Tag Archives: healing

Words Make a Difference

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When I lived in New York City in another lifetime, I always wondered what it would be like to be a cab driver and hear all these personal conversations.

I think of horses having to hear all our conversations. Many times I think humans don’t realize the importance of their words, their stories, the emotional impact behind what falls out of their mouths.

This has come back to me recently with my young mare, Red. I get the distinct feeling that she doesn’t want to be referred to as a “rescue,” so I will refer to her as my young, adopted mare whom I got from a loving sanctuary. She has had a hard life packed into a short period of time and no one needs to hear that story over and over again.

Imagine if I was introducing you, my friend or colleague, and I said, “This is my friend Lucy. She was in a foster home; her father beat her and she nearly drowned when she was two years old.” Rather than, “I’d like you to meet Lucy, she’s a gifted painter and beautiful rider.”

We would like to be introduced in the best light possible. I say things that are true about Red and any horse that I know, if I know enough about them to comment. I say, she is the bravest, most courageous mare I have ever known, beautifully willing and enthusiastic. (If anyone will give me that much airtime!) And it is all true.

Recently, the true characters of some people have come forward for me with regard to her, and while some of these – even professionals – have been around for some time and well regarded, I have felt disappointed by their response and lack of respect for my horse and for others. They may not talk disrespectfully about all horses but if they do that about just one, it’s in their hearts.

A lot of this arises out of fear, as horses who have been mistreated in the past may respond in a flight/fright mode. Some horses really aren’t safe to be around. We don’t know what they might do. I understand that, and it may mean not working with that animal or minimizing contact. In all these situations, it’s important to recognize our fear of the horse who doesn’t do exactly what we want or might exhibit some unwanted behavior. Recognize what the animal is able to offer and start from there. The horse may behave very well with its owner but have trouble with strangers, and it takes awhile to overcome what abuse may have taken place at the hands of strangers.

Also, people who call horses unflattering names are not doing horses any favors. It’s fine to call them little gentle pet names like goofballs, which I’m fond of calling my geldings, but not mean names. The horse takes it all in. My sense is that they have heard the bad name before in a much less pleasant setting and it brings back memories. I’ve noticed my mare Red has a sensitivity to certain names and I expect that she’s heard those mean names before.

Even a story of another horse’s trouble can upset a horse. And I know this sounds crazy to some, but the horse feels it and the horse can see it in pictures. The horse may convey those pictures to me. My horses do that, and some client horses do too.

I used to go into this whole thing about relaying stories about how someone mistreated a horse and how awful that was, but the horse doesn’t want to attach itself to that story anymore. It wants the new beginning it’s been offered, the new richness of love and respect. If I need to discuss background with an owner, I will try to minimize the story, have them fill out a form beforehand, or talk about it away from the horse. Ultimately, the horse’s demeanor and body will tell the most important parts of the story.

We have more rescues and horses who may have come on hard times after being worked really hard, won their owners money or other kudos, than ever before. Horse shelters and kill pens are overflowing. And so many horses have lives the equivalent of going from one home to another, as in a foster care situation, or worse, knowing they are one step away from slaughter. This is hardly good for their self-esteem.

With that said, there are some horses who want to be the subject of the story, and enjoy hearing how they were rescued or how they got well after being ill for a long time. Usually it’s an older horse that feels proud of what he or she has accomplished. I have one like that – I can talk about his story and he is very pleased to have people know about him. But I talk about it in a way that shows how proud I am of his accomplishments and that helps people know him better and admire him.

For the hour or hours that I’m entrusted with a horse’s care,  I bring my best to them, and I want to acknowledge their gifts, their personality, who they really are. That’s the beginning of any session we share. I can’t bring them all home with me, but that time we share is a healing time just for them and their owners. I want it to integrate into their daily lives as a positive change.

Bottom line: horses are in our care, and if we bring them our joy at seeing them, remarking on something really cool or positive about them each day, their nervous systems will surely relax and seek to connect.

Meditation for a New Year

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As I have received so many Happy New Year messages from so many, I feel compelled to write one too. There is an eagerness, a hopefulness that this year will be better than the last. New year’s resolutions are made and discarded at the first temptation to do otherwise. Perhaps because they put more expectations on us.

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come,

Whispering ‘it will be happier’.” Alfred Lord Tennyson

So maybe we talk about something else – how it’s possible to reach out to people and animals across the planet, not just in our backyard? That while in some parts of the world you might be snowed in or otherwise unable to go minister to somebody who needs it, you can send a message. Not just ‘I’m thinking of you, hearts and prayers,’ but a message from my heart to yours.  They may live five thousand miles away. Or if the body is not responding well at all, how about just sitting with the person or animal, being with them? If you can’t sit still for whatever reason, do something.

