Building Horses Who Last - Celeste Lazaris

I typically kick the episodes off by having the guest tell us who they are and what it is they do all. Right, my name is Las Lazaris. I’m owner of Lazaris Sport Horses and creator of balance Remove that method. But I’m a horse trainer. I’m a licensed human and equine massage therapist.

I do a lot of trauma informed work, a lot of horsemanship. My background was horsemanship and then starting out with vaquero style riding, so bridal horse and so I got to have a feel for really balanced, really well trained horses and I did not know as a child what a blessing that was. Throughout my life I was a big adrenaline junkie. I race cars and motorcycles and I loved jumping and mounted shooting and basically anything that was like fastest clean wins is my heart. I was a surfer.

That was my lifestyle growing up, but as I got more and more into writing and training, I didn’t realize that what I was searching for was the balance that I found in the vaquero horses that I had ridden as a child. That was what I learned was correct and that’s what my body learned, what felt good. And the horses were really sound and their minds were really sound. And as I went through life, I was just always hunting for that feeling. But I didn’t understand what it was until I got into like bio mechanics and muscle development.

And it was such a different world from the traditional training that I grew up in that it’s OK. We train our horses and we walk truck Cantor and we do our flying lead changes and we learn things and we learn how to rate for jumps. And it’s like everything was a training education perspective. But we never talked about whether or not the horse had access to their body to give it to us correctly. Why was the horse that picking up their right lead?

That’s because they’re naughty and they don’t understand more. So we’re going to get a different bit and we’re going to get a different saddle. And you pop them on the butt during this part of the take off of their Gaid count, offend them to get this lead. And I learned how to be a super manipulative rider. I could do all kinds of fun sheet party tricks on horses to get them to do the right thing.

And I thought that made me a really good trainer. And then I learned that I was wrong. And my whole life, like, flipped upside down. And yeah, it’s been a long journey for sure. But yeah, ultimately, Long story short, I just kind of learned that what I had felt and what I’ve been chasing my whole life from those horses, it wasn’t a training thing necessarily.

It’s just the way that they train their horses, do such good development, produce such good balance innately. That’s why the horses had such good access. And it’s just the missing piece thing. Like people will be like, oh, this was the missing pieces. And what it really is, this just tiny little foundational things that are usually the basics.

A lot of things were skipped past and we just really didn’t realize it because we don’t talk about it. Read books on classical masters or we watch other people ride and we’re like, oh, this is where we’re trying to get. But we don’t realize that there was so much more work in hand that needed to be done to develop the horse so that they had better access. Yeah. So I’ve been over the last 10 years, like, my world flipped upside down.

And it was like, everything that I knew was a lie. And I don’t know how to ride and I don’t know how to train. I should never train wars ever again. But now I’m just going to do it from a much more thoughtful lens under the bio mechanics and the body work and all of that. Yeah.

Been processed. But it’s really, I’m very grateful for it. Yeah, I find your story super relatable because through sport, like I got into horses through sport, I grew up just happenstance at an eventing barn and ended up doing some show jumping as a kid, kind of fell into being a professional. And through that, like I’ve found that my passion is actually helping horses become sounder in their mind and their body. And it’s that same idea of like, all of a sudden your world flips upside down because you realize how dysfunctional your horses are.

And you go to a horse show and you see all of the dysfunction and it becomes really hard and really heavy. And that’s why I think podcast and social media are so important because through that I’ve been able to find people like you and other vets to really give my horses and client horses. I’m more well-rounded approach. And yeah, you realize how I’ve been on a 2 1/2 year competition hiatus and I’ll still go coach out horse shows and I go, Oh my God, if I could just tell that rider to let that horse stand there and take up to breath, all of this riding stuff would go away. And so.

It’s a really hard thing because once you’ve been through it, you’ve been through it, but it’s like 1 of, I call it my first ego eradicating moment. There’s a body worker that came to the barn and I was always good. I was a foster kid and part of the program that they would do is they would put the troubled youth in with some troubled horses and be like work it out, which worked great. It was incredible. So I’ve always grown up with troubled horses and because I think I grew up with a lot of abuse in my own life, I can tune into that really quickly.

I just innately understand what they’re going through emotionally. So I’ve always had a knack for problem horses well before, even now, I’ve always been like, hey, like the source is about to get put down. Will you play with it for a minute? That’s just been my journey. And so this body worker came to my barn and she knew that.

And she was like, hey, I knew. I heard about your reputation. This is what I do. Can I? Do you want your horses getting worked on?

And I was like, what fluffy bullshit is that? Like, I don’t need to get worked on. I don’t get massage. I’m going to massage my horse. What are you talking about?

This is crazy, really funny. I was in my 20s, so I knew everything and I just said, no, thank you, whatever. And she’s, I’ll tell you what, just give me the toughest horse in your barn. I’ll work on it for free now. I’ll just pay me and then just give me some feedback afterwards.

That would be really, I would really appreciate that. And this was, gosh, how old is my son’s 14. So this was probably about 15 years ago at this point. And so bodywork wasn’t even very popular then. Like it wasn’t really a thing.

So she was also trying to get her reputation out there too, because everybody responded to her the way that I did. We’re like, yeah, whatever. And so anyway, so I gave her the horse and she worked on the next day. I take the horse out and I work. And a lot of the problems had gone away.

The horse was dealing with. And of course, again, being egotistical and in my 20s, I’m like, we had a really good ride that day. So we don’t know for sure if this is what happened. IA month later she came back out and she was like, hey, what do you feel? What do you think?

And I was honest with her. I was just like, there were a lot of notable changes and we had a lot of consistency. We did have a really pretty gnarly training session. So I’m not really sure, but I do think that there was an improvement. I’ll have you work on a few more.

I’ll pay for it this time and we’ll just see. Because I really, I was an egotistical 20 year old, but I was also, I’ve always wanted to put the horse first. I’m like, if there’s something here like I will actually explore it. I know I acted like I thought that I knew everything, but I never believed it. So I’m like, yeah, I’ll play.

So she works on the other horses. I’m sure as shit like mass improvements at this point. I’m like, this is undeniable. Which means my first like ego fracture of maybe it’s not an education thing, or maybe it’s not just the horses being breath thing. Maybe the horse was actually in pain or didn’t have access to their body and that’s what they could do it.

And then I watched her work on the horses and I watched what they were going through. And again, like, you can see it. Like you can’t make that up. Yeah, So I changed my training program to where the horses, when they came in and they had to be seen by her first, I wouldn’t even work with them. I wouldn’t touch until I gotten body work first.

And then I felt like I had a really good, honest understanding as to what was pain and behavior or creating and what was not. And so I had changed with that. And I was like, this is my big contribution to the fighting. I was one of the first trainers that did it in our area. And then people started seeing these crazy changes and how fast these horses were coming around and it was like my name was blowing up, Her name was blowing up.

All of a sudden she was really busy and she couldn’t come out as much that she started teaching me how to work on the horses. So then I started working on my own. And when you learn how to work on the horses, what I think is really cool with it more than anything is that you learn how to palpate the tension and you learn how to palpate healthy tension and dysfunctional tension, right? Because there’s good tension, there’s bad tension and you start paying attention to balance and they’re weight loading in a different way. It’s just a different feel unless you got.

So I was started palpating my horses before and after I rode them and before and after lessons. I was realizing that the way that we were riding and the way that they were moving via under saddle and in lessons, we’re actually putting some of that negative attention back in. I was like, I just should never ride a horse again ever. And I could never get, I like had this huge mental breakdown. And I also was going through a divorce and it was like a whole Saturn return hit.

And it was like, everything is going to get flushed off the table. So I burned my training business down completely. And I went back to school for horses and then I went back to school for humans. And it was through structural integration. So it’s kind of like Rolfing.

So it’s a really intense way of reprogramming the entire body head to tail. And then I started working on horse and rider teams because at that point in time, I didn’t believe necessarily that we could ride and train in a way that to chiropractically adjust the horses and work with them the way that I didn’t know that yet. But I knew that body work could fix a lot of things. And I knew that riders and balances could fix a lot of things. And we’re told that all the time rider posture things were like the horses this way because the riders really heavy in that right leg or they’re really they’re really pulley on this left shoulder have good range of motion.

