Rethinking Soundness, Posture & Consent - Yasmin Stuart

I typically kick the episodes off by just having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do. My name is Yasmin Stewart and I’m an equine physiotherapist and a trauma informed horse trainer. I have several areas of interest within that. What I’m really interested in is the philosophy around the choices that people make for their horses and how that informs their horses health and well-being. How we can support our horses body health by supporting more of the nature of the horse.

So this goes a little bit beyond meeting their ethical ecological needs and becomes more about inspiring curiosity and problem solving skills and giving them more autonomy and agency within their life with humans. What blows my mind is how a lot of the problems that I find as an equine physiotherapist kind of disappear when we can inspire a bit more invigoration in a horse’s life. And I think that’s really fun. And with the people that I work with, the owners attached to the horses, I find that when they start to see their horses lived experience beyond what the horse does for them and beyond compliance, that also is hugely enriching for the humans too. That’s where I found myself currently, as much as across my career, I’ve pulled lots of different threads and that’s found me in lots of different areas of the industry, all of which have been fascinating and brought me to this point.

So what inspired you to get into this trauma informed way of looking at horses? And because trauma is such a heavy word and I think people don’t realize that like trauma can literally be, oh, their friend left and that was stressful or something. Literally they flipped over in a trailer. Like it encompasses so much. So what kind of inspired you to look at that side of things?

Yeah, Before I go there, I want to speak to what you said about trauma encompassing so much. And I also think that trauma has become a little bit of an icky kind of word lately because I think there’s a cultural thing, particularly from a human perspective, where everything can be trauma and then where everything is trauma, it can sometimes make people not accountable for their actions. And you bring up the word trauma and people high roll and say, oh God, here we go again. Whereas from an equine based perspective, I think firstly we haven’t been so good at realising the ramifications of our actions on horses and how that affects them psychologically. Distract from, it’s not the human perception of trauma when we’re talking about human relationships, interpersonal relationships, where you might say, oh, because of my previous lived experience, that thing that you do isn’t terribly pleasant.

I’m talking about trauma on a neurophysiological level and how our lived experiences can influence our associations to a particular life event. When we experience something negative, our brain stores that information. So when we experience something negative and then we’re exposed to a similar situation, our brain can automatically assign an emotion to that based upon that previous lived experience. So even if the previous situation was horrible and the situation you’re about to experience is pleasant because you’ve had a terrible time of it, you’re going to assign not such pleasant emotions to that experience and that will colour your perception of that experience from an equine perspective. If you’ve got a horse who has, for example, moved herds lots of times they’ve moved to different yards, their friends have been taken away, they might see one horse leaving the field and go, this is going to be terrible and they will experience a negative emotion to that.

And that might play out in behaviours that we don’t particularly like as people when that horse will perpetuate their negative experience as well. But coming full round to your first question of how did I find myself here, that’s quite a long convoluted story, so I’ll try to give you the succinct version. Over the course of my career, but also my lived experience with the horses in my life, I have had a huge diverse range of horses with different personalities. And I, when I first got my equine physiotherapy diploma, I was very much of the mindset that you could rehabilitate everything with the correctly applied exercises. And so all it took was some skill as a trainer.

And by skill what I mean is someone who is very adept at making a horse do a thing, not someone who is adept at reading emotions and blah blah blah. And then enough time to repeat the number of exercises and then your horse would get better. That meant that if you applied the exercises and the horse wasn’t getting better, that meant that you were doing it wrong. That meant that you were doing it wrong. The horse needed to perform the exercises better and then happy days, that would be that.

And that would be fine. And by exposure to horses that have come into my life, my personal horses, they have one horse at a time, deconstructed that ideology. Whether that was no matter how many times I tried to do the correct exercises, that horse wouldn’t comply. Or I did the correct exercises until the cows came home and the horse still did not get better. Yet my perception of my skill set was fairly adequate.

I was fairly good at making a horse do a thing if I wanted to or if I wanted it to. And I wouldn’t say I was horrible about it in the context of I was never that person who was going to chase a horse round with a whip. And I met someone who’s now a very good friend and their behaviour consultant and she and I had very interesting and stimulating conversations about behaviour. And this started from an equitation science perspective, which was a very much tactile stimulation to get the horse to do a thing, developing an understanding of learning theory. But then this other filter naturally naturally dropped in, which was more to do with the horses lived experience.

And I would say that this then precipitated more of an awakening of starting to see what horses are OK with, what they’re not OK with, and where those problems might lie. And that then became a little bit more about everything outside of training rather than the training situation itself. In acknowledging the horse having a lived experience outside of what we want to do with them, I started to see that I could program exercises for an owner to do with their horse, but I couldn’t sleep at night if it wasn’t appropriate for the horse to do those exercises because there were other things they weren’t OK with. I can’t prescribe exercises for kissing Spines rehab, which involved the horse being in the arena 6 * a week because the horse doesn’t want to be in an arena. I don’t want that for that horse and I don’t want that for that person.