One morning recently I could not take care of someone’s animal physically, and so I decided to make bread. I decided then to make the bread in honor of that animal, and lo and behold the animal got up and started moving. In a way, taking the pressure off, just doing stuff, may have made a difference.

The message sent does not carry any baggage; it’s not a pushing or moving of energy, it’s  just an inquiry, or a sitting with a situation, not influencing a particular outcome.

With one animal I worked with at distance over the holidays, at first she couldn’t bear my making contact. I said in that case, I’ll just be over here, and sit with you but not too close. After that, she began to inch closer and began to share herself. It was completely her decision.

How do we work without expectation to embody a sense of well-being in ourselves and others?

A way to begin this may be as follows:

Hold a meditation for the new year. I strongly suggest getting comfortable, with a cup of your favorite tea or coffee.

Begin with the body, your body and include your animal bodies. Begin with the space between the big and next toe and just hold it and see what you feel. Do you feel a connection to another part of you? Does it hold a memory? If so, just remember that but move on to another part – the lower leg, the knee, the hips, the buttocks. Some of these areas may hold a memory of pain, a surgery, a fall. If you feel you’re getting plugged up there for some reason, or the body doesn’t want you there, leave it and move on up the body. If you’re working with an animal at the same time, the animal may have areas it feels at the same time as you, or different ones that pull at you, areas it wants to avoid or becomes sad with upon contact.

So acknowledge those sensitive areas and move on. Move on to the midsection, remember you pass through various chakras at the same time, where different energies are held. You don’t have to identify those now, you can simply know that you have a root chakra, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye and crown. At any one of those places along the midline and the band surrounding it laterally on both sides (heart will include shoulders, for example), you may hold energies of either good or bad things. Just the recognition may bring a certain peace. If it doesn’t, move on to a new location.

You can hold your hands upturned at your sides and feel warmth grow in your hands. These are the hands that can touch or simply hold energy for others, and for yourself.

Moving up through the heart area – what do you feel? During this colder season, sometimes the chest area becomes compressed, warding off cold, and the heart becomes squashed in there. It needs room to feel everything it can feel.

Then move further up to the throat, the third eye above your eyebrows, and crown at the center of the top of your head.

Check now and see what parts of you feel lit up, alive. Which are they? Connect one of them to an area that doesn’t feel so alive or is in pain or emotional turmoil, and see what happens.

Sometimes just gently cupping the face area can relax the tension collected by frowns, tense jaws, concentration, worries. Once recognized, you may move to a place of seeing differently, quietly, letting peace drape around you like a soft blanket.

To come out of the meditation when ready, retrace your journey from head to feet, slowly, checking in with each area. See how it feels. Is there still tension or disturbance there or has it gone? Is a painful place less troubled? Does another area call you? Check with your animals as you retrace the journey with them.

In this small meditation, your body and/or your animal’s body gets to have a voice. It is given space to move and decide, or not.

This is what I want for my new year – to enter a realm of possibility for healing without a list of expectations.

 

A Healing Journey is an Historic Journey

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A healing journey is specific, non-specific, historic, full of layers and wondrous avenues of enlightenment. The layers that developed first – en utero, at birth – will be deepest in the body, and the last ones to heal. Perhaps we can go farther back than that – generations that will heal last, if at all in this lifetime. The healing journey is one of seeking to unravel those layers in the body’s time, as it has a time of its own. Seeking self-correction.

With minor injuries  the person or animal may not need veterinary or therapeutic care at all, it will deal with it on its own. If one needs to see a bodyworker, then one or two sessions will suffice at getting the body back on track.

When I talk about injury, that injury could be internal or external, it could be musculoskeletal, visceral, neurological, circulatory, emotional, psychological, psychic…

Rehab is a process. Perhaps the person doesn’t want to get started because he or she has developed a system of compensation that holds together pretty well. This new wrinkle in health is an annoyance, something to be flicked away like a fly.

The body is constantly making adaptations. Every time the body gets injured or diseased it launches a response to compensate so that it can keep on trucking.

When the injury is repetitive, and comes from a major event or series of major events, then the symptoms are going to remain or morph. The horse whose hind end keeps dropping out from under him in work, for example, will require regular maintenance. The person who has had a traumatic shoulder injury may need support after physical therapy has ended. Bodies with a number of compensations and lacking vitality are of course going to have more trouble and possibly be more prone to re-injury, so the added support will be paramount in their healing.

Unfortunately for all concerned, the longer the injury exists and the larger in magnitude it is, including repetitive injury, it will create a linked compensation pattern throughout the entire body.

Horses demonstrate to us repetitive stress in so many ways. They are subjected to repetitive activities – training, carrying people with unaddressed repetitive stress and compensatory patterns, saddles, bridles, other tack, trailering, abuse, repetitive behaviors.

