Isabelle Greenfield Dreams of horses

23/05/2026

I wish every of my students could read this . Specially the saddle part as it is something we often discuss. In my opinion it is often what tips the horses from being half ok to being not ok .
It also highlights that with diligent students who commit to the rehab and agree not to ride for a while, even using online lessons it is possible to make big changes. One thing I have learnt is that the plasticity of the body is pretty incredible

7 months ago this horse could not be ridden.

Barb had known something was wrong. She had been riding this horse for years on the trails they both loved, and things had quietly stopped working.

The body had not broken down overnight. It rarely does. The horse doesn’t object at the first sign of discomfort. He finds a workaround, a small adjustment in how he moves that takes the load away from what hurts. Then another. The workarounds accumulate until the system is so far from its original organisation that what was once a quiet signal has become a structural problem. By the time the owner sees it clearly, many parts of the body are already under significant stress. Every practitioner will find something different because they are each finding a piece of the same picture.

This is why I encourage every horse owner to look up Sue Dyson’s ridden horse pain ethogram. The signs are there earlier than we think, and they are worth reading. Does your horse react when you brush certain areas? When the saddle goes on, do the nostrils tighten, the eyes close, the body shift away? When the girth comes up? These are not quirks. They are the only language available to your horse, and the earlier they are heard, the simpler the path forward.

The first sign that a saddle has become a problem is often the imprint it leaves after a ride. The body has begun fitting itself around the saddle rather than the saddle fitting the horse. By the time that shape is clearly visible, the damage is already accumulating. In combination with poor posture or movement imbalances, an ill fitting saddle can contribute to conditions like kissing spine and sacroiliac dysfunction. Part of the commitment I asked Barb to make was that she would not ride him until his body was ready to carry her comfortably again. She committed immediately.

That was the start of a twelve session rehab pathway over seven months.

Rehabilitation of back issues starts from the ground, always. The smallest adjustments and incremental restoration of oscillation and healthy organisation come before anything else. The body releases in stages. The topline begins to return. The hind legs find their way back under the horse rather than swinging or stumbling around the dysfunction. When the saddle finally came out, we spent a session understanding exactly what had happened and why. Barb found a fitting saddle within a week, I loved that! Riding was added incrementally from there.

Barb is not a dressage trainer. She told me in our first session that she’d never liked arena work. Not one of our sessions was focused on dressage training or complicated manoeuvres. The exercises were simple, grounded in how the living system actually works, and Barb felt confident doing all of them. From a horse that needed constant pushing to stay forward and was nearly impossible to move with any enthusiasm, he became a horse that walks, trots, and canters on the lightest aid. Now they’re back on the trails with a maintenance structure to keep building his body.

I have never met Barb or her horse in person. Every session has been online. That still makes me quietly excited, that through a screen, this kind of support is possible.

If your horse has been diagnosed with kissing spine, sacroiliac dysfunction, a suspensory injury, or any of the conditions that seem to close the door on normal work, it doesn’t have to stay closed. And it doesn’t have to take years.

Barbara Douglas, thank you for your trust and your dedication. And Katja Mueller, thank you for seeing what needed to be seen and knowing what to do with it. This is what a horse community built on good knowledge looks like. ❤️

22/05/2026

If you are one of my regular students, you know that I am always available for a chat if you get stuck in between lessons.
For those of you, who send me regular DM with questions about their horses as much as I would like to help you all, my time is limited and precious so I have decided to open up a couple of new options:

A one off assessment: This can be online or face to face, if you are still hesitant to commit to a lesson package after your 20 min free consult or simply want to check me out.
A telephone consultation: This is the opportunity to discuss specific issues
Check out the list of options on my website:
https://www.dreamsofhorses.com/book-online

20/05/2026

This book is going to be something special

The rib cage is not a cage. The name is the first mistake.

A cage is rigid, designed to contain. What the ribs form is a spiral structure, capable of rotation and lateral flexion, transmitting the oscillatory wave from hindquarters forward and redistributing force across the whole thorax with every stride. When it is free to move as it was designed to move, the rider feels it as swing. When it is not free, the rider feels nothing, and mistakes that stillness for stability.

Stillness in the barrel is not stability. It is the beginning of compensation.

When a horse has lost its organisation, lost its tensegrity, the rib cage is where it becomes visible, a barrel that travels without swing, a body working hard to look smooth. Spinal blockages and rib immobility destabilise the joints of the limbs over time. The compensation chain spreads.

Restoration does not follow a single gait. I begin with the horse standing. Hand placed on the spine, waiting for pulse, reading what is available, what the system is offering and what it is withholding. That initial read tells me what I am working with before a single step is taken. Then walk, briefly, not as a rehabilitation gait but as a diagnostic one: is the horse comfortable enough to continue, and what does movement reveal that stillness could not?

Most people are surprised when I move to trot before walk has done much work. Walk is the gait we reach for in rehabilitation because it feels cautious. But a horse that has lost its tensegrity cannot always maintain the slow, continuous organisation that walk demands. Trot offers something walk cannot: suspension. That brief moment of diagonal transfer, when one pair of diagonal legs pushes free of the ground as the opposite pair prepares to land, the spine is momentarily free of the stabilising demands of constant contact. In that suspension, the lateral swing through the barrel can reappear. The thoracic sling re-engages. The spinal wave, which was fragmented or absent at walk, sometimes returns at trot before it returns anywhere else.