So travelling from there, I then started to play around with more enrichment strategies filtered through various professional bodies of work and looking at research around enrichment. And I also started to see that as I imply, applied those enrichment strategies, not only did horses seem to have a nice time and want to be with people, but also their posture improved. And that was incredible because it requires very little skill to do enrichment strategies with your horse, enrichment strategies with their horse. For a certain part of any kind of rehabilitation, it’s really easy, but they also get to have fun with their horse. And I think that’s really important.

Now, that’s not me saying that I don’t do any training outside of those enrichment strategies, but that is me saying this becomes a huge part of what I suggest people should do with their horses, certainly in the beginning. Can we bring their nervous system down? Can we help them to enjoy time with people? And then from that, how does their body change? And then what training sort of strategies do we need to apply from there?

But also within that, has the humans lens shifted about what they actually want to do with their horse based on what they’ve learned through that journey? I hope I answered that without waffling too far. Yeah, and it’s really interesting because right now I’m actually dealing with a horse who had previously had some Saddlefit issues and now she does not want to be in the arena at all. And I’m working with the owner to be like, I don’t think either of us want to go into the arena and get fucked off because she’s not enjoying her experience there if she’s happy enough to go out and do trot sets and what not on the trail. So like how do you deal with opening people up to this horse is its own being and has its own thoughts and feelings.

But also supporting the fact that an owner may have a goal that they wish to accomplish with that horse and the feeling of it may feel slower or it may feel a certain way that doesn’t feel as productive working towards that goal, but that the goal may still be attainable. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes total sense. I would say that I don’t tend to find myself in a performance field anymore. Usually the people that I work with tend to be, and I’d like it not to be the case, but they tend to be more the last resort kind of people where they’re like, we’ve tried all of the traditional stuff, let’s go here.

And I honestly, I think it depends on the case as well. I think it depends on how traumatised the horses and how much water has gone under the bridge. I think for me, it’s a case of building time frames and giving the people that we’re working with sort of landmarks to get to. So what does it look like for my horse to be moving in a good frame? What does that look like?

What does it look like for my horse to have neutralized posture? What does that look like? We are going to do this until we see these visual indicators and then we can talk about moving on to the next step We’re looking at. We’re going to do this until it sticks and the results tend to happen fairly fast, like the immediate sort of instant gratification change of posture happens quite quickly. Then we need to look at all of the situations where we lose that posture and that will become the thing that we’re working on.

Equally, we’re going to look at achieving this neutral posture first and foremost. So if I’m looking at taking a horse who’s just been treated for kissing spines, they’ve had their back medicated, they seem to be a lot less painful in the first few weeks. I’m going to be looking at more sort of treat scatter stent work based modalities because that really helps them to embody that neutral spinal position. So we can help them to find that without human intervention. And then we look at adding cues to that.

So I find the initial stages are a really good way of getting people to train their eye. Or when your horse moved in that specific way, look how their back shape changed. Look how they’re using the musculature over their neck. Really, rather than them just going through the motions of lobbing a few treats on the floor and watching their horse have at it. I can say train your right of this because then when we move on in the program, you’re going to need to keep your eye in there and make it so much more about empowering them to make really good choices their horse.

And then within that, once we’ve achieved that sort of baseline posture, if you like, I then start to say you can do any activities where your horse finds that posture. So we know your horse can find it. We’ve maybe attached some cues to them finding it, IEA little bit of negative reinforcement on the head collar to get them to lower their head, or you’ve followed them around the arena doing a treats gaster. And so you can also use your body as a cue. Now go and do what feels good to you.

So rather than it becoming just about the rehab, we give them options. They can go and explore. They can be curious what is my horse happy with, what is my horse not happy with? And then we can build from there. So with your example with the person you’re working with and the horse in the arena, for me that would be OK.

The arena is where fun happens. And I don’t mean human fun, horse fun. We go do a treat scatter. We do nice things where the horse gets to explore, they get to build their curiosity mindset. And then outside of that, we can do training elsewhere, providing it safe to do, whether that’s in the paddock, whether that’s in the car park, whether that’s out on the trails.

Does that make sense? Yeah, so it’s more fostering the human experience within it rather than 14 steps to make the horse to the thick. So you mentioned neutral spine and for the listener who may not know what that is or what that looks like, could you explain that for them? Yeah, of course, when we’re looking at a horse carrying the weight of a rider, we want them to be in a little bit of a flex position. We want them to have their back lifted and engaged.

I tend to see a lot of horses are more orientated to a hollow position. If we were to look at their backs, we would say it depends on the horses confirmation, right? But we would say that their spine is in a hollow position. You’d look at the Withers, you’d look at the area behind the Withers, and perhaps the area behind the Withers is quite dipped. And perhaps if you track the angle of under where the rider would sit up to the horses crew, perhaps it would be like a sort of diagonal downhill slope rather than parallel with the ground.

From a neutral spinal perspective, I really want by and large that thoracic region under where the rider sits and then the lumbar region just behind the saddle area to be parallel with the ground. That tells me horses fine is neutral. Now there is a bit of train your eye in between. It would be easier if I could show you pictures and point at a living horse. We don’t have that available to us on a podcast, which is a shame.

