Looking out onto the more than 90 people assembled to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her monumentally influential first book, Centered Riding, Sally Swift, 92, expressed her gratitude in trademark style: “This is really great. You’re saying all these nice things about me. I’m so glad you did this while I’m still alive!”

Swift, who lives in Brattleboro, Vt., where the reception was held in conjunction with the 10th annual Centered Riding Symposium last fall, hasn’t taken what many would consider a standard path on her way to becoming a world-renowned horse person.

“At the age where most people are starting to think, ‘Where’s the Barcolounger?’ Sally was just spring-boarding her way into this brand new career,” said longtime friend and former student Denny Emerson, one of the Chronicle’s 50 Most Influential Horsemen of the 20th Century.

Having sold more than 500,000 copies printed in 14 languages, Centered Riding has affected equestrians throughout the world. The book, first published in 1985 by Trafalgar Square, presented Swift’s imagery intensive approach to riding, which sought to improve riders’ awareness of their bodies and, as a result, their connection with their horses.

“The difference between what Sally does and what most people do is that Sally took a piece of the equation–the human body and its relationship to the movement of the horse–and tried to make people understand how it worked,” said Emerson, who wrote the foreword to Swift’s book.

“People have a pretty strong work ethic about dressage [for example]. You say the word ‘dressage,’ and it conjures a seriousness of purpose, the word ‘earnest,’ the idea that ‘I’m going to work really hard.’ As soon as you work hard, you stiffen up, and the minute you stiffen up, your body doesn’t move with the horse. Instantly, we have that Judeo-Christian work ethic that kicks in and paralyzes us,” explained Emerson.

With Swift’s belief that most instruction stresses what to do, instead of how to do it, she sought to simplify complicated concepts and make them accessible.

“The people who write those books about what to do are mostly what I’ve always called ‘natural riders’ and are automatically centered when they ride,” Swift said. “They’ve never had to learn it, so they don’t know how to teach what comes naturally to them.”

Swift’s presentation, which isn’t discipline-specific, allowed her concepts to be applied to any occasion a person threw a leg over a horse, be it for a trail ride, a cross-country trip or a reining pattern. Since her book’s publication, the concept of Centered Riding has expanded over the past 20 years to include a series of videotapes, another book, called Centered Riding 2, and an entire organization devoted to her training ideas and instructor development.

Anatomy And Horseology
Accumulating the knowledge to create her unique approach to riding wasn’t a conscious effort for Swift. Instead, she came by it incidentally, as the by-product of dealing with her own anatomical demons. Born in 1913 in Hingham, Mass., at age 7, Swift was diagnosed with scoliosis, a spinal disorder that may have resulted from an undiagnosed case of polio.

When her condition was first discovered, Swift and her family sought the help of Mabel Elsworth Todd, a therapist and author of The Thinking Body. Swift worked with Todd into her 20s, utilizing her imagery rich teachings of anatomy and physiology to help contend with her misaligned spine.

“She kept anybody from putting me in a full-body cast or rods in my back, or any of that mess they were doing in those days,” said Swift.

“She was wonderful, and she was very powerful. I suppose she was dictatorial–my mother did anything she said!” Swift recalled. “My mother was a marvel. She brought me up doing all these exercises, and then I went into a [leather corset] brace, but she never let me feel different. I was different, but she didn’t let me take any advantage of that.”

Swift, her older sister and her mother had always loved horses, and Todd encouraged Swift to ride as an exercise to balance and strengthen her lopsided body. Some of her first forays on horseback were earned working as a groom for her neighbor, who, in exchange, would pony the 9-year-old from the back of his Thoroughbred mare. She began riding regularly as a teenager, although without formal instruction.

Graduating cum laude from nearby Milton Academy, Swift began a career as a riding instructor, a pursuit she’d begun in the summers during school, working with a nearby trainer.

“Mrs. Todd didn’t want me to go to college because that would involve too much sitting,” she recalled. “I suppose I was an apprentice for two or three years after I graduated. I didn’t pay her anything at that point, nor did I earn anything, except that I learned an awful lot about barn management in the process.”

Swift’s father encouraged her to go out on her own, which she did, teaching at a series of locations over the next 10 years.

“I kept going back to what Mrs. Todd had taught me. I’d think of an imaginary ball in my chest that would drop through my body and drop into my pelvis with a thunk, as though into mud. I made the connection and used [centering methods] in my own riding in my upper teens but I never used to teach it,” she said. “When you’re in your 20s, you don’t go out on a limb and teach things nobody else is teaching!”

A conversation with a friend over a cup of tea inspired her to return to school, and the next day Swift applied to, and was later accepted at, what’s now the University of Massachusetts. Majoring in dairy cattle and farm management because “cows were big, like horses,” she transferred to Cornell University (N.Y.) after two years. “I think I was the last girl they took into the agriculture program for three years afterward because the boys were coming back from the war,” recalled Swift.

Swift worked as a herd-breeding analyst for eight years before taking a job in 1954 with the American Holstein Association, based in Brattleboro. The world’s largest dairy cattle breed association, they maintain records on ancestry, identity, ownership and performance for all registered Holsteins in the country. Working under the head of their testing department, Swift helped check reports and kept their records in what was the beginning of the computer age.

