The Lost Language Between You and Your Horse - Dr. Allison Baier

I typically kick the episodes off by having the guest tell us who they are and what it is they do well. That’s. Awesome. So I’m Allie buyer and I am a physical therapist and lifelong equestrian and I own equipped and equipped. Really.

Oh, it’s, it’s such a great story, but the gist of it is I’m a physical therapist that works with writers on site with them and their bodies, their mechanics, they’re musculature. But then it’s taken a really lovely evolution into dealing with the nervous system and how the body and the nervous system can’t be separated. You just can’t work on flexibility or strength or balance without also having a real foundation and a real understanding of what the nervous system is doing to support that. So that is the, that’s the gist of it. And I’ve done equipped now for just going on just a little over six years, but have been a physical therapist for about a decade before that.

So lots and lots of times with lots and lots of bodies and just feel really blessed to be able to have brought it back into the world that I grew up in, which is with. Horses. That’s awesome. OK, so I have had this theory for a little while now and I think you’re just the perfect person to talk about this with. But so I, I grew up eventing mostly in Pony Club and when I up in New Hampshire and up there, it’s a big sort of lesson, barn culture, just a lot of like kids growing up in barns.

Yes. I moved to Aiken SC 6 years ago and my whole client base here has been older adult amateurs. And you know, there there is a stark difference between teaching young adults and children and teenagers and teaching and working with adult amateurs. And I really have this theory that adult amateurs have more fear because of their inability to control their body the way they want to. Yes.

And like their awareness of their body. So when the horse does things, they don’t feel as like prepared or whatever to like deal with that circumstance. It’s almost, it’s like a lost language, I think whether you want to call it a sense, you know, your sixth sense that has all kinds of connotations depending on how you come at it. But like we all have this language of communication from a very young age with our surroundings. And the more you stop practicing that language, the more you’re relying on thought processing, mental, emotional states, top down approaches and fear.

It’s like if you don’t know how to go back and speak that original language, fear is it just paralyzes the body. Yeah. And. When you say like original language, what what exactly are you sort of referring to? So to peace out just for a minute, the education that is coming behind these comments.

So physical therapy has, you know, been my primary career and in I’d say about four years ago, I started education with somatic experiencing. And it’s an educational body, somatic experiencing international. It’s been around for several, several decades and it’s the originating work is around trauma. So when you say things like fear, you know, it’s really hard to not associate that with how people handle anything that’s traumatic. So the language, what I’m what I know in in the somatic experiencing concepts, they call it the felt sense.

That’s a term coined, you know, by the originator, Dr. Peter Levine. So the felt sense. And like right now, Sam, I could tell you, OK, can you feel your body on the chair? Let’s say yours?

And then you’d say, yes, I can feel my seat bones on the cushion, or maybe you feel it on the back of your thigh. And then if I say like, well, what does that feel like to notice the chair on your like on your thighs like, well, you could say it feels soft. I can feel maybe it’s squishy because of the contact of the muscles. And now all of a sudden we’re talking about the inner world’s description of what you’re noticing. There are adjectives that are far not I guess we lose them.

We just assume, OK, you’re sitting on the chair. I feel some pressure on my seat bones. We’re good and we stopped there. But if I say, well, what’s the pressure like? Well, the pressure feels still the pressure.

Maybe it feels warm. Yes, there’s somebody heat there. Maybe there’s actually a little bit of some rocking or some, you know, micro movements going on in there. And the more you linger on those adjectives, inner world, you’re starting to hone what is your felt sense. And that’s what work got really interesting because when people are in fear states, you know, they get tunnel visioned, their thoughts stop processing as quickly.

They can become overcome by their emotions. But emotions are really just felt senses that are given a name. So if I’m like a trainer and here’s someone who’s afraid and they’ll be like, oh, yeah, my mind is just rushing. And I, I’m, I’m losing the dressage test. I’m forgetting it already.

But I’m, I’m coming up next and I might go, OK. Can you feel how fast your thoughts are going in your head? Yeah, I can. And are they spinning? Are they bouncing?

Are they just evaporating? And then when that person takes some time to go into the felt sense of a fearful mind, it starts to change the Physiology in their body. And that breaks them out of the fear more so than like, it’s OK, your horse is great, you’ve done this before. Like that language, that mental and emotional processing that people want to solve problems with. 10 times out of 10, as an adult, that’s not helpful anymore.