What I find is a lot of horses are not in a neutral position and neutral is just the area, the sort of no man’s land between being extended or hollow and being flexed or having their back lifting. So neutral means the horse can move anywhere between the two with equal ease and that’s important for health. It’s great to have a back that’s flexed and lifted when carrying a rider, but the horse does equally need to be able to extend their back. That’s an important range of motion for them to be able to access, and equally through movement, the horse’s back will oscillate between extended and flex depending on where they are in the stride cycle. It’s not about demonizing one sort of portion of movement, it’s more about helping to create the ability to access all of it depending on the locomotor need.

Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So it’s I do a lot with off the track thoroughbred. So typically they’re very tight through their back and they’re very high up in their head. And So what I’m seeing is that before I really start to do the riding portion, I make sure that they’re just even.

So if something happens, they can come up, but they also can come down, which tends to be the issue that they struggle with is the call it letting go. So when you’re working with horses and riders and all of that, what does, I guess some aspect of it is you mentioned that you don’t find yourself working with performance horses or in a performance setting. Do you feel like performance inherently takes away from a horse’s ability to have good posture and good mental well-being? Or do you think there is a place where the 2 can’t live together? That’s such a good question.

I think it’s really difficult to work in a performance sphere and also really honour your horse’s lived experience. And I don’t think it’s as easy as saying performance is cruel or not cruel because I don’t think that’s fair on the people. But I also, I don’t think that’s fair on the horses because I do think there are cases of habituation where horses, they just acclimatize to what’s expected of them. And if you were to really break it down with those horses and lay them on a chair and say, so how do you really feel about that? I think you’d have to dig down quite far to find the negative emotions, even if they were like an undercurrent of their baseline feeling.

A bit like with people, you put them in a therapy setting and it can take a little bit of discussion before they go, oh, I didn’t realize that that thing was a problem, but it is actually a problem for me. I think the tricky thing with competition is or performance in general is that a lot of people will say that they are taking their time with their horse, but when it really comes down to it, they’re not taking the time needed for the horse to feel OK in an environment, for example. So if you look at the stresses placed upon the horse in a competitive setting, it’s not just the performance element from the. Moves that we’re getting them to do is also taking them away from their herd, is taking them to a new environment that maybe they’ve never been to before where there are lots of scary novel objects that they’ve never seen before. And lots of other horses who also seem quite stressed.

There’s the emotional contagion piece of that. And I think that is enormously difficult for a lot of horses. I think it’s very rare for a horse to go into that situation and feel OK because they’re OK with it. I think often times it’s a they’re not doing, they’re not performing horrible behaviours, so therefore they must be fine. But then on top of that, I think looking at how the body adapts from a performance perspective, I think there are a lot of people who don’t give the body enough time for it to adapt to what is being asked of it.

So this would be from a competition perspective, you might see that person jump up a number of levels in a season, but there’s no way that body could adapt to what’s being asked of it. There’s no way that you’ve had muscular adaptation, that horses develop the muscles required to support their body in that way. And I think that can be where we break down with that. But then I also think even on a consent based perspective, I think when you’re, I think that you can be a consent based person and you can say, if my horse doesn’t want to do it, then I’m not going to make them do it. And we can just I’ll load them back up on the float and we’ll take them home.

But I also wonder how many people when they’re there and they’re, they just need to do a sort of 20 minute warm up to then take their horse into the class, but their horse doesn’t want to be ridden. And you’re like, it’s 23 minutes work, right? The dressage test is 3 minutes long. The warm up is 20 minutes. So surely like 23 minutes isn’t so bad.

And I’ve spent this much money to get my horse here and my float cost me this much money and oh, we’ve worked so hard. It’s just, we’ll just go and do it because we’re here. You know how many people will go, Oh no, my horse doesn’t want to do it, so I’m not going to make them do it. I think this is where it’s so really tricky conversation. I also recognise that I sit on the more sensitive side of the spectrum where I see conflict behaviours and I see pain related behaviours and I see all of the things and it makes me think, oh God, I’m not sure that I’m not sure that I could do that.

But then also me seeing conflict behaviours like I I don’t think it’s possible to. I’m not sure where I sit when I’m looking at a horse in a working setting. I don’t think it’s possible for them to have a happy, relaxed face all of the time because I’m also not sure of the requirements of the physical output of the work. Does that make sense? I train at the gym a couple of times a week.

I lift reasonably heavy weights. I do enjoy it while I do it, but I bet if you were to record my face as I was doing it, I bet that I would be grimacing as I did it. That being said, the difference is, as I’m doing it, I have given consent and I want to do it. And I also know that if I’ve got a weight held up over my head and I suddenly decide, I hate this, I can put the weight down, close the door on the gym and never go there again. Whereas I think with animals, it can be a really tricky line to tow when you’re looking at their face and you’re thinking, oh, is that a conflict behavior?

Is that a pain face? And you can, it feels a bit remiss to say, oh, no, they’re just working hard. That movement is just a bit hard for them, but they’re having fun. Like, how do we quantify that? I feel like we’ve digressed.

But I hope that I’ve spoken to your question at least a little. Bit yeah, no. And it’s, it’s definitely because I do performance. I have high performance aspirations, but I haven’t competed in a year and a half because I faced the same dilemma of like how happy are my horses to go out and do this? And even if my horses are happy enough to go out and do it, I show up there and I have to see every other horse and the people that don’t know how to handle it.

