Sally Swift and Centered Riding

Published in Equus December 2015. Click on each image to read the complete article.

Copied from Centered Riding February 2025 Newsletter. "2025 is not just another year here in the Centered Riding community. It marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Sally Swift’s landmark first book, “Centered Riding!”
In 1985, Trafalgar Square Books (TSB) in North Pomfret, Vermont, was a small-town business, just getting started in publishing. “Centered Riding” by Sally Swift was the first horse book they produced.1 It quickly captured the attention and imagination of
equestrians far and wide. Countless book stores and libraries began stocking it, and before long, riders, trainers, horse owners, and many others far and wide began reading it. More importantly, people began implementing Centered Riding techniques and
principles in their work with horses and riders, and in their own day-to-day lives.
1 The source of much of the information in this article can be found on the Trafalgar Square Books website,
at: https://trafalgarbooks.com/pages/our-story (accessed January 29, 2025). '

Sally Swift's "journey" to becoming a riding teacher who has probably helped more actual people than the most famous Olympian didn't really start rolling until she was in her sixties.

Sally had scoliosis, so her own riding was limited, but probably, just as they say blind people have a heightened sense of hearing as a compensatory mechanism, Sally had an uncanny sense of what body part was the root cause of something else. Fix the root, start to fix the bigger problem. An example might be that rigid shoulders prevented a swinging back, that sort of thing.

At first, I don't think Sally's insights were accepted or even "welcomed" by the "dressage community."

After all, they said, she isn't a rider. She has worked for decades for a Holstein cow association. In Brattleboro, Vermont. She is old. What does she know?

But Sally could see, and therefor fix, posture and mechanical and emotional issues that flew past the radar screens of the more famous "experts."

Her book, Centered Riding, is probably the biggest selling non fiction horse book of all time, and every day riders use Sally's techniques to loosen up and balance and be more one with the horses they ride.

And Sally was totally and completely non judgmental. She tried just as hard with someone most trainers would write off as she would with some current riding icon.

A famous rider is only famous for about as long as he/she is riding and competing, and after a few years of retirement, is vanished and forgotten. But Sally Swift who died in 2009 at 95, will be remembered today, as riders all over the world quote her and use her teachings.