So I’m like, cool, I’m going and then rebrand and I’m just going to work on horse and rider teams. And that’s what I travel around competitions and training burns and I would work on the horses one day and then I’d put the humans on the table the next day. And it was so cool. And there were these bad changes and I made a ton of money and I blew up really big. I specialized in nerve compression, so I worked in a clinic as well.

I got to tag team with surgeons. I can learn stuff and I’m really smart, but when something clicks in your brain and you want to learn it, you like hyper fix. They can’t really. And that was me, a nerves and nerve compression. And it just made so much sense to me.

And I was like the fashion, all of it. It just made sense for the humans. And so I tag team with surgeons and got to have these really cool results. And then I and I, that happened after I went to equine, the equine school, we never talked about nerve compression and the equine school and I went to a really good school and I took like state boards, like it’s a national board exam And I’m like, there weren’t any questions on that related to this. We never learned about different syndromes and horses.

So then I started Googling it and I started looking in books and I couldn’t find anything on it. And I’m like, nowadays you can find it like now it would be great. I love that people talk about it now. And I’m just like, I was in the first ones. I was talking about it, but that’s OK.

But like Audrey, the clue I think was the next person that started to talk about it after me. And then because she has a podcast, then you start seeing like you look at the dates of things and now a lot of people talk about it. Just fantastic. But when I first started talking about it, there wasn’t anybody talking. You couldn’t find it.

And so you couldn’t even Google it. So when I would bring it up to people and I would bring it up to vets and they would search for it, they were like, yeah, I don’t know. This isn’t a thing. I’m like, but it has to be though, because we have the same hearts. No way that working with clinical practice.

And like, there’s no way that we’re seeing it to this magnitude in humans. And the horses. It’s here. I win horses. You could find there was like 1 published study on thoracic.

It wasn’t even called thoracic and lung syndrome. It was called, it was just brachial plexus injury. And they very specifically said that it’s next to impossible for this injury to happen in horses because it’s so well acted. And in dissections it looks like it’s well protected too. But also, if you Google any equine skeleton, the only pictures that you’re going to see both on Google or in any veterinarian textbook, it shows C7 and T1 out in front of the scapula.

And that’s where the brachial plexus kind of comes down underneath it and then it’s surrounded by a bunch of fat. So if you look at it in the way that every textbook shows you, yes, in theory it would be really hard. But when you know how to palpate horses and you know where to learn where things are, their thoracic slings are so dropped and the posture is down and back. And now they don’t have the lamellar attachments that kind of hold the cervical spine back because we brought it out of them. So C6 and C7 and T1 are all jammed back in behind the scapula.

And so there’s a ton of cervicothoracic compression over where the brachial plexus is. The nerves that come out of it in between the neck that’s all jammed down because everything is kind of like A5 car pile up in there. So posturally, and it’s the same for humans. The reason why humans have brachial plexus injury most of the time is from posture. It’s a postural issue.

It’s from sitting like this for too long or hairdressers get it a lot because their hands are up and so their scalenes are really tight. So we were fixing it all through posture and body work for the humans. And then I came home and I started mapping it out and I’m looking at the symptoms of these horses where it’s like rain lameness is almost with the nerve compression or a scapular glide issues that goes hand in hand. And they’re like, why does it happen sometimes? But we can’t block it and it only happens on a bend, but on the straight it’s fine.

And it’s because the horses are leaning in and then it starts to compress. I started piercing all of these things together and I went Mad Hatter batshit crazy. My poor husband was like, you were like, I would come home and you just had like Sharpies and you’re drying all over these different, like the horses and all these books everywhere. And I’m like, no, like I’m, I know in my bones that this is what’s going on. Yeah, that’s how it all started.

And then I started treating them in the same way that I was treating the humans. And the symptoms were going away and then they were staying gone. And we just went with it and then it just blew up. So that was how it all happened. So what is like nerve compression?

So nerve compression in the way that I see it in the way that I believe it to be from what I saw and studied with the surgeons in the humans. And then what I’m seeing with the horses is one of two things. It is mainly from poor posture and it’s from either bone compression from the joint Spain either misaligned and not supported properly or lack of development. A lot of so like the scapulars are coming down in the cervical spine. It’s smooshed.

So smooshed. It’s a really good technical term. So it can come from the Bony Muslim and not a lot in chiropractic adjustments where people will have, they’ll call it more of a pinched nerve, but they’ll have a compression and they’re having this nerve fire and then they get chiropractic adjustment that makes it so there’s more space between points and then the nerve can be alleviated. So that’s one way. The other way that we see it a lot of the time is through fascial compression.

So when the fascia is stretched super tightly, it also stretches out and it causes lack of glide for the nerve. And it can also do like the compression on top of it. So it’s compressing it. And so then it gives you that nerve fire and the more you can stretch that out and give it space, that’s basically what everybody needs when they’re dealing with it. It just saves more space, needs more movement.

And so then the question becomes, first you have to ask the question of why is it, where is it coming from? A really basic way of understanding the fascial system in the body? Is it like a giant spider web? When you pull, the tension is actually coming down here. So if I have pain here and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, so if I have a lack of range of motion up here, we people aren’t going to see the video.

If you grab your shirt and you pull on it, you’ll feel the tension come down on the opposite side, maybe over your hip. So people come in with really bad hip pain and they’re getting their hips massaged over. It’s not like it feels better, but it’s not going away. They come in and I’ll look at the body and I’ve learned, I’ve been trained to trace the pattern and find it. So I’ll actually work on the shoulder or I’ll work on the diaphragm, which then backs off the tension where it’s and then the compression goes away.

Does that make sense? Yeah, and it’s, I think bodies, human or horse, are so fascinating because of the way they compensate. And I’ve gone and seen my my body workers come to work on my horses and I’ll be complaining about something and she’ll go, oh, get on your get on my table. She might work on my stern and like that that had nothing to do with what I was feeling. And then I get up and like it’s completely gone.

Yeah. What are you doing to me that you’re doing nothing? That’s basically what it feels like is nothing’s. I had my fiance, who’s not foresee at all get done and he said he’s a computer guy. He sits at his computer all day long and.

That’ll mess your back again. Oh my God, He, he’s so screwed up. But he’ll complain about hip pain. And I go, I think you’ve got so many other issues to worry about before. And she worked on like the whole front of his chest and all of a sudden standing up.

Yeah. And, and even he was like, I don’t know what she did. Like there was no. I go, yeah, it’s like energy, but it’s not. And it’s so hard to explain.

It can even be hard to explain to horse people. And because there, because there’s a lot of different components to it, right? There’s is there attention coming from lack of muscular development, which is what we find a lot of the horses. That was like the second piece that I started seeing. So I’m like, OK, so why is the tension?

I could release it with the bodies, but then it would just go back. We release it and then it would just go back. People were having me every two weeks because when I would work on them, they’d be fine. But even though I burned my training business to the ground, at the heart of it, I’m a horseman and I’m a horseman. And I’m like, but why is it coming back?

I was definitely that annoying kid that was like, but why? But what it’s still here. And I’m like, OK, like, it’s cool. And I’m so happy that I can come out and I can fix this. And I’m so happy that I can make these changes.

But why do they need me every two weeks? I’m making sense. So then I started playing around with my husband was a was a boxer and has done jujitsu. And when we were talking about stuff, he’d made a comment around the human one of the humans clients that I was working on. And he was part of the problem that he’s got going on looking at him is that he has no triceps and he’s got all biceps.

Like something’s not right, like in the 10th integrity between the muscles and when that happens, you’ve got extra loading on one joint. And so when we would have fighters come in that would be struggling with something, one of the things that we would do is we’d send them to do isolated workouts so that we get more balancing in their body. And I’m like, Oh my God, that makes so much sense. So then I got into understanding that with the humans, and it makes sense for humans. We go to PT like most chronic back pain with people, especially, especially jumpers, like we’re really bad about this.