Fascia is a huge component to the musculo-skeletal system as it adapts and compensates for injury.  Ortho-Bionomy can address fascial challenges, not just what is called “myofascial” work. Fascia envelops every bodily structure, not just skeleton and muscles. Soft tissue – fascia, muscle, tendons and ligaments will change quickly when injured but can take much longer to recover. The bones, the organs protected by bones and other tissues are also connected and need help.

Untouched, repetitive stress patterns deepen in the tissues and muscles will reduce in size as well as increase in size. You can see this in horses very clearly in the gluteal muscles – where one part of the gluteal structure will be flaccid and another will be rock hard. Or, in the hamstrings, where the hamstrings are rigid and restricting the hocks and stifles while the gluteals will be flaccid, almost unresponsive. At this point the joints, ligaments and tendons are being pulled unevenly by muscles. All this can cause pain in hocks, stifles, ligaments, and create spinal and hoof problems.

Without care, the bones will begin to compensate for the pulls and slacks in the whole system. It is a tensegrity system, where tension in one area creates slack in another, and everything is off balance. The bones may develop arthritic changes as a result – all the way through the horse – jaw, poll, neck, spine, hocks – though the original insult may have begun somewhere in the hindquarter. Once degeneration occurs in the bone then the opportunity to rehabilitate is lessened.

This gives us an idea of rehabilitation – it isn’t an overnight process in these cases. It needs to take place slowly, addressing each layer as an individual, peeling them back as the body is able to address them.

Supporting exercises can be huge for the body that has been stuck in one posture for what seems like forever.  The exercise will be gentle, appropriate to the body’s ability to respond and use the movement to its advantage. Most likely the recipe will not include belly lifts, tail pulls or for humans, crunches or push-ups. Ground poles, conscious walking exercise, straight lines in some cases, a little hill work maybe, also looking at what’s available in the horse’s environment to help him or her recover. For humans, light stretching and body awareness.

My primary vision is to “meet the body where it is,” where that is in space and time, and address what it is willing and able  to show at any given time. This way, the body is able to take the new stimulus and create wondrous avenues of enlightenment – from the place we’re working to include somewhere else in the body.

We move away from the looking at what’s wrong – it’s this or it’s that, because while surely it is those things, the compensation is coming from a lot of places and the body wants to be addressed as a whole. Not only will it show its compensation, it will show its strengths – where it can move and where it is light and receptive.

For me, this is where I begin – the most receptive, enlightened part of the being.

 

Where does our love of horses come from?

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Lost in the Horse

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I was lying on the massage table receiving physical therapy recently and talking about myself as I was asked to do, past injuries, etc., and then I made a switch to talking about one of my horses. My therapist expertly swung me back to the discussion of “me,” which is why I’m there, and I realized something – not just about me, but many of us who work with horses or love them.

We would prefer to talk about horses than anything else. Horses are like meditation to us.

Screen Shot 2014-06-28 at 12.55.20 PM

They are definitely calming, even when talking about something that isn’t right with them.

But there is another piece to this which may sound wild to some people, but I’ll put it out there: we get lost in the horse. It becomes an “out-of-body-experience” when we need to be in our bodies to experience it. We need to be in our bodies to give the horse her due, and to heal ourselves.

This is the awareness, the eye-opener, that appeared to me on that table, that I want to share with you, because I am so good at doing this myself.

I know I’m talking about several different things, but I’m really talking about the same thing. I’m talking about staying in the moment, in the body. If I am to learn the new way of using my body in physical therapy, then I need to be in the moment to absorb all the nuances of what my practitioner is telling me. It’s not a time to wax eloquent on how far one of my horses has come in his physical or emotional development!

While sometimes the conversation can be helpful for bringing us around to the true story of one’s own body, it can also take us far afield, out of ourselves and pain.

I’m in physical therapy for a reason, because I’m healing from something. Pay attention.

IMG_0630Being “in the moment,“ and “in the body” do take some time and energy to achieve, especially in Western society. We are expected to be out of the body in a lot of our daily interactions with people and in our jobs.

But horses live in the body and in the moment, so they would like our interactions with them to take place there.

I will say that with every horse mishap and accident I’ve had, I’ve been out of my body. My energy has not been centered. People who come to me after horse wrecks tell me all the time, “I knew that I shouldn’t have gotten on…” “I knew the horse wasn’t ready…” because it can be the horse that is not agreeable also, not just the person.