And I think even when we go to competitions with the best intentions for ourselves and our horses, even when we’re in that state of maybe heightened adrenaline or nerves or whatever, like we aren’t thinking clearly, right? So it’s, it’s not even that we’re necessarily doing it intentionally, it’s that we’re like not always fully there. And so I think there’s this line and that’s where I’m trying to find four people who do love performance but also love their horses of is it up to a certain level? Is it at all? Is it a certain type of horse?

Is what makes competition consensual for both parties? Because I also think there are plenty of people that don’t really even like competing, but yet they’re just have found themselves in a training set place where they’re like, I had one client who years ago, she enjoyed hacking her horse and going and doing walk, trot, dressage tests. And they were both happy enough to do that, right? He was in the arena for two minutes trotting around with his mom, who didn’t really ask much of him. And he would get out and he’d get 100 million cookies.

And he thought he was the greatest thing ever. And she enjoyed it, but she would put this pressure on herself to Canner because she’s if I don’t Canner, I’m crap. But you get so anxious, you almost break down into tears. You get now, if this is something you want, that’s one thing and you can find some way to work through that mentally. But if you don’t want it and you’re pushing yourself through it because you feel like you have to, that’s a way different conversation.

And so I think just trying to find this place of how can because also don’t know what the world looks like for horses when people don’t have the performance side of things. And it’s not necessarily, of course there are poor examples of people at top sport that do horrible things, but there’s also a group of people that are really educated, dedicated horse people that work hard with their horses and achieve things with their horses. And it’s sometimes the in between of the people who don’t go out six times a weekend on six different horses. Like at that point, that person has developed such a skill of being in pressure that they are so much more conscious than the person who goes out one time every six weeks. And I think it’s the same.

The horses don’t like that pressure either. So it’s what’s the line of creating a horse who’s physically, emotionally and mentally happy to do the job because it needs to be on both sides. Because if my horse is happy to get up to the three star level of my event, which I think out of all the sports is the most fun for the horses because they’re not confined to this one modality of training. And like, sometimes when my horses need to go on a hack, I just go on the ground and like, we just navigate and we it like it’s there’s not really a set of, although there is I need to do this many hours of conditioning in order to prep. There’s not really a it has to be done this way where I think sometimes in dressage specifically, it gets very much so you have to do this thing with your horse at this time and if you don’t, you’re crap.

So I think just trying to find how all of this intertwines and keeping the consent and happiness on both parties. It’s just what I’m interested in, which is why I have people on the podcast who maybe aren’t in performance to give those perspectives. Something that I’ve been working on with my young horse is I recognized how conditioned I have been to the struggle. So you go into a training setting, even if you really enjoy training, which I do, and even from a traditional perspective, like I look back at me like when I used to compete, I used to love competing and I used to do well. And I was also the one who would be in the lorry park looking at other people with other competition riders, absolutely screaming at the people with them because they were so racked with nerves.

And I’m like, why are you? You’re here, you’re obviously not having fun. It’s not why are you here? Because maybe they’d go and win, but they’d have a terrible time doing it. And that just feels a bit ridiculous to me.

But coming back to my young whore, I found that my mission over the past year has been how easy can I make training? And I don’t mean go in there half arse it come out having not achieved much, but how can I be laser being precise with what I want to do? Also also not hammer the point, how can I set things up so the horse understands in the lightest, most least intrusive way possible so that I can achieve what I want to achieve without stressing them out, without making it a big deal? How can we just move through training like that? And I started to notice that my nervous system felt really unvalidated when I do a training session where the horse did all of the things, appeared to have a nice time doing it, and there was no struggle.

It was almost like my body was like, oh, is that it? And by struggle, I don’t mean hanging on the end of the lead row. There was no sort of hint of confusion on her face. And no, oh, we need to repeat this a few more times for you to understand it. It just went in, happened and we finished and I’d, I’d come away and I’d be like, this feels weird.

I almost invalidated myself. And so that started to, for me that kind of deconstructed all of our ideas around training. Even that you just every, everything from a traditional perspective is like more leg, more rain, a little bit harder, one more attempt to keep going. And at some point through that, you’ll get these conflict behaviours which crop up because maybe the horse is fatigued, The horse doesn’t understand, the horse did it the first three times and now is a bit bored of what you’re asking them to do. And so I think if we’re bringing this back to a performance piece, I think it’s working out why you want to perform and what what motivates you to do that.

What is that you enjoy? Do you want to win? Why do you want to win? What underpins that? And it’s fine so long as you understand why that is and so that your horse doesn’t become the puppet within your own self-serving show.

But I also think if you do want to go out and compete and you’ve set up what consent looks like for both you and your horse, I also understand what it’s like to go out there and see other horses and think it’s quite depressing. And I know I’ve had a couple on the top of my head. When I look at my books, I’d say 98% of it is rehab cases, complex rehab cases. I would say of the performance riders, I can think of two performance riders that I’ve got on my books off the top of my head, and I see anywhere between 750 to 1000 horses a year. So that’s not many performance riders.