Yeah. It’s not available. That language isn’t available when you’re in those heightened states. It is so interesting because I know riding is a very feeling sport and I think that’s why so many people are sort of drawn to horses is because they’re sort of this inner part of them that kind of longs to feel this kind of certain type of connection. Whether that be in overcoming fear, whether that be in building confidence with it.

There’s something that they feel they’re lacking, that they feel they can kind of connect with horses and achieve. And I think it’s so hard because horses are their own sort of sentient beings and they can have a bad day and then we can be there and experience that bad day with them and be like, wow, I really suck or, you know, this, whatever. And we kind of start to spiral and these like down, downward, negative thought patterns. And sometimes maybe that’s the thing that puts pressure on us to want to perform better or whatever. But I do feel like there is a big disconnect from people sort of allowing themselves to feel what should be being felt versus feeling only their nerves or only their fear.

There’s kind of this inability. Maybe it’s of being present like they’re lacking? Where do you think this stuff sort of like stems from? That inability to feel well, I want to go back to maybe the first thing you said. And just by going back to the first thing you said, it defines a bit of the culture of my work.

And I’m going to defied that out here. You said I think people find horses because they are giving us an ability to feel and be seen, be heard. You know that horses are just doing that 24/7 in our presence. And then you also said we fraction away from that and get caught in these spirals of fear or shame or OK. So those are two things.

One of those things you brought up sounded really great to talk about, and the other sounded kind of like the Earth part and the human’s nervous system. It’s drawn to what we call that trauma vortex, the negative, the spiraling. That’s big, that’s powerful, that’s attention grabbing. Sometimes it has to be because our survival depends on it. If something big and startling and overwhelming happens and I just want to sit and smell the roses, I’m probably not going to survive.

So that charm of vortex is extremely magnetizing. So I don’t want to shame anyone who’s like, yeah, I have a lot of negative thoughts and I can just run in spiral. But counterculture to that is by taking more time to to be in the opposite vortex, which and somatic experiencing is called the counter vortex. But I even like calling it like the resource vortex. So let’s go back to that first part.

Attunement is the word that comes to mind for me. Attunement is being heard and fully experienced by another. And then they try to tune with you like like you’re tuning an instrument stride. I hear the piano and I’m going to try to match my voice to it. And horses just want to do that.

And what a gift that is. What a gift that is for another being to fully attune to us. And that is extremely powerful. You can have just as big and as powerful of a resource vortex as you can a counter vortex, trauma vortex. I’m sorry.

I want the good. I want the good. Just magnetizing to me and building upon good and, and noticing all the good my body is doing for me and noticing all the good the horse is doing for me and my friend at the farm and my trainer. And gosh, look at can you feel yourself change just listening to me about this vortex. Yeah.

Yeah, like what’s the change in your body just hearing about it? Yeah, no, it’s just lighter, right. Like it? It doesn’t feel so, yeah. And we have a choice.

It’s where I’m sure family structure, culture, even the subculture that is being an equestrian, we have a choice of how we want to spend our mental time and we have a choice about how we want to spend our felt sense. And so I think it’s like, why does that happen? Why did the spiraling mental thoughts happen? It’s biologically important to care about things that might harm me. My safety is important.

It’s culturally a bit of a narrative. I’m just going to, I don’t know every discipline of equestrian sport. I don’t know every farm. I’ve been to a lot of them and there’s you don’t have to go far before filing a complaint. We live in a tricky time, but I think a big piece of the work here is I sit down with someone, I say, what is your body doing well?

Where are you feeling connected to your body? What feels possible right now? What’s the worst offering for you right now that we can build upon? And the amount of growth that happens within a session or between sessions is exponentially faster than looking at the problem list and starting to check through them. So that is what is so attractive for this work for me.

I just start to become someone who who feels better to be around because I’m coming in saying like, hey, our bodies got this. We have these beautiful relationships, this attunement from this animal. And then what? How do we want to go from there? Yeah, no.

And even just sort of listening to you, I’ve been, since the new year, the theme of the podcast has sort of been helping people just become more aware, whether that’s a body awareness or environmental awareness or mental whatever. Because I realize I struggle with that a lot. But one of the things that I’ve constantly noticed with some of my clients is that they’re really unaware of what their body parts are doing in the moment. And I’m listening to you and to me. I’ve been on this whole venture of like trying to figure out how to tell these people that like, they need to have more awareness of their body.

But I haven’t ever once approached it from like, what are these people aware of? Or like what’s already here, friends, Which is just in itself a very powerful sort of shift, right? Because that’s, I love it. I feel like your mind just like gained some space right now and you’re playing in this new, new amount of space in your head. It’s really cool.

But that being said, what are in in sort of the physical therapy side of things or the physical side of things, where are people sort of holding on to tension or holding, having compensation patterns or any of that? You find sort of coming up again and again in maybe the like different age brackets or rider disciplines or if there’s a way you’re sort of noticing the things that people are coming to you with. Yeah, I will start with some context. So I grew up in Pony Club as well and coming from it, the English discipline and the work right now in Southeastern Wisconsin, like the people I’m seeing weekly and monthly are largely dressage and 100 jumpers and some pleasure riders. However, there’s still, this is where I, you know, I’m really looking forward to, I’ll be at the Midwest Horse Fair for the first time and I’m like, OK, bring on more disciplines, bring on more context for this.

But I’ve worked with Western riders, endurance riders. But again, I’m not going to have the strongest sense of the typical patternings for those disciplines, but patterns that I see across all disciplines, across all humans, because there’s like a decade there. We’re working with the modern Americans. That disconnection is really, it’s really easy to get disconnected from your core and your legs. I think those are probably the biggest pieces.

We tend to be fairly active with arms controlling our cars, our food prep, our equipment for tacking up, controlling a horse through the rain. I don’t think there’s a lot of disconnect from a sense of upper body control and tension. I think depending on how active or inactive you are, you might have some reasonable access to your legs like if you’re up and about versus sitting. But it’s, I would call, I would call it torso and its integration into the pelvis. And with riding, it’s so fascinating because so much of us of our education is like, find our seat, get our province and neutral and then get our leg underneath that.

And now we’re going to come up and get the body above that depending on your specific sport and position. So there’s an innate sense though, that I would say 80% of the work for people, it’s going to be around breath and its integration into your center of mass, which is I guess in the rider term seat. But technically your center of mass is just, you know, just behind your belly button, if you will, L5. So it’s the spine plugging into the pelvis that’s actually your center of mass. And then breath.

I know that is something that originally piqued your interest in speaking with me so I can get to the breath in the second, but can I even back up about the lack of body awareness? Oh yeah. Because that is situational. If I’m in the middle of a yoga class or in the middle of my workout, I’m going to have a lot of body awareness. I if I close my eyes in any given moment there I might feel full context of like both my arms as they plug into my shoulders, plus my breath and my legs.

Like that map is fully out. And then if I’m watching TV, I might not be aware that I have a body at all. So it’s very situational. That’s where this nervous system piece gets interesting to me because there’s a certain amount of activation and invigorating of our nervous system, a little sympathetic activation that puts us like, yeah, I got blood flow to all the muscles and I could do anything and react but stay available to listen, feel the horse. That’s awesome.

And if I get a little too high, a little bit high in my sympathetic activation, I’m now going to be a bit more braced, fixed, rigid, anxious. So that’s fight or flight mode we’re coming into. So I will either see jaw tension, neck tension, hands getting harder on the reins, that’s more fight energy. And then flight energy. I’m going to see the tip forward pelvis, the hyperextension of the lower back, the gripping of the legs, pinching of the knees.

It’s a bit more of a lower body response. And then if you go, OK, I can do this, I can do this. I’m going to fight through it. I’m going to like, I’m going to flee through this. I’m going to invigorate my body.

Whatever this person’s coping strategy is for the moment, it gets to a certain amount of activation energy that actually trips your vagus nerve in a not so helpful way, which I think most people have associated the vagus nerve with like. Rest and relaxation, breath and digestion. And it does do that. It does do that. The front or ventral fibers of that nerve as it’s exiting your brain stem is part of all that ooey, gooey greatness.

And then there’s dorsal fibers which think of your horse, the dorsal stripe from the back of the brain stem. And when the dorsal fibers of your vagus nerve are being activated, it’s slamming on the brakes. It’s not a quiet slowing down, a nice pause. It’s like check out you don’t have a body. Freeze is the common term for this.

And then freeze. You don’t have a body that you’re aware of the blood flow to that area slows your sensory experience going into your brain is less so your motor control of it is less as well. And people can have very sectioned off parts of their body that are stuck in free states, depending on, you know, perhaps their trauma history, their pain levels. Do I have chronic arthritis in my knee? Well, yeah, I kind of want to check out.

I want to dissociate from that as much as possible. But I’ll see people get into free states. And then it’s like we lost that coherent flow of the ride. And if I’m a trainer, if I’m seeing that, I’m seeing the glazed look in my rider’s eyes, I see them slower to react to something. They typically do react well too.