What has helped me to stay in my body has been a variety of things. There will always be things to pull me off course. But these steps help me stay focused:

  • Breathe. Breathe into areas of discomfort if you have them.
  • Pay attention to the horses when you feel out of body. Know when your energy right and when the horse’s energy is too high or not agreeable. It’s okay to say, I don’t think I’ll ride today. Or, this exercise isn’t right for this horse at this time.
  • When you feel yourself being pulled into the horse’s story, pull back and see how you feel in your own body. How does it make you feel? Do you feel empathetic pangs in a corresponding part of your body?
  • There is a difference between an emotional response and a response formed from data collection. Do a small investigation to find out which you’re experiencing. If in doubt, check in with your own body – touch your heart space, and connect up there. Do you need to address the emotional climate or the physical data you’re receiving, or are they intertwined?
  • Walk with your horse if you can. Let him or her graze a little then continue the walk and pay attention to your own body while walking. Where do you put your feet and how do you place them on the ground? What’s the rest of your body doing? How does your horse respond to this?
  • If your horse is excitable, check your own energy and shift it so it goes deep into the ground. Watch and see what your horse’s response is. Then recheck your own energy.

When I work with horses in a healing capacity, if they are trying to avoid my noticing something painful, they will flatten their ears or kick out maybe, or become dull in the eyes. They may move away from me and give me the distinct impression I’m not welcome. Sometimes the mere intention of wanting to heal will make them nervous. I have to arrive in their space with less agenda and give them space. The space may be then filled with part avoidance, but will gradually turn to curiosity as I work in areas that are not so triggered for them.

With the horse, while their natural state is to be in the body all the time, when people are around and trying to help with pain, sometimes they get “out of the body” too, just like us.

[Catherine Sobredo Photography]
[Catherine Sobredo Photography]
Most of them welcome the help. The other day a mare I was working with kept presenting her head to me. You’ve got to do something about my head, I kept getting from her. But at the same time, she didn’t want me to touch it, until I had worked elsewhere. And then it was just in small increments on or around the head, but it made a difference. During this time, I checked with her, and I checked with myself.

Sometimes we know we need help with something, but we are operating with our foot on the brakes and accelerator at the same time because of pain, whether physical or emotional.

Deflecting attention away from the pain can also be a way of not being in the body or the moment.

The horse also knows that we know how to figure out a lot of things. This is one of the things they like about us, and attracts them to us. We may not be as smart as them in some ways such as staying in the moment for such long stretches of time, but we can get aha moments and figure out how to help them because we have the intellect.

What has helped me a lot with the “lost in the horse” issue is to work on something that is my challenge and include one of my horses. For example, the PT work has offered me new ways to walk and sit. I’m applying that new knowledge to my walking with my horse, and my sitting in the saddle. This can best be done with a horse with whom you have a good relationship with, not recommended with one you’re trying out for the first time!

I find my horse – whichever one either comes forward for the task or I feel is the one for that activity – enjoys being helpful and helping me figure it out. The horse will behave much the same way with this helping activity as they do when you introduce new activities for them. The added plus is that they can not only feel a sense of accomplishment from completing the activity, as they do with ones planned for them. But they can feel a sense of accomplishment in helping you solve a problem.img_0320.jpg

All of this helps me stay in the moment. It also gives me something new to talk about when I go to PT and can talk about the progress I have made, still weaving in my horse stories, but now in relationship to the PT work!

(Some of these new insights will be incorporated into this year’s Conformation, Compensation or Both? classes offered in Florida, Santa Fe and Oregon. The relationship work will be detailed in the class Equine Liberty from the Heart, offered in Santa Fe, NM)

(c) Susan Smith, Horses at Liberty Foundation Training, Equine Body Balance (TM)

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Leadership revisited – both horse and human

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JazziefaceIn horse training, leadership is discussed a lot. If the person doesn’t have leadership, the horse will not be as responsive to them. There are people who are born with innate leadership. In horses, leadership potential can be recognized the moment the foal drops to the earth.

A breeder friend of mine once said, of certain foals, they recognized it in themselves and you as a person could immediately recognize this presence, this ability to be a leader. It wasn’t necessarily attached to physical attraction or size. It generally has to do with the presence of the individual and their awareness and caretaking ability, of other members of the herd.

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The deepening bond between horse and human

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The trail followed the creekbed then crossed it, curving like a snake up the side of the canyon. My horse stopped to drink in the creek, then scaled the rocky side of the canyon and the switchbacks, a steep drop on one side, a canyon wall on the other.

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The spectrum for horse and human

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There is a spectrum from 0 – 100+ or maybe more in terms of engagement and levels of interaction for horse and human.

Oliver_Tina2016
Oliver takes a really long time to come over to Tina to get treats.

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Subtle language of horses

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The other day I was working on a horse who began to swish his tail when I attempted to lift a hind leg. Obviously, this was painful for him, so he was letting me know in the way that he knows how, without kicking or biting me.

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What is your horse’s self worth?

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My mare Zuzka recently showed me something while I was riding my mare Jazzie in the arena. She looked directly at me and proceeded to wrap a lead rope that was hanging from a halter on the fence, around her neck. It was as if to say, “take me out for a ride.”

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