Thank you to all my new followers, it makes me so happy to see how many people are ready to advocate for their horses and I cannot believe how these numbers have jumped – almost 1000 followers in just over a week. I am thrilled with how man people area aligned with this page.
I thought I would do a recap for you about the reason Painless Equestrian Therapy exists. My name is Mandy McConechy and I was raised in south west Scotland. Having always had a passion for horses, I was fortunate to start eventing at 17, being selected for the Scottish JRN squad the year later then Scottish Riding Club Under 25 championship in 2005 and I would say the ultimate experience was qualifying and going to the British Intermediate Champs where my first horse and I managed to drag ourselves round with just 1 stop, having only ever done 2 advanced classes ever before – and not many since!
I am not sure why that was a better experience than getting 2 horses in the top 20 in a 1* (now 2*), maybe because every jump was just so HUUUUGE.
I lived and breathed horses and at 25 made the decision to ride and aim for the 4* events over taking a spot I was selected for in the Scottish Ladies Rugby team – Pony Club, Riding Club, BHS, BHTA (as it was back then) even horsesense stages – if there was something I could learn, I was on it, but as I have learned in the last few years, in reality I knew nothing about horses (that really mattered).
I trained at several eventing yards, worked for a grand prix showjumper, a dealer, livery yards and many more always looking to learn new things and add to what I already knew and often a bit confused that not so many people shared my thirst for knowledge.
By the end of 2012 I was burnt out – mentally and physically struggling with the symptoms of back pain and low moods/anger. I was living in the past and could not put aside that in 26 years I had: a horse who had a heart attack under me, ridden 15 horses eventing, put down 10 horses (including a ten month old foal), had 1 foal aborted, one die at 4 days old, found one horse dead in it’s stable, been kicked in the face twice (and broken my arm in the process of one), bitten in the face once, kicked in the stomach, broken my collarbone when I horse ran away on the lunge, found that 2 of my ponies on loan were utterly emaciated where they should have been in a field of grass as promised, accidents on the road, accidents competing, tendon injuries, freak injuries – 1 swam down the river and sliced it’s legs on poaching traps, 1 had a tendon slide off it’s hock going cross country – the list goes on and on and on. It was not just me who struggled with all this kind of stuff – it was just horses and I had had enough of having horses break down, struggle with intermittent lamenesses, and ultimately having to lose best friend after best friend.
So often, the horse was going so well and then an injury and subsequent break from work and it just never got back to feeling as good as pre-accident or performing as well. Not lame, just not as manageable to ride and often with more quirks and definitely not the same results – and I did not understand why this happened.
I knew friends who had never even been to funerals and it felt like it was just one horsey funeral after another but those goodbyes were always so short and bittersweet. I felt like I never did them justice because it always happened so quickly and it was more important that they were taken care of and out of their pain than I got to say goodbye or grieve for them – because there was always the rest of the animals to have to deal with. Life never stopped for a minute because the horses were all so high maintenance with their needs and quirks – as different as they all were and all these feelings were festering away inside of me desperate to be felt.
Long story short, I gave up, sold up and left the UK. I ignored the back pain and had fun in different sports until my body said no more and laid me out at 99% pain, diagnosed with a herniated L4/5, prognosis to live in that pain for 6 months until something changed that the surgeon anticipated would. That wasn’t good enough for me so I explored other options to discover a wonderful man called Pedro Mentoya who took all my pain away in one session using Proprioceptive – deep tendon reflex.
He explained that the adrenals have an interaction with where the herniation was and actually they were the cause of the pain I was experiencing. He had not fixed them, but downregulated the way they were talking to the brain, and relieved me of the pain. And I could see this because he showed me that the muscles associated with the adrenals were not contracting and relaxing as they should, but aberrantly communicating with the brain.
It was a miracle! For 3 days I was pain free for the first time in ten years, then I spoke to someone I found trying on the phone and my pain flooded back. Pablo explained that this was emotion pain (??!!) and that this was what was causing my adrenals to struggle so what I needed to look at working on. I used the P-DTR method for a while and was blown away by it’s applications, then trained through to advanced in it.
As I sat in the cranial nerve class of the advanced P-DTR Module, I listened to all the symptoms of cranial nerve dysfunction and saw each of my horses pass before my eyes and the ways that this new information meant that I could likely have helped them (and maybe not had to prematurely put them down). The head shy ones, the neurotic ones, the ones that dangle their legs over a jump, the spooking, napping and all the plain weird stuff etc all became so clear as I understood the implications of compression around cranial nerves. Basically anything that involved their sight/hearing or shoulders potentially was completely reversible!
The biggest thing P-DTR taught me is that what we see as behaviours/symptoms are just RESPONSES TO WHAT THE HORSES BRAIN PERCEIVES but WHAT THE HORSE’S BRAIN PERCEIVES IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT IS TRUE.
