Books with Spirit – Joyfulness between horses and people

A student’s horses were recently treated by a vet for pinworm infestation by treating them for 5 days in a row of an Ivermectin based chemical wormer. 

I’m anti toxic chemicals, but even so, I was shocked at that kind of toxic overload for worms that are not harmful to the horse’s health (they don’t migrate through organs or body tissue for their life cycle).  They are unpleasant little critturs though, who can cause the horse to itch like crazy, so I decided to post this simple remedy for pin worms.

Click here for the rest of this article.

I enjoyed reading Linda Parelli’s article on Hill Therapy that is in the Fluidity program.  Since that is a particularly strong area of expertise for me, I much enjoyed seeing a focus on restoring horses to good muscular and skeletal health.  

You can add a powerful improvement for your horse to that Hill Therapy Program – by adding an emotional aspect to the work.  

“What?” you’re probably thinking…

What have emotions got to do with bad posture, poor musculature, short, choppy, uneven strides and even skeletal damage? 

Well, emotions have a HUGE effect on our horse’s  physical body.  Click here for the rest of this article.

Hi Jenny ~ I have a yearling Pre.Andalusian that has just come down with a condition that looks very much like Stringhalt the vet is saying that it’s an intoxication i.e. poisoning which I’m assuming is from the plant Catsear!  This
year we have had an extremely hot summer and although I’ve been feeding myhorses my youngster seems to have gone down with this condition and as you can imagine I’m extremely upset for him as he’s such a beautiful young horse please can you give me any help regarding this condition and is it curable ? Yours  Karen

Stringhalt is absolutely curable, so do not worry except for using that worry to change what needs to be changed! Click here to read the rest of this article

Here’s a great reason for keeping two or more horses together, that you might not have come accross. 

There is a powerful acupuncture point in the horse’s mouth that releases endorphins (the feel good, pain relieving hormone).  That point is located where the gum joins the upper lip in the centre of the horses mouth.

Yesterday, I noticed that when they rub another horse with the pad of the their nose, they activate that acupuncture point and release the feel good endorphins. So, rubbing another horse is a seriously pleasurable event.

I have also noticed that as they rub another horse, they are often working on that horse’s known pressure and acupuncture points. (Gee whiz, what a surprise that they know what they are doing! Yes, a little Aussie sarcasm there…) 

I see it in clinics a lot, how being rubbed by another horse actively improves visible muscular problems. (I tend to notice these things because of my extensive experience in fixing muscular-skeletal problems in horses.)

These two insights taken together, mean that depriving a horse of a companion to rub and be rubbed by, seriously compromises our horse’s ability to self heal.

Click here for how this relates to windsucking

When your horse wants to be with you and wants to do what you want to do, you can achieve so much more with your horse.

Last week I worked on a wonderful 20 year old Arabian mare, Bremervale Promise, in the vet check and rest intervals of a 160 kilometre ride, that she completed in around 18 hours.  No big deal, she would have made it fine without me – maybe the reiki healing that I gave her made it a bit more comfortable, that’s all. 

This was Promise and young Sarah McLaughlin’s 4^th Quilty buckle, a silver belt buckle that is a symbol of the completion of that ride.  So this was the fourth time Promise had gone out and carried Sarah for 160 kilometres in less than 24 hours.  Congratulations on a brilliant effort to Sarah and Promise and all the other partnerships that completed the event with their horses in good enough condition to go out again.

Then there was the star of the show as far as I am concerned, a partnership between a lady and a white haired elderly gentleman named Sarisha, a 23 year old Arabian gelding who achieved their 11th Quilty buckle.  This was the eleventh time that Sarisha  had carried his owner Keryn Mahoney for 160 kilometres in much, much less than 24 hours.  This is an extraordinary new record and deserved of huge congratulations. 

So what makes it possible for one horse to do the most extraordinary feat of endurance with their rider, year after year after year?  And others cannot?

Click here for the rest of this story.

Yesterday, I was working with a horse who had just arrived from Queensland for The Quilty, who was tying up.  The Quilty is a 100 mile endurance ride and it’s being held at Tonimbuk this year, relatively close to where I live. 

