless: we're getting them out of kick and pull.
Then in the mid stages of this, it's learning to do it going faster and
do it during transitions and just peeling away patterns, peeling away
patterns, both rider patterns and horse patterns, and trying to get a
more wholesome interaction and ways of talking about that and understanding
it and turning change into bite sized chunks, what I call next step fixes.
Mm hmm.
and really getting the rider doing what I call riding on interface,
which would be the rider discovering for themselves the cause effect
rules of the rider horse interaction.
So kind of when I do A, the horse does B.
When I do C, the horse does D and that's reliable.
And if the horse does X, I do Y.
Shoots out from underneath me, I lean back and pull on the reins.
I support my body weight better.
It comes up through his back, all these kinds of things.
So, so there are rules.
You know, my first sense as a physicist, there have to be rules
of cause and effect, there has to be a science under the art, there is.
is well hidden, but it's there and talented elite riders stumble across
it by magic, but can't talk about it.
And as that process goes on, I don't know that there's an end, but it becomes
more that I fix something in me and feel how that fixes in the horse to where
you can go, Oh, my horse needs more X and fix you in a way that changes.
The horse, right?
So it can become, it's, it's being able to feel and sense your way
into the entirety of your body and the entirety of your horse's body.
Rupert Isaacson: Do you have exercises psychologically and emotionally
for accessing away from the horse, the thing we're trying to get to
on the horse, which is joy, right?
The only reason any of us ever got on a horse was because we thought it might
make us feel better or good or something.
Very rarely did any of us get on a horse because we actually
needed to ride to Edinburgh.
You know, there was a time in life when that was going on, but not anymore.
So, we, we, everyone who gets involved with horses is coming in for joy.
We know then that can get lost.
Through, obviously, dance, NLP, the work you've done with Feldenkrais,
psychotherapy, and so on.
These are all, of course, ameliorative.
Although dance actually can be just very joyfully expressive of that.
Do you actively try to help people just plain old access joy and then say okay
now you've got that thing can we bring that thing into the saddle with you?
Mary Wanless: I would say it starts more in the saddle with that.
Okay.
What I'm trying to get people to access is flow.
Rupert Isaacson: All right.
Definitely joy.
Yeah, so
Mary Wanless: joy is a subset of flow.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm . I would agree.
Mary Wanless: And flow is the state where you're totally absorbed
in a task you're doing, you're having no extraneous thoughts.
Mm-hmm . Time is going by, you may be unaware of time, and my
aim when I go in a writing arena is to get myself into that state.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mary Wanless: To help the rider get into that state.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm
. Mary Wanless: To, this is maybe sticking my neck out anthropomorphically, but
to get the horse into that state.
Rupert Isaacson: Or at least have that intention, yeah.
Yeah,
Mary Wanless: so that's my intention when I go in a riding arena.
And I think everybody's greatest joy in life actually comes from being in flow.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I would say, I'd say that's pretty true.
You must be working with a lot of instructors too.
Yes.
What's your mechanism with them to help them access that sense of
flow and also to prioritize flow?
Mary Wanless: I teach them what flow is,
Rupert Isaacson: you
Mary Wanless: know, as I talk about it in workshops, as well as they've started to
experience it on a horse and in teaching.
So I'm really trying to get people there in their teaching as well as their riding.
And I think quite often it gets people there more there in life.
I mean, I think I live my life to a large extent in flow.
And when I can do that in everyday menial tasks as well, that's great.
So flow is, I think the bottom line on that.
And, and I also do encourage people to ride out as well as ride in the arena.
And, you know, when I ride out, I, always have something I'm working on, but
it'll just be something in my body and my horse's body, just quietly, even if
we're just hacking along and there's no pressure in that, you can take your time.
And, and one of the biggest things in this, I think, is teaching the noticing
skills of teaching people to check in.
Yeah, innate riders never check out, but teaching the average rider
to check in, what's happening now?
Oh, I hollered my back again,
right?
Yeah, and then not having to do a whole self beating up thing.
Rupert Isaacson: Say that again.
