Empress Equine

04/11/2025

Here is what you are supposed to do, if you are to succeed on social media: be relentlessly, ruthlessly on brand. (I still only have a hazy idea of what that means.)


Down in the magic field, the red mare blinks and gives me her right ear for some very particular scratching. I sniff the precise spot on her muzzle where the very essence of her scent lives and think, for the thousandth time, that it is the sweetest smell in all the world.


Here’s what they tell you, the people who know how to build your business on the internet: you must identify a problem that people have, and endlessly talk about how you are going to solve that problem. Really every post should talk about that problem.


I wheel the slightly dented wheelbarrow to the dung and back to the muck-heap. Tern follows me, helpfully. I feel her sweet shadow at my back. Every so often I stop and give her a stroke and a murmur of thanks.


Yesterday, I heard a man say that absolutely everything has to be about messaging. You’ve got to be messaging, all the time. And you’ve got to post three times a day, with your messaging.


In the gloaming, I see Clova come back from a ride with the great-nieces and their mum and their dog. It’s like something from a fairy tale: the little white pony appearing out of the falling dusk, the smiling children, the beaming mamma, the gambolling lurcher. I feel an explosion of love go off in my chest.


For your online business, you have to build funnels and generate leads. Probably every day. (I have read this a lot. I still don’t know what a funnel or a lead is.)


I spend quite a lot of time in the afternoon congratulating Florence on having grown easily the thickest and softest and most velvet winter coat in the whole field. ‘Feel it,’ she says. ‘It’s very nice. You can give it a jolly good rub, just here.’ I give it a jolly good rub. I am a little bit weepy with love, because this is the horse who once used to leap away when I tried to touch her.


I think: don’t be snotty about all those business people with their incomprehensible business talk. Just because they know what they are doing and I don’t. I do want my fledgling business to be sturdy and resilient and real. I want it to see me into my old age. I’m proud I made it, from scratch, even if I’m not always messaging and building the brand and generating leads.


I did things with the mares which are not seen as the traditional, conventional way. The village is used to seeing me wandering about the woods with a dreamy thoroughbred, as if I’m walking a great big Labrador. They once gave me looks, but now they are familiar with the sight. I sing to the horses too, a lot of the time. People seem to have got used to that, too.


I think: maybe I can do the business in my own way too. I don’t think I’m ever going to be on brand, or on message. I mean, I’m not a total hayseed; I know there are things you must do. But some of them make my soul shrivel in me. So I expect I won’t be doing those.


We can choose. All of us. You and me and Bobby McGee. We don’t have to do things in the way that everyone says we have to do things. We can wear our rue with a difference. (Which is what Shakespeare said. And he, somehow, miraculously, seemed to know everything about the human condition.)


Yes, I really think we can.

20/10/2025

This one is for anyone who has the audacity to hang off their horse's head and call it "training".

You know the ones - plus or minus a rope halter, flailing the end of the longline - the horse is spinning circles around them.

"Disrespectful"

"Dangerous"

Frantic.

Terrified.

Waiting for the moment a human is going to haul on the rope, dragging them to a stop.

Only to send them in the other direction.

"Asserting their dominance"

"Moving their feet"

Abuse under the guise of "horsemanship"

Rinse and repeat until the horse complies.

To "teach them a lesson"

"Be the boss"

You're not actually doing the thing you think you are doing.

(Not that you would have the insight to recognise this.)

Want to know what you are achieving, though?

Pain. Think like whiplash -

Generalised deep muscle ache around their neck, back and hindquarters. Which is magnified every time you hang on the rope. Provoked with the centrifugal force of the circle and the increasing cranial pressure.

A chronic headache. Referred TMJ pain.

That beautiful region where the fascial system meets the central nervous system, the myodural bridge, rich with mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors, ragged around like a tuggy toy. Lit on fire.

Hurting the horse.

Traumatising the horse.

Teaching the horse that humans are not safe.

Defending your actions with the horse is "dangerous"

Thinly veiled abuse justified as "If I don't fix them, they'll be put down."

Here is your invitation to do better.

https://www.yasminstuartequinephysio.com/the-horse-posture-blueprint

31/05/2025

Yes. Absolutely all of this. There is so much joy in the slow road - please give it a go 🙏🏼

"In order for the body to heal, we have to take it out of the environment it became sick in"

I spend a lot of time telling people to stop riding their horses. And I really get that this can be down right inconvenient.

But I'm an optimiser.

And when I'm looking at helping a horse's posture to neutralise, quite frankly it can be quicker, easier and far more ethical to teach a horse to find postural neutral without a rider and then teach the rider to maintain that, than it is to teach a rider to fix the posture under saddle.

Particularly when the horses crappy posture developed because of unsympathetic riding, a saddle that wasn't designed to fit any horse, let alone that one, or an instructor who has no understanding that to safeguard a horse's performance, they might need to know how their bodies truly work rather than have committed to FEI rulebook to heart.

I'm totally not saying there aren't people skilled enough to rehabilitate horses whilst riding them, but I would really like to invite you to consider that just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Because though you might enjoy it, doesn't mean your horse does.

And "it'll be good for you in the long run" doesn't mean it's fair on your horse in the moment.

So if we can do it more simply, in a way that sees the horse for more than just what we can do to their bodies and what they can do for us...

Why don't we?

-

"Should I be riding my horse right now?"

Join Integrative Equine Podiatrist, Beccy Smith, and I as we discuss this topic through a variety of lenses: combining evidence-informed practice and research to give you practical skills to assess your own horse's wellbeing so you can answer the question for yourself.

30.06.2025 19:00 BST

Recording available if you can't make the live ❤️✨️

📸 Olivia Rose Photography .graphy

23/11/2024

A moment with Ally 🫧

I've been thinking alot about the concept of "training".

And the word itself has given me increasing pause.

Because, really, our value to horses is in our ability to facilitate their health and safety within our world.

We facilitate contexts in which they are able to be themselves, and explore their unbelievable power.

We are not "training" them to have power and prowess, we are facilitating situations in which they feel safe enough to REMEMBER and explore their innate capabilities.

This is why I love bodywork at liberty. It is on us to be attuned, regulated and congruent to a point at which they feel safe enough to allow us the vulnerability necessary for healing.

And without tack, the horse has the agency to go at its own pace and let us know where and how we can help.

We don't need to be "training" our horses to allow this work. We need to be examining how we can facilitate a context (both material and energetic) in which the horse feels safe enough to allow us in.

20/11/2024

Afternoons with Magic 🔮💜 my peaceful escape from the social media world, which I've had to limit due to anxiety - sorry for the radio silence.

The deeper I delve into my work, the more apparent it is that self-care does not involve comparison (which is a huge challengefor me on social media).

But I can't share the joy the work brings me without putting myself out there.

So now is the time for love and exploration without comparison, and growth without competition.

This work is more than an approach to horse-humanship. It provides an avenue into our exploring our perceptions. Our perceptions of horses, ourselves, and how we fit into the world.

This work has provided me with more safety, love and understanding than I could have imagined.

If you're looking to understand your horse, yourself and the relationship between you on a deeper level, please don't hesitate to get in touch 🍃✨️