Dressage lesson on 2/17/07 - miracle lessons are over

Well, my lesson luck has run out. After the three (or so) excellent lessons where I made huge leaps in understanding, I am back to lessons that feel like I am slogging up a hill I have been up a hundred times before. (A hundred times a month.) While I did learn a lot this lesson, it was one of those lessons that showed me just how much I still have to learn. I started out with my usual questions. I've been doing some of the exercises from the 101 dressage exercises book, but I've had problems with some of them and can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. It turns out, almost everything. First of all, a lot of the skills required to just do the exercises are way beyond me and Mercury. The example I used with Bob was the exercise where you have to halt for 6 seconds at A at the walk, trot, and canter. You leave from a halt into the walk, trot, and canter. We can barely leave from A into a trot, and no way can we do a canter. It also has you stopping on a dime there at A, and after we come around a corner, we're lucky to stop at the next corner. Bob said it is a fine exercise for warming Mercury up, but not to stop at A each time. Instead, stop at random spots. What frustrated me was I already knew that. I know not to do the same routine at the same place each time because he memorizes it, and poor Mercury, bless his little heart, gets confused and frustrated once he's figured out the routine and then I go and change it on him. It made me mad that I didn't think to apply that to this exercise in the book.
Then I got all whiny and complained how all we ever do is walk, trot, and canter, and yet there's still so much to learn just about those three and how I'm never going to progress. Bob asked to what, big fences? and I said no, even simple things like turn on the forehand we can't do. So Bob asked me to show him what I was doing, and then laughed and laughed and said Mercury was doing exactly what I asked him to do, which was only in the vaguest sense (like an apple and a cherry are both fruits), a turn on the forehand.
It turns out it has 45 steps, and I didn't understand the first one. Here they are:
1. Take up contact with the bit, flex his head opposite the direction you're turning. (I think.) The interesting, and shocking part about this, was that you flex him to the right (for a left turn), by having his nice inside right rein contact, longer outside steady contact, and by doing half halts with the outside rein. Opposite of what I've thought for, oh, 15 years.
2. Then you shift your hip. I was already lost at step 1, so I can't even begin to explain this. It is different than leaning your shoulder.
3. Then you tap, tap, tap (not constant pressure) with your right leg (to push him left).
4. But at the same time, you use a magical, unknown amount of pressure with your left leg to keep him from stepping back.
5. Then voila! You are doing a turn on the forehand. (Not exactly 45 steps, but it felt like it during the lesson.)
Hint: It is better to start with his nose against the arena wall, because then there is one less direction other than around his forehand we can move.
So after this, we tried to do half pass and leg yield, which is close to the same, but with a couple more steps.
You start by walking forward, and you do all 4 steps above, but going in a straight line, and using your whip on his rump if he is moving at an angle. We got this one at a walk and a trot, after a few false starts. Mercury caught onto this one pretty fast. But his neck was bending too much, and he forgets to bring his back end, and he starts going just sideways instead of forward and sideways, so there is still a lot to work on.
I think around this point I started crying. I was in a bad mood, and I just couldn't get things to work, and all the steps felt complicated, and I felt like an idiot for having ridden all these years and not even being able to do a turn on the forehand.
So then we tried to do ground poles, which I wanted to practice to prepare for next week's jumping lesson (the first jumping since last September). What I had expected, which was foolish of me, was that all our hard work on the flat would magically translate into effortless ground poles, and instead, they were just as much a disaster as when we quit doing them last September. We smashed through, with Mercury alternating leaping and stomping on them, and me lurching around on top of him like I was a noodle. It was totally, horrifyingly humiliating. And I got really mad, really frustrated, and really upset. We were trying to do 4, so Bob took away 2 of them, leaving the two end ones, then said just do one, and we did that one so pitifully I just quit.
Today I put one pole in the middle of the arena and we did that one at walk, trot, and canter, and it was mostly ok, and the difference was this. I had expected yesterday we would have a magical connection, and I would do nothing except point Mercury at the poles, and we would glide over them. Poor Mercury hasn't practiced a pole since then, and neither have I, so I don't know now why I would have expected that. Anyway, today went better because I actually did half halts up to the pole, and there was just the one pole on the ground.