Here is an excerpt from Pathway to Heaven on Earth, that talks in a very simplified way about how the emotions get buried in the body from the human point of view and we can take this knowledge through to horses as a concept too.
It’s recognized by many different alternative therapies and even by many doctors that our emotions are the cause of much very real, very physical illness. But it’s not the emotions themselves that make us sick, but how we deal with them.
HOW do emotions make us sick?
This is an oversimplification, but it will do for our purposes here.
The front part of the brain is where all the really positive action takes place – where we can change our old ways of “doing” emotions. That’s where asking The Magic Questions that I talk about in both Pathway to Heaven and Zen Connection with Horses. ( 🙂 Clearly horses are not going to be able to ask themselves The Magic Questions! )
The limbic system, roughly in the middle, is where we feel the emotions, that’s where we feel the pain, the hurt, the anger, the anxiety, the terror, the grief, all the big stuff.
When we ignore these emotions or try not to feel them or when we’ve become so overloaded with intense emotions that we’ve gone numb, then they get shunted to the back of the brain – where we can “do” the emotion physically. That’s where we do our tantrums, slam the door, kick the cat (I’m kidding), throw the dinner at the husband (I’m not kidding), punch someone’s lights out (hopefully not, because that sort of behavior comes back at us!)
This back part of the brain is an auto pilot survival reaction place where we can also use physical effort to release the emotion. We can run until we are so tired that we drop, we can use a punching bag, we can use music and dance to release emotions instead of burying them.
If we don’t deal with it physically, then the brain pushes the emotion down to be stored in the body, it buries it. This is an ingenious mechanism – it clears the decks, if you will, for the next lot of emotions, otherwise we’d go mad with all these emotions swirling around in our head at the same time.
It is the result of the brain burying our emotions in our body that makes us sick.
This burying of emotions in the body is the source of serious and often life threatening and very real, physical illness. Everything from cancers and arthritis,
to simple aches and pains are involved.
Almost all illnesses, if not actually caused by buried emotions, are made worse by buried emotions.
And the worst part about these buried emotions is that when we feel the same emotion some time in the future, the old feelings that we didn’t do anything about in the past, come welling back up, often HUGELY INTENSIFYING what we’re feeling about the current situation – making it bigger, stronger and more uncontrollable.
Emotions buried are cumulative, i.e. each “little” one is added on top of the last one until you have a giant that can be made up of small things.
It makes more sense when we realize that our emotions are messages from our inner guidance system, from our soul if you will. If we don’t get the first gentle message, then our inner guidance system sends the message louder and louder, bigger and bigger until the emotion is so intense that we simply have to do something about it or burst!
Each of the ancient civilizations, scattered all over the world, describe the same emotions as being attached to the same organs. (Some validation if you need it! 🙂 )
For example, they all talk about feeling unloved as affecting the heart (we’re all familiar with that one), anger as affecting the liver (even in modern English expression we describe someone angry as having “shit on the liver”) kidneys are affected by fear, the bladder is affected by terror (wet yourself with terror), the pancreas is affected by our experience (or non experience more to the point) of the sweetness of life, the spleen is about rage (there’s that expression “vent their spleen” when you describe someone who is really hopping mad / angry, depression in the lungs, resentment (many long pushed down angers) into the gallbladder, depression into the lungs.
Here are some of the relationships of emotions and muscles with horses, that blow me away with the possibilities for healing that they bring:
The psoas muscle – a big muscle in the pelvis whose tension gives a horse those raised back vertebrae behind the saddle (L1 to L5) – the psoas muscle is a kidney muscle and kidneys are where a horse (or human) buries fear when they are unable to act on it to keep themselves safe.
Thus, the damage to the vertebra L1 to L5 that is caused by the stored tension and contraction of the psoas, can be RELEASED by helping a horse to feel safe. – THAT’s where The Seventh Key to Happiness comes in – with it’s simple technique of feeling the Not Quite Right, backing off, and waiting for The Chew no matter how long that takes.
And you can “fix” those muscles, cause those bones to go back into place until the cows come home, but if we don’t address the basic cause – the horses need to feel safe, then we cannot have a permanent fix of the problem.
Conversely, if we DO address the original cause – the horse’s need to feel safe, then we CAN permanently fix the problem.
The upper trapezius, the muscle that is withered away in front of the wither in some horses who have a corresponding big muscle underneath the neck – the upper trapezius is also a kidney muscle and thus is also affected by the horse being unable to use their fear as the message it is, unable to keep themselves feeling safe.
And you have to realize that this is about their FEELINGS not about their literal safety. If a horse FEELS fear, whether that is a valid fear to us or not – then that fear will be stored if we do any actions that force them to feel unsafe and the subsequent muscular – skeletal problems will result.
The bladder meridian muscles are responsible both for the stability and action of the hock and one of them is involved in enabling a horse to round up into self carriage and then collection. The bladder is where we store terror. Thus horses who have stored terror – where they were unable to make themselves safe in these extreme circumstances – they have trouble lifting their backs properly and using the hind end as the postural powerhouse that it is designed to be.
Is this all starting to fall into place now?
Horses who have had tension or stress around eating or other stomach problems, are going to have trouble with their neck flexing and extending muscles and with their shoulders.
The liver is where we store anger and the big chest muscle that ends up running underneath the girth and can make a horse very touchy to girth up and get on – that is a liver muscle.
Here’s a little more about depression and the lungs, since we have seen in this clinic, how big a deal breathing is. Sections of this excerpt from Pathway to Heaven about depression brings a whole new insight to our horses hey?
“Depression often follows when we buried sadness, fear, anger, or grief. An accumulation of buried emotions over time cause a loss of energy and depression.
Depression (that’s the big, “I can’t drag myself around for one minute longer” feeling) is actually an ingenious survival mechanism when we are so “off our path” that our mind/body/spirit has no choice but to stop us from moving forward.
Depression takes over and consumes us when what we are doing and where we are going in our life isn’t what we really want, when something that we are doing in
our life does not reflect who we really are. In fact, we can consider the loss of energy that is depression, as our emergency break.” excerpt from Pathway to Heaven, with a couple of minor additions from my more recent understanding.
I don’t have as strong an insight about breathing and depression as I do about the kidneys and the bladder – but what if not breathing properly for the horse is at least at some level, partly them being unable to express who they really are? I would love to discuss your insights about this possibility more on the forum!~
For our purposes with this particular clinic – I don’t think that understanding the detailed process of how all the different emotional stresses effect every muscle and the way our horses move is necessary, although I will enjoy practitioners with anatomy and physiology knowledge coming into the forum and adding to the insights about how which emotions effect what particular action of the horse through which muscles. Yes Mary I thought you might enjoy that!
So, for those who are interested, here is a list of meridians and the muscles that are attached to each of the major meridians.
This whole subject gives us a new insight into our horse’s braces and their stuck spots and their resistances and their muscular skeletal problems,, hey?