I went to Blair horse trials yesterday. I was carrying my camera and tripod, and as the day went on, I was starting to really feel aches all round my ribs. It continued to get worse overnight to the point I was in pain just sitting still, so I decided to treat myself and see what came up.
I don’t love treating myself, however when I have to, I have to – and this was one of these moments!
As with my clients and their horses, I thought about what movements my body was making to relieve the pain, which was twisting and bending forward form the waist and inflating my ribs at the back.
I also thought about yesterday (the trigger), what I was seeing and doing, if I could have injured myself, what I was carrying and then I started working.
The first thing that came up was to do with rotation – interesting given the amount that rotation of horses was discussed yesterday - never a coincidence!
But not JUST the physical movement of rotation (in fact, just treating the physical rotation would not have done a thing in this case) but the pain created by pain pathways involved with THINKING about rotating and the SUFFERING the thought of rotation.
This was causing my body to seize up before I even moved, all in the name of protecting the problem the brain thinks is there.
Before I was even engaging any muscles just the thought of rotating was causing me pain, which was why it hurt sitting still.
The next thing was the emotion of desperation – and rightly so, as the day went on I became more and more desperate –
*Where can I find an example of a horse that is not open mouthed, lips drawn or mouth strapped tightly shut?
*Why is the state of the horse world like this?
*How are we ever going to change it when the problem is just so vast?
This desperation was followed by the emotion of anxiety that I had felt from my friend who was with me at what she had also bene seeing.
So, I treated these emotions and rightly enough I found desperation at the suffering of the horses I saw, and was down a good shift in pain, from about 5 points to 1.
Finally, I looked at rotation of the trunk and neck and found that when my neck was rotating, my trunk was struggling to rotate in the same way – that is not going to make walking, never mind riding easy at all!
After treating that, I really was back to normal. All the wee stabby pains had gone and I could just sit and be without them being a constant niggle.
This made me think about the horses again and wonder how much of their pain is from pain pathways? I have no doubt they are regularly MOT’d especially at the top level, yet are exhibiting so many pain indicators.
How many suffer little stabby pains in their ribs due to past bone torsions from spurs and hard kicks or neuroreceptor dysfunctions related to emotions from being ‘corrected’ with the whip as punishment for them expressing pain/suffering through their body (bad behaviour) as they come up to a corner, anticipating the rotation involve with the bend?
From talking to @ Steph Bloom on her stand I gather that most horses have some form of rotation in their ribcage, so is this to play or even the cause for this? One instance of a badly fitting saddle and every time they see a saddle it gives them a nip where it originally hurt, enforcing the rotation of the ribcage daily, without any idea whatsoever this is what is causing it.
If physio fixed this, why would we see such massive instances of rotation in the ribcage being present?
The scientific community look down on muscle testing to some extent as not being scientifically reliable, but only through that, crazy-ass intuition or some other weird and wonderful way, in my opinion, are we ever going to be able to truly find the CAUSES of the gait and behaviour anomalies that we see that tell us our horse has a problem and help them to feel good AND compete.
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