We have a lot of quads and we have no hamstrings. And so we’re constantly in a little bit of a wonky pelvic tilt, which causes a lot of loading on our load, especially our knees. But it’s because we have that grip to hang on. And so we have to do in order to solve the back pain. We can go to body workers and we can help and it will do stuff.

But if you really want to alleviate it, you go to the gym, you develop your hamstrings, you even that pull out and then that balances it. So I started getting understanding that with the humans better. And then I was coming out to the horses and being like, man, dude, I was competing at like top levels. I want a lot of really high and nobody ever in my world was like, do you know that your horse has no thoracic sling or like we, we understood top line, but we didn’t understand top line, You know what I mean? Like we knew the horse needed one, but but what is it and how do they develop it?

What actually needs to happen? Nobody ever talked about necessarily like a good range of motion and what that was correctly. So we see, for instance, horses and dressage do a lot of the lateral work. So like they can they’re lateral all day long. But if you actually learn their muscle, like the muscular system and the actions of the muscles and what they’re supposed to be doing, one of the big things that we found is the muscles of AB duction in the horses are usually the number one muscles that are atrophied or not developed correctly.

So they have a lot of adductors and they don’t have AB ductors. And so if you have 50% of what you need to have a complete core package, that’s a big deal now. Horses are still doing, they’re still opening, they’re still doing abduction, but how are they doing it? They’re not doing it with abduction. They’re doing it because they’re crossing over and they’re pulling that way.

So they’re doing the movement, not using the muscles meant for that bit. And that I think was the like the Holy Grail for me, because once you really start understanding that and you can look at horses, then it takes the edge because that was the missing piece as the trainer, because we could educate it. But I’m like, yeah, we can do the movements. We can do a side pass on your shoulder and we can do all the things. But if you could look at their body and you could be like, but they’re not developed in the muscles that they’re supposed to be technically work.

So then that means they’re doing it through compensation. And if they’re doing it through compensation, that’s your precursor to injury. So if you want to stop the injury, you need to be able to learn the body and understand whether or not they’re actually doing the movement correctly. Not does it look pretty, not are they making the stride, not are they doing the movement. But does their body say that they are developed in the muscles to do that job?

Because bodies don’t lie. It doesn’t have to be my opinion or your opinion. That’s you just look at the body and it will tell you the truth. And yeah, that clicked off for me and there’s just no shutting me up about it. And people can say that I’m right, wrong or indifferent and I’m like, it just doesn’t matter to me anymore because that’s one of those like few capital T truths.

Yeah, that just. So that’s what. I always think of like when I start working with horses because even though I have been as sport and do my own sport with my own horses, that’s not where I make my money. And so I make my money through these problem difficult horses. Yeah.

And so many of the times, you know, maybe they’ve had some time off or whatever, and when I start working them, they get really sore or really not really sore, but like, I won’t work them two days in a row. And they go, why not? And I go, Have you ever been to the gym? And if they tell me no? Next I.

Tell what happens is I could go and do an exercise and because I have all these other stronger muscles, those muscles are going to do that exercise and I’m not actually gaining string in the thing that I actually did. I thought this was just going to be how I was for the entirety of my life. But through helping horses with confirmation faults actually straighten out their limbs, I go maybe I don’t have to live like this. And so you start working on, I think of your hamstring and quad example an issue and say that causes my pelvis to tilt and then that causes my knee. So all these times I’m treating a knee injury, it’s really just because my pelvis.

Yes. Got screwy and you can work. I worked with a physical therapist for a while for my knee and he goes Oh yeah, it’s women. Women are always prone to these types of knee injuries because they’re like pelvis. And I go, I go, but yeah, and they’ll go, your pelvis is shaped different, whatever.

And I go, but shouldn’t my body, like if we’ve been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years, shouldn’t my body be like, good to handle the way my pelvis is supposed to be? And yeah, it’s the same with horse training of getting into the nitty gritty of OK, yeah, your horse made me more impulsion or whatever you think the issue is. But actually they need to slow down and start doing it this way, and then once you ask for that, it’s going to be no problem. Exactly. But.

And the other, to your point, the other big one that we found was like posture versus confirmation, which again, now lots of people are talking about. And I’m so thrilled for that to be the case. But when I first started, I didn’t know that was a thing yet, but I was watching what I was taught was confirmation shift, which means it’s not confirmation because your confirmation is your bone size. That’s it. Your confirmation is the length of your bones.

That’s confirmation development is what you can do. So being knock kneed, right. My husband was also overweight. He was like, I was a total fat kid and what he’s learned and he had to work really hard as an adult, but he’s always struggled a little bit around like with the hips and belly, like he’s got to be really mindful about like where it just where he packs weight. He’ll somebody pointed out the fact that he’s really flat footed and because he’s flat footed confirmationally this is a confirmation issue.

But then I gave other what he believed was just how he was built, like the knock name and the thing we just said, oh, I’m just built this way. I have these build problems, so I have to be extra hard. What it actually confirmation of his feet was so flat footed that it knocked him in and he started getting inserts to help support that and he could work out in a better way. And then everything else that he thought was a confirmation issue with actually just a postural issue secondary. And I all of it completely went away and he’s like all the time I thought I had was knock me and I had knee and hip issues and it wasn’t it was his feet.

And we see that in horses, you see their posture come and go with a good trim or a bad trim and you see what’s going on with their ankles. And you also see horses with fantastic barriers that are really struggling with hoof growth and really struggling with how they’re loading. But then when you start looking at their body and you see where they’re developed and where they’re not, there’s a reason why they’re loading unevenly. So that you start doing targeted isolated muscle workouts on just working on some triceps, just working on that infraspinatus, C perspinatus, and trying to get getting more balance in the body. And then all of a sudden the hoof starts growing better.

So part of it is like really understanding which is confirmation and which is posture. So now and again, now it’s getting way easier, but there’s a lot of times where we see horses that are like they’re unit or they have a really weird slope in their shoulder, a really weird slope in their hindem and people are writing them off as having bad confirmation, but it’s not. That’s all posture. And so it’s a really, it’s been a really cool thing learning like what you can fix and what you can’t. And then the things that you can’t fix, how do you work with it?

So the horse is struggling conformationally that what that horse needs for training is not going to be what a horse that has flawless confirmation is going to need. That doesn’t mean that they’re a bad horse. It just means they just need a different training program. My husband have to work out different ways. We have different bodies, different issues.

I struggle with this with my fiance all the time because he is like if we stand up our hips end up the same place. I’m 54 he’s 5 foot 11 so he’s on torso and extra vertebrae. It is torso and he’ll go to the gym and he’ll just start lifting and then he’ll get hurt 2 weeks later and then he’ll take time off and I go you’ve just like supported your spine. And. Definitely coming around, but.

Yeah, I’m like, he’s got to hear it from a dude on a podcast. Yeah, exactly. Some bro science and. The the mother of boys, and I will tell you, it’s been like it, like pulling teeth. My oldest is 14.

He just started high school and it’s been like pulling teeth. Trying to get him to listen to me about this because of course I don’t know anything. I’m not. And then he’ll come to me and he’s, oh mom, like I really need to do this thing or I’m starting to sing and it’s working really well. And I’m like that thing that I just wanted to do 2 years ago.

And I’m like, you know what? And I used to get really mad about it and now I’m like, great, yeah. I hope you find a guy on a podcast that tells you the same thing that I did. That’s when you find guys on podcast and you send it to them. Oh.

Yeah, you know that. And to your to like his point for working at an office, like that’s such a hard job. Like we’re not, I know, like evolutionary like we are. We’ve developed a little bit more, one could argue maybe to tolerate sitting more than we did, but not really. One of my dearest friends, he’s worked in IT his whole life and he sat at a desk his whole life.

And he’s 6 foot four. Yeah. And he does not look like he is an IT. He’s built like really nicely and he always gets shit for it, but he’s, if I don’t go to the gym and I don’t work extra hard because of how tall he is to be in a good posture because he sits at a desk like 10 hours a day, he’s all be completely broken. I have to work out so that I can sit at a desk.

