Equine BodyHelp

26/11/2025

Just look at that bottom lip! This horse is so totally relaxed 😌, processing his treatment after a slip in the field.

Find out more about what I do and how I do it on my website: https://equine-bodyhelp.jimdosite.com/

26/11/2025

What do you do with your horse when they are no longer useful to you, when they can no longer compete? Please read the story below.

I understand the arc of a jump in ways humans never will.
The gathering of the hindquarters, the calculated thrust, the moment of suspension when there is nothing beneath you but intention and trust. For years, this knowledge lived in my body like instinct, like breathing.

They called me Sully.

I had purpose, once.
Each morning began with the sound of her footsteps - a rhythm I learned to recognise among all others. Horses notice patterns; our survival depended on it. Her footsteps meant feed, grooming, work. But more than that, they meant presence. Familiarity. Predictability. Safety cues. The things a nervous system anchors itself to.

The work was clear.

Dressage in the morning - though I’ll admit I found the precision tedious. All those circles and serpentines testing my proprioception, my awareness of where each limb was in space. But I was good at it. My body could collect easily, and there’s a quiet satisfaction that moves through a horse when communication is clean and the aids are soft. We’re not so different from humans: achievement activates reward pathways in all mammals.

But the jumping - that was mine.

A horse’s vision works differently than yours. Our eyes sit on the sides of our head, giving us a wide field of view but a blind spot directly in front. When I approached a jump, I had to commit before I could truly see it, trusting the distance she set and the balance she held in her own body.

Do you understand what it means to launch yourself toward an obstacle you can’t fully see, simply because a human asked you to?

Cross-country was where I felt most alive. Galloping awakens something ancient in a horse - not only the flight instinct, but the exhilaration of doing what our bodies evolved for. My heart could climb to over 200 beats per minute on course. My lungs pulled in air in huge amounts. My muscles fired with perfect timing, a language written in bone and tendon long before humans ever touched us.

She would lean into two-point, her weight balanced over my center of gravity, and I would adjust my stride, rock back on my haunches, and explode over solid fences that didn’t fall.

People debate whether horses enjoy their work, whether we can experience meaning. I can only tell you this: after a good round, my ears were forward. My stride loose and proud. When she dismounted and her hand ran down my neck, damp with effort, something inside me settled. Oxytocin, maybe - the same hormone that bonds mare to foal. Horses don’t reflect in words, but we do feel. We have emotional memory. We know partnership.

I knew who I was.

The injury was small at first. A subtle lameness in my left front - you might have missed it if you weren’t looking closely. But she noticed. She always noticed. The vets came with flexion tests and nerve blocks, narrowing down the pain with the logic humans excel at. Eventually: degenerative changes in the coffin joint. Bone meeting bone where it shouldn’t. Inflammation that wouldn’t let go.

I tried to keep going. Horses hide pain - we’re prey animals, built to mask weakness. But eventing demands soundness, demands impact absorption on uneven ground, and my body could no longer promise that.

She cried when she made the decision. I pressed my nose into her chest - a way horses seek comfort and regulate stress through touch - and her arms came around my face.

And then she was gone.

The new place smelled wrong. Horses navigate the world through scent - we have tens of millions of olfactory receptors compared to your six million. This place smelled of neglect. Of fear. Of humans who moved around us without softness, without attention.

I called for her. Horses call out to maintain connection, to locate familiar beings across distance. I called until my voice was raw, until the other horses stopped answering, until the truth settled like dust: no one was coming.

The field was sparse. The shelter leaked. My feet, once picked and cared for daily, grew long and imbalanced, shifting the angles of my already-damaged joints. Pain became a constant throb, altering my posture, my movement, my ability to rest. Chronic pain rewrites the nervous system. It heightens sensitivity. It dampens the dopamine that once made life feel good.

But worse than the pain was the emptiness.

Horses can fall into learned helplessness - when repeated stress without relief teaches the brain that nothing you do matters. The spark fades. The responses dull. I stopped walking to the fence when humans passed. Stopped nickering at feed time. My head hung low, not in relaxation but defeat - a posture researchers can measure, linking it with elevated cortisol and weakened immunity.

I was still Mister Sullivan.
But I was no longer Sully.

Sometimes, on quieter days, my ears would swivel toward distant sounds. Footsteps. A gate. A voice calling a name. My heart would spike with hope - the same physiological surge I felt before a competition. My muscles would tense, preparing.

But she never came.

Here’s what I want you to understand: horses do not think in stories. We don’t sit with concepts like justice or betrayal. But we feel. We form deep attachments. We regulate through routine and familiarity. We suffer when the world becomes unpredictable, when connections disappear, when the patterns that made us feel safe suddenly vanish.