Mary Wanless: People think they ought to be able to ride
by the seat of their pants.
And yet, so many people come back to riding as adults after however many years.
And maybe as a kid they did ride by the seat of their pants and they did
have a lovely pony and it all worked.
Or you come back at 50 something, with many more what ifs in your
brain, and the seat of your pants doesn't work any longer.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Mary Wanless: And often people are shocked by this.
So, you know, getting to check in, to keep checking in.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, without negative self beating up language, yeah.
Mary Wanless: Yeah, not beating yourself up, but just checking in.
In a non judgmental way.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, oh there's that thing.
Non
Mary Wanless: judgmental awareness.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely, absolutely.
It's it's the difficulty about sport instruction, because sport instruction
always, always has the implicit, the implication that there's a judge.
You know, and of course you will never meet that judges expectations and it's,
I agree with you so much about being outside in nature while you do it.
It's actually gotten to the point outside of our therapeutic work,
which we almost entirely do in nature, unless weather forces us inside.
Just because arenas are relatively sterile environments, you know,
in terms of introducing a brain.
You two things you want the outside world.
I've now gotten to the point with dressage.
I almost never teach in an arena anymore i'll do almost the entire thing in the
forest because i've just noticed that people and horses are happier there and
then occasionally if there's something where okay, we could benefit from the
wall, or we could benefit from the fence, or we could benefit from a corner here.
Okay, let's go back to the arena for that one thing.
But it's, it's so interesting how just the very presence of an arena brings pressure.
Yes, yes, it's
Mary Wanless: true.
Rupert Isaacson: You know, gladiatorial.
Mary Wanless: And it's sad, certainly in the UK, you know, we have
increasingly little safe riding.
Rupert Isaacson: So true.
Mary Wanless: Off road riding, you know, to have access to the
outdoors without tying yourself up in a juggernaut, you know.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely, no, you're absolutely right.
Not,
Mary Wanless: not, not to be taken for granted.
No, it's true.
Rupert Isaacson: When, when I was when I was a boy, you know, we would
hack to a meat of hounds that was.
Anything up to an hour away and might finish.
after dark and hack the lanes home for two hours.
You couldn't think about doing that now.
You'd be killed.
I used
Mary Wanless: to ride out hunters for somebody when I
was at university in Bristol.
We rode along the A38, which is one of the main roads from Bristol
going north up to Gloucester.
I, I You know, brushed with some of my nine lives along that road,
but you wouldn't dare do it now.
Rupert Isaacson: No, you wouldn't.
You wouldn't.
And back
Mary Wanless: then,
Rupert Isaacson: yeah, it, and you're right.
There isn't the public access in the UK.
I'm lucky here in Germany because you can basically ride any, you can ride.
There's tracks everywhere and you can just go.
But it's, I've never experienced that outside of places like the
Welsh borders or areas of open Hills.
Mary Wanless: And then there are places, I mean, I.
Rode a lot on Exmoor in my university days and God, I love it there.
It's one of UK and probably the world.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I agree.
So yes, there's, and it's true that one then needs ways to
kind of humanize the arena.
And we do that with autistic kids.
We will create forests in the arena.
We'll have trees that we bring in and like you're setting up jumps,
we'll set up a forest or Right, okay.
We'll turn it into a beach, you know, and we'll have couches
and even a little fire going.
And, you know.
A sofa will bring that, you know, and anything we can think
of to kind of humanize it.
But It's so easy to just think in terms of I am doing this task here.
I'm working my horse.
I'm not playing with my pony.
So even that language of, you know, it's always serious.
It's always a horse.
It's never a pony.
It's always a rider.
So I try to use the word monkey, you know, got sky monkey, ground monkey, front
monkey, back monkey, anything to just sort of take the seriousness out of it.
Because of this pressure that the arena is a place where you go to sort of suffer
and die on the sand and either Caesar puts his thumb up or puts his hand down.
Yes, it's
Mary Wanless: kind of like that, yes.
I mean, thank God that is on the way out.
It is
Rupert Isaacson: on the way out.