She worked at the AHA for 21 years, “retiring” in 1975 at age 62.

Swift, who had continued riding throughout her period of bovine diversion, looked forward to “teaching lessons to some friends for fun.” No longer bearing the insecurities of her 20s, she began to share the centering techniques she’d practiced her whole life.

“I started teaching it to other people, and of course, it worked like a charm,” she said. “It spread by word of mouth, and that’s how Centered Riding got started. It never dawned on me it would go where it went.”


Writing It Down
Once she’d gained a measure of fame in New England through her clinics, friends urged her to capture her instructional approach in book form.

“A book is relatively daunting if it’s not your thing,” said Emerson. “We kept telling her, ‘You need to write this down.’ She would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I will,’ meaning ‘don’t bug me; I won’t!’ “

Although it took years of prodding, Swift began the laborious process of writing her ideas down by hand, even dictating some of the content for a typist to record. “I wasn’t very good at it!” she admitted. “I wrote it the way I taught it, and you can’t write a book, apparently, that way, so I learned!”

Caroline Robbins, who owned Trafalgar Square Farm Books, a U.S. distributor of limited-edition, niche books published by the English company David & Charles, was interested in publishing a book of her own. Her interest in horses and proximity to Swift’s developing local phenomenon made the two a natural match.

“When Sally brought the manuscript in for Centered Riding, it wasn’t a manuscript–there wasn’t anything to edit at that point. Caroline looked at the first chapter and said, ‘Eek! I can’t read this!’ ” said Karen McCollom, an upper-level eventer and former Trafalgar employee who was called upon to bring some order to the chaos.

“It was a manuscript-sized pile of papers that was completely disorganized. It wasn’t even as organized as one of her lessons–and I’d taken quite a few lessons with her–because it was so much broader in scope,” added McCollom.

At a time when personal computers were just creeping into the world, McCollom faced the monumental organizational task without the ability to cut and paste.

“It was crazy. There were kids and dogs on the table and pages flying everywhere. It involved a lot of arrows and retyping, and pages that ended up in a drawer somewhere or under my dining room table that I would find later and have to add!” she said.

“Sally would drive to my house with her little dog, Joy, and she would suddenly think of another way to do it and would give me a lesson. She’d say, ‘See, this is how it works,’ and throw herself on the floor and start doing her exercises!”

McCollom, with input from Robbins, who did the final edit, worked with the maiden author to give her ideas a presentable shape, but the concepts in the book were all Swift’s.

“She was very articulate in explaining things, but was just not methodical in her presentation,” said McCollom. “All the core ideas and images were already crystallized.”

The first book took two years to develop from an amorphous “lump of pages” into its wildly successful current form. Those involved thought its sequel, published in 2002, would be a piece of cake, but it was seven years in the making.

“I think [Centered Riding 2] is a better book. They go together beautifully, but it was more universally appealing. The jumping chapters were better. Sally doesn’t really teach jumping, so she got input for those chapters from her instructors who did,” said McCollom.

She explained that the second collaboration took so long because Swift continued to add more and more information as they went along. “Through her continued fame, she was learning from other people, international instructors, and there was constantly information coming in.

“At this point, she was very elderly, and she was still throwing herself on the floor and showing me things!” McCollom added. “Her dog, Joy, now very old, was still there, too!”


Absorbing The Shock
“One thing Sally used to say was, ‘The function of a joint is to move.’ But people become these rigid little robots,” recalled Denny Emerson, who wrote the foreword to Sally Swift’s Centered Riding.

“What Sally was able to do with the images in the book–and some of them get a little ethereal and too touchy feely for some people–is to get people to let their bodies go a little bit and allow the movement of the horse to be felt,” Emerson continued.

“Essentially, you have this horizontal horse, that is a shock-wave machine, and you have a vertical rider, who has to somehow be a shock-absorbing machine. The book allowed people to understand that their body could adapt to that concussion and absorb it and dissipate it.”


Mouse Wheels And Elephant Wheels
Beneath the vivid concepts that illuminate the Centered Riding movement, as its foundation, is Sally Swift herself.

“If you really analyze learning to ride, there’s a lot of anxiety and a measure of fear, and out of that, it’s easy to let a pall of a sense of insufficiency cast its spell over you,” said Denny Emerson. “Sally doesn’t let you go there. With her, everything is, ‘Yes, you can.’ “

“She has an incredible ability to observe and figure out things that are happening in a person and a horse and can retransmit the information she’s absorbed in a way that’s almost non-verbal,” said Karen McCollom, who helped Swift write her books. “She helps people who learn physically and mentally, as well as verbally.

“Some of her images were hysterical. I remember laying my head on my desk, groaning, ‘OK, so there are mouse wheels, and there are elephant wheels�’

“Sally is totally uninhibited in her efforts to make things seem as real and entertaining to people as they are to her,” she continued. “She’s so delighted in life at all times. She is so open to everything in life.”

Observed Emerson, “She’s one of those people that when you’re around her, she uplifts you. She has that rare ability that when she walks into a room, everybody there feels better for her having spent time with them. That’s an amazing gift.”