Loose in the Saddle

Years ago I was introduced to five words that changed my mind. Literally. As in, not changed an opinion, but the way I actually think. 

I was in a small study group, all of us wives, meeting every couple weeks to discuss marriage and spiritual growth. Whenever one of us got cocky or confused or frustrated about an idea we were considering, our leader—a humble, humor-driven wise woman—would smile delightedly, lean forward in her chair and earnestly exclaim: “Ride loose in the saddle!”

The first few times she said that I had no clue what she meant. All I could picture was someone lounging sloppily on a horse’s back doing little to prevent themselves taking a hard, possibly critical fall. To me, that was someone not responding appropriately to their situation. Someone asking for trouble. Flirting with danger.

Not being that kinda gal I thought it sounded like bad advice.

Until, that is, she offered the translation: Don’t be too sure about what you know. Don’t hold too tightly to what you believe. Stay loose with the truth. 

Once upon a time, I would have rejected that suggestion out of hand. 

You see, I grew up wanting to know what was true so I could walk the upright path. Moral failures, even spiritual ones, I regarded as generally avoidable—the result of poor judgment or poor self-control. I grew up believing that the road to everlasting happiness was simply a matter of identifying the Truth, then refusing to veer from the Straight and Narrow. 

Ride loose in the saddle? Ha! My younger self would have scoffed that off as a reckless move, turning a sure bet into a crapshoot. Practically a guarantee of a wandering horse or a hard fall. Nope! I'd have said. I'll just hold my seat and steer my horse, thank you very much.

Fortunately, by the time I heard her explanation I was in a place to recognize that our leader was not exhorting us to be lackadaisical about the truth, to be some kind of ho-hum seeker unconcerned with The Path. Rather, I understood that she was urging us...me...to notice how I think about what I know, to pay attention to how I relate to my understanding, to whatever I believe is true. 

And to loosen my grip on my certainty about all of it. 

Looking back, I realize they were mind-changing words because the wisdom they contain is ancient. I came across it again a decade later when I began exploring Buddhist teachings and the tool of meditation for spiritual growth. Ironically, in the lexicon of sitting practice, “hold your seat” has the same essential meaning as “ride loose in the saddle.” The basic idea is stay open. 

In meditation practice we “follow the breath.” The basic instruction is to notice when thoughts arise (which is constantly, let’s be real) and to let them go by returning to awareness of our breath. When discomfort arises, rather than escaping into our thoughts, seeking distraction, we’re instructed to stay in the moment and experience it without storyline or judgment. We simply hold our seat and breathe. We stay open. We ride loose. 

You might wonder why anyone would want to “stay open” to discomfort or doubt, much less make a practice out of it. It might sound more like the road to hell than happiness. And given the way our minds work, it actually does mean the difference between suffering and peace. But not in the way you might think.

In her book, Rising Strong, Dr. Brené Brown describes how stories fundamentally help us understand and integrate our experiences. In explaining how our minds instinctively construct narratives, she points to research showing that

our brains reward us with dopamine when we recognize and complete patterns. Stories are patterns. The brain recognizes the familiar beginning-middle-end structure of a story and rewards us for clearing up the ambiguity. Unfortunately, we don't need to be accurate, just certain.

Dr. Brown makes the point that our brains are biochemically wired to fill in the blanks when we only have pieces of a story. Our minds recognize gaps, search for answers, and automatically make connections, so that very often, without even realizing it, we rely on assumed knowledge rather than hard data to arrive at our conclusions. 

In other words, we make a lot of stuff up. 

And then we believe it as fact. 

Every one of us could tell a tale, for example (or numerous tales, if we’re being honest) of a time we felt hurt by someone or critical towards a person for something they did, only to find out that we had one or more pieces of our story wrong and the guilty party was innocent of our charges. Or perhaps we believed a person didn’t like us, or that we’d somehow offended them, only to later discover that they had no problem with us, that none of what we were thinking was true.

Typically in these situations, the parts we get wrong are the blanks we’ve filled in with logical suppositions based perhaps on a past experience of the person (or maybe just hearsay), or on our own fears or insecurities, or on the circumstances involved. But we believe our story because it makes sense. The dopamine release convinces us—it feels factual.

Many times, it simply looks like the reality before our eyes.

In his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey tells a powerful story that illustrates this experience. He describes a peaceful, quiet ride he was enjoying on the subway one Sunday morning that was jarringly disrupted when a father and four rowdy children entered the train car. The father sat down next to Covey and closed his eyes while his children created a ruckus, yelling, throwing things to each other, even grabbing people’s newspapers. Covey describes the immediate agitation of all the passengers and his own growing annoyance as the father continued to sit oblivious to the disturbance his children were causing. He was dismayed by this man’s irresponsible parenting, his appalling inconsideration for everyone in allowing his children to act with such appalling inconsideration. 