Mary Wanless: There is not enough really good, sane understanding
and coaching on the way in.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah.
Mary Wanless: There is some, but not enough.
Rupert Isaacson: Well, you've been, I think, one of the big forces
for humanising the entire thing.
And I think that one of the reasons why the UK is where we are,
actually, with sport riding, that suddenly we can beat the Germans.
I think it's largely down to people like you making these processes.
available to people, but outside of the sport riding just to help people
connect joyfully with their horses.
I, I do think there's a whole generation of riders, two generations of riders
in the UK who owe you a great debt.
So it's, it's been massively educational for me, but also a great honor for
me to have you on here because, you know, you've, you've really contributed
in this massively positive way.
Mary Wanless: Yeah, I think there's been a level of me kind of pushing up
from the bottom And some of the big name really good riders It's pulling up
from the top and inspiring from the top.
And I think there could be some truth in that, that my influence is bigger
than I probably realise in terms of
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I think you should savour that truth, because it's good
work that you've done and continue to do.
So if people want to come and learn with you how do they do that and then how
can they find your books and can they learn with you online as well as live?
Mary Wanless: Yes, so my website is meri onelist.
com Is that Lower,
Rupert Isaacson: please.
Mary Wanless: mary oneless.
com mary
Rupert Isaacson: oneless W A N L
Mary Wanless: E double S
Rupert Isaacson: com
Mary Wanless: that's got information on the courses I teach in the UK and the US
Rupert Isaacson: alright
Mary Wanless: and it's got information on coaches who are accredited in
this work, mostly in the UK and the US, but Australia, New Zealand,
a little bit in Europe, too.
The website DressageTraining.
tv, which is a membership site, DressageTraining,
Rupert Isaacson: all one word,
Mary Wanless: DressageTraining, all one word, dot
Rupert Isaacson: TV.
Okay.
Mary Wanless: Puts my work online.
Rupert Isaacson: What can people do on there?
Mary Wanless: They can watch webinars.
They can watch what we call the rider biomechanics course, which is
broken down into bite sized chunks of what it is that the rider needs to
do with their body to make it work.
There are other courses on things like steering, straightness and sideways,
the baselines of on the bit and what that really means and how to influence
a horse's posture and movement.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
Mary Wanless: There's also the groundwork that we do based on giving
the horse a conscious understanding of the legs as go and the reins as woe.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm-hmm
. Mary Wanless: Equine learning theory is where we start in groundwork.
And you can send in little bits of video if you're doing some of the courses,
you can send in lots of little bits of video and get feedback on them.
Rupert Isaacson: Right.
And I've met people
Mary Wanless: who've really taught themselves to ride on the internet.
Rupert Isaacson: Yeah,
Mary Wanless: it's never sure that could happen at the
beginning, but it really can.
I so agree
Rupert Isaacson: with you.
They've
Mary Wanless: taught themselves to ride on the internet.
Rupert Isaacson: I was very sceptical about that and I've absolutely
seen people who've done it.
How much, what does it cost to be a member on your website?
Mary Wanless: It's, it's going to be, it's going up fairly soon to 25 quid a month.
And you get access to a huge amount for that.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay, great.
And then your books, tell us about the books.
Mary Wanless: Yeah, so there are I've written seven books,
three are still in print.
So there's Ride With Your Mind Essentials, Ride With Your Mind Clinic.
and Rider Biomechanics.
Okay.
And sometimes people find the older books in, in car boot sales.
There's a couple of people I know who've got very involved in my work that found
one of the early books in a car boot sale.
So there's probably find them
Rupert Isaacson: online too.
I mean, there will be
Mary Wanless: there and other places that might work better than that nowadays.
But those three books are a good trilogy.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Just give us the titles again for those who didn't get to ride
Mary Wanless: with your mind essentials,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
With your mind essentials.
Mary Wanless: That's the place to start.
That's the sort of beginning ABC.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: Ride With Your Mind Clinic, which is a series of lessons.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
Mary Wanless: And talking about it through the experience of the rider in the lesson.
