02/13/2024
"What's the value of 'Yes' if 'No' isn't even an option?"
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Last year, I burned out. I was on the road all the time, I didn't exercise, I didn't nourish myself, I didn't make time for myself.
I started to feel pretty awful - emotionally and physically.
I'd planned to have December off and when that month came around, my goodness the wheels thoroughly fell off. Low mood and then eventually, raging illness.
And I knew that it would be hard, but I had to find a little glimmer of starting to gently rebuild myself and relaying foundations [whilst also promising to never let my self care fall by the wayside again]
I've always been active and I've always trained at the gym and/or practiced yoga and so I wasn't prepared for what I would feel like when I started a bit of yoga again.
I kept the intensity very low, mostly stretch poses on the floor - I wanted to step back into my body, not punish it.
So I was horrified when those very gentle poses made me feel physically sick - I hadn't even raised my heart rate, why was I so nauseous?
I later learned, after some reading, that this is in fact a safety mechanism from the body - when you've been chronically stressed, you're body sees movement patterns outside of the norm as a threat, which results in an upregulation in your sympathetic nervous system.
A stress response to movement.
It took me about 4 weeks of gentle consistency to stop feeling like that. And some days I would stop because I felt too terrible.
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Through a bodywork lens, when you look at a horse and see their respective muscular restrictions and tensional patterns, you can get caught in a cycle of 'doing to' the horse, not 'working with' the horse -
You see the 'lack' or the problem to be fixed, not the fact there is a whole being there who has a fully embodied experience of their tensional patterns.
The patterns that kept them safe and served them exceptionally well until they manifested in chronic strain and overuse.
The temptation (and admittedly the initial training) is to bodywork the horse to get rid of the tension and then this is followed by an expection to put together a programme of exercises to get the horse nice and strong so it doesn't happen again.
What increasingly no longer sits well with me is that when you give out directives for what someone should do with their horse, it can stop the horse from being seen.
They become the list of exercises to tick off, irrespective of how those exercises make them or their body feel.
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Every horse that I work woth teaches me something, but my goodness this horse absolutely deals the lessons in an incredibly beautiful way...
He absolutely commanded to be the curator of his experience and his human was absolutely listening.
This meant that I could say "hey, this is what I would like you to work towards" and it would be integrated into his plan, gently. To his tolerance.
He gets to say Yes and equally, he gets to say No. Both of these are fine.
Likewise from a bodywork perspective, I thought that I was soft and gentle, but he taught me that I can always be softer and more gentle. And equally just because it's soft and gentle doesn't mean it's tolerable.
10 months between the photos and we're just getting started β€οΈβ¨οΈ