Covey recounts what happened when he finally spoke up, suggesting as politely as he could manage that perhaps the father could do something to rein in his kids:

The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

In an instant, this family’s pain supplanted the story Covey had constructed about them. The children were not indulged brats being allowed to tear through the world without manners or direction. Their father was not lazy or thoughtless, lacking concern for others or responsibility for his children. They were not a selfish family. 

They were a devastated family, reeling in the fresh shock of a shattering loss.  

Covey’s tale involves a far more dramatic revelation than might be typical in our daily experience, yet it illustrates the reflexive ease with which our minds formulate narratives and judgments that seem wholly valid, even obvious to our eyes, yet are grounded in unconscious conjecture. 

The uncomfortable reality is that we do assume a lot, on a regular basis, and there is no way around that since it’s a biological and necessary instinct. Dr. Brown clearly makes the point:

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. It’s how we are wired. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Meaning making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect. 

It is our primal need for self-protection that is really the key. It drives not only our story-making impulse, but another, related instinct. Our aversion to uncertainty. 

The further back we look in human history the more clearly we recognize how our survival once depended on our ability to navigate uncertainty—to recognize where danger or safety lay, to distinguish between threats and resources, opportunity and peril. Thankfully, most people no longer live in circumstances in which their daily handling of uncertainty means the difference between life and death. 

But uncertainty still underpins our existence because not one of us can be certain what will happen tomorrow. Or today. Or even in the next second. 

Impermanence, as the Buddha pointed out, is a basic condition of existence.  

This points us to the troublesome fact that human beings dwell within a conundrum: we naturally resist uncertainty, yet it is a constant of our lives we cannot escape. And this gives rise to suffering, since our impulse is to try. 

In her book The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chödrön teaches: “It isn't the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” 

This is the crux of the situation. We instinctively pursue stability in a universe that is never static. Everything changes, for better or worse. Our aversion to uncertainty thus keeps us scrambling for the feeling of ground under our feet—predictability, security, a sense of control, the comfort of knowing what we know. We naturally cling to the belief that our ideas about the world, the truths we tell ourselves, the thoughts we conceive, are solid, real, dependable. And when we cling to that belief, we suffer.

Which is where cultivating our openness to discomfort and doubt becomes useful. 

The practice of holding our seat, riding loose in the saddle, is the practice of awakening to our reflexive mind, to its narrative impulse, its attachment to certainty. It is the practice of relaxing into the ambiguity of life, accepting that we don't know what we don’t know, until we know it. It is the practice of leaving ourselves—leaving everyone—lots of room to be wrong. It is learning to be okay with life just as it is: impermanent, uncontrollable, suffused with uncertainty.

In other words, it is the path of moving with our fundamental reality rather than struggling against it. It turns out that abiding with doubt and discomfort—holding our seat—is paradoxically the path to greater understanding, and deepening peace. 

And it’s some of the rockiest ground to ride. 

It is a hard spiritual road because it requires relinquishing our deepest attachment of all—the one thing to which we most ardently, reflexively, stubbornly cling. Our ego. That instinct to grasp the reins tightly and steer our horse is, in a word, ego-clinging. It is fundamental attachment to self, to one’s own ideas, to the craving for certainty—a sure bet.

On my own journey of learning to ride loose, trying to hold my seat through doubt and discomfort, I’ve found that cultivating egolessness begins with a single seed. Curiosity. 

When we allow it to grow...allow ourselves to become more curious than afraid, we begin to notice—and resist—our natural reflex to self-protect, to habitually defend the “solid” ground of What I Know. We let ourselves wonder about what we don't know, and relax about what we do. We start to acknowledge our thoughts as...just thinking...allowing their authority to abate into the softer realm of Possibly True, rather than clinging to them as Hard Reality. 

And as we ride loose along our path, holding our seat, we begin to discover a world that is at once more beautifully complex and more profoundly simple than the one we’d been engaging from behind the rigid armor of our ego. This complexity is revealed in our deepening understanding of ourselves and others, in our expanding compassion for the humanity we all share. The simplicity manifests in the growing peace we experience by surrendering our ego, by awakening into the awareness that groundlessness is really nothing to fear. 

It’s just life. 

Transient. Imperfect. Unpredictable. Permeated with pleasure and pain, joy and failure, gratitude and grief. A journey abounding in moments when we can drop our preferred narratives, soften our hearts, open ourselves to fear—and find connection. We can hold our seat, ride loose in the saddle, quietly breathing and letting go.  

Breathe. And let go.

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To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.             ~ Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart