Sometimes a horse NEEDS riding to bring it back to wellness

28 years ago I rehabbed my first horse from arthritis. I thought I’d already tried everything. His knees had been swollen, he’d got to the point where his eyes were wracked with pain and I’d already rung the vet and made the booking to put him to sleep. He was within hours of dying when I heard about a course coming up that weekend for Bowen muscle therapy. I rang the vet and said “Don’t come, I’ve got one more thing to try.”

The Bowen worked well enough to take the worst of the lameness away and that horrible pained look from his eyes and I was able to keep him as a retired companion for Bobby. Some time later I was in my first kinesiology class and the teacher mentioned something about curing arthritis. You gotta’ know I was so opinionated and stuck in what I thought I knew lol!

“You can’t fix arthritis!” I said. “Yes you can” she replied. I think that was a disbelieving, scoffing noise I made and I vaguely remember saying something like “Everyone knows you can’t fix arthritis.” She went on to tell us that almost every working day she was successfully helping people reverse arthritis.

“Can you fix my horse then?” I demanded. Snort with laughter – I can still hear the challenging tone in my voice 28 years later. “Well” she said, “I don’t know anything about horses, but if you do, we could work together and give it a go.”

That’s all history now. Rhonda did the bulk of the work, pulling him back stage by stage and when I had completed that part of my own training, I finished the job. Carlos came out of retirement and was the first horse I ever danced with.

Oh mannnn… I remember that feeling of dancing with this incredibly generous horse so vividly. It was like each of my hands and legs were attached to each of his legs – as my body moved here, his body moved with me. As I moved over there, he just slid there with me, in utter glorious sync together. Looking back I think he was showing me what’s possible because it was with Bobby and learning the Feel work before I could find that feeling reliably.

Back then, even though we very often got fabulous results, the healing work I did was considered woowoo. I remember bristling when someone would use the “witchy” expression. Can you see me rolling my eyes? I did a LOT of bristling in those days…

Fast forward 10 years and the live clinics based around Bobby’s Diaries were in full swing, with horse owners getting dramatic and visible healing results in very short spaces of time – particularly on horse’s muscles and bones – simply by changing their approach to their relationship with their horse. We saw sacro-iliac damage starting to heal, kissing spine changing, horse’s swayed backs lifting up into place. Gygs in the photo below was one of the very early saggy backs to lift up – one of many examples of a spectacular result in a clinic. Sometimes we watched the bones starting to slide back into place in front of our eyes.

We saw muscles that had been starved of oxygen and other nutrients start to plump back out, horse’s strides relax and lengthen, mysterious lamenesses disappear – again often in front of our eyes. In these clinics there was no healing work, no meds, no muscle and bone work, no massage – just a change in the relationship between horse and human that was brought by learning a conversation together. Even in the face of so much proof, the majority of “normal” horse people still considered what we were doing was “woowoo”.

Fast forward another 4 years to 2011 and participants from all over the world started producing those same kind of spectacular healing results in their horses with the first Through the Grace of Your Horse on-line clinic and the program that’s now called Fast Track to Brilliant Riding.

I’m shaking my head now because I’m beginning to see a pattern here… it was unusual and ground breaking and incredibly effective and was still considered woowoo. Funny, it appears that I’m the common denominator, so I think I’ll change that! 🙂

Even now, there’s still only a few people in the world who deeply understand the possibilities of actually riding a horse to wellness. In my experience, depending on what caused the original injury and what stage a horse is up to in the healing progress, it can take riding to actually complete the healing.

Just pause on that for a moment and feel into how big that is. You can actually ride a horse to wellness. Sometimes the horse NEEDS riding to bring it back to wellness.

Sometimes the horse needs riding to bring it back to wellness, though not the same kind of riding that caused the damage in the first place, hey. When the damage to a horse’s back has been done in the riding of them, often the fastest way to release that stress is actually in the saddle again – but it takes Feel for your horse, the internal communication between horse and rider that brings a whole new level of confidence in each other – an innate knowing, a feeling of where the next layer of the problem lies and how to help our horse release it.

We’ve now got 28 years – 28 years – of doing things that other people consider impossible. I think it’s time to step out of the woowoo and into the light and own it. I’m OWNING the fact that what we can do with this work are far in advance of some areas of veterinary medicine. This work isn’t special to me – we’re all, every one of us – capable of bringing the same healing opportunities to our own horses too.

It’s bigger than that though – bigger than the fact that we’re all capable of helping our horses to heal – it’s the Care Factor of a loving person who actually creates the opportunity for that healing. If you think you couldn’t possibly ever be that good with a horse, I look forward to smiling together in a live event one day. I’ve never met anyone I can’t teach Feel to and feel is pretty much all it takes.

If your horse’s health problem is “sticky” or considered unfixable or difficult to fix or expensive to fix or requires on-going fixing by your vet, then you’ll want to know that vast amounts of what modern medicine considers unfixable IS fixable when we get at the source of the horse’s stress and support them to release that. There’s so many supposedly impossible things that we’ve had success with. We’ve even had both the presence of Cushings and then the healing of it confirmed by their vet. I’ll ask the lady who learned how to facilitate that healing if she’ll pop into the comments.

28 years later, our understanding and skills in the healing area have gone exponential. These days it’s not me doing the “healing”, it’s routine for the owners to do it. The deep listening that we do here, the Feel work we’re so incredibly good at teaching, understanding the effects of stress on the body and knowing how to release it, understanding the process of healing so much better – all of those things are the magic ingredients of what is “just” good horsemanship and “just” beautiful riding.

I can trot out some of our more spectacular cases that happened to have before and after photos and videos again, but most of you have seen them before and if you haven’t you can find some on the link below – knowing that most of the miracles happen quietly in people’s own paddocks and fields and barns without the benefit of photos and fanfare, with simply happy horses and simply happy people.

https://www.jennypearce.com.au/category/back-injuries-in-horses

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5… Something wonderful is coming and healing for horses is only one part of it!

Today’s photo: 29 years ago, Carlos and I.