My wonderful friend is an animal communicator. For those of you out there who do not know what this is, it is a person who can intuitively and through going into a meditative state can communicate with animals. Well I kind of think it is along those lines!! The deeper I go into this work and and connect with my own body and listen to what it is saying, I feel a deeper connection with my horses. I get images, feelings, sensations. They are hazy, but generally, I have been in the right direction with each of my horses so far. It is fascinating and sometimes sad, but enlightening to know they are sharing their stories with me in order for me to help them.
So anyway, with Cassie, it was a little harder, as the barrel of her body kept coming up and her hind end and the sadness of the loss of her foals. My friend kept getting images of us reengaging her hind quarters, getting her to notice her barrel. Cassie didn't know her back end existed and had disassociated herself from it. It made sense. I could brush her, do what I wanted with her, but she never had an opinion. We can come to our own opinion of why she was disassociated with her body. Generally when a human has had trauma in their life, they do not like to go back to that place, they do not feel safe inside their body because that safe space has been taken from them. The horse is the same. However, with a horse, they do not reply the story in their head, but they do hold the trauma in their body. As my journey with Cassie develops, I can start piecing the jigsaw together. She had been abused when she was a racehorse, I am assuming (due to her not being near whips), she was pretty badly beaten, so it would make sense that she had disassociated from the barrel of her body. However, why from her hind quarters? Again, I am assuming, but intuitively, I feel that it was to do with her being bred. She is such a sensitive girl, so sensitive to smell, sound, heart rate, I have never known a horse so sensitive, so being asked to be a mother, and she was a good mother and loved her babies must have been so hard for her. She was presented to a stallion. I know she was covered twice by a stallion and artificially inseminated for another foal. I have worked in studs before and even though I didn't see it at the time, it is brutal when a stallion covers a mare. Generally they are hobbled (meaning their back legs are tied down, so they can't kick the stallion) and the stallion gets to do his job, but they are pretty rough. I will allow you to come up with your own story for what Cassie went through. However, this is the normal way we have done things when the stallions are worth so much money. She has had her choice taken away and therefore disassociated from herself. Sorry, if this is too much information, but it plays a big part in her story and her finding her body again. It wouldn't even occur to most owners that there is any other way of breeding. I prefer the idea of putting the mare in with the stallion and letting her choose whether she wants to be bred. It is done, it can be dangerous, but she has a choice and we advocate for our choices, why not our animals????
So anyway, now we have a base of where we can start from. I started with getting her to reach around and eat a little of carrot that I would have on the barrel of her body. We do this to help flexibility with our horses, but for Cassie, she could easily do this, but honestly, she didn't even see her body. Her whole body was still, rigid. So I would ask her to gently move, just one step over and she would always be surprised to do it. She didn't really associate the work with checking in with her body, just she got some extra carrot! So I changed tactic and asked whether she wanted to be brushed or not. I would walk up to her and show her the brush. I would chose different brushes and brush her very slowly and gently, watching for the tiniest of movements on her body. She loved to have her head brushed, especially her ears. However, as I started to offer her the choice, she decided that the rest of her body was out of limits. As soon as I noticed her give me a NO on her body, whether that be a tiny twitch, her nose wrinkle, an ear go back, a slight movement on the leg, her tail swishing, I would stop and step back. She would register that I had noticed her being uncomfortable with being brushed. She definitely got braver in saying no. I would go to her stable (and still do) and show her the brush and ask her if she would like to be brushed today. Most of the time, she will walk into the corner of her stable with her back end to me and nodding her head up and down agitated. This is a no, so I respect that. Yep, she has been pretty grimy this year, but she has had a choice for the first time in her life of whether she wanted her body touched. In her 17 years, I don't think she had ever been given a choice. Some days she would let me brush some parts of her body, but other areas are too sensitive or she just wasn't up for it that day. Each day was different. Now, through all of this, my breath was one of the most important factors with Cassie. I would breath slow and steady, exhaling from my mouth, allowing anything that didn't serve either of us to be exhaled and taken away. It also kept my heart rate low. I wear a fit bit and I can tell you this has saved my bacon a few times with her. These days, she uses the corner of her stable as a time for her to adjust to the fact that she will allow me to brush her, but she needs that moment and when she is ready, she comes over to me and lets me brush, but as soon as she has had enough, she tells me and I step back and stop. I never push her over her personal boundaries. I will be honest, there have been a few times, where I need to put a headcollar on her and tell her we need a very quick brush, because she is so grimy, but I allow her to adjust to this and do it super quick and then give her lots of scratches to make up for the fact I over stepped. For 90% of the time, it is her choice.
I had noticed that when I took her for a walk, we would hit a spot and she would get agitated, starting to jog, I would have to move faster to keep up with her, (I have very short legs) and she would get even more agitated, jumping around and getting restless. So one day, I stopped just before the spot and took some breathes. I noticed that my heart rate had elevated, only a bit, but she was happy when it sat at 75 to 85 bpm. When it started to creep up to 90 bpm, she was not a happy horse. Hmmm, so I would stop and let my heart rate drop before we continued on and through this, she settled back down. Go figure. My heart rate was a trigger for her anxiety, which makes sense. In the wild, if one horses heart rate goes up, everyone else is on flight mode and they run for it. She was listening to what I was doing and feeling and using that as an indicator of whether she was safe or not. However, I was just unfit and couldn't keep up, but she didn't know that!!!
As we started to work on choices, being able to have a voice, life changed a lot for Cassie. I can tell you now, it was going to get a lot worse before it started to get better. I was in for quite a brutal ride for a couple of months and it was not pretty!!! Oh and by ride, I mean me on the ground, horse spinning around me. Enter Part 3 of my beautiful heart hurt horse's recovery.
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