And both of those performance riders that have cropped to the top of my head have both said to me in slightly different phrases that I’ve ruined their life when they go out competing because they just can’t, they can’t Unsee stuff. I think you’ve got to be really good at keeping your head down. But then I also think that with that there’s a level of from a performance perspective, romantically in my head, I’d love to say yes, there is a way we can go out and we can do it force free, we can do it kindly. We can really fly the flag for what a happy, healthy athlete looks like and a beautiful rider who really cares about their horse. And then I also think that it can be absolutely soul destroying and demoralizing to take your beautiful, happy athlete out and then lose against the stressed lame horse that looks flashy.

And I think that can also be really demotivating. But I also, I think there’s this tricky line to tow as well, which is when you’re going and you’re paying to take part in something like that, and you’ve got your beautiful, happy athlete that gives consent to do the thing and you honour them and listen to them. But then if the judges aren’t open to what it is that you’re offering and they don’t see how it is that you show up, are you helping to feed the system into becoming better, or are you still supporting a broken system as well? Yeah, this is a very deep conversation. Yeah, it’s just, it is so tricky because especially the way I was having a conversation with someone a couple months ago and they were like, when you go into these competition settings, you need to put on your own armor and focus on your task.

But I also think it goes back to something you said early on in the podcast of I may show up there with my happy horse, but by association of my horse being in proximity to all of these other horses that are stressed out, my horse then comes up and if you’ve done all the training and whatever, they might come up and then come back down. But it’s, yeah, I think it just comes back to how do we educate? It isn’t even the riders at this point. It’s how do we educate the organization’s to say there was just recently that jumper rider, I think it was that was riding around in the draw reins at an FBI competition. He had no rains.

It was only draw rains attached to the girth through the bit. And that’s what he was using to ride. He was on FEI showgrounds at an FEI competition. It was on social media and everyone on social media started freaking out, right? Because it’s an abusive thing to do.

And it’s, I think more and more people are having the conversation of why are we paying all this money to these organizations in the name of their protecting horse welfare when they’re not advocating for the horses at all. And so I think it is such a tricky line because I’m very lucky. I live in Aiken SC and we have world class facilities that hold schooling shows so I can almost any day of the week go to a top class facility and just pay a non compete and go and hang out with my horse and acclimatize my horse and see when does the stress start? When does all of this start? They just don’t know and it’s it all comes back to educating people.

What do conflict behaviors or conflict signs look like? What does actual tension look like? Because there are times when you’re trotting down the arena and your horse is nice and relaxing. Another horse comes trotting past, your horse, tenses up a little bit, and then the horse passes. They relax and they’re like, OK, that’s normal, right?

Horses are inherently flight animals to come up and then come back down. It’s what you’re looking for in a very regulated horse. But when the 6th horse comes trotting by or the 10th horse comes cantering by and you’re just building and building, it’s like the struggle is how do all of these people protect their horses piece? And also coming back to why are you doing it? Because if you’re doing it to win and you want to protect your piece and your horses piece, you may feel demoralized.

But if you’re just going there to say I just like to do this thing with my horse, the result itself doesn’t necessarily matter. Top sport or whatever your top sport is, right? To some people, it’s novice, to some people it’s 45 is. Can I get to that level without feeling like crap about myself and about my horse when the judge who’s been conditioned to look for these certain things doesn’t reward me for my horse, who baby is actually moving correctly and actually has a happy expression on its face and that I’m actually soft with my aids and I don’t need the spur and the whip. All of these little things that I think can sometimes be overlooked because, yeah, this person may have inch and a half long spurs on and they may be using a whip.

But did you see that thing like then across the diagonal in your mind, if people are going out and competing and doing, even if they’re not necessarily going out and competing but continuing training in a performance manner, they’re doing the dressage movements, they’re jumping the jumps. How can these riders either support or find people to support their athlete as a whole through that stuff? That’s such a good question. I think I would certainly say having practice for coming up 10 years now, I would say it’s only the past three years where I’ve started to find my people, the people that I share a common interest with and also the people who share the care and interest around their horses well-being. Something that fascinates me is the fact that when I started to just become a bit more vocal about my own thoughts.

And I don’t mean being obnoxious on social media and I don’t mean being horrible about other people, but even talking about what interests me and what I’m looking for. Maybe I had a session with my horse and something cropped up and it perplexed me, so I. Happened to mention it in passing to someone else and they went Oh yeah I’ve noticed a similar thing with my horse. Or I’ve had the same thoughts with my horse. Even a more of a human perspective from a philosophical level as well.

The more I’ve had conversations with people where I’ve front loaded honestly with my thoughts. I think it’s part of the fun of being British as we have this kind of beautiful, slightly cynical kind of sarcastic outlook on life. And I used to have like really hold that in. And now I front with that a little bit more with people and I get so much more feedback, which has really helped me to find the people closest to me and find people who are pulling the same threads that I am. So then what I would say is from the perspective of the trainer or the bodyworker that you engage with, I think being firstly, really being honest with your own pain points as a consumer, what is it that you were worried about specifically?

When I used to work more in the performance fear, it would be something about my horse, my knock 2 fences in the second class, but in the first class, they go around clear and I’m worried that they’re in pain. But really there might be a pain point under that. It’s not necessarily performance related. It’s more about worrying about your horse’s welfare or worrying about a specific way in which your horse looks at you, or even just a vibe and being able to say I got this vibe that my horse isn’t OK. I can’t tell you why, but the vibe crops up when I do XY and Z with them and I’d like to explore this further.

