When Sally Swift began her Centered Riding journey more than 35 years ago, she certainly didn’t know, or even imagine, that she would be etching her name among the ranks of the world’s greatest horsemen.

But her desire and enthusiasm for making the lives of horses and riders more joyful and harmonious carried her on an upward spiral to greatness.

“It’s not about lofty ideals or selling books,” wrote Swift in one of her newsletters about a year before she died in 2009. “For me, Centered [Riding] represents all that is good in today’s world. I realized that Centered Riding was my vision of what can be when we tear down the human armor and give a little of ourselves to one another and our four-legged friends.”

Retiring To Teaching

Swift’s career with horses started when many people would be looking forward to their sunset years. While she rode as a youth at the recommendation of Mabel Elsworth Todd, author of The Thinking Body and a physical therapist who was helping Swift overcome scoliosis, she focused on a career with cattle. She worked for the Holstein Association of Amer-ica for 21 years after graduating from Cornell University (N.Y.) in 1947.

She taught riding lessons off and on for most of her life, but only when she retired from the HAA in 1975, at age 62, did she begin teaching full time. She never advertised; her reputation spread by worth of mouth, and before long she was traveling up and down the East Coast giving clinics. Her concepts quickly spread like wildfire all over the world.

“Sally had all these totally new ideas that nobody had ever heard of,” said trainer Denny Emerson. “She understood the way your body worked. Most people get tense and tight. They’d try to force the horse and force themselves, but Sally could cut through that in a very quiet way. She was one of the real innovative thinkers in our sport. She looked at it from a totally fresh perspective. I think she changed the way a lot of people ride.”

Olympic dressage rider Lendon Gray worked closely with Swift while Centered Riding was in its infancy, and she said the time she spent in her indoor ring in Maine with Swift broadened her experience.

“Each year she came she had these wonderful new ideas,” reflected Gray. “We’d go down in the arena, and she would experiment with me. She was so positive and enthusiastic and was just doing it for the love of doing it. We really had unique one-on-one time together, and it was fun to be so open with someone and not be restricted by ‘this is how it’s always been.’ That was great fun.”

Changing The Face Of Riding

Though Swift never actually competed in dressage, she was an avid sup-porter of the sport long before the U.S. Dressage Federation was born.

“I was from that early 1960s era when there was no dressage in the United States to think of,” said Emerson. “Our concept of dressage, generally speaking, was much more aggressive and forceful than it is now. Nobody knew the right way to do it. It was out of ignorance and lack of opportunity [that we didn’t know] the correct way.”

Emerson, who went on to become one of the leading event riders of his time, credited Swift’s teachings with changing his own riding style.

“She was quiet, intelligent, compassionate and a class act in a hundred different ways,” he said. “She was a real horse person and never wanted to do anything through force. I think she softened up a lot of people like me who were a little rough and ready. Event riders in my day were tough guys. It was just a bunch of cowboys and cavalry men. She was a shining light in that time.”

Swift’s Centered Riding concept slowly developed into a tangible training method as the years went on. She focused her program on the four basics: breathing, soft eyes, building blocks and centering.

Once the four basics were achieved, grounding, or the feeling that the ground was coming up to support you, was the ultimate goal. Her peers and apprentices encouraged Swift to write her ideas down, and she published her first book, Centered Riding, in 1985. The book, and its sequel, Centered Riding 2: Further Explorations, became immediate successes. Together, they’ve sold more than 800,000 copies in 15 different languages.

“Sally brought teaching the rider back into the horse world,” said Lucille Bump, a good friend of Swift’s and a Centered Riding instructor. “Looking back at it, everyone was trying to teach the horse instead of the rider. She brought that back into it in a very neat way because she understood how the body worked. She had an intuitive way with horses and riders. She had a fantastic way of just looking and knowing what had to be done. It was amazing to watch her do it from the ground.”