I gave everything I had - not for ribbons or prestige, but because cooperation and connection have been shaped into horses for thousands of years. I tried because that’s who we are.

And I was good.

So good.

Sometimes, when the wind threads through what’s left of my mane, my body remembers. The gather. The thrust. The moment of flight. My muscles fire in ghost patterns, neural pathways carved so deep they may never fade.

I am still here, in this field where the grass is thin and the water is dirty. My coffin joint aches.
My hooves crack.
I am twenty-three years old, not old for a horse, but old for a horse in pain.

And I am still waiting.

Because horses don’t understand abandonment.
We only understand presence and absence.
And the absence is everything.

By Gaylene Diedericks

23/11/2025

Before I started working together with horses I knew that I had to learn their language, their body language, in order that I could stay safe when treating a new horse. Since then, I have learnt that it is far more important for me to regulate my own body language in order that the horse feels safe! Only then can we begin to communicate and I can possibly begin to help them heal. The post below describes this so beautifully from the horse's point of view. 🫠

Stand beside me and I’ll show you what you’re made of. Not the story you tell yourself, but the one written in your energy. The slight tremor in your hand. The breath you hold. The way your weight shifts backward when you’re uncertain, forward when you’re angry, nowhere when you’ve learned not to take up space.

I don’t hear your words. I read your weather, I feel your cloudless sunny days, your stormy rainy ones and the ones that are grey and endless. You think that you are so good at hiding it, that the smile works, that the calm voice and confident stride disguise what’s underneath. But your heartbeat gives you away. Your skin speaks in chemicals I can taste on the air. I'm good at that you know. Your stiff spine tells me everything your mouth won’t say. I am fluent in the language you’ve forgotten you’re speaking.

They call me prey, but that’s not the whole truth. I am a listening breathing antenna, this body is built to read the margins where safety ends and danger begins. This gift means I cannot lie to myself about what I feel they way you do. There is no gap between sensation and response, no debate about whether the threat is real. My body is the truth and I don't always have agency over it. I wish you could understand this.

When the world is right, I exist in ease.
My gut digests. My breath flows. My muscles hang soft on my bones. I can play. Rest. Lower my head to graze while my herd breathes around me. This is calm - this is home. My ventral vagal system is a green light for peace.

But when the air changes, when your shoulder tightens or your jaw locks or your attention splinters then sadly I cannot stay there in that peaceful space. My body does not allow me, in a split second my sympathetic system shifts without permission and it moves me.
Flight. Now. Not because I’m stupid or skittish or disobedient, but because that’s what survival looks like when you’re built to run.

And if I can’t run?
If the lead rope holds me, the pen contains me, or punishment comes when I try, well, then I go under. I enter dorsal vagal territory. Shutdown. That desolate place where I’m still standing but nobody’s home. I go to another place where I feel safe but numb. (I know you do this too sometimes) In this space I am compliant because compliance is the last card I have to play. You might call me quiet. Well behaved. I call it disappearing while my body stays behind.

You have this too.
The same wiring. The same three roads your nervous system can walk - connection, fight-flight, shutdown. But somewhere along the way, you learned to mistrust your own design.

You silence your body with caffeine and distraction.
You push through exhaustion like it’s weakness instead of wisdom.
You mistake numbness for strength, control for safety, and the ability to override your instincts for evolution. You have lost your way dear human...

Then you come to me carrying all of that - the override, the push, the masks you wear, the noise of your busy mind and you wonder why I won’t settle. I’m not reacting to you. I’m reflecting you.

Your dysregulation is contagious. Your calm is too. This is not metaphor. When your exhale lengthens, your vagus nerve signals safety, your heart rate drops, and mine follows. When you freeze, I freeze. When your energy fragments, I feel the pieces scatter and cannot find your centre to orient toward. We are caught in each other’s nervous systems, whether you know it or not. Sometimes this can spell disaster, sometimes we can both get hurt. I don't want to hurt you or myself but sometimes I cannot control my responses. I need your help to feel safe in my body. I need you to feel safe in yours.

How do we change this? STOP trying to fix my behaviour. Start witnessing your own body. Not as a problem to solve but as a landscape to inhabit.

Feel your feet on the ground when you approach me.
Notice where your breath stops - in your throat? your chest?
Does it reach your belly, or hover in your chest shallow and trapped?

Sense your shoulders. Are they braced, climbing toward your ears, holding something heavy that has nothing to do with me?
Track your attention! Find out where your awareness is? Is it here or is it ten minutes ahead, three days behind, split between your phone, your to do list, and the argument still looping over and over in your mind?