I think can be really helpful. I certainly know when I arrive at a console, the best sessions I have are not with my best sessions aren’t when I’m talking to someone who is super educated. My best sessions are when people really front load with their problems and their problems not being my horse doesn’t stand at the mountain block is more about the undercurrent of their relationship. And that really helps to build something bigger. But also with that, I think that can create more connection because when I meet those people who kind of front load and are open and honest and we can have those on this conversation, I can also go, here’s my team and I can connect them to other people as part of my team.

And then other parts of my team can connect them to other people as well. But also I find twice a year I run, or it’s currently twice a year, I run a three day workshop. And one of my favorite things about that three day workshop is the people that attend. I love networking with them, but what I really love is that they meet more people who are on their wavelength so they can build connection as well. So coming back to it, I think being really candid with your own pain points, being able to vocalize your pain points.

And that acts as such an incredible filter because if you vocalize with your own pain points and the professional that you engage with says, I don’t really believe in that while you’re being ridiculous or have you tried whipping your horse a little bit, you immediately go, OK, that’s not the professional for me, that’s really helpful. So I don’t think I have an over formula, but I do think if we can all be a bit more vocal about our own lived experience, not in a way that undermines other people, but in a way that says, hey, I’m an honest human being, this is what I’m seeing, this is what I’m struggling with. And then it can be nurtured by the people around you. I think that’s a pretty good indicator that you’re on to the right people. It’s so important to because I think it starts with being honest with yourself and what, OK, this is a thing that I’m struggling with.

Is it a thing that I’m struggling with? Is it a thing that my horse is struggling with? Cuz sometimes I get crooked. I do this. I ride horses full time.

Like sometimes I fall off and my body gets all crooked and all screwed up and then all the horses for the rest of the day are going like crap and I go, I think this is a knee problem. I think I need to go see my physio and get sorted out and then maybe tomorrow everything will be better. And then if I do that and things continue to persist, I go, OK, I think that maybe this horse is struggling with this thing and then I’m a rabbit hole person. So I go, why would that horse be struggling with that thing? And then what creates this thing?

It’s when you get on the Facebook rabbit holes and you go, Oh my God, this person specializes in this thing. That’s the glory of the podcast is I get to just talk to people when I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing. How do you do what you’re doing? But it is funny when I show up to lessons and I’m not wearing spurs and I don’t have a crop or a whip, and I go, yeah, those tools are off limits for me right now. Because you mentioned finding yourself being conditioned to the struggle.

I find myself being conditioned to sometimes I get frustrated and I just don’t know what to do. And it’s not that I’m out here whipping my horse, but I go, they’re not listening to my leg. And I just use that whip to say, hey, you need to pay attention to my leg where it is here. And I go, OK, but I’m doing that out of frustration. So like, I need to take that tool away for me right now and know that if my horse isn’t listening to my leg and I know they know how to listen to my leg, like there’s something else going on, I don’t need to like brute force my way through that.

Yeah, and that was part of my emotional awakening, if you like, in that what I studied equitation science, and I remember riding my old horse Falcon, and he’d derail on a circle. We’d come off of the track and his neck would jackknife and he drift down the long side and I’m like, cool, because I’ve got this whip and I’m not using it hard, but tap on the shoulder. Put your shoulder back in. I think I did it like the third time in a row. And it was like this divine inspiration of all of the appropriate things to do in that moment.

Doing the tap on the shoulder probably wasn’t it Because why does your horse keep derailing? What things precipitated that? What were Let’s go three steps back. Where did it first happen and why did it first happen? Not pop, Let’s just pop, put that shoulder back in and carry on.

And it was after that point that I put a whip down and I was just like, I’m just, I’m not prepared to do it. And it was out of, as you said, that frustration piece of if you’re frustrated, you probably shouldn’t be using it. And for me, it was like you’re not discerning the appropriateness of using it right now. You’re just going to look at this thing and I’m going to use it. So I definitely, I understand that.

Sorry to talk over you. No, it’s I, there’s like this quote that’s if you go to a surgeon for your problems, the answer is always going to be under the knife. And it’s the same like when you, I was listening to a podcast that was talking about the Charlotte Dujardin video and they were like, that just looked like someone who had no tools in their toolbox. They resorted to this thing because they had no idea what to do. They’re used to these big flashy horses.

They didn’t know what to do with an average horse who maybe has average movement and average goals. And I was like, sometimes I think that is horse training in a nutshell. Because when you have the whip or you have the spurs or you have whatever that becomes your most readily available tool. But if you put that down and you can’t get your horse to go or you can’t get your horse to do things, then it’s just about developing new tools to or a new understanding. Or like I had a horse who she’s a show jumper and randomly 3 weeks ago she stopped trotting under saddle and I had my body worker out and I had my body workers.