That is why I work out so I can be functional. And it is the most brilliant thing that I’ve ever heard anybody with a desk job do because it’s so true. Like when my business took off more teaching COVID, it was rough, but it was one of the better things that happened to me because I am so not techie and I would have never, ever given a lesson via Zoom. People had asked. And I was like, yeah, no.

And then we couldn’t travel and we couldn’t teach. We can be around each other. And I was like, yeah, I guess I’ll try really hard and I just won’t charge anybody for a while and we’ll figure it out. And it’s no different to me teaching online than it is on the. And so that’s really cool.

But with that, I started sitting at a desk a lot more and I started noticing a lot of body issues that I did not know that I had because it just didn’t come out because I was always moving or sitting in a horse. So now I had to change my workout program again to support sitting at a desk for several hours a day. Yeah, no, I feel I literally the last because I was doing the podcast for a while and I got really busy with the horses and then I started getting really back into it and the going back to in a desk all the time. My lower back started killing me. And I was like, I’ve always prided myself on the fact that I have no back pain and Oh my God, I literally shoulders listen, those things are gone back pain relatively minus the pain of falling off overall.

I don’t live in pain with my back. Yeah. And just then sitting I go Oh my God how screwed are people. I got COVID couple years ago and I was out for four days like literally not leaving the bed and my hip pain was so excruciating. It’s one of those moments where you don’t even realize that most of the population feels like that all the time.

No. And it’s such a good point to talk about because most people have checked out of it too. I think the majority of humans, like a lot of the reason why we see all the epidemics that we see in the horses, because humans are dealing with it too. And we don’t talk about it because we’re just used to being in discomfort. We’re used to being like crap.

A lot of people don’t eat super healthy. They don’t need to support their bodies. They don’t work out, they don’t have healthy movement. They don’t have time. We’re all time poor.

And so that’s hard. So we’re all used to being like a little bit checked out and a little bit in tension and a little bit just associative. And then our horses, we have a harder time picking up on our horses because and we’re like that. And so until we start really getting to our own bodies and our own nervous systems, it’s really hard to pick up on the fact that our horse is in the sympathetic. And why is that not OK?

We’re always in synthetic. Yeah. So it’s like a matchy thing. So he has to start with a human. But then it also you have to address the worst most horses again, to your point with the movement piece and the sitting, most horses are in stalls a lot of the time or they’re in pastures and small paddocks.

Like my horses are out 24/7 and they have really big pastures that they can move around and they have a nicer environment, but they’re still in a fence. And because they’re still in a fence, they’re not out there moving a ton of horses that are out on track systems. Like they move a little bit more, but I know a lot of people that have some of the nicest track systems and there’s some like cool footage of them, like moving around a lot, but they’re still mostly in the same place as just standing. Versus when they are in the wild, they’re moving and roaming all the time because there’s no energetic containment, there’s no fence. And so you’re getting healthy movement of uphills and downhills and navigating rocks and moving their feet around and getting all those little mechanoreceptors online.

And there are so many innate things that just domestication as a whole has robbed from horses. And then we take them out and we do our circles right in our. So we write in our round pens and we do the things and we walk 5 laps and we try 3 laps and we can’t or three laps. And then we walk 5 laps and we have our regimented thing. But like that’s not, we’re never hitting the bus of all of the different things that those movements need.

Yeah. And that’s a really then you get into the nutrition, you get into the fact that our soils are complete garbage. So everybody to be on different supplementation and they need to be tested to know what supplementation they need based off of the hay that you’re around. And Oh yeah, are the same way. When you really start getting into it, it can be really overwhelming.

There’s many times the rice 1/3. I’m like, I don’t really know. I’m a little bit fractured a lot of the time because 50% of me loves what I mean, I love at work and I love, I can’t even tell you how many horses that we’re going to get euthanized that we were able to real good horsemanship is a big sink Peep. I know you run into this all the time. And they’re like, this horse has to be in pain.

Look at how awful they’re behaving. And they’re just telling me we can’t touch them and they’re so dangerous and they’re so this and I’m like, they have no boundaries and they’ve never been taught healthy horsemanship in their life. We’re going to start there. And then you watch their nervous systems go to the parasympathetic and those tension patterns start going away. And when there’s compression, especially fascial strain compression, if the body isn’t sympathetic, it’s 10 times harder.

So without even touching a body, you can get them through good horsemanship, healthy boundaries. If you can get them to regulate their nervous system and stop being on sympathetic and come over to the parasitic, the nerve compression pain that they’re feeling goes away in a lot of these cases. So that’s why there’s a lot of people that they’re not body workers. They don’t do any of the stuff that I do, but they’re just good horsemen and they’re taking a lot of the same results because it’s the nervous system that’s running this show. Yeah, no, I the number one thing because I’m a lot of horses, glass stops and typically they’re and like literally I preface this by saying I don’t do anything special.

I’m just, I always say I have the patience of a mule like I’ve got all the time in the. World am I just sat here for you? And like today, I was doing trailer loading practice, but my intention with all of my courses was none of them. I wanted to get on the trailer. That was nothing.

The point was I want them to get in the vicinity of the trailer and take a deep breath. And then once they do that, we’re going back to the padding. And so many times I’ll walk into a barn for a riding behavioral issue and you approach the stall and the horse pins its ear. If it’s like gritting its teeth, they’re. Like that started so far before I.

I’m like that’s when they’ll they’ll go to take it out of the stall for their they go we need to work on the riding. I go, I need to work on this like I, I’ll get horses that are perpetual rearers and by the time again, the program, there is no program. By the time I teach them or they learn, it’s not even me teaching. It’s by the time they learn, they can regulate their own nervous system. By the time I get in the saddle, I’m not even worried that horses going to rear like to not even a concern.

And how do you get to that point? You have a couple horses, you’re up on you, you get fucked off a few times and you go. There’s got to be a better way because. I would love to tell you that’s true, but it was not true. There are lots of people that have been bucked up lots of times and have not that you have gone.

I rode everything ranked like I was the first person in line to get on the rank horses because I could manipulate him out of it. I would never say that I didn’t care about the nervous system. I did, but I also was trained to ride them through the sympathetic. And again, if you remember, I was an adrenaline junkie, so I had a horrifically traumatizing childhood and I went only in the sympathetic. So that was what I felt was normal.

So when I got on horses that were bottle rockets, I was like, cool, me too, like it’s fine. And so it didn’t phase me. And so we could get through it and then at some point we would regulate together. And what I didn’t realize was that we were regulating together. I didn’t know that it was because I was stuck in the sympathetic.

Now I’m pushing 40, I’ve had three kids. I’ve been a lot of psychedelics and a lot of therapy. And I have since then been like, my nervous system is so toned to not be in the sympathetic now that when it does and when I’m around a body that is, I notice really hard because now I’m not in it anymore. And that’s what I meant around. It has to start with a human like you don’t quite know until when you seem like you have a really grounded nervous system.

We’re like, now you’re like, yeah, I pick up when they get sympathetic and I just not, we’re just not going to until you get that. And that I wish more like if there was like one thing that I wish that people could get and learn, and it’s not even about horses, but horses teach us so beautifully. This lesson is that is learn how to regulate your nervous system. Learn what parasympathetic feels. Learn, learn what feeling good and relaxed feels like.

And then be able to be that grounding rod around the horses and help them because they ground us. They work to ground us all the time. They have no grounding powers left because we robbed them of all of it. There’s no even exchange. And So what I hear from you is you’re doing a lot of that even exchange.

It’s a lot of what I’m doing now too. Or it’s like now we’re taking the horses that they have lost their ability to ground as of the humans and the environment that they’ve been around. And then they get to us and we give that back to them. But this is where that fracture hits for me. What I’m dealing with right now that I’m still trying to navigate how to work through.

It’s like whether or not I need a rebrander, what to do. What is that like? I love this work so much and I believe in it and I see it and I like once you do it, you can’t not do it. And this is so good. But then we have to give them back and then the horses have to leave.

And as much as I would love to just have all of them and that I just have hundreds of thousands of acres that I could just turn them all loose and be like, here, all of your needs are met and you can be on thousands of acres for the rest of your life. That would be my dream. But it’s like then working out this, what’s the point? What’s the point of doing this if then we have to give it back And it’s just that constant. I know every professional deals with us.