Swift derived her ideas from different disciplines, including martial arts, and became a student in “body awareness” at a young age through her work with the Alexander Tech-nique. She used the Technique’s method of re-educating the mind and body in her teaching and used a balanced approach between working with specific parts of the body as well as both sides of the brain. Imagery became an essential part of her teachings, and many of today’s riders fondly recall her colorful analogies of how riding should feel.

“She let riders enjoy their riding, and that allowed the horses to be more comfortable in their work,” said Gray. “Everyone I worked with [at the time focused on] how to make my competition horses more competitive, but she was a breath of fresh air. [The goal] was to become better, more comfortable and more a part of the horse so the horse could enjoy his work. That had a strong impression and influence on me.”

An International Influence

Swift began traveling the world in the 1980s due to increased popularity of her methods. Centered Riding Inc. became a worldwide organization with more than 500 certified instructors and members in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe. Today, Swift’s message is continuing to spread to other countries such as Japan, Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Mexico and South Africa.

In 1985, she received a phone call from Richard Weis, an up-and-com-ing instructor from Australia, who received her book as a gift from one of his students. He’d been teaching adult education and yoga instruction along with his riding lessons, and he often apologized to his students because he wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he knew it had to be good for them.

When he read Swift’s first book, however, his work suddenly made sense, and he picked up the phone.

“She was a bit overwhelmed by having an Australian call because she wasn’t famous yet,” said Weis, who eventually became Swift’s first appren-tice. “She’d been doing some good work, and she’d written a book, but nobody knew if it would sell, and all of a sudden that [phone call] was a little sign of what was to come for her.”

Weis traveled to the United States to work with Swift for five months, and she became his mentor and a driving influence on his teaching career. Weis said that while he was nervous about the concept of trying to change the way riding was taught in Australia, Swift’s encouragement helped him move along the right path.

“What she taught me more than anything else was that as a thinker in the industry I had value,” said Weis. “I thought I was off center and was trying to find my way, and I was incredibly under-confident as a person and as a teacher. After I worked with Sally, I came back more confident in both areas in my life. That’s lasted, and I’ve been fairly successful in my career. I don’t think that would have happened had I not had that much encouragement.”

Weis was constantly amazed by her generosity and spirit.

“The wonderful thing about Sally was that she was really fundamentally creative,” added Weis. “She looked past the obvious and continued build-ing her life skills. She applied that creativity to every moment of her life.”

Her Lasting Legacy

“Sally really brought thoughtful riding to a whole group of people who perhaps felt a little left out,” said Gray. “She brought a way of describing good horsemanship to a very large number of people.”

While Swift’s teaching greatly changed riders like Emerson and Gray, her true gift was to the thousands of riders around the world who suddenly found the concept of harmony with their horses an achievable goal.

“Her legacy was the ability to teach the rider, putting it into the books, and then training instructors to teach it,” said Bump. “Reading the book is great, but if you have someone explaining it to you, telling you when you’ve got it, it makes a big difference.”

Swift was inducted into The Roemer Foundation/U.S. Dressage Federation Hall of Fame in 2006, and she earned the seventh Equine Industry Vision Award from Pfizer Animal Health and the American Horse Publications in 2008.

“Perhaps her most important influence has been in the back yards of horse owners all over the United States,” wrote Mimi Pantelides of Swift’s induction to the Hall of Fame. “She was able to simply and kindly communicate the basics of good horsemanship common to all forms of riding. The idea that a horse should be happy and comfortable in his work in order to do it well, and that a rider could attain this ideal by learning about himself as well as his mount, has been revolutionary.”

On April 2, 2009, the equestrian world lost one of its most influential horsemen. Swift peacefully passed away surrounded by her friends and Centered Riding family less than three weeks before her 96th birthday.

“She was always a very honest, straightforward person,” said Bump. “She was also very giving. She’d give and give and give whatever she had. We can all learn from that.

“It’s amazing how far reaching her influence is,” Bump continued. “Sally literally changed peoples’ lives by changing their body and changing their way of thinking. She really changed people, even though her intention was only to change their riding.”