So there's a lot of photographs in that book.
Rupert Isaacson: Mm hmm.
Mary Wanless: And Rider Biomechanics comes in through the model of The
fascial net and fascial lines and like that understanding of the core
of the body and how to access your own fascial lines and how that helps
you organize the horse's fascial lines and how that whole system works.
Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
And fascia for the listeners.
Fascia
Mary Wanless: would be the connective tissue.
So in the history of dissection, like everything, they kind of cut
it into little pieces and when, Oh, this muscle begins here and
it goes to there and it does this.
But if you turn the scalpel on its side, you could go, okay, so here's the joint
capsule and here's the ligament, and here's the tendon and here's the muscle.
And there at the other end is another tendon and another
ligament and another joint capsule.
And if you keep going, turning the scalpel on its side, you can create chains of
muscle and con and connective tissue, some of which go from head to toe.
So they're almost like guy ropes within the body.
And getting those guy ropes to have an appropriate and balanced tension
makes a huge difference.
Rupert Isaacson: Biotension.
Rider
Mary Wanless: actually is using her own fascial net to change the horse's
fascial net when it goes really well.
Rupert Isaacson: Perfect.
Okay.
And fascia, I think is something which used to be one of those words you'd hear
and it's now becoming more familiar.
Mary Wanless: It is.
So, so Tom has done a lot to bring that into public awareness and There are
more and more people looking at this sort of systems approach to the body.
And then there was actually a medic who started talking about fascia
because there's some talk about how cancer cells migrate through
the body through the fascial net.
Rupert Isaacson: And
Mary Wanless: that became the medical discovery of it.
Whereas outside of Directly medical circles.
There was a lot of research already going on,
Rupert Isaacson: right?
And if dysfunctional cells can move through the fascial net, then
presumably functional things can too.
Yeah, so the
Mary Wanless: fascial net is actually the basis of our feel sense.
It has way more receptors that send information to the brain
about feel than muscles do.
And it has to be taught.
It's also the organ of force transmission in the body.
And to transmit force well, it has to be taught.
Rupert Isaacson: TAUT as in T A U T.
Mary Wanless: T A U T.
Rupert Isaacson: I can see another podcast coming on.
Mary Wanless: So it has to be taught.
So anyone who's told to relax and just goes, Ugh!
Rupert Isaacson: You're not
Mary Wanless: going to do a good job because that's too
soggy and too like a rag doll.
Rupert Isaacson: Right, so what you're talking about is
relaxation in tension, right?
Like a dancer.
Mary Wanless: Enough
Rupert Isaacson: tension.
But not so much tension that it's rigid, enough relaxation.
Mary Wanless: Enough tension but you're not uptight.
Indeed.
Rupert Isaacson: But you're
Mary Wanless: not too down loose either.
Rupert Isaacson: Yep.
Which is rather difficult when your amygdala is firing and you're
sitting on a horse that you're worried is going to unload you.
Yes.
So there lies the art.
And I think you help people get there.
I'm really grateful that you came on.
I'd like to have you back actually, now that you've opened
up this thing about fascia.
And fascia and feel, because I'm a great believer that a lot of rider
feel comes through the fascia.
And that this is something that can help people, because you know,
when you and I were growing up, there was this myth that, oh, feel
can't be taught, and it can totally.
Yes,
Mary Wanless: no, this is definitely not true.
Feel can be taught.
Rupert Isaacson: I so agree, and I'm so happy.
It's easier
Mary Wanless: for some people than others, but feel can be taught.
Rupert Isaacson: Absolutely, like a language.
Well, fantastic, mary wanlis.
com, dressagetraining.
tv, the membership education site.
We have the books.
Mary, thank you.
I've learned a lot.
I hope you'll come back on because I think there's further things we could explore.
And we tend to get a fair amount of questions coming
through from the listeners.
So, Perhaps with your permission I'll collate some of those and then maybe
we could regroup in a few months and
Mary Wanless: yes I'd be happy to do that.
My pleasure.
Rupert Isaacson: I hope you enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.
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