BlueHorse Equine

08/21/2023

🥰🙏🏻❤️🙏🏻🥰

08/17/2023

I’ve been posting some short quotes by an author-horse trainer/healer-horseman-horsehuman facilitator coach, Nahshon Cook (he eloquently exists beyond the limits of a single title). I’ve been reading about a chapter a day, sometimes more, as part of my centering practice recently while caregiving for my mom.

The short quotes are left for people to make their own metaphors, connections, and applications from. This will be a longer post, making some of the (potential) connections more explicit. Horses teach us, or have the potential to teach us, about every other aspect of life—if we’re listening. As a therapist who specializes on relationships in all of their varieties (parent-child relationships, romantic relationships, divorcees and co-parents, foster/adoption/kinship care dynamics, work stress, social skills, etc.), it is clear to me that people often aren’t listening. Listening requires letting go of control. Listening requires not knowing. Listening requires being open to being influenced by someone else’s experience, even if it is different from your own or inconvenient in some way. The discomfort and fear of those requirements can override the ability or willingness to listen in a moment. And that is a place where humans cause a lot of (unintentional) harm. After all, most of us have been modeled ways to persuade, convince, or demand that certain things happen on certain timelines, without also being taught skills of compromise, discernment, or adaptability.

In chapter 26 of “Horses See Us As We Are”, Nahshon writes “With horse, when you can move beyond what you’ve learned to be afraid of, and it still feels right, even if it doesn’t make sense, that’s love. You just want them to be happy. That said, sometimes you have every good thing to offer, and they still say “no.” If you honor their answer, that’s love.”

That is also true for a child, or a partner, or an athlete, or a colleague… the ability to accept an authentic “no”, even if it doesn’t make sense or isn’t what we want to hear (because we’ve already given every good thing we have), is the ability to tolerate disappointment and heartbreak. [Ideally, especially with a loved one, we get the chance to have an open conversation about the boundary, over time, with support, but sometimes it isn’t up for conversation or explanation.]
Sometimes people leave. Sometimes relationships fizzle. And when we have space for boundaries and limitations inside of ourselves, we don’t have to fight against or deny that truth. The “no” can cause an ache or sinking, and we feel that truth alongside the spaciousness that the “no” was honest as well. The magic is that there isn’t a secondary contraction around the ache or the sinking feeling. So much more becomes possible when we practice this skill.

In chapter 31, Nahshon adds, “But, I know that sometimes the lesson is in accepting that a horse is outside of my expectation of what I think they should be and that being enough.
For example: I have a horse, my young horse Remi, who is seven, who had really horrible trauma done to one of his ligaments in his back. He’s rideable, and I want to ride him, but he doesn’t want to be ridden, so I’m not going to. He’s cured. His body is good. But mentally, he’s not, and he may never be, and what do I do with that except understand that being healed can sometimes be very different than being cured.”

You might want to read that last part again. Feel it. As a therapist, it brings tears to my eyes. Sometimes, when I’m working with clients, the entire work is around the fact that I don’t have the same expectations of them as their parents or teachers or other people. I let them choose their goals. I let them identify what they believe can be healed or not. I often hold more belief in their capacity to heal than they do, because I’ve already seen/experienced that kind of healing and know it is possible. But I don’t have expectations about their pace or how far they get or what route leads to their healing.

Imagine how much less conflict would be in your life if you didn’t experience the pressure and “shoulds” of someone else? Imagine how much less conflict would be in your life if you didn’t hold so tightly to the “shoulds” and expectations you have of other people. What if it was all just questions and requests? And enough space to say “no” and receive “no” when it is true?

Thanks for this inspiration Nahshon Cook Horsemanship.

11/04/2022

There is, on one of the horse groups I belong to, an extremely accomplished young rider. She does things with horses which would make the red mare and I fall over in awe and wonder, they are so beyond our scope. Whilst we pootle into the woods and sing songs, this horsewoman is doing flying changes. I use the flying changes as a kind of metaphor a lot of the time. This person is doing literal ones. Every day, I’d bet.


Today, I saw that she was having what she described as a self-doubt spiral. She said that she looked at all the other brilliant horse people doing their brilliant things, and felt ashamed.


Can we just have that one again?


She felt ashamed.


And then she wrote the sentence which broke my heart: ‘It’s getting really tiring being this down on myself.’


I felt a sudden starburst of fury. It’s great-aunt, old lady, mamma bear rage. I suspect that any of you who are, like me, in your fifties or older will have this anger. It is absolute fury at what the world is doing to the young women.


That’s my specific focus now, because I work with a lot of the young, and because I work with a lot of women, and I hear this story, over and over. I hear the shame. I hear the self-laceration. I hear the old, old scripts which run along the lines of not being good enough and never being good enough. I have some of them in my own head, even now, although I've got very good at heading them off at the pass.