And I’m going to say, oh, we got to steady. We got to slow down, pause. And I’ll tell you what I do with it with riders from a nervous system standpoint, but you can see it’s like they’ve checked out. So body awareness changes depending on the state you’re in. And hopefully there’s just this nice low level invigoration, a little bit of sympathetic activation where I have that like awesome body map.

But yeah, quite a few people are chronically dissociated from or disembodied when it comes to their breath and their trunk, and then over reliant on the limbs more of those fight flight patterns. Interesting. I want to back up for a second because I feel like we kind of got really into it. What made you get into the somatic? Work.

It’s a great question. The oh, it’s such a great personality trait I have, which is if I don’t understand something, I want to learn about it. And if I can fix it myself, I will. Like it’s a it’s a fantastic, yeah. It’s a really nice way of, of learning and having curiosity.

And the reason I say that is because I was, I was postpartum with my first daughter and of course all kinds of body changes and different amounts of structural strain on my rib cage happened with that. But after I had her, there was a, a rib discomfort, discomfort that I had. And I’m like, OK, you’re APT. You got your things. Doing all the things I know to do.

It’s actually a pain that I know started back in college when I, someone hugged my rib wrong and I felt a pop. And so I’m like, all right, well, it’s not your rib hurting from a decade ago. And then I went, or is it because it wasn’t responding to the typical strengthening, stretching, postural awareness and not just like average Joe awareness, like really good awareness. So that was when just the little seed gets planted. Maybe that’s something stuck in your body.

Maybe that’s an emotion stuck in your body. Maybe that’s an injury that’s stuck. And that led me to, it was sincerely a Google search. How do you get stuck emotions out of the body, like out of your muscles And yeah, acute somatic experiencing. It’s something that I looked at and as I, I knew I was working with riders at that point.

And I’m like, oh, well, we all are going to fall off horses at some point. We all are going to get hurt at some point. And I know the horses feel this. I know they do because that’s just how they survive that that’s benefit of being who they are being really feeling, you know, and sensing and aware, aware animals. So I was like, easy peasy.

I will go through this three-year program and I will get this education and I’m going to fix my pain along the way. Yeah, it’s been a really, it’s been a really appropriately planted seed for me that’s blossomed into something that is just absolutely changing how I show up in the world as a professional, as a physical therapist, as a mother, as a spouse. It’s a big, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. And I really am thankful for it.

Yeah, no, it, it is very interesting because probably like 2 years ago now, I had a woman on the podcast who does equine Hannah Somatics. And, and this is really the first I had ever when I looked into her, I was like, I really don’t know what you do because like, it’s not really massage. It’s not really, you know, like, so come on and talk to me about it and you know it. But it was sort of the same thing with her where she had this horse that kind of was always on and off lame and she found this thing that she thought maybe could work because the other stuff hadn’t worked and it was the antenna somatics. And so she now it worked.

And so now she teaches it’s a people and but I never because she had only really done the work with horses and it was more for like legit physical things that are stuck or kinked in the body. I never associated somatic with an emotion. To me it was purely like just this physical. Maybe it was fascia. It was kind of like just this physical thing.

And then about six months ago, maybe a little longer, 8 months ago, I had a horse that got really sour walking to the arena and we had realized that she was having a full somatic experience from a bad saddle fit. Yeah. And that’s when I realized that this kind of could be tied to the emotional state of us or, and sometimes I think that’s when you like touch a certain part on a force. They might turn around and bite you, or they might immediately lick and chew, or they might give you all these different reactions because there was like this thing that was stuck and needed a little releasing. And horses are great role models that it is helpful to have the presence of another, like a kind intentioned, a patient of, you know, a fairly stable presence of another can allow the horse to work through what it is they wanted to work through.

Are they just going to do it themselves randomly while out in the paddock? Yeah, I don’t know. So taking that hand and laying there at your attention and intention there, and then the horse gets to choose how they want to work through that. Where does that stuffness want to go? How does it want to leave?

And that’s very much what I do in my work. It’s not so much through a prescriptive amount of stretches or direct. I don’t direct how someone should moves, but it’s that choice of like, hey, what if we hold our attention on this a little bit longer? And then what does the body just actually want to do with it? It’s really cool to hear of how you’re learning about it from the intention of trying to help your horse, which by the way, is like so many of my clients are like, I don’t want to be even for my horse or I want to be a better rider for my horse.

And I just look at horses like, thank you for giving people permission to learn and experience and have empathy towards these horses because then it’s indirectly coming back. And we try to T give a little of that nurturance back to ourselves. And whether it’s because that’s because when you win more ribbons or that’s when the ride is better, either way, you’re gaining some Wellness. So yeah, what a gift for the horse to do that for us. Yeah, No, I mean, I think the relationship between horses and humans is really special.