It is tough thing to be like OK, so now what? I call it living with two truths because on the one truth, you see how the dysfunction led to this force becoming like this and getting here. And then you have to do all this work and then you have to basically against everything in our beings and them back to that environment. And you like I always joke with people like I want my clients to not need me. Like I will come and I will work with your force for a month straight at your barn.

And I live in Aiken, SC. So like it’s that’s the business model is a lot of amateurs own their own little barns and there’s not really the big training barn type thing. So I do have skulls, which I find actually. I do too and I bring my like my horses are in stalls right now because it’s 100 and grades. But yeah, and like being aware of and that’s what I find going to these people’s places and being able to work with the force in that environment actually helps both the owner.

I had this one client and maybe they’ll get mad that I’m talking about them, but I don’t really care. It’s a husband and wife and both of them want to do Best Buy their horses. You walk into the barn, they’re kissing with their horses. They love their horses, but they struggle with the leadership aspect of riding. And it goes back to that thing that you mentioned of when horses have no boundaries.

They don’t, they don’t know what to do. And so that spirals into these behavioral issues and whatever and for. This specific thing, it’s this is a trail horse who all of a sudden decided it did not any longer want go on the trail. And to me, I go up to that horse and I go listen buddy, it really doesn’t get much better than this. So we’ve got to work on it.

And and then you’re also going back to your why question. So it’s why does the horse all of a sudden not want to go down the trail? Because most horses love it in general. We hear of getting rings sour all the time, and that totally makes sense. But why do you not want to go down the trail?

Was it because you’re human? Is having a meltdown every time you go down the trail? Is it because something is hurting down there? Is it because something doesn’t feel safe? What is it?

And so I start working with this horse and it took me 3 sessions working on his nervous system for me to say OK now you can call the vet. Because like before he wasn’t, he refused to be vulnerable. He’s the stoic type. So even if a vet showed up I was like unless she takes blood up the yin Yang and just gets in rats. All kinds of stuff and it’s still going.

To and now I’ve only ridden the horse now two times and I’ve got him going on the trail nut problem. His thing I think ended up being a little bit of foot soreness, but we our weather has been not. So the foot soreness I go that makes sense, but herd bound to me. Herd boundness is not when the horses don’t want to leave their friends, it’s when they don’t accept you as a member of their herd. 100% and.

So the work has now become OK. He needs to trust when he leaves with you that he’s like leaving with his herd. And I really liked when I was looking at on your website, you have these three pillars and the first pillar is relationship and to connection. And is the horse connecting with itself? Is the force connecting with you?

Are you connecting with the horse? I struggled with that. I know at the end of the day I’m going to have to sell them. I would get non emotionally connected and then you’re not accomplishing anything like you’re banging your head against a wall. And I’ll take that even one step further.

So with the relationship to connection, those of us that are horsemen, you can pick up on it and you’re like, I know all of the ways this means and it’s always hard to explain it, but it’s my favorite thing to talk about. A lot of horses that we get in don’t like being touched. They have an unhealthy relationship to contact. So when you go in, they’re OK with brushing and stuff maybe. But if you go in and actually just said we call it neutral touch.

If you just do a neutral touch where the halter goes, you’ll watch them pull their head up, neutral touch over the nose. So you’ll watch them like no, OK, you do neutral touch especially like the high in their pole. There’s always you’re getting a reaction to it. If you think about it from that perspective, you’re a body worker. You talked about she sounds like she’s got similar training to me.

Sometimes you can really get in there and re separate other things where the person maybe doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything because your fascial system is like a body in and of itself. Like she has her own idea of what’s going on and is so deeply connected to your nervous system. And a human can sit there and be like, yeah, just dig in. You just go for it. It’s fine.

And good trained therapist will feel that and be like, I’m just going to hold here. And what we’re feeling for is we’re feeling for the fascial tension that is underneath their hands. We’re feeling for that to let go and we’re feeling for there to be back to being a rhythm in your fascia again. We are not doing anything aside from touching you. We’re feeling that the body seizes up going, I’m unsafe.

All of my alarm bells are going off. Now you’re not necessarily feeling like that because you’re like that all the time. You think it’s we’re trained. That’s not good. So we just sit there and we’re acknowledging the body and are we running energy?

Yes. But basically we’re just sitting there being like, I’m acknowledging that you’re not OK, and I’m just going to sit here and I’m not going to push any harder or do anything else until you are. That’s it. Yeah, that’s what we’re doing. And at some point, your fascia goes, Oh my God, you heard me that I’m feeling unsafe.

And then we’re like, yeah, we hear you. And then when it starts to calm down, we take our hand off and then we come back and we do it again. And then maybe it seizes up, but maybe it doesn’t seize up as long. And then we it relax as we take our hand off again. And then we put our hand back on again.

And maybe this time it doesn’t seize up at all. And instead this time it goes, something’s touching me. That’s safe. Touch should be safe and for most of us it’s not. And it doesn’t have to be some big trauma.

And for courses, it definitely doesn’t have to be a big trauma. We put a halter on him and we lead him around. And how many people actually go up and touch these areas and do this gentle touch attunement work and say, well, do you actually feel safe to contact in this area? I was never taught that and so I started paying attention to it. So bare bones basics is so when we look for horses, we’ll say pillar.

So I have like pillar one, pillar two, pillar 3. So pillar one from a like what really is my horse? And pillar one where we’re looking for first and foremost is do they feel soft and relaxed? Is their nervous system and parasympathetic? And then it’s can we guide them into a posture where their brachiosphalicus isn’t engaged while they’re standing?

Because it’s not a stand, It’s not the muscle of like movement during the head, like they shouldn’t be using it to stand. So a stabilizer. And so we play around with teaching the horse to lower their head and raise their head. So signals to the halter, which again with people also don’t put horses on. I don’t know how many work times you like get a horse and you’re like, do you know how to soften up that left, right.

And they’re like, I have no idea what to do. So we first we make sure the horse is OK to touch. So we do that neutral touch conversation. And once horses can be touched everywhere the halter goes and they see all that. This is a nice feeling.

This feels safe to me. Then we put the halter on and then we teach them signals to the halter. So you can call it pressure release and call it however you want to do it. But you put signals to the halter on, up, down, left so I can move their head and their Atlas in a way where they feel relaxed and they’re already, they feel safe to the touch. And now, and you can think about it in your own, if somebody’s touching you and you are rigid, you’re not going to have good range of motion.

If somebody’s touching you and you’re like, oh, I feel so safe, you’re going to have a lot different range of motion. So to your point on when and like how you called the vet later on, if a horse is stuck in tension and they’re stuck in sympathetic, you’re not really going to get an honest answer to what’s going on either. And that’s a big reason why. So we get them soft, we teach them up, down, left, right signals to the halter. And then we can use the line, our connection to the horse to say, hey, now that you have a good relationship to connection and I can guide you, I can guide you into the posture of pillar 1.

So you’re in your joint straight, it’s open, it’s not stuck closed. That brachiosphalicus is relaxed. Now we have access to ask you to listen to your slang because now it can guide you into a healthy posture with the most relaxation and the best range of motion. So that’s where that starts. And then we go into Pillar 2, which is teaching them how to actually engage their whole core.

So we’re getting them that center of balance or center of gravity so they can actually start. Because if you don’t have that first component, in my opinion, you’re never actually going to get a horse or truly have self carriage and a good core because they can’t, they don’t have good access to it. So you got to start here and then you can move to there. And just like anything that build, if you’re working on your center of gravity or you’re working on your rage of motion, a reduction, if you’re working on any of those things and you start getting tension again or you start getting those bracing you. Go back.

To one them back in a relaxation because that’s what matters. You don’t do one, check it and don’t worry about it again. That’s always what you’re worried about. And then as long as they can hold it, we can build on top of it. If we lose something, we go right back forever and ever.

