Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

Stillness in Motion

About the Book

The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest. -Bruce Lee

I love this quote from Bruce Lee because it so eloquently opens our eyes to one of the greatest truths of life: the idea of stillness as a lack of movement is a fundamental misperception. In order to illustrate this point to yourself, I ask you to rest your hands, close your eyes, and sit, feeling the stillness in your body for five or ten breaths. After sitting in this way, I invite you to ponder this: what you may have felt as total stillness is actually the combination of countless movements, both small and large. As you sat still, your body was being accelerated by gravity towards the center of the earth at a rate of 32 feet per second per second. The weight you felt in your body was the constant force of your physical mass being pushed against the earth. The piece of ground on which you sat was rotating around the Earth's axis at roughly 1,000 miles per hour. The Earth was orbiting the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Our solar system was orbiting the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, at 490,000 miles per hour. The Milky Way was being pulled towards the closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, at 180,000 miles per hour. So when you sit in stillness, your body is actually traveling through space at a rate that is the combination of all of these movements. You do not feel them as forces because your body is in perfect synch with their rhythms. Thus, we begin to see that the true nature of stillness is equilibrium in motion. Legendary horseman Tom Dorrance talks about this principle in the DVD Feel, Timing, & Balance. He describes the metaphor of trying to balance a broom with the end of the stick on the palm of your outstretched hand, the bristles of the broom pointing up towards the sky. Naturally, the broom will begin to fall one direction or another. In order to catch the broom and keep it balanced, you must move your hand a little bit further, a little bit faster, than the broom is falling. As you do so, it will begin to fall a different direction, and you must move to catch it again. At the start, you are just playing catch-up with the broom. You are being reactive rather than synchronized. This only works for a limited amount of time. Your corrections have to get larger faster as the broom wobbles more and more until you are finally left behind the motion and the broom topples to the ground. In order to reach harmony with the broom, you must at first be proactive. You must feel where and when it will move, move with it, and them add a small amount. If you stay with the motion in this way, the movements of the broom will become smaller and smaller. Eventually, your movements will become so small that it will appear you are balancing the broom perfectly without moving at all. You will have found the state of stillness in motion. I recently witnessed an eye-opening demonstration of the value of this lesson when my partner, Kali, used this demonstration to describe the act of riding to one of our advanced students. She placed the butt of a dressage whip on her hand and began to balance it as she described the balance the rider must have with the horse. At first, it was very challenging for her to keep the whip upright. Soon though, as she talked through the process of adding speed if your horse is heavy on the forehand, walking more if their weight is too far back, and bending to balance between the left and right, her relationship to the whip began to change. By the end of her description, it was perfectly balanced and looked totally motionless. Through the process of describing the balance in riding, Kali had gone to that place of instinctual equilibrium in movement that creates true stillness.