But it’s not just the young and it’s not just the women. I think this happens to almost everyone, in one way or another. I can’t work out whether it is a specific cultural or historic thing, particular to this time and place, but someone - culture, family, teachers, wider society - is telling people like that kind, good-hearted, accomplished young woman that there is something wrong with her. That she needs to feel ashamed.


And I’ve bloody well had enough of it.


I want her to ride with the wind in her hair and a song in her heart. I want her to cherish her good mind and her strong body. I want her to delight in the marvellous horses who come through her hands. I want her to feel the energy and the savour of learning, every day. I want her to laugh at her mistakes and exult in her triumphs and skip through everything in between.


I want her to have a singing sense of self, to know that she is unique in the world; that there never was anyone quite like her and there never will be again. I want her to know that as she gives that self to her horses, they will connect with her and give her some of their own unique self - they will lend her their own power and their own wisdom and, together, she and they will be unstoppable.


I want her to grab every moment with both hands, because this moment - and this, and this, and this - is her life, and if old people like me know one thing, it is that life is short. Time shoots by your ears and before you know it you hear yourself saying things to the young people like, ‘Forty years ago…’ Forty years! Where did they run away to?


I want her to be happy. I want her to have the Place of Peace and the love and the joy. I want her to have all of it.


And it makes me spitting furious that the world comes along, in one way or another, and says, ‘No. No, you can’t have that. You’ve got to tell yourself stories about how you aren’t good enough, instead.’


I’m writing this because I’m angry, and I always throw fury at the page, so it can run its spleen off. I’m also writing it because, on the group, she asked for encouragement and advice. Lovely people, who have been through a bit more of life, gathered round and gave her such beautiful words. I wanted to add to them, but I could not find the right way in. I certainly couldn’t find anything short enough to fit into a pithy, helpful comment. And I wanted to work my anger off first, so that it wouldn’t leak out around the edges. Even though it is on her behalf, she might have felt it as an emotion too far in her state of vulnerability.


I think now, as I grow calmer, of what I would like to say - to her, to anyone who is in despair, to all of us who tell ourselves the sad stories about failing our horses.


Where would I start? It’s so complex that I’ve written whole books about it. But right now, in this moment (which is our life) I might say something about choice.


I might say: never forget the power of choice.


Nobody can force us to tell ourselves these stories. The hoary, creaking scripts get embedded, over the years, but we humans have the power to change them. You can, literally, figuratively, metaphorically, write yourself a new story. You really can. It’s not even very complicated. You are just building new mental habits. You lay down a few hopeful neuronal pathways and you’re good to go.


This might not be easy, and it might take time and effort. The brain loves the familiar. As you tell yourself the new stories, about how you don’t have to be ashamed and you don’t have to be down on yourself and you damn well can believe in your own brilliance, the brain will be yelling, ‘But I knew the old stories! They were more miserable than Dostoevsky, but I knew how they worked!’


The gremlins, who are also traditionalists, will be whispering in your ear about how you don’t deserve a new story.


And you? You get to choose. You are a grown-up. You have agency. You have the power (and almost certainly the glory too).


You can say f**k it. Because, actually, really, f**k it. Sod the horrible old shame stories and the stupid chattery gremlins and the endless, endless feeling of the other people always being better than you are. Bu**er it and damn it. (I do find that swearing is sometimes exceptionally helpful at driving the old stories away, and I use it freely as a therapeutic tool. The red mare is used to me going down to the field and hollering streams of cuss words at the sky. She gives me a duchessy look and then carries on eating.)


Here is how I do all this. Every time an old story comes up - the shame story, the you are useless story - I greet it, thank it for coming, and ask it two questions. Is it useful? And is it true?


The answer is almost always no. So I send it into the next room where it may have cake or gin.


If it’s a persistent story, I’ll write it down. The page will take anything.


If it’s one of the old as the hills ones which will never quite leave me, I’ll ring up my friend Kathy in Wales and tell her all about it. She is my Queen of Emotional Processing, and she never minds if I yell down the telephone, ‘Have you got five minutes to process an emotion?’ She’ll always say yes, as long as she’s not lambing.


What I mean by this is: you need a crew. Shame can’t survive empathy. I’ve got five people on whom I can utterly rely. I need five, so I can put them on relay. I’d love to tell you otherwise, but I can’t do this s**t on my own.


After all this, I’ll shake the story out of my body. I stomp and stamp and dance and stretch and jump up and down and sometimes yell my head off. If the red mare and I are both a bit scratchy, we’ll go for a stomp together, in the big meadow. ‘Dance it out!’ I yell at her, at myself, at the world. We both feel a whole lot better afterwards.


