I had a horse piaffe with me for the first time ever at about 9:30am on Tuesday 27th Jan 2026. Her name is Alya, she is 23yrs old, semi retired with a dodgy shoulder.
It was also completely unplanned - I had a lesson entirely in walk inhand focused on spinal alignment, stelling, counter flexion, adduction and abduction and half halting different hind feet on Alya, an elderly schoolmaster who had been out of work.
Then at the end we were cooling off Alya was like "that was good! But hard! No more focused work! Look at my tricks!" lil rear random spanish walk And I laughed like "sweetheart your tricks are not very intimidating you are in your space and I'm in mine" and a few minutes later she started half steps.
Without even thinking I slowed, slowed stopped my own feet, pointed a line down outside her shoulder with my eyes and felt this huge well of power behind my bellybutton and suddenly she was piaffing on X infront of me. Very, very, very cool.
I did not really think I could ever do that. And it was so distinct, and obvious of a feelage. It had always imagined piaffe would feel like a stationary passage, but it actually felt to me much much closer to a very collected uphill walk.
I think I dont have enough understanding of piaffe to find those intermediate steps and work towards it - like I don't understand how to get from where I am to where piaffe is with my own pony because I'm not sure how to regress it down to her current level.
With Ayla it was easy because it was suddenly very clear that SOMETHING was RIGHT THERE like on the other side of a thin membrane and all I had to do was channel and allow and provide a bit of resistance with my bodylanguage for that something to coil off, a nd suddenly surprise a piaffe. Thinking back, this is really similar to my first experiences of passage.
Weird tangent - this is also how good canter transistions sometimes feel to me, like sometimes canter is available bubbling under the surface, I can feel canter RIGHT THERE and I just do a tiny "something" maybe not even canter aid, just a wee bump or bounce or very tiny change of balance and then the horse is cantering. Its not always like that, sometimes the canter is not already available and I have to actually ask for the horse to canter (which isnt bad either) - but when the canter is already available before I ask its always a much better transisition. And sometimes I've felt that availability on very green horses who didnt have canter aids and the transisition STILL WORKED. (although no consistently, I did still have to teach the horse a "proper" "consistent" canter aid)
Anyhow I've been reliablely informed that piaffe is just sternum lifts -> renvers -> diagonalization -> halfsteps -> piaffe. So I'll get onto that ;) and also go back and have more lessons with Alya to put more feelages in my collection!