Picture me laughing as I answer that question. The healing ability of horses has been under-rated and underknown by the vast majority of horse lovers. Underknown – I love making up new words!
AND there’s a wonderful gift at the bottom of the page.
I came into the blog to talk about evidence of how you can literally rebuild the brain’s grey matter… yes that’s what I said… REBUILD the brain’s grey matter that we use for thinking, feeling, using our muscles and all kinds of automatic nervous system responses. I also wanted to talk about evidence of how your horse can have a significant positive impact on your body’s other abilities to heal itself – including healing gastrointestinal disorders, irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease.
But before I get into it, you might think that talking about the healing ability of being with horses is a weird thing to talk about when horse riding is rated as one of the top ten most dangerous activities and the level of injury is second only to being hit by a car. Good heavens! Second only to being hit by a car! But it’s the danger bit that’s the contradiction, not their healing ability. I’ve written plenty of articles about there’s no need for that level of danger with horses or to be falling off horses either and I’ll link to some of them at the end of this article.
The research about horses being good for our health has taken a sudden twist.
To talk more about the ability of our kind of work with horses to re-build brain matter and increase our body’s ability to heal itself, I went looking for the link to the HeartMath study as part of my article. This study measured people being within 55 metres of a horse and found that people slowed their breathing, reduced their blood pressure and evened out their heart rate variability when they were in that close proximity to a horse. The link I had didn’t work, so I looked harder, couldn’t find it on the HeartMath website at all – it had disappeared. Googled the original researchers – it wasn’t on their websites either.
“THAT’s weird!” I thought. I googled more broadly and found the reason. Although there were no questions about the breathing and blood pressure changes, some of the research about the heart rate variability wasn’t as straight forward as it first appeared. Some of their evidence showed that not only was the heart rate variability of humans affected by horses, horses heart rates were influenced by people as well.
That’s a new twist to the story right there. It turns out that aspects of the studies showed that it’s a two way street – horses can affect people’s heart rates and people can affect horses. It also seems that some horses have more of an ability to influence people than others, so that wasn’t straight forward either.
The whole thing opened up a can of worms on social media (gee whizz…) and it looks like they pulled the research link until they sort it out. It’s early days in the debacle and I’m happy to leave that part to the researchers to figure out. It fits however, with what I observed long ago.
When horses heal humans and humans heal horses, the beneficial effects are magnified dramatically.
I suspect the variations in results that raised the storm that caused the HeartMath study to be pulled, happened because some horses are more relaxed than others. So very many horses have been trained in chronic tension and some traumatized horses don’t even experience relaxation – a bit like some people in that respect.
I noticed a long time ago that students here who learn how to help their horse release old trauma and find a comfort zone in their human interactions – i.e. those students who have relaxed horses – these students also experience relaxation and healing as much or even more than what is reported in deep meditation.
They also experience a different level of their body’s ability to heal itself, including a steady release of anxiety and depression – even with dramatic problems like the extremes of panic attacks and PTSD.
I’m not in the slightest bit surprised at people having the ability to affect the horse’s heart rate. I have long noticed that it’s the RECIPROCAL experience that offers the most benefit for both horses and people – horses and people escalating each other into more and more feeling good.
I found a couple of studies about the physical benefits of meditation that tells us why our work with horses is so special.
I’m happy to go on experience personally, but hey it’s nice when science catches up. There’s two lots of research that jumped out and bit me on the butt. One is a study by Harvard researchers, that saw changes in brain structure on MR images in people who were meditating over time. The conclusion was that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing, their brain is literally re-building grey matter while they’re meditating. Far out that’s big hey? At first I wondered what we’re using that grey matter for, then I realized derrr… I’ve been experiencing it for a long time and at least some of it goes to a brilliant way to solve all kinds of problems.
And those measurable brain changes were happening in only eight weeks – just imagine how powerful that brain building work would be when that state of mind goes on INDEFINITELY like it does when we routinely find that brain state with our horses?
The other study that you’ll find in the Harvard Gazette here showed that the relaxation effect of meditation can have a significant impact on the clinical symptoms of gastrointestinal disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. In my experience the benefits of meditation certainly aren’t limited to those health problems, it’s just that those were the specific illnesses they were studying.
So here’s the cool thing about meditation when you add horses.
Meditating with horses is so much easier than trying to get good with meditation and mannn I know that one from personal experience.
I practiced guided meditation for many, many years but ohhhh dear… I spent more time with my face scrunched up trying too hard and then I kept falling asleep. I sucked at it.
It was during the time when my horse Bobby was teaching me how to listen to him, that I discovered that this meditation business was a lot more simple than I’d thought. I discovered that there’s layers in it and that we don’t have to try at all – in fact, the key is NOT to try at all.
1. If we be with our horse quietly, not asking anything of them, not thinking about what to cook for dinner or all the things we have to get done – if we simply observe a cloud for a while or watch the leaves moving in the trees, or smile at our horses relaxing in the paddock, then our mind slows down a little – it quietens.
2. I’ve noticed that if someone is really wound up, even just reading a book in the presence of your horse helps to get rid of the “trying too hard” thing. I’ve used that one myself on occasion when I just couldn’t shut my worrying up and it works a treat.
3. When we add breath awareness to that, then we drop down into another level and the beneficial meditation effects increase.
4. When we add inner awareness to the presence of a relaxed horse and the breathwork that we teach in even the freebies around here, then we drop down yet another level into the same brain state that experienced meditator’s experience – where the Harvard folk tell you that you’re re-building brain grey matter and where you’re experiencing the kind of healing opportunities that they were talking about.
But healing isn’t the only benefit of meditating with your horse
The kind of easy meditation that we teach here, also flows into an ability to listen to and understand our horse – we call that Feel for our horse and it’s the secret skill of the great horse men and women – and we are masters at teaching that here.
The inner awareness that we teach here means that we feel things inside us long before our horse has to tell us with their physical reactions. We know what to do and when to do it. It gives us a chance to act and change something long before the crappy stuff happens that makes horse riding dangerous. It reduces the dangers of horses DRAMATICALLY.
When we know how to quieten our mind – maybe that’s better expressed as learning how to flow with and understand the thoughts and ideas of our mind – then we can develop an awareness of ALL the other ways that our horse communicates with us – communication with our horse becomes easier and easier. And I’m not talking about body language here, I’m talking about the INTERNAL communication that happens long before you can see it with your eyes.
I call it Feel with a capital F for good reason – because it’s so important. The ability to communicate with a horse – to understand them and be understood – changes EVERYthing.
We have an incredibly special program here called Journey to Feel, that brings you all the health benefits of meditation that’s listed by those Harvard researchers PLUS has you feeling good, PLUS accelerates your horsemanship in a very short space of time.
Check out the testimonials on the link further down the page – they blew my socks off…
Journey to Feel
And here’s some of those links I promised you about why riding simply DOES NOT have to be such a risky business.
I’ve never met anyone who was really a crappy rider.
Is falling off a horse really an opportunity to learn to ride like a centaur?
Today’s photo is one of Minna Kumala’s from her beautiful series The Island of Horses that she graciously gave us permission to use in Journey to Feel. You can find more of her beautiful work here. The website is in Finnish, but you’ll notice there’s a translation button.
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