Episode 204: Your horse experiences your body.

Episode 204_ Your horse experiences your body..mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 204_ Your horse experiences your body..mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Stacy Westfall:
Your emotional experience is being infused into the physical cues that you're giving your horse.

Announcer:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill, this is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple: to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Stacy Westfall:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall, and I help riders become resourceful. In this episode of the podcast, I'm going to explain a concept that's getting a whole lot of attention inside my program. It's called the body scan, and it's a tool for increasing your awareness. And you've heard me talk about the four square model, the rider's mind, the rider's body, the horse's mind, the horse's body, and I want you to listen to how this concept, the body scan, takes the four square model to an entirely deeper level. I want you to consider this when you are working with your horse: You look at your horse's body to understand his experience. When you're riding your horse, you probably notice his physical responses to your cues as well as physical clues to his emotional state. Let me put that in an example to make it a little more clear. Let's say that you're riding your normally steady horse around my four-leaf clover pattern, and he suddenly becomes very tense and choppy. And you'll probably notice this tension, which is his emotional state, even if he doesn't leave the pattern. So he's technically still responding to your physical cues enough to stay on pattern but you notice his emotional state reflected in the tense and the choppy. In that example, we can say that you were reading your horse's body for both his emotional state and his response to your physical cues. Have you stopped to consider that your horse is doing the same thing? Your body is giving out both of those signals too. Just as your horse's emotional state is reflected in his body your emotional state is reflected in your body also. Your horse is reading your body, your physical cues, and your emotional state. This is it in one sentence: Your horse experiences your body.

Stacy Westfall:
If you pause and think about that for a moment, that means your horse feels if your muscles are relaxed or tense. Your horse feels if you are focused or unfocused. Riders tend to focus on the physical cues that they give to the horse, for example, how they apply the rein or the leg or the seat aid. I would argue that the bigger impression you make is with your energy, which is the expression of your emotions in your body. Here's the problem. Many riders are often unaware or even blocking their own body signals. And when this happens, the horse receives mixed signals. Or another way of saying that is the signals are incongruent. Let me pause and clarify some of the words that I'm going to use for the rest of this podcast. When I say body signals, to me that isn't very clear whether I'm talking about your physical cue, how you put your leg on your horse, or your emotional state. So I'm going to use the words, "feelings" or "emotions" or "energy," to describe the body signal that I'm talking about. That way it sounds different than the cue, which would be your leg or your rein or your seat, the energy you give off. When you have a feeling or emotion is also something your horse is reading from you. So if you feel nervous, that's a different energy than if you feel confident. Frustrated feels different than determined. So what I want you to remember is that the bigger impression you make is with your energy, which is basically the expression of your emotions in your body. If you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that this is true with people, too. You will often read the energy or emotion of someone before words are even spoken, which is why it's possible to walk into a room and sense the energy. We have expressions like, the entire dinner was so awkward you could cut the tension with a knife because of that feeling in the air. Or this expression, the room buzzed with excitement. It's interesting because if you think about it, you can feel a certain energy in your body, an emotion that could have a buzzing sensation. So when we talk about these things, we're actually talking about the physical feeling of an emotion. So I'm going to call that energy or emotion or feeling in this podcast. It's interesting to think that as humans we struggle with this because animals and really young children tend to be very congruent with their emotions, which means that when they feel an emotion like excitement or fear, they tend to show it in their body. What's interesting is that as people mature, we tend to pick up an added challenge. As humans, we have this unique ability to move a concept into our mind and rationally consider it. So it means that we carry this ability to move our experience into a thought and consider it in our mind. And this can be very useful when we want to double-check the facts. Or we might use this if we want to appear a certain way. Or we might use this if we want to avoid feeling a certain emotion. Now the challenge is it can be done so frequently that we become out of touch with what's going on in our bodies. I was teaching on this inside of my program and I was using the example of the death of one of my horses and the reason that I can talk about it and not have all of the emotions is that when I start talking about it, I can actually feel in my body the disconnect where I actually physically try to stay in the thoughts in my head and not allow the memory to become fully there and present because I don't want to sink into all of those emotions. So it's interesting to think about how we use this in some very useful ways so our mind can either help us or if we're not aware, it can get in the way.

Stacy Westfall:
I do have some good news. You do not need to become like a toddler again to be able to fully feel your emotions. You can actually learn to be true to your emotions and not react to them. And in a minute, I'm going to talk about how you can actually get to the point where you can create or choose them also. But first, let's circle back to the idea that it is really important for you to be able to recognize these feelings in your body because your horse is always reading your body. And your mind and your body can be congruent, they can match up, or they can be incongruent. And when your mind and your body are congruent, the cues that you give your horse–I'm going to say it this way–will be enhanced by that feeling in your body. So let's put it into a very concrete example. Let's imagine asking a horse to move from a halt directly into a trot. If you're asking that horse, you're going to have the aids, your cues, let's say it's your legs and your seat and your reins. You're going to have a particular way that you ask the horse to move from the halt directly into the trot with no walk steps. If you are experiencing the feeling of something like "committed" while you are applying those aids, then your aids will be infused with that feeling of "committed." So when you're congruent, your cues and that desire you have to ride the transition from a halt to a trot, they're going to be more effective because they're all going to match up. Now let's do that same transition again, but let's make it incongruent. So when your mind and your body are incongruent, the cues that you give will often conflict with the feeling in your body. So again, imagine asking the horse to move from a halt directly into a trot. But this time, imagine you're feeling "hesitant." I still want you to imagine that you apply all the same cues, but this time they are going to be infused with the feeling of "hesitant." Can you see where from the horse's point of view, it would be more challenging to decipher the cue system because part of the cue system is saying go while the whole energy feeling emotion around it is hesitant? So the rider's body contains this conflict between the aids and the emotion. So whenever a cue isn't as effective as you would like it to be, it is worth pausing to consider your emotional state. Yes, it is true that the horse might be learning to do something like maybe this is the first time you've asked the horse to go from a halt to a trot without any walk steps. So maybe the horse truly doesn't know the correct answer. But even then, it's important to remember that a congruent rider will be more clear and will get faster results.