And throughout history we’ve had horses, so it makes sense that we feel this like insane connection to, you know, them and dogs and I yeah, I don’t know. It’s interesting because I do find that so many horse people will get their forces chiropracted and they’ll. I mean, these people will get their forces like seen by a psychic, but they won’t like go and get a sports massage because they consider it like a luxury to go do that. But they’ll do all these things for their horse and they just don’t give themselves the permission to like, make themselves. Better.

Yeah, it’s. Well, it’s a gift and a huge challenge to be around a horse that wants to reflect and be with us in the way where they’re also showing us a little bit of ourselves and everyone’s on their path of self-awareness different differently than where you are or where I or where another listener might be. The horses are patient, they’re resilient. And yeah, thank God they’re forgiving. Yeah, I know.

Thank God, I know. That’s kind of the glory of this podcast is I get to screw up and then find a professional who’s really good at the thing that I kind of suck at at the moment and get a little bit better, hopefully. But yeah, there’s a lot of cookies involved in in my training because you got to forgive me somehow, but. One thing when you were bringing up this lack of awareness, I mean, we’re talking now about lack of awareness that I impact my horse just the way I am, the way I am entering the ring, not just the way I’m built or how I’m structured, although that of course is a big piece too. But that lack of awareness.

I think one of the gifts of becoming more in your body and more aware of perhaps some of that felt sense language that we originally talked about. You can start listening to your own body language a bit by yourself and then see what it’s like to do it around a horse. But it’s the main ways that I ask people to maybe come out of freeze or get settled and just introduce themselves to that. That inner language is through orienting and it’s just done through any of your five senses. But we are highly visual creatures.

But for someone it might be auditory or smell or even taste. You can do this while you’re eating your meals, but to pick one of your 5 senses, and I’m going to just use an example, I have a little Lantern thing on my desk here. So as I look at that, I’m going to notice what it’s like inside the boundaries of my skin, what it’s like as I’m looking at this Lantern. And it’s helpful to start on something neutral to positive. But as I look at that Lantern, instead of it just going to my brain, that’s a Lantern or going, yeah, you got that Lantern at that store on vacation.

And instead of it just staying like direct to mine or might dabble in some emotions of yeah, that was a pretty store and I had a nice time. OK, but let’s say what else changes in your body as you’re taking in that Lantern? Well, I see this twinkle part of this little sparkle part of it actually makes my eyes feel a little sparkly too. And then I’d say as I noticed that sparkly feeling in my eyes, what do I notice next? And I’m sure you can see in my video here, I start to smile.

And as I start to smile, what do I notice next? Well, now my chest is feeling a little lighter. And next thing we know, we’re in our felt sense language. And if you are around the presence of another being, whether it be your dog or your cat in the room or a friend or a horse, they’re going to start to feel different around you. It’s a really powerful way to just take a second, enter your body and then go and start to have an engagement with, you know, perhaps you’re worse.

When I feel flustered, I’m feeling fear coming on. I might as a rider who wants to try this themselves or have a little conversation with my trainer. If you notice I’m going there, let’s try this orienting thing. OK, I’m going to see the the tree that’s at the end of the ring. OK, I’m going to look at that tree.

Yep, it looks green. OK, as it looks green, what do you notice about your body? Well, I noticed that I’m still a little tense in my shoulders. OK, good. And then as you take in the green tree.

Well, yeah, yeah, I noticed the tree starting to wave a little in the breeze. Oh, there you go. OK. And then I can actually feel the breeze on my cheek a little bit. OK.

And then what inevitably happens is someone does the thing where they go. Double end tag. That real natural, unprovoked reset breath. And that’s the cool pervert. It’s like you didn’t have to talk about the fear.

You don’t have to talk about whatever the horse was doing in the moment. You’re just orienting. And it’s a powerful tool because orienting lets you see the safety around you. You might in a, in, let’s say a show ring, you’re approaching the show ring. You see the gate, you see where you’re going to be going in?

That’s all unknown. You don’t know what’s going to be out there. OK, check in. Check in. What looks familiar?

OK. My trainer’s face right next to me. She looks familiar. OK. Yep.

Look at her hat. Yep. That’s the hat she wears at every show. OK, good. Yep.