So the sequence often is: stillness, then walk to check comfort, then trot to find the oscillation, then back to walk to locate and release the remaining blockages. Canter arrives after, when there’s enough tensegrity to support it, and it brings its own gift: horses that have been hiding low in the neck begin to rise. The longitudinal engagement that canter demands asks the system to find a different organisation, and often it does.

The full architecture of this sequence is in my book Living Movement: Organisation, Oscillation and the Education of Horse and Rider. It is nearly here.

20/05/2026

As I am getting back into the rhythm of the farm and preparing for my next clinic o was going through my stacks of photos .
One of my very favourite things to do in life is to take my tribe on adventures. We did it with our human tribe when the kids were still at home and we naturally transferred our love of exploring with our animal tribe . Whether exploring new trails in the southern forests or discovering large expanse up North in Cattle Country it has been something that we have always cherished. We have got lost plenty of, finally finding camp in the dark. We met all manners of creatures, including fairly wild cattle barging through camp, we crossed rivers and enjoyed refreshing swims . In all of these epic time what stood out is how bonding it was for us and our horses to share these adventures together.
What made them so successful was careful preparation and the routine of daily consistent training where grounding and presence are always the most important components. Our horses have learnt to look to us for reassurance in unknown situations through this consistency . Being a classical trainer and rider has many many benefits other than competition and blue ribbons . For us is having balanced horses that we can take anywhere

19/05/2026

Do yourself a favour and click on the link, you will get access to the first chapter of the book. I cannot wait for all the other chapters!

https://www.belindabolsenbroek.academy/living-movement-join-the-waitlist

The head and neck are not decoration and they are not the problem. They are a regulatory system.

In correctly organised locomotion, the head and neck swing in elastic, rhythmic coordination with the spinal wave. Not dramatically. Not loosely. They participate — a subtle oscillation timed precisely to the forelimb swing phase. The brachiocephalicus runs from skull and neck to humerus. The omotransversarius bridges the cervical vertebrae to the scapula. Together they form a living relay between what the spine is organising and what the forelimb expresses. When the head and neck oscillate freely, these muscles coordinate the timing of forelimb protraction in precise rhythm with the spinal wave. The step swings. When they are held, that coordination breaks. The limb lifts instead.

Swinging and lifting are not the same movement. One emerges from an organised system. The other substitutes effort for coordination.

I have watched this change happen within three or four strides, the moment restriction is removed and the neck is allowed to find its own rhythm again. The stride lengthens without being asked to. The shoulder opens. This is not training producing a result. This is the body returning to what it already knew.

Many training approaches treat the neck as something to position. Lower it, round it, set it into a frame. The biology runs in the opposite direction. You cannot position your way to organisation. The neck follows when the system beneath it is free. Position the neck and you have bypassed the system you were trying to educate.

This principle runs through every level of the Belinda Bolsenbroek Knowledge System and is laid out in full in my book Living Movement: Organisation, Oscillation and the Education of Horse and Rider.

— Belinda Bolsenbroek | Belinda Bolsenbroek Academy

The opening chapter is here for you. And I’ll let you know the moment the book arrives;

https://www.belindabolsenbroek.com/living-movement-join-the-waitlist

18/05/2026

Visualising spinal alignment and balance can be tricky when you don't yet know what to look for. I think this drone footage will help develop your understanding.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19ujygUSsD/

18/05/2026

That is what harmony looks like , when your herd is well regulated.

17/05/2026

First time on the track . Feeling very relieved that this year the horses will have somewhere to keep moving when they cannot spend 24/7 on the paddocks . They seem very happy with it too!

10/05/2026

I am currently taking an online course on the horse skeleton with Evolution Equine Services - Maggie Ashley and I can honestly say I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Horse anatomy itself is not new to me, but what makes this course so different is the use of real skeletons from dissections. Instead of looking at the perfect “textbook” skeletons we are used to seeing, Maggie shows the many variations that develop when bones are shaped by the strains and adaptations of life. We get to see what skeletons actually look like in real horses. It is a real eye-opener.

The reality is that we can never fully know what our horse’s skeleton looks like internally. Even with X-rays, some areas remain hidden. Horses adapt to the lives they live, and bones remodel over time in response to stress, compensation, injury, and movement patterns.

It really highlights that even when you are trained to analyse gait, asymmetry, and imbalance, and you have a good understanding of rehabilitation, the horse may still not physically be able to do what you have in mind to help him.

For me, it reinforces the importance of always listening to the horse’s feedback. One of my personal rules is: ask three times, without escalating pressure, and if the horse still does not respond, leave it.

Seeing bones that are worn, rubbing against each other, or even fused together to create stability — and therefore reduce movement — reminds us that there may be many reasons a horse cannot do what we are asking. Non of these reasons are that the horse is stubborn, lazy, or stupid.