Stacy Westfall:
So increasing your awareness of how certain emotions show up in your body is a superpower that can greatly enhance your relationship and your results with your horse. Learning to become aware and then to even create this is something that you can be taught. It is something that you can learn. This is something that I learned about years ago when I wanted to achieve higher and higher levels of performance. So I was learning about it on the high-achieving end. What's interesting is that when I really started teaching it to students, I actually started teaching it most when riders had a lot of fear. And one thing that I've noticed in life is that if you find something that helps on both ends of an extreme–so riders that are fearful or riders that want to achieve high performance–if the one technique works on both extremes, maybe you should pay attention to it. Because if you find something that helps on both ends of that spectrum, it often means it's going to be a superpower when you use it in the middle. So if you have a lot of fear, this is a really great tool to use. But also if you want to achieve amazing things with your horse, it's a really great tool to use. Also, when I was teaching it to the riders who had a lot of fear, we started calling it body scanning and it's something that you can practice with your horse and it's actually really important to practice it when you are not with your horse. And here is the condensed version of it and the three stages that I use it in. Let's go with the stages first so you've got them in your mind. So the stages are number one, awareness, number two, allowing, and number three, creating. The reason I wanted to tell you all three is because stage one and two, aware and allow, those need to be done over and over and over again before you earn the right to be able to get to stage three, which is when you get to create it. So stage one is awareness, and in its simplest form, it is you becoming aware of what you're feeling in your body. So that might be something that's easy to do if you're having a really pleasant experience. You're out in the barn, everything's going well, you feel happy. You could pause and feel what happy feels like in your body. Where do you feel it? Would you describe it as light or heavy? How do you describe and feel what is your physical experience of happy? And this exploration, this awareness is one that we tend to not even do with the good feelings like happy. But imagine how easy it is to resist or skip completely the idea of taking a closer look at what yuckier feelings might look like. So, frustrated, how does that show up in your body? How does frustrated feel in your body? Do you feel tense? Where do you feel it? How tight does that feel? So when you're feeling this in your body and you're really becoming aware, that's how stage two becomes involved because it's very tempting, if you have a feeling that you don't like, that you might skip over becoming aware of it. Because to become more aware of it, you're going to have to allow it to be there. So if you've got something like angry or annoyed and you would rather rush to get away from that, then you're not going to be able to allow it for long enough to really, truly become aware of it.

Stacy Westfall:
If I had to give you just one reason that makes it worth it to slow down and actually become aware of and allow a feeling like annoyed to be in your body long enough to study how it feels. It would be this when you can actually feel in your body the difference between different emotions, like frustrated and annoyed. How do you feel those differently in your body when you get to the point where you can actually separate the nuances of those feelings in your body? That's when you unlock the ability to get to stage three where you can actually create feelings. People so often want to skip stage two and jump straight to stage three. But if you do try to do that, what you're going to notice is it won't consistently work. But this is where it's going to get tricky because a lot of times when we have big goals, if you have a feeling that you really want to avoid like the feeling of, let's say, incompetent. If you have a feeling that you really want to avoid, like feeling incompetent, then the problem is if you don't know what that feels like and you don't know how to allow it to be there, you won't actually be able to unlock some new big things in your life to create some big new breakthroughs. Because at least in my life, there's a lot of times that I still, when I'm going in to learn something new, there's moments where I feel incompetent, but that doesn't shut me down. I actually know how to be okay with it, how to feel it, how to allow it, and then how to move past and create the feeling I want to create. Learning to trust your body is an amazing skill. There are many times when I'm working with my horses that my body gives me feedback before my brain. And because I've done this work over and over and over again, I. I've learned to trust my body and that feels like magic. It feels intuitive and it feels instinctive. The important thing to remember is that your horse experiences your body. Your emotional experience is being infused into the physical cues that you're giving your horse.

Stacy Westfall:
As humans, we have a unique ability to disconnect from our body, but we also need to increase our awareness so we can choose to connect, so we can have that more intuitive or instinctual experience. It is really important to remember that your horse is reading your body all the time. And it is also important to remember that these are skills that can be taught. This is something that you can learn to do. And if you would like to take this to the next level and really dive in, come join me inside my program, the Resourceful Rider, you will find an entire module on mindset mastery and the body scan where you can study this in detail. You can read about other students' struggles and successes, and we talk a lot about emotions. You can join me live on the calls and get the help that you need so you can reach your next breakthrough and your next breakthrough and your next breakthrough. I love reading notes from students like this, from Heather. It says, Stacy, one of the things I love so much about your approach to teaching is how well-rounded it is. That you don't just help us with the technical and the skills part of training, but with our thoughts and emotions as well. This has been a game-changer for me. Thanks for sharing this success, Heather. Thanks to all of you for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Announcer:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit stacywestfall.com for articles, videos, and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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