And then these are the gloves. These are the gloves they always wear. And whatever’s in your little bubble, you can Orient just what feels close and familiar. But that’s how I work with people to prime their body to perform better when it’s going into those trauma vortex it’s. Interesting because it feels almost meditative without the like you’re focusing on your in out breathing and hold for four and do this for and don’t think about anything.

Yours feels very, you know, like it’s forcing you to the present, but not necessarily in the present you’re in That’s maybe scary or overwhelming or, you know, whatever. It’s just kind of the, the actual present, the trees around you, the, the gate, the that’s really interesting. I know I work for the sports psychologist a couple years ago, few years ago now. And he, I was really struggling with feeling feelings. And he suggested, because I had a trainer tell me that he thought that I was nervous when I was in the dressage arena.

And I was like, I’m not really nervous. You know, I don’t really care about the dressage. So to me, it’s like I wasn’t going to win it. So I wasn’t trying super hard, which to me, when I felt nervous previously, I think it came from the sense of wanting to please or trying really hard. And that’s not what I was feeling at this time.

And so to me, I didn’t equate it with being nervous or having nerves. So I realized, OK, there’s clearly a disconnect between either what I’m feeling and what people are seeing or what I’m putting out there versus what I’m, you know what? There’s a disconnect somewhere. And we started talking and he gave me this exercise to do right before I went into the dressage arena, which was go through my body and clench and unclench my muscles and like go through a checklist of different muscles to do or just do the same muscle over and over again. And I’m sitting at the dressage arena like waiting for the person in front of me to finish doing this thing.

And all of a sudden I start to feel my heartbeat like freaking crazy. And I was like, Oh my God, I am nervous. Look at this. I had no idea. And but yeah, it was that idea of like bringing the focus to something.

And he was like, then you at least know because you’ve gone through and literally forced all of your muscles to tense and relax. You’re at least not physically tense, which is something you can be like, oh, crap, I’m mentally tense or whatever. And and yeah, like I was all excited because I was like, Oh my God, I do feel nervous. And yeah, it turns out I wasn’t feeling anything, but that was fine. We worked.

So you were you were more in that I’m dissociated from anything positive or negative. Yeah, it’s an interesting concept. One thing I, one thing I think is really great is when people use psychology, any forms of talk therapy where the minds, thoughts and the emotions, and I’m going to say something about the emotions because it’s a bit of a hybrid. It, when that stuff works, it’s incredibly helpful. And they’re very quick tools to just like go in there and do that.

And it’s, it’s wonderful to have those tools and techniques and management strategies. And the emotional piece is also made-up of that felt sense language. The felt sense comes from the lower brain stem. I call it like the lizard brain. So anything a lizard would do or experience or be capable of just sitting on a branch in the jungle, it would have vision, sound awareness of its skin.

It would know when to wake up, it would know when to hunt, it would know when to go find a mate. It would respond to a sound. But it’s not like pondering what’s going to happen in 30. So when I go to that other tree, it doesn’t do that and it doesn’t have emotions. So we’re past that.

We’re not lizards, but we use those that felt sense. Let’s say I feel water behind my eye and tension on the in my throat. I’m learning throughout being in a, you know, a human with other adults raising me. I’ve learned that when I have the water feeling behind my eye and the tension in my throat, that’s called sad. And the sensory information from my throat and from my eyes comes into my sensory cortex of my brain.

And a set of those instructions goes back to my cerebellum, which is also a huge cut, huge contributor to your balance and movement. So being that you now have labeled the tension at the back of my throat and the watery eyes, that’s sadness. And with sadness comes all the cultural aspects of what that is. Were you allowed to be sad? Is sadness OK in the sport of being a horseback rider?

And, you know, all of that stuff come in. What I like to do is just tell someone. Would it be OK if we just noticed the throat pressure and the wet eyes? Yeah. OK.

All right. Just let that be. OK. Well, now I feel snot forming. OK, great.

Let the snot form. And I feel my rib cage jumping. OK, great. Let the jumps happen. Because the belief here is that anything comes up must come down.

And if you let that sympathetic charge of sadness rise up, it’ll always cycle back down. And if a rider has never trusted that an activation like that in their body goes up, if they don’t trust that there’s a down, they’re going to try to control the up, get away from the up, suppress the suppress the feelings, dissociate from the feelings. But man, we have all kinds of these activation and deactivation cycles every day. And if I just trust that, OK, I’m going to let these tears flow for a little because I inevitably I’ll find my breath resetting itself, the tension, the throat eases, the crying stops. And I know that’s OK because I I’m a mammal and I have a cycles of my nervous system.