She feels hypermobile. So I don’t necessarily know that this is an actual physical problem. We had a dog come up to a fence line scare the crap out of her twice. She I was working her on the end of a line and the line got stuck under a rail and she spooked and the rail went flying. So she had all of these instances where her nervous system got so overwhelmed where she literally throat and if I had the whip, if I had the spurs, which it took everything and made it not pick up because I was like, there’s got to be horses.

Don’t just randomly stop trotting. This is a seasoned horse. I was like, so I went back and on the ground, I was like, if I’m on the ground and I say trot, does she trot? And once I work through it that way, now I can get on no whip, no spur. And I could say try and she’s cool.

She has to do a lap around the arena. She has to take a deep breath. She has to all of these things before I get on. But once I get her nervous system to be chill and she’s a chill horse. So you don’t think the source is like in fight or flight?

But she said freeze. And I just remember this is just a couple weeks ago and I’m like, I’m at a barn with a very traditional dressage rider. She owns the barn and I just at least another barn. And I’m like, these people probably think I am a nut because I am out here with my horse in hand. Just try.

I do my little trot and then she’s OK. I try and I’m like, oh, good girl for three steps of trot. I can’t get on until she takes this breath and has to be a real breath. I always view this as conditioning me to be OK with looking different than what everyone else is doing, because I know that when I step into the show arena, I’m going to want to crank my horse back up and I’m going to want to do these things. If I could be at home and deal with the judgement at home, by the time I get to the show arena where none of these people matter and I don’t have to see them on a daily basis, I’m going to be good.

But it takes so much mental conditioning to get to that place of being OK with doing it different. And I think there’s also there’s having the tools in the toolkit. And I also think even if you don’t have the tools in the toolkit, having the self assurance to say there’s a problem, I’m not doing anything, we’re going to stop. No one dies if we stop. And I think the fair piece is huge in the horse industry, like a big one, even if you look at the horse being on the forehand and things moving cultural cycles.

But a couple of years ago, when I was more heavily involved in the traditional side of training, people would come to me and be like, I can’t get my horse off the forehand or my horse is hollow or. And I’d watch them ride and their reins would be like a foot long and their horse would be like congested. And I’d be like, can we just let this horse move? Let your reins longer? And they’d be like, yeah, but if I let my reins longer and my horse’s neck is longer than my horse will be in the forehand, and then like the sentence outside of that is and then they’ll die.

It’s like that complete over catastrophizing of the situation, having the power to say like I say it regularly to clients where I’ll show up and like I like to think that I’m good at what I do, but I still turn up to clients and I look and I’m like, oh boy, there’s a lot going on there and I haven’t a clue where to start or I know there’s something wrong and I don’t know what it is. And I will still say to my client like we have a problem here. I don’t know what the problem is, but these are the things that tell me that we have a problem and I will support you while we find out what it is, whether that is going to the vet or the dentist or the nutritionist or another body worker. Let’s just see how we can help your horse. And I find that kind of fronting with that is important, but I also think it’s important to speak to the human that’s attached to the horse and the fact that we don’t want to disappoint that human.

Like one of my clinics this year and all of the people that come to my clinic are absolutely gorgeous and the horses that come are gorgeous and I just, I feel so grateful that they come and I want them to have a great time and by a great time, I want them to come away feeling safe and like they achieved something this time around. One of my ladies went to tack her horse up on day three. We hadn’t done any riding before that and her horse is absolutely fine and I’m working with another horse and she’s in the stable across the way and I see this horse rear up and I’m like what is going on? We press pause and once I finished with this horse, I go over and I’m chatting through what happened and helping to deconstruct without shaming anyone. And then we’ve got the saddle on the horse’s back and I’m looking and I’m saying I don’t think this saddle is a good fit for this horse right now.

And that meant that she didn’t have a ridden session. She was brilliant about it, as I’d expect because she’s turned up to one of my offerings where we put the horse first. But at the same time, I knew that she was disappointed for a few reasons. The first one being that her horse was really unhappy and that she just the saddle had slipped down the list, which is an honest thing that happens with a lot of people. And I also felt really upset because I there was that conflict of me wanting to give her a great experience from a human perspective.

Most also doing right by the horse and I have to always do right by the horse. But it’s still her to have an upset human, even though she could rationalize and even though she understood, and even though she agreed with the decision to not ride is really hard doing right by the horse and then also acknowledging the human at the end of the rope as well. Yeah, no, it is such a, it’s a tricky time we find ourselves in where up to this point the horse hasn’t really mattered. And not because people haven’t loved their horse, but because it goes back to what you were saying is the horse has its own lived experience. And I feel like up until the last couple of years that never really mattered.

It mattered. It has always inherently mattered, but in terms of a cultural perspective, it hasn’t really mattered. And so I think as we all navigate these next few years of putting the horse first, because the human can rationalize and the human can, at the end of the day, we are the decision makers and we are the custodians of these beings and we just have to keep on. OK, your horse didn’t sign up for this. This has been the big thing that I’ve been dealing with lately of, OK, we spend this money on board, we spend this money on feed, we spend this money on shavings, we spend this money on tack, We spend this money on bodywork.

We spend this money on Cairo, we spend this money on supplements. And at the end of the day, goes back to that horse that didn’t want to trot and my horse still doesn’t want to pick up the truck. I would actually much rather a horse not trot than a horse that takes off, explodes and bucks me off. But at the end of the day, I want a horse that’s willing and able and happy to do the job. Luckily, that’s my own horse and not a client horse that I had to deal with because sometimes it’s hard when I can have the tools.