Tying up is a painful muscle condition, with cramping,  stiff movement, they don’t want to move when it’s really set in. Their heart rate is elevated and they are breathing faster.  The horse is in serious pain when they are tying up. 

There is a strong school of thought that nervousness of the horse is a big contributing factor to horses that tie up. 

The method of communication that I write about in Zen Connection  with Horses and teach in clinics,  usually makes it possible  for a nervous horse to become a confident horse quite quickly.   At the very least, they become a lot more confident.  It’s very powerful.

I had just finished a healing session on this tying up and the lovely little horse was walking with much looser steps and looking more relaxed in the eye. 

I decided to teach her rider how to listen to her horse’s emotional communication so that I could go home for the night knowing that the right things would happen at the right time – so that she would know when to walk her, when to rest etc. 

This incident reminded me of how easy it is to teach people to do this and made me decide to post this helpful article here on the blog. 

Click here to read the rest of this article about how you can notice when your horse is communicating with you emotionally.

I’ve been doing alternative therapies for 14 years now and I have more than 15 different healing modalities that I use in my healing work, yet I still marvel at the power of Bowen muscle therapy.    

The very gentle and non invasive Bowen ‘moves’ put a vibration in the muscle that releases muscle spasm and resets the brain to muscle connection for optimum muscle operation.  Bowen is an excellent modality for the clearing away of muscular-skeletal problems in horses. 

In this Bowen course, I’ve added the precision of the pendulum to prioritise the Bowen ‘moves’, which makes the original excellent Bowen work seriously more powerful.  I’ve also added horse communication as I consider it an essential healing tool for anybody who is working with horses.  The combination gives you a healing course guaranteed to knock your socks off.

To see a horse with a simple and common condition like a sore back get such quick and easy relief is such a buzz.  

I also have many, many stories of amazing healing that has taken place with Bowen muscle therapy, some of them bordering on the miraculous – long term lamenesses gone, muscles moving freely, muscle spasms released, bones sliding back into place, colic turned off like throwing a light switch, a dog who had been paraplegic for 3 months walking again.  But the best story that I have about the power of this healing modality is about one of my students.

Click here to read that story and other details about courses learning Bowen muscle therapy for horses.

We have two 3 day Bowen courses coming up – one here at Tanjil South in Victoria, Australia from Saturday 14th to Monday 16th October and another in New Zealand at Wainuiomata 28th, 29th and 30th Novmember 2009

Here is a query about stringhalt from a reader that came in through the website.  I thought I would share my answer with you.

“I was just reading about bobbys case of stringhalt.  My thoroughbred also has stringhalt.  I’ve taken him out of the paddock and given him a mineral block and he has improved.  The only time it’s noticable now is when he makes the transition to a trot from a canter.  He has also dropped quite a lot of weight so I’m now hard feeding him and I’m just not sure if thats gunna make the stringhalt worse so I thought I’d ask your advice.  He has a round bale of grass hay in his paddock and I hard feed him chaf mixed with hygains honey bee. Any advise would be greatly appreciated.”

Click here to read my reply

Once your horse has discovered their deep comfort zone, their back will start changing shape for the better, sometimes quite dramatically.  In every clinic I teach, I see horses backs healing under our eyes, without anything else happening except this extraordinary connection of horse and rider.

Click here to read about how you can help your horse strengthen his back for the saddle work.

First of all, why should we want to do such a thing?

·        As as an animal specialist in alternative therapies, with a passion for horses, I am constantly working to reverse the damage that the harsh worming chemicals do to animal’s systems, on one occasion, fighting for the horse’s life and that was directly caused by a chemical wormer. 

·        I see many, many animals (mostly horses and dogs) who have high worm burdens when they have been chemically wormed regularly, some on very expensive veterinary preparations.  So chemical worming preparations don’t always work as well as we would like them to.

·        Chemical wormers kill the “critters” in the soil that are essential for the health and robustness of pasture/plant life.  i.e. from tiny insects to worms, to dung beetles, to microbes.  This is MUCH more important than I ever realised.

Click here to read the rest of this article about alternative methods to chemical worming for your horse