A Feather Touch is a Feather Landing

"A feather touch is a feather landing."

When I was 21 years old, I learnt to hang glide. During the week-long course with a handful of other students, we started out learning the basics in theory, and then ventured to the sand dunes for our first time in the harness.

First, we learnt to feel the glider and make corrections as it hovered in the breeze, held by people on both sides to prevent it from taking off. It's easy to focus on those corrections when you know you aren't going to go anywhere, but to some degree, those soft corrections seems to go out the window when the 'safety net' is gone.

When it came time to launching off those dunes for our first brief glide, almost all of us struggled with the landing.

The instructor could see that we were trying to over-control the glider, but as much as he told us to "losen our grip", "keep it soft", we couldn't imagine holding it too much softer than we already were, considering we were controlling equipment that could be carried off by the wind at any moment.

This is when he got into the glider himself, and after launching, he hovered in the sky just above us, and then let go of the bar entirely. Sure enough, there he hovered. The glider didn't plummet to the ground or sway out of control, it just floated on the breeze. When he did touch the bar, he could have been touching a leaf on the water with his soft yet precise corrections.

Something that has stuck in my mind for all of these years was what the instructor told us..

"A feather touch is a feather landing. You need to stop feeling the need to over-control the glider, and stay soft. The softer you are, the  easier you will feel the tiny adjustments that you can make."

During every flight since that day, that message has replayed in my head. When things feel a bit dicey, your brain wants to grip harder, control more. But the softer you feel with your hands, the more you will be able to feel, and the more you will be in tune with your glider and the air around you.

I think of this often now when teaching people to ride.. and sometimes I need to remind myself, too.

The softer you are with your horse, the more you will feel. You need to let go of the need to control, and work *with* your horse.

If you meld your mind and your energy into the horse's, and the ground beneath you, and the air around you, you will start to become a part of them all, and then you will find yourself flying.