But to help people develop the tools and develop the patients, that’s where I think the struggle isn’t. Like you, I’ve curated the clients come to me because they’ve run out of options maybe a little bit, and they also have decided that their horse comes first. But we’re all human, so we’ve all been conditioned a certain way in this industry. And so when the horse does or doesn’t do something, it’s that guilt that I think we feel all around. The owner feels guilty because the horses saddle was maybe not right and they put their horse in that situation and they are also disappointed because they don’t get to do the thing.

And then we feel guilty because we’ve invited them to this space to feel all of these emotions and these emotions are really heavy to deal with. And but the horse at the end of the day is like, cool, I’m not in pain anymore. And this is all fine and dandy and we’re all learning, but it can still feel heavy from a human perspective as well. It’s really interesting and tricky to navigate a bit. I think your Facebook is really, I love how you tie the physical to the emotional to the mental and you don’t necessarily call things out, but you’re just like, this is what we can do to better support the horse.

And I think that is such a great perspective of getting the message out there where you’re not out here like shaming riders. You’re not out here. I don’t look at your Facebook and find shame. I find someone who’s just educating people. And even through this conversation, I really felt that you were very conscientious with your words and willing to sit in the mud a bit and talk about the discussions that I think people want to have, right?

Like they want to hear the right or maybe they don’t necessarily want to hear the wrongdoings of the competitive world because they’re in it, but they need to hear it. And it’s not just all great and lovely and there’s a lot that needs to get fixed and be worked on. But just opening the door to the conversation of, OK, it may not be possible that we can have high performance and happy horses, but if no one tries, then it’s definitely never going to happen. Yeah, and what’s really important to me, like I even from a human perspective, I don’t want the responsibility of the choices that someone makes for their horse. Whoa, no, I’m just like one person, some thoughts and feelings.

But if I can put stuff out there that invites people to think, and I understand that can be a really uncomfortable place. So you’ll notice in a lot of my Facebook posts, I ask more questions than giving answers. And that’s genuinely how my mind thinks. And I can’t switch it off, unfortunately. It’s a blessing and a curse.

But then I also, I look at the trajectory of my career and throughout the entirety of my career, at every point I genuinely thought I was doing the right thing for the horse. Even when I reflect back and I was in thoroughly invested in classical dressage and riding and healthy posture and all of the things. And at that point my motivation was still doing right by the horse. Respect to horse sport. I, as much as I would like to click my fingers and say let’s make it really good, like let’s burn it down so it doesn’t exist.

And then we’ll put together these frameworks which support healthy, happy horse. But even then there’s so much subjectivity in that. And of course I’m not talking about the subjectivity of horses bleeding or not in competition. It’s the subjectivity of the horse’s genuine lived experience and what they’re OK with. And I think that’s really difficult to distill down into a facial expression, for example.

It’s so much broader than that. And of that facial expression is, what does that mean? And is it just with respect to the environment and how do we do that? But I think the more we can have conversations where people say even the most traditional of people I’m sure will have had the thought, like the little feeling in the pit of their stomach that said. I don’t know if my horse is OK.

And even if they just vocalize that, even if that is the one thing that they say, that’s still a starting point and to see competition. If we can see this sort of continental drift where things look 2% happier than they looked last week, If we can do that week on week, then by the end of a year, that is a huge change. And I think that’s really important. Does it mean that we’re all the way there? No.

Will we ever be all the way there? I don’t know, because I think our landscape and our understanding of horses and people continues to change and that’s exciting as well. For me, I find that fascinating, but I understand that I can sit there in the weeds with my own thoughts ad nauseam if you like. But I also think that if we can foster this environment where also the people who are competing feel supported rather than shame, then, and that’s also a tricky line to tell. And I won’t get into that.

But I think even if we can do that, then that will surely help. Because I know when people roll their eyes and say, oh, these people, they’re just pony patters. The other question I have is what underpins that statement for them? What makes them roll their eyes? I don’t think it’s about the pony patters in inverted commas.

I think it’s more about the fear that they’re not acknowledging whatever that is. So, yeah, it’s fascinating. But thank you so much and thank you for your nice words on my Facebook. I try hard. Social media is brutal.

It is brutal, but yeah, I really enjoy what you do. And so how do people find you? Follow along with what you do. On Facebook and Instagram I am under Yasmin Stewart Ecorn physio. I have a website which is Yasmin Stewart equinephysio.com.

I also have a weekly ish e-mail which does free bodywork techniques that will train your eyepieces. There’s a journal prompt to quote I’m thinking about and either like a podcast or a book or a piece of research that I’ve read that week as well and that can be signed up to via my website. The mailing list is called Modern Centaurian. And then finally, I also have an online course called the Horse Posture Blueprint, and it’s training your eye to horse posture, but it goes so much bigger than that. So it’s not just about seeing horses something to fix, it’s trying to curate a little bit more harmony around what we do with our horses, whether that is through the medium of bodywork or training or management.

Thank you so much for joining me. This was great. Thank you so much.