And when it’s all over and the crocodile grip of the stupid old tale has let me go, I’ll smile and feel better and remind myself that we are all human and we all have those moments when we are caught in shame and fear and that is all right. I have tools now, so I know what to do. And that means that I can come down to my mares with love and joy and laughter, instead of with misery and dread.


I’ll do anything to maximise the love and joy and laughter. Because that’s what I want to remember when I am very old, and looking back over my life. I want to say, ‘Damn, we did love each other, and oh, oh, we laughed.’


That’s what I want for this young woman. That’s what I want for all of you. That is something that is worth working for.

05/01/2021

There are many ideas surrounding how to address the back of the foot with our trim. Heels, bars, frog…some trimming techniques are more aggressive than others, recommending more or less removal of material. I was taught a trimming technique to address distortion in the heels by Dr. Judith Shoemak...

11/24/2020

Supporting proper gut function is critical, keep it simple:
Click here to visit BioEquine.

One of the very first interviews I did on The Naturally Healthy Horse was with Equine Nutritionist, Dr. Juliet Getty, but since it’s been a few years (and someone suggested it on the Facebook...

11/21/2020

Keep it SIMPLE! This is what you to optimize your feeding program for you horse:
Click here to visit BioEquine.T

How Much Are You Really Paying???
Many times I have watched horse owners walk into a feed store looking for a feed supplement. It can be very confusing because there are a vast array of complete feeds AND feed supplements.
Complete feeds contain varying amounts of “carrier” or “filler” often described as added protein or fat or fiber. Most of those products come in bags and are priced under $30 per bag. That seems like a great deal…big bag, small price. Usually in 20 kg bags, which is around 45 lbs of product, these products are full of processed fillers such as soybean meal, dehydrated alfalfa, wheat midlings etc etc. While these products may be a good source of protein, it is all the other factors to consider that concern me. What heat and/or pressure processing do they go through? What is left of the vitamin and enzyme content after all that? What is the source of the filler?? Organic? Traceable? North American? And the feeding regumin..if the recommended portion is 2.5kg that $30.00 bag only contains enough for 10 days or $3.00 per day for some inexpensive filler and some vitamins and minerals. Most of these horse owners say “oh I only give them a little”. Well to me that is wasting your money. The true nutrient content (vitamins, minerals, enzymes) etc are calculated to contain a daily requirement in the 2.5kg recommended dose NOT a cupful! Yet bagged, processed feeds continue to be a multi billion dollar market in North America.
Feed supplements are an entirely different product. They are concentrates that are meant to be fed in addition to your daily feed regimen of protein, fat, carbohydrates etc and give you as the horse owner the opportunity to fine tune your program to your horse. I feel strongly that if a supplement dosage is more than a couple tablespoons of product daily, it has some filler in there somewhere. So, read the label, divide the total contents by the recommended dosage to figure out the number of doses in the container and then divide the cost by the number of doses. For example, our BioEquine Natural Digestive Supplement 5 kg pail (we have other sizes) contains 5000gm (5kg) of product. The recommended daily dose is 30gm. That gives you 167 doses (167 days or 5.6 months for one horse) The 5kg pail is $200.00. So the cost per day is $1.20 per day. AND instead of having processed fillers, chemical binders, questionable carbohydrates and more, our Natural Digestive Support contains probiotics, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, marine trace minerals, toxin binder, gut cleanser and natural parasite defense. I invite you to find a more complete product….never mind the amazingly low price. Other companies offer you MULTIPLE products to try to accomplish what our Natural Digestive Support by BioEquine does. I invite you to compare products and find anything that comes close both in efficacy AND price.

02/12/2020

12/04/2019

Dissections showing underlying bone loss can help hoof care professionals know how to manage different types of hoof capsule damage.

12/04/2019

☆☆☆ ORGANS AND THE SPINE ☆☆☆
(eg Back problems causing colic and guts causing back problems)

A great image to show how the guts (and other organs) as well as blood supply are so strongly related to the spinal cord and the vertebrae.
It is this neurological connection that makes the organs such an important aspect to consider during any treatment process.
Not considering their role in the reduction in mobility of the body results in a reduced quality of treatment. This is because a large factor has been overlooked.

The digestive system, the reproductive system, the urinary system and respiratory system all must be included within the treatment thought process.

In this image it shows the relationship between the spine, the spinal cord and intestine plus it's blood supply.
ANY changes to the mobility of the spine can increase the risk of digestive disturbances including colic....
It also goes the other way in that ANY problems with the gut can reduce mobility of the spine...

All food for thought...

NB I found this image in the depths of my phone. I have no idea where it came from...