Amen. So it’s just good horsemen. She just broke down in foundational. And here’s muscles and here’s nerves, and here’s a bunch of other cool stuff you can look at. But that’s why what you’re doing is working so well is because you’re taking them in and you’re like, I’m going to hone the nervous system now we can see what’s going on.

Yeah, yeah, no. And that’s what like once you start looking at, I hate the term the whole horse because I think people think of it as like nose to tail. But it’s like I always say when I made all of it riding, I originally, I used to until I started getting into like the muscles and how the muscles can manipulate the spine and all of that. I used to think of riding when I was sitting on the horse. I’m riding their skeleton.

And to me that would just help me. Yeah, train the horse in terms of. I still feel that somehow like you’re like, I think of like the joints and I’m like, where’s the joints ride the joints ride the nervous. System, but exactly, and it’s you’re not just riding the horse like you’re working with all of these different systems and it’s the same like I, I do feel lucky in a sense because I find it funny when you said, Oh, you have a grounded nervous. I literally I am.

So I’m a calm person like by nature, but I can get super OCD about things. I can spiral. All of us, everybody. When I say to be the singer for everybody listening, when I say that I’m in a place like my nervous, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get shot to shit. A lot of the time I have kids like that’s normal.

But it’s your ability to the fact that you can feel that and what I’ve learned a lot through clinicing that there’s a lot of people like, I would be generous to say that the majority people that I go to night clinic with don’t know how to come back here. That’s the problem. That’s what I’m learning now, but I’ve been pretty lucky with the horses. The like I remember trying to get into meditating a few years ago and I just could not figure it out. I was like, I actually just posted a meme a couple days ago that was like, anything you need to know about me is that I just tried to listen to a calming guided meditation of 1.5 speed.

But when I’m with the horses, I feel like that’s very meditative to me. It brings me to the present moment it and, and mostly because I think there’s a healthy level of fear when working with horses and that fear, that alertness is really only possible when you’re present because you’re going to notice the eye change before the spook like it. And it’s all of and yeah, I’m learning now that I actually do need to learn to meditate because it is hard for me to once I get spiraling, it’s hard for me to come down and start working with gratefulness practices and all of that stuff. But. Can I tell you I’m the best CHEAT SHEET for medicating because I for years my mom was a Reiki master.

I grew up in hippie shit and meditation and crystals and this is just normal for me. But I could never meditate and I, there’s got to be something wrong for and I would get so annoyed by it and they’re like just relaxed. And then finally I learned it’s called something different. Lots of people do it every it has a different name depending on who you ask it. The one that was taught to me was just called come to your senses.

And it’s what I teach people and it’s what I do. And it’s the easiest, most beautiful way to do it. You just, I was going to run you through it really quick and everybody can do it because everybody, it’s just very simple. Just close your eyes, take a nice deep breath in. It’s really good to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.

And then I want you to, with your eyes closed, I want you to just take a moment and listen to any sound you can hear. Maybe you’re just hearing the annoyance of your own breath. Maybe you’re hearing cars on the street, music in the background, anything. You just try to hear whatever you can hear, and then you move into your sense of smell and you just take some nice deep breaths in and just smell whatever you can smell. And then you move into your sense of taste.

Maybe you can taste a little bit of leftover coffee. Maybe you don’t taste anything, just feel around the taste. And this is a really fun one. Sometimes with your eyes closed, try and see what some people see. Just black.

Some people see pictures and images, some people see colors. My husband sees a light show every time he closes his eyes. There’s no right or wrong to any of this. And then the last one is what do you feel? So you can feel your own hands.

You can feel your shirt on your skin, you can feel your pants. You can feel the chair that you’re sitting on, can lean back and feel that it’s holding you, supporting you. And then you just slowly open your eyes again. So it’s just going through a very quick, you go through your senses and what happens is because you’re tuning into a sense, you have to come back to present. And because it’s such a quick thing in your ear that you’re getting your seeking drive, right?

So you’re seeking, what am I smelling? What am I saying? What am I tasting? It’s getting your brain to focus on the here and now, right here, which is really cool. And again, like thoughts are gonna come in, but they’re not gonna come in as much because you’re searching for something.

And you just go through that. And what I find is like when you’re on one sense, basically when thoughts start coming in, like you’ve smelled everything or there is a smell and you’re like, there isn’t anything else. And then thoughts are coming and you’re like, we’ll move to the next set. And then you just bounce around and you just get a little bit longer and longer at it. And then at some point when you’re doing it, you’ll start maybe 5 or 6 times and you’ll drop into like more of a stillness of your breath.

You can also feel your heartbeat is another one in it too. But what it does is it does exactly what you said with the horses is that you’re picking up on all of their senses. You pick on like how are they smelling? What did they just hear? What are they did their breathing change?

Are they breathing fast? Are they breathing slow? It’s another one you can check in with yourself and really like. The reason why you don’t tell many people to do the breathing thing or the heart one. I do it.

And if you can do it in a non judgmental fashion where you’re not trying to change what you’re breathing, yeah, absolutely do it. And I think checking in with your breath before you do that meditation and then after, you’ll notice that it comes down. But often times people are so like, I’m doing it wrong or I’m checking with my breath and Oh my God, I’m breathing so fast. This is so bad. Don’t do that.

Just it just is like you were breathing like that before you noticed and you were fine. So just chill. But you tune into your senses and then you can tune into your horse’s senses from a place of your nervous systems matching instead of doing it necessarily out of the fear, which we should have a healthy fear and we should have a healthy respect for everybody that’s around us, for sure. But it just comes from a little bit more of a toned perspective. But yeah, it’s what taught me how to meditate.

And now I can drop in and I can meditate without doing it. But it I had to start there. And nobody ever taught me that. You have to give your brain something to do first in order to be present, because being present is not something that we are working around the past and we’re working around the future all the time. And so it’s just one simple thing to kind of.

Get your back. Yeah, I it’s really funny because this is off topic, but it made me think of it. A few years ago I was really struggling with a horse at competitions. She was great at home and I figured a competitions and she just constantly made me bang my head up against a wall and I could not figure out what the issues were. And I seeked out a sports psychologist and he I go, yeah, that my trainer told me that I’m nervous, but I don’t feel nervous.

I work with him for four sessions and then I go to my next horse show and I’m like sitting there by the ring and he was like just sit and just hang out and notice what happens as people are like going into the ring and whatever. And then the person before me goes into the ring and all of a sudden my heart starts pounding and I start sweating and I’m holding my breath and I go hi. I got so excited and I was like, my God, I feel nervous like I’m feeling it. Yes. And it was like, finally I can one, I should apologize to my trainer because I was like not nervous, but also thank God because now I can do something about it.

And I’m actually really glad that you said that. And this is probably I know that we’re already going longer for like your normal stuff. Probably a really good thing to like circle back into because it really is the whole thing. Horses. There was a meme one time.

I’m going to go way back. So I had a body worker that I just enjoyed was the only really sad thing about me moving to Oregon is I don’t get to see him as often, but he was everything that my body felt safe with to work with, which was really rare for me to find. And he was a master at our bodies hold emotion like we know that, but he was a master at being able to name the emotion because he could feel it come up in his body. So he’d be we’re going to and he’s oh, this is where like that last little thing jealousy is, or here’s where this shame is or here’s where whatever. And he was working on my diaphragm and it definitely like I, I get a really, everybody does it different.

I, when I have a really wicked emotional release, my body will get really cold and then I’ll sweat. I like, like fever broke. Yeah. And so he’s working on something and I’m getting this really like weird sensation that like I can’t, it’s definitely turning into an emotional release. Like I can’t pinpoint what this emotion is.

I’m pretty good at, I know my body really well. And I, again, I’ve done a lot of work. So I’m like pretty good at feeling what it is. I can’t pick up on what this is. And Tyler can’t pick a phone, what this is.

And he’s got, it’s really interesting. His guy. I’m not like, like my body wouldn’t let him hear what that emotion was. It was, she was so like, no, we’re good. I’m like, how?

That’s crazy. So anyway, works through it. I feel a little bit better. Later on that day, I see a meme on Facebook and it’s about being a horse trainer. And it says being a horse trainer is all about both of you knowing for sure that you’re going to die, but only one of you gets to act like it.