But that is you don’t just go in doing that for like your biggest trauma you’ve ever had that can traumatize someone to just let it all happen, happen, happen. Bill, Bill, you got to do that with a professional. Yeah, Now it, it was funny because I, I realized because I had had a force kind of have a career ending injury and I’m an action risk taker. You know, I’m like, OK, we’re going to go do this thing and then I’m going to buy this horse and then she’s going to retire in this field and then we’re going to end. So I sort of jumped into action and anytime kind of anything has ever happened, I just jump into action and I which I think it’s a very good treat for a horse person because you see a horse that breaks out of the past year, it’s probably a good idea to just run and grab the grain bucket and be prepared versus like, Oh no.

And I’m just very actionable, which I think stems from being raised like in a bar. But my sports psychologist’s name was Doctor Phil Phil something. And so I called him Doctor Phil. And after my time with him, I became way more emotional. Like I, I’ve started to even out over the years, but like kind of everything that I wasn’t feeling all of a sudden I like would cry at everything and like laugh at everything.

And well, like, so it wasn’t just like the sad about it was literally everything. Like there were so many emotions. And during the Super Bowl this year, there was a Lays commercial that was about like this family farm. And my fiance works in tech, so he’s watching all of this from like a very critical eye. And he goes, these people are so good at getting people’s emotions.

Someone definitely cried during this commercial. And I’m over here sniffling like, yeah, it definitely wasn’t me. But it is so stark because going from, I think we’re raised in a culture of horse people where like emotions don’t belong in the saddle. And I think a lot of people mean that in the sense of like getting frustrated doesn’t belong in the saddle. But when you hear emotions don’t belong in the saddle and you’re a woman who feels 300 emotions a day, you go, OK, crap, what can I feel in the saddle?

And then we start thinking. Yeah, I think there’s, are you familiar with the traditional bell curve? There’s an amount of activation that I already mentioned puts you into this prime like embodied state. And then there’s an amount of activation that starts taking you closer and closer to freeze. So when I’m having, if I can have the emotion while being aware of the environment and probably not too far up that ascending roller coaster up, up, up, up into freeze.

But I could be like, gosh, that I, I don’t know why that like that commercial and like, oh, and it made me think about my grandma. And then now my brain is thinking I’m in grandma’s living room, like I’ve lost time and place. But if I can be like, Oh my gosh, that commercial and and I noticed my dog on the floor cuddled up and you know, I’m thinking about how I would love to pet my dog and feel better. OK, I’m aware of time and place. So you can’t get so emotional that you lose time and place because we are in the presence of danger.

It’s a high risk sport we have. So I get what they’re saying It’s but there is a version that you press override too many times. You’re training yourself to be a different type of of dissociated. It’s more of like the suppressed version versus I’ve let my emotions take me away and now I’m not present. They’re both not helpful.

Yeah. I just think that the healthy thing is for us to have the emotions that we have, no matter how overwhelming, but be regulated enough that whatever that emotion is doesn’t affect the way we handle and be with our horses. Does that make sense? Well, yeah, if we go back to like the conversation I started with for the somatic experiencing piece was this rib pain, this hug gone wrong situation. So when you’re being hugged by someone, this was just kind of a random person at the end of a social event, and we were saying bye.

And it’s so not someone I really knew. And it was one of those, like, all right, we’re going to do a hug. So we’re going to call that, like, an unwanted hug. Yeah. And it led to injury.

So if I were in a situation that was unwanted, I want to get out of there. OK. I want to have a flea response. Or I might want to be like, no, I don’t want your hug. And I might put my hands out, or I might move away and skirt my rib cage to the side to get out of that.

So fight, flight. OK. There’s an impulse there in my tissues that wished it could have happened and it didn’t get a chance to. So if you think about this normal cycling of, OK, I’m in a situation, I don’t like it, I’m activating, should I run? Should I yell?

Should I push my hands out? And then I didn’t get a chance to do any of that. So in my tissues are a bunch of mobilized energy. Get out of here or put shirt, say with your mouth like, no, there’s all this activation there ready bubbling and it never got to complete. So somatic experiencing work is about letting the tissues complete what they wanted to complete so that can have that deactivation and that settling again.

So that’s why no stretch is ever going to get that out of my system. I didn’t want to stretch from that moment. I wanted to be like, I don’t want your stupid hat. That’s what I wanted to say. So my tissues are going to hold tension until I get to express that no, in a way that is contextually relevant to the time when it first happened.