As this was happening, I was finally starting to see a path through my pain as well as a result of taking the lifestyle changes to heal adrenals. At the end of the P-DTR courses, however there was still this linger. I had learned all this cool stuff, had every bit of it done to me as went through the course but I still had pain – why??? As time marched on it became apparent that this was still being created by how I felt about myself. The ‘not good enough’, ‘not worthy’, ‘second guessing’, vacillating people pleaser I had always been.
I owed it to the horses to accept what their bodies were telling me over what I had had drilled in to me in my former equestrian days and most importantly to act on it.
I then realized that the horses are feeling the exact same way we are but have no way to tell us. Imagine going for a run then cooling down and going and sitting in front of the TV for the other 23 hours of the day – that is the equivalent of stabling with no turnout. If you run – you can only imagine how sore your body will be when you start to move again…
With this all floating around my mind I started utilising my newfound skills on people with great results. I did some more courses around emotional integration, hormones, equinology and theta healing, which all in their own way further compounded what P-DTR had told me and showed me how to take the bits of each of them and give each horse individually what it needs from them.
I had worked on a few people, but no horses and it was affecting me that I had these skills, but the fear of ‘not having the right qualifications’ was stopping me from lying hands on a horse – even though I knew I could help them in ways they had never experienced and that would really serve them.
So I started to talk about it and Vivienne McConechy let me work on her horse. This mare had been head shy since forever so I worked with her memories of pain when someone went to make contact with her and treated some pain receptors on her face. She immediately stopped being head shy and has never been head shy since and this was in 2018. I was flabbergasted but also filled with joy – it worked!
I started putting myself out there and found that whenever I worked on a horse OR rider their performance as a pair improved. I followed my hunches that shoeing was causing neurological pain to our horses and found that by treating feet I could completely change the musculature throughout the body. We have all experience nail bound horses in the days before a competition that we then have to withdraw or enter with far from perfect preparation, yet continue to tell ourselves that nailing shoes on to the horses feet causes them no pain.
I found an incredible book thanks to Lee-anne Bryson, another influential figure in my journey into the world of consent and doing it WITH the horse not DESPITE the horse - Horse Brain, Human Brain – The neuroscience of horsemanship by Janet Jones which explained even more. Do you know that the way horses learn, it only takes one instance of something bad happening and they associate it with that thing forever. I was already way out there – transforming necks that were like planks of wood into gooey mush by treating the neurological damage of shoeing on the feet – but this changed how I saw them even further.
Somewhere along the way I bought 2 horses and acquired a third. I thought I had an idea of what I was buying however they were a catalyst for a very steep learning curve. My ideas of getting horses and going eventing turned into negative palmar angles, ulcers, equibiomes, iridology, feed changes, herbs, probiotics, antioxidants and lots and lots of ripped rugs. There was something up and I could not quite put my finger on it - it appeared it was mostly gut stuff, but as the gut got better other stuff popped up.
Aware of the body’s compensatory mechanisms being the tongue, jaw, hyoid I could not bring myself to strap any mouth shut no matter what it was doing -I would rather see the problem exists and look to see if I can suss out any possible cause. In spring of 2022 I found Celeste-Leilani Lazaris from www.balancethroughmovementmethod.com who assisted me with my horses after I saw her work with the thoracic sling and the before and afters she was sharing online.
Celeste’s horse first method combines in-hand and ridden training to achieve whole horse balance with a unique lens that is the missing link to help build and maintain soundness.
With best intentions I had transitioned my horses to barefoot when I got them, however as I have more recently learned this can cause more problems than it solves. As part of changing the palmar angle I contact a vet turned barefoot trimmer. To learn several years down the line that he had not been trimming them and had indeed almost caused some damage that may have been irreversible.
However, Beccy Smith at Holistic Equine came to the rescue with her incredible podiatry skills at just the right time – a gift from God – and 2 trims down the line we are already seeing positive progress. Yet I am still not riding my eventers…
Fortunately, they are teaching my invaluable lessons that I am most grateful for are the most loveable snuggly wugglies.
This spring I was incredibly fortunate to have been accepted on to Celeste’s nerve release course and the stuff I have been seeing is amazing. It is like the missing tool to the belt.
One of mine was very anxious from day 1 – seperation anxiety etc etc – a total stress head. I released his head and neck and shoulder crease in a 121 with Celeste-Leilani Lazaris as part of my training and he suddenly went from a horse who would be on top of you if you took one out of the field to a horse that lay on his own for 20 minutes after his pal had left and was even out of sight overnight.
I have seen every neck I have worked on lengthen when the nerves are released, spinal angle change, whole body and mood changes from just establishing connection with consent, pelvic/shoulder/leg angle changes, behavioural changes and more so I know that we have answers to the problems we face with our horses.
It is a team effort though and that starts with us, the owners. And us, the bodyworkers. And us, the vets/chiros/physios. And us the trainers. Posture can create or eliminate lameness, so why is the start of all equine care not posture? Why are we not taught about posture in Pony Club alongside first aid?
We all know that we should not slouch and that core is important for riding – do we know what a horse looks like when it is slouching or how to activate it’s ‘core’? Who even thinks of horses as having the capacity to slouch?
Every time I think I find an answer, it turns in to a million more questions these days…
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