Books with Spirit – Joyfulness between horses and people

For those of us looking to be the best that we can be, for and with our horses, stillness or quietness of mind is something that is priceless, particularly when we are actually with our horses.  

Here is a particularly lovely poem that I came across on the website of  the International House of Reiki  yesterday.

For the relevance to our work with horses, in the fourth stanza, third line, I changed one word from “accept” to “understand”.  I hope the author will not hold that against me… 

Stillness
K. Hudson
Emerald Isle, NC 11.2.09

Let me let the stillness be.
Let me let the “me” be “Me”.
In face of You sometimes I flee,
rushing, doing, busily.

Let me let the stillness be.
Let me slow and breathe and see.
Let me feel my hand touch Me.
Let my heart rise and break free.

Just who is it that must allow?
Who bars the way, the path, the how?
Who uses fear to bend and bow?
Is it me who won’t, who blocks the Now?

Let me let the stillness be
I choose then Now to trust, to see,
understand the fear, embrace that me…
I love and let You. I am free.

And when I let You work in Me
I finally let the stillness be
And in that Being then I see
In the stillness, You are Me.

When I read this poem, it gave me goose bumps.  I thought “this must be a Horse person”.

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.

Google about the foals that are taken from their mothers way too young, so that the drug company can use their mothers to make Premarin.  Not a pretty thought… I had an email from Anna Twinney – good on you Anna from reachouttohorses.com and the folks at the foal rescue centre for what they are dong with some of these foals.

About the drugs involved -  we have the power, ladies, to vote with our wallets and make a difference.  We are powerful as individuals.  Collectively, and with the horses, there isn’t anything we can’t do!

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.

We were taught how to be brave around our horse, we were taught to ignore our fear, push it down, get on with it, ride them through it and many other ways of describing ”don’t pay any attention to your fear”.  We were even taught to get back on when we were bucked off – even if we were terrified.  And we were taught all that by wonderful, well-meaning people who knew no other way of dealing with fear.

I am so happy to be able to tell you that we don’t need to walk that path any more.

 Click here for the rest of this article.

I tell you all … after revamping the clinic pages on this website today and seeing clearly for the first time everything that I do,  I wonder when I ever get time to write books and still do healing sessions on people, horses, dogs and other critturs!  And yet I do … And I love it all – woo hooo! 

Go check  out my hard work, click the ”CLINICS”  button at the top of this page.

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

If you are feeling anxious, nervous or a lack of confidence when you are on your horse, then get off that horse.  Make yourself safe – get off that horse and learn how you and your horse can enjoy riding all the time.

Anxious, nervous and a lack of confidence are all words that we use to dismiss our fear.  The problem is, we are supposed to listen to our fear, not dismiss it. 

Our fear is designed to keep us safe.

Yep, that’s right – we are supposed to listen to it, we are supposed to know something about it or we are supposed to do something about it and then we are supposed to take some kind of action to make ourselves safe.

What?  Nobody told you that either?

I don’t know about you, but I am over 50 years old now and the ground has got harder every year – so being as safe as I can be is a very high priority for me.

These days, I don’t wait until I feel anxious or afraid to make myself safe.  I pay attention and take action on a very small early warning signal that I call Not Quite Right.  Listening to Not Quite Right and taking action on it has taken me on the most amazing journey, both with horses and in the rest of my life.

When you get off that horse, I don’t know how long you’ll be with your horse on the ground.  But I do know that you will enjoy being on the ground, developing a relationship with your horse that world class riders would envy. 

By the time you’ve finished the 8 simple audio lessons that you take out to your horse on your MP3 player (the 8 lessons that are in the  Zen Connection with Horses book and CD package) you will be getting back in the saddle with a different and wonderful perpective on what a horse and human can be together.

And you are entitled to not only be safe – but feel safe.

Zen Connection with Horses comes as a printed book and CD package or you could be reading the e-book in five minutes and I’ll post the CD of the audio lessons out to you. 

Zen Connection with Horses, like all my books, comes with my personal ”love this book or get your money back” guarantee.  Click here.