Me saying no 50 times over to the wall isn’t, that doesn’t count. But me being in a time or a place that feels constraining and I don’t want to speak up, but I do want to speak up, but I don’t, but I do getting to say no, then that actually wouldn’t perhaps let that trauma resolve, let that energy discharge out in a way that means it doesn’t stay coming back. So what I find interesting when people who are repeat emotional outbursts or out whether it’s crying or anger, OK, like let’s dial that down. Let’s go really slowly and and perhaps as you feel the first hotness in your stomach or the first clench in the throat and you just stay with the sensations. Some people have very, very historical years, decades before situations that come to mind.

Gosh, you know, this reminds me of when I was like 7 and my mom wanted me to go play soccer and I didn’t want to and and you’re like, oh, here we’re just at the bar and on your neck flexibility. But here we are where this tension is an incomplete experience for your tissues. And if we can revisit it enough and have just enough context, like I’m not a mental emotional provider, but I can stay in the tissues right when I see the tissues are getting just enough activated, you can say something like, well, what do you wish you could have said your to your mom at that? No. And then we’ll have these gestures or they’ll have these body movements of hands out or gripping or you’ll you’ll see the tissues let go of energy in a way that is contextually relevant.

And then they get on their horse and it’s like, Oh my gosh, like my shoulders are so much more free. Or look at my horse, he’s softer in the bit so quickly in the ride and I’m like, you discharge some energy. So that’s that rise and fall can just let the fall more completely settle. And I I hope that for all riders that we have available to us fight and flight and freeze for distressing times. I hope none of us feel more than we need to.

I hope all those responses are available, but you might be someone who’s like, gosh, anytime things get tough, there I go mouth off to the people in the you don’t want to have one grooved response all situations. I don’t want to always get tense in the rain for every problem my horse has. And that’s where the somatic work plus the just saying in the tissues, letting the bodies have the expression it wants to have. It’s really, really beautiful because then it gives choice. The next time your horse is getting nervous, the next time you say I’m going to the ring and feel your heart starting to beat, you have choice and how you want to respond to that.

And might the choice be you naturally look around and just go, oh, we’re OK, but it’s not my direction. I think that’s the magic sauce here. Never my idea as the practitioner. It’s always exactly how that person’s body wanted it to go. That’s so powerful because it’s basically like through our bodies were able to heal these like emotional thanks.

So happy to hear that that landed, yes, Express just landed. So I’m feeling a lot of yeah, yeah, that’s. Yeah, no, it’s it’s really beautiful and I think a great place to start winding down the podcast. For riders who are sort of looking to have a better connection with their horse, what is a piece of advice you have for them to sort of work on? Start in the resource vortex, start in the things that are going well for people that want a better connection.

Hopefully it’s already there. Hopefully there’s little pieces of it and when the connection happens, when the horse comes to you and isn’t asking for a treat but just wants to smell you or just wants to look at you for a minute, like whatever the connection quality is you’re aiming for, when a moment of that happens, notice what happens inside your body as it’s happening. And then when you go, oh, look at that, he just checked in with me instead of, you know, winning to their friends. They checked in for with me to see if this is an OK moment. And then I’d say, do you know what do I notice inside?

My heart warms, my jaw relaxes and you can like we did with that orienting example. OK, well, when your heart softens, then what do you notice? Ah, then I noticed like there’s less tension around my head. Just keep letting that evolve because the horses feeling your nervous system shift and that’s the best reward ever for them. Yeah, that’s that’s great.

So thank you so much for joining me. This was such a great conversation. How do people find you? Follow along with what you do, All of that good stuff. Yeah.

So well, for those that are local in the Midwest, I do travel to farms and I do group riding clinics where it’s these integrated, mounted and unmounted experiences. So for a vast majority of people that I can travel to, that is wonderful to do something in person like that. But I do offer virtual somatic experiencing for people that just want them and their nervous systems at the forefront here. So yes, both in person, not that I don’t travel beyond the Midwest. Let me explain it.

Happy to do that too. But but online is also available for aspects of my care. And then I have a website rideequipped.com, Facebook, Instagram, and that’s about all of the digital world. I can handle be the the methods and I have them just this year in 2026, gone a little old school to the e-mail newsletter on that. Yes, there’s a couple paragraphs you could read, but I just take a little 10 minute video of a particular concept.

I did the eyeballs. What’s magic about our eyeballs and using sight in our writing? And then I’ve done the sacrum, just little mini Nuggets around different parts of our anatomy and explaining both the bio mechanics, but also this nervous system piece. So that’s what’s coming out through those e-mail newsletters, and you can sign up for that on the. Website as well.

That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me.