Yeah. And earlier in that week, I had, I had a client bring their horse in for training to drop off. And something had happened in the horse trailer where the horse got tied up and went down and the horse was down a bit stuck in the rope in the horse trailer. And I had to get in there. I didn’t have to.

I chose to. I was the one that chose to because we’re the ones that suicidal enough. To like go exactly. But I go in there with the knife. But again, we’re so good at my nerves are good.

I’m like, it’s all good. It’s OK. I’m just going to Cut the Rope. We’re going to be good and I’m going to, I’m going to breathe with you long enough and pray to all my gods and ancestors you’re going to stay down so I can get the. Fuck out of here the.

Reality of the situation is I very well could have died and and death might have been favorable to what else could have happened had that where it’s gotten up in the box and me gotten smashed into the metal box and the whole thing could have been really bad. And that is a very lived experience for the majority of us horse trainer, because whether or not we like to talk about it, to your point, horses are dangerous and it could be the smallest accident. One of my friends just got into the horrible rotational fall because her perfect Unicorn of a horse missed and the pole came down. He got tangled and flipped on top of her and she’s horribly injured. Yeah, Greek shit happens.

And the stuff that we do with these dangerous forces isn’t a free thing. These are, we know we’re going into potential horribly violent situations and it’s a choice we make. And I don’t know why we make it, but we do. But these events all happen. And I saw that meme and I was like, Oh my God, that was fear.

Holy shit. And then I, and then I had the whole somatic, if anybody’s ever had one of those, I had a as soon as I recognized it and it was the whole somatic thing, I threw up, I cried. I had a whole, it was a whole thing. And I was like. I’ve never once and all of, I think I was 31 then.

So for over 30 years, like I had never admitted once that I was afraid. Not only are we not allowed to because that makes us weak, but we’re also not allowed to because if we admit that we’re afraid around the horse, then they go, Oh my God, it’s true. And now we really could die. But there is some truth to it’s gripping military family as well. And so it’s like when you’re around a lot of soldiers, like good soldiers have a nervous system because of all the trouble that they’ve been through.

That’s completely calm and horrible situations. And it’s, it’s a hard balance because on one hand you want to have that skill set, but what’s the missing piece? And what was the missing piece for me was that then I, but I didn’t acknowledge that I was in an, I was going through an active trauma every time I went. So then what was happening was I was never releasing it. I was never actually doing the work.

Then after the fact to be like I went through a traumatic situation, I need to get somebody work done. I maybe need to smoke a blunt and take a bath. Like I maybe need to do some self-care. Like for real, because it’s just part of our day. We just don’t notice.

So you’re then stuck in the sympathy. You’re not. You can’t feel that you’re nervous, you can’t feel that you’re afraid. You have no idea that you’re feeling me because you have trained your body and not. But what happens with our horses is that it doesn’t matter if we can’t feel it, they can.

They’re masters at it. They’re masters of the systems. So then we have a bunch of professionals that are running around not feeling the fact that they’re actually nervous and terrified. And then we’re running into these issues with our horses trying to figure out what’s going on. I suspect that you hitting your head with this horse probably went down a little bit after you figured that out and you could work with it.

Yeah, that horse really changed the trajectory of my career because up until her I’d always made all the horses that I had. But she made me realize how good those horses were and like they were just so forgiving of my mistakes. She was holding me to a higher standard than any of those. Oh my God. And she’s just not mayor and I tend to gravitate towards mayors in general.

But and she basically, if it really wasn’t for her, I probably wouldn’t be doing this podcast right now and I probably really wouldn’t even. Maybe it was always in my path for me to care about this stuff. But frankly, I don’t know. Because I was good enough just going and competing and riding my seven horses a day and whatever. It was fine.

But I again, I was that annoying kid that was always like, why? And so then you figure it out or you go on the journey to figure it out. And that’s really what, yeah, like I said, she changed the whole trajectory of my career. And she’s still, she’s still teaching me. The reason I’m doing this big trailer loading practice is because, yeah, things got better after I realized that I was allowed to be a little more emotional and we connected a bit better, but there was still struggles with tension and explosive behavior and things that I could not mimic at home.

Then I realized that, like, she actually got so triggered by the trailer. Like today I got within 200 yards of the trailer and I didn’t ask her to go any closer. So we’re talking like, I’ve been working with this bear for 3 1/2 years and I’m just now getting to the point of figuring out, oh, God, like, actually the riding piece after all of this, the riding piece could have been such a minimal part of it. And it’s really all this other stuff. But yeah, so then I do feel like sometimes I struggle with my own horses where I can go to a client and there’s that impartial, like I’m choosing to go into that realm of dealing with the dangerous parts, which sometimes I think it’s a little easier than like having a catastrophic fall at a show or whatever.

Because even though you’re choosing to get on the force and go jump it, like at least I know when I’m working with a force that I was talking to my friend who starts horses and I’m like every now and then she’ll have a force who because it’s literally learning things for the first time, it’ll just react. And so it’ll reroute and I go that’s different because I’m getting the horse knowing it’s going to reroute. And that’s yes, it’s worse when it’s unexpected. For sure, that doesn’t mean it’s not less risk. No, it’s not.

It’s less repeat also just the and I’m still like putting words to this because I don’t get to talk about this very much. So thank you for letting me about it. When we go into, when I’m learning, I guess within myself, whether or not this is true for everybody, I don’t. But I’ve had a really complex daring in training for the last couple of months and now he’s just a baby doll and he’s doing lovely. But the first month that I had him, I knew acted with him.

I was a little bit putting my life at risk. Now every did every time I interact with him, he did. He put my life in risk. No, not everything. He did a handful of times and then like I learned and altered and we did different things.

But every time I interacted with him I knew that it was a risk. Whether or not he did it, I knew it was a risk. Which meant every single time I worked with him, if I did not treat myself afterwards as if I was in a traumatic situation, then I had a build up of sympathetic, it would come out. And so I think that’s more So what I’m trying to express people is just because something bad didn’t happen, the fact that you are putting yourself in these situations, It’s why like I’ve got so much, I have a lot of law enforcement friends and family and they’re not to be unlike politics, but there’s some like horrible shit that happens. And I’ve had a lot of horrible friends with cops.

Like I’ve got a lot of trauma with police. And even though I know I have loved ones that are in the enforcement and but what I see in stuff like that is these guys, whether or not they have a bad day, every day they put on their uniform, they know that there’s a chance that they could die. There is no self-care. There’s no conversations around it. There’s no let down.

And then you have a build up of somebody that’s so stuck in the sympathetic and has so much trauma fueled in her body that they’ve never been allowed to express and get out because maybe they haven’t actually been shot. So why are you tripping like that? Dismissive a little bit, but worse. And then we have cops of shoe people. Yeah.

And they, and it’s, we see it in big things like that. When you’re driving and you get in a car, every time you get into a car, you’re receiving an accident. If somebody slams on their brakes and you slam on their brakes and you’re SOAS like because, oh, my God, like, I just had to hit my brakes. You’re SOAS just clamped down over all your vital organs. And your body doesn’t.

Your nervous system doesn’t decipher that any different than at the Saber tooth tiger can rock. Corn. Yeah, exactly. So then what are you doing to down regulate from what are you doing to be kind to yourself from that? Yeah.

I think a lot of, I find a lot of parallels between like elite athletes and like elite business people and in terms of like mindset. And so I was listening to the salesperson talk and she was saying that she’s done hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. And she goes, there are some days where you literally get told to go off yourself and like all of this stuff, it feels really hard. And she goes, So you know what I do at the end of the day? I run myself a bubble bath and I pour myself a glass of wine.

And because you need to rebuild up your serotonin. You have to do that. And so many people, whether it’s law enforcement, whether it’s anyone working with any animals, I worked at a doggy daycare and like got way more respect for dogs after that experience than I had before. And it’s going from because even if nothing happens, by putting yourself in the situation you’ve contemplated that thing could happen and your brain doesn’t know that it didn’t happen, no. And there is, I don’t know if you ever watched like Georgia Spencer or any of that where there’s all kinds of scientific studies where they’re putting out that they are proving like they can see it on scans.

They’re proving that your brain cannot tell the difference between watching a show with trauma. I was just talking about like, I should have really stopped watching. I really like Dexter, the new season. Watch an episode of Dexter before I go to bed. That’s probably not helpful for like I have a hard time going to sleep, but it is.

And so our brains can’t tell the difference between a trauma that happened and also perceived trauma. So if you’re worried, if you’re around people that are constantly telling you that like you’re unsafe or you’re don’t do this, you’re going to get hurt and all that program your body and your mind will create a story that says that thing already happened to you. That’s wild to me. That’s so crazy that it works like that, but that’s also why conversely, and This is why like Joe Spencer and he’s like, cool, So yeah, we have that. So if it’s true for the negative, it could be true for the positive.

So you’re just trying to like, yeah. And so then there’s also studies around athletes who they got in a bunch of these athletes and they’re like, OK, Group A, you’re going to go and you’re going to lift these weights and you’re going to do these workouts for you’ve seen this. Right, I just forgot about this. So fucking cool. So you’re going to do these workouts, you’re using Group B, you’re going to meditate.

And by meditation, I just mean you’re going to have this script that you’re going to read and you’re going to have this thing that you’re going to play out in your head and you’re going to pretend in your mind that you are and you’re feeling the feelings. And they’ve taught him how to do it right, specific type meditation, but you’re going to do these workouts in meditation. And then they put the two together and the group that did not physically work out, the group that did the meditative workouts, had more muscle growth than the ones that did. That’s not to say you can replace education. It is just merely pointing out the fact that in these small instances, your mindset matter.

He talked about that a lot. He would talk about the playoffs that he would do and like. He would watch. In his mind, he would imagine how the game’s going to go and played it so that his body was toned for winning. If it’s so cool, it’s really funny because I had this horse actually, she’s retired in my field now.

I still have her and she was my first, the first horse I ever came to a crossroads on of. Do I sell this horse to continue doing what I like doing, which was eventing, or do I continue with this horse and go do you know the jumpers or whatever it is that she likes? And when you’re a junior young rider, like that’s a really big decision because to you like that’s going to dictate the rest of your life now. Like I’m now no longer shooting for young riders in show jumping maybe. But like this life that I thought I was going to have, I’m no longer going to have with this horse, but I love my horse, so I’m going to choose to be with her versus whatever.

So I call in a psychic. And this was at a point in time where now you can talk about for psychics and people are like. It’s much more accepted, yeah. But like we’re talking over 10 years ago this was happening and the mayor I was having a lot of stopping issues on cross country. She was just and not even at jumps, but she would like galloping and literally I just would have to like hack to go find a fence judge to retire because I was like she refused to go and this the psychic told me to start visualizing doing visualization and she goes, you’re not committed to the thing that it is you’re doing.

And because of that, like she feels lack of direction and it changed every and now the first thing I do like when I’m at a competition or whatever, like I am visualizing my dress lunch test. And then once I get dress lunch test, I visualize the show jumping. And that doesn’t mean I have 100% clear round rate or that mistakes don’t happen or whatever. But you almost feel OK, you’ve done it before. And to go even more will horses see in photos and they see in pictures.

And so the way it was like described to me by the force psychic was that when you do the visualization, save one visualization session for you and your horse and do it in the stall or whatever with them and just run through it jump by jump because like they know. I have two funny stories. No, you bet this that is 1 isn’t really, it’s not so funny. My my jumper coach actually was fantastic and I was taught to walk a course three times. So you walk a course whether or not you’re walking the work course or if you have a chance to walk a three times.

Otherwise, just look at it and the first time, and I’ve done it for every other version of writing that I’ve done, but you do it once just to get to know it. You do it a second time and you try to imagine every way this can go bad. And then while you’re doing that though, what things that you can do to counter that mistake. So if you go in too deep, if you go in too far, if you know whatever the thing that you can think of, if that happens, how can you well be your best Ave. to get out of it?

So your body gets to feel going into that and then helping the reaction to get you out of it. But the last time you would do it in visioning it being completely flawless and perfect. And if you could do that with your horse, all the better. So like you have that tone in your body and that was like, I can’t even tell you how many times that saved my house. And I had no appreciation for it until I’ve gotten older and I’ve learned about the site, but all these things.

And I’m like, kind of like with the bridal horse up and I’m like, oh, that’s why that was an idea why that was so important. But the second one is my I sent my own horse on a road trip with a girlfriend of mine because I just want him to go out and see life. And we’re in Washington. She’s like, I’m going to go to Wyoming and stay to ranch for a little while. Then we’re going to go down to San Diego and pick a couple 100 acres of trails.

And I’m like, yeah, I was take our, it’ll be fun. Bush takes him and he has never seen an automatic water before. Is this really funny? You want to talk about bullshit? This is stuff you cannot make up.

So he’s really, he doesn’t like things touching his nose. He’s really sensitive. I’m very sensitive on his face. And he doesn’t like mechanical things. And I’m like, and he really doesn’t like water spraying yet.

Like there’s all of these things about this that are like, this is not good. And she was like, so when we’re in San Diego, she’s I’ll make him a bucket. Like we could make him a bucket. And we have a pee in the bud. All they have are it’s kind of a bougie place, but all they have is automatic water is it’s the little one that’s the little dish.

And they have to push their nose up and the water springs out. And I’m like, this is not going to be well, the same. But the source at all, the source has bored in my lap. Like, I know him in and out and I’m like, OK, I’m like, let’s just go down there and he’s in the trailer ride and I am laying down and I’m meditating. And I do a lot of my own version of animal communication with him.

And I’m trying really hard to send him the picture of what this automatic water looks like and what it is he’s supposed to do with it. And he’s this makes no sense. So he gets there beginning at 11:30 at night. She gets him into a stall. She videotapes it.

She’s I videotaped it because I was expecting there to be this like, big reaction. He was going to go in, sniff it, get spooked in the whole thing. That’s what figured was going to happen. She’s on video and he walks in and he’s looking around like he’s looking for something. And then he sees the automatic water and he walks up to it.

And you just watch him be like, and then he shoves his nose into it and starts slurping as hard as he can. And he’s just like a going for it. And he’s this is what she’s talking about. We were. Hilarious.

Best you cannot make up, but I was bit for hours. I’m trying to send him because he needs to drink. It’s a long trailer right now, but and like I said, she would have gotten in my bucket anyway, but I was just really hoping and he didn’t. And and now he loves them. He thinks they’re the coolest thing that he’s ever experienced.

But it was there’s no way that happened without visualizing like it was his. Everything about it is his worst enemy and it was just so good. So people need to work on their nervous systems and visualize for their ponies. Yes, exactly. Love it.

All righty. This has been such a great conversation. So good. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me.

And how do people follow along with you and what you do and all of that good stuff. Yeah. Facebook is the one that I’m the most active on and it’s just I had my personal one. I was a grown up recently and I did start a bouncer movement method official page only because and I will try to be more active on that. But I had a lot of people like hack accounts or create fake accounts.

So I created an official one just to be like, this one is actually made. So there’s bounce removement method, Facebook page and my personal page. So Celeste Azaris, which is like I said, the one I’m most active on Instagram is Travelling Horse Switch, which was a nickname lovingly given me to me by somebody who like similar to you. They’re like, yeah, like we just call this person when we need to put down a horse and she just magically talks the travelling horse, which is my nickname on Instagram. And then the website is Bounce your movementmethod.com.

You can see all of the courses that are on there. We have a free educational video on pillar one that everybody can watch. It just talks about like your basics of it, both from the connection standpoint and the bio mechanics. The master class is usually where I encourage people to start. It’s 197 and you get lifetime access to a metric ton of videos and content.

There’s a complimentary Facebook group that comes with it where you can go in myself and my trainers are in there and you can ask any question. You can post your attempts at any of the pillars and we’ll give you a complimentary feedback on all of it. So it’s all individual for your horse, which is really cool. I’ll be back to clinicing probably later this year and next year for sure also. Thanks so much for joining me.

You are so welcome.