Because I need you here. I don't need you perfect. But present, located inside your own skin, breathing in real time, willing to feel what’s true instead of what’s convenient. That’s where we meet.

This is the work nobody tells you about. Not the training. Not the techniques. BUT - The coming back to your own body so I can come back to mine. We are inextricably linked you and I, if you would just realise this, we could find our happy and peaceful space together.

You can teach me that the world can be safe through your consistency, through the softness in your hands even when I’m afraid, through the way you breathe when I can't control what my body is responding to, the way you wait when I need to think, the way you don’t punish me for being honest about my fear.

And I will teach you something you may have spent a lifetime unlearning: that your body is not the enemy. That sensation is information. That feelings need to be felt and processed and released. That the wisdom you’re looking for doesn’t live in your head but it lives in the places you’ve stopped listening to. I will teach you that control is not connection and that presence is not passivity. That the bravest thing you can do is stop pretending and start being.

We are not teacher and student. Not master and animal. Not even rider and horse. We are two nervous systems reaching across species, remembering something ancient. That safety is not a destination but a state we create between bodies. That trust is not obedience but a willingness to be affected by each other without disappearing. That partnership begins when you stop asking me to carry your unprocessed fear and start meeting me in the space where both of us can breathe.

So come to me with your humanness - your mess, your grief, your joy, your exhaustion, not to hand them to me, but to meet me from within them. I don’t need you fixed. I need you self-aware.
Standing on your own two feet, breathing your own breath, brave enough to feel what’s real without making it mine.

Do that, and I’ll show you who I am beneath the training, beneath the freeze, beneath every coping mechanism I’ve learned to survive in your world. I’ll show you the horse who wants to meet you - not because I have to, but because finally, it’s safe enough to want to.

We are the same animal, remembering how to trust the body’s knowing.

21/11/2025

The physical response to a major trauma can be released, but it often takes time, a lot of patience and most importantly, trust. The therapist needs to be able to create and to hold a relaxed, safe space so that the horse, in this case, can let go of all the stored up traumatic emotions. This sounds quite dramatic! But in reality, it's usually a gentle process of the fascia and the muscles finally being able to relax and let go within the safe space that is being held. This is often accompanied by a "shaking out" of the stored-up traumatic energy through the hands of the therapist. In the wild, this shaking out will happen as a natural process by the animal itself, once the danger has passed.

I started treating this horse almost 4 months ago, every 2 weeks at first and then every month. He was a difficult case; extremely proud and independent, not at all sure if he wanted this stranger to interfere with him and his body. He had chronic asthma and wasn't eating, so wasn't getting some of his medication. Immediately after the first treatment he tucked into a full hay net, but however, he remained quite resistant to being worked with physically, so hands-on. This wasn't a problem for me as I then worked energetically, hands-off, most of the time, until yesterday...

So what changed? A month ago, I was able to work quietly in his aura, identifying the areas of his body where there were energetic blockages and beginning to help to release these. Standing to one side, level with his thorax, I became aware of the thought that he had been pulling a cart and had gone down, becoming trapped in such a way that he couldn't then breathe. After working with this impulse together with the horse, I communicated this to his owner, who in great surprise told me that the animal communicator had told her a similar story when asked about the horses past. I was amazed! This trauma was probably the cause of his breathing issues.

Yesterday, a month on, he greeted me and allowed me to work hands-on, physically with his body, releasing residual tensions in his rib cage and his body, which now felt malleable and moveable, unlike the rigid structure, so typical of trauma, that I had felt before. It had taken some time and it had taken a lot of patience, quietly gaining his trust. And of course, his owner, who is completely dedicated to helping him get better, also needed to trust during this time, that we were getting somewhere, that there was no quick solution. Now he has taken this massive step forwards, I really really hope that he continues on his path of recovery. 😁😁

19/11/2025

There is nothing romantic about working with trauma clients, be they human or equine. When one works in a holistic manner, with the body, with the mind and with the soul you become very aware of the interconnection between these three things. We read excellent explanations of the physical connections within the body, but those of us who work in a holistic way, know how the emotions of the mind affect those physical connections, (it's called embodiment) and how the soul, deep down within all of us, if unhappy, can and does affect the mind and thus can and does affect the body. If as a therapist, one only considers the physical connections and not the emotional mental health of the person or the horse you are not doing a complete job. It has nothing to do with magic or trying to hijack clients or guarantee an income by making up stories about how the trauma happened. It has a lot to do with helping the client to heal, completely, and not just in their bodies. And then they go away happy and don't need continuous treatment!

As said above, there is nothing romantic about working with trauma, where the psoas muscle, often called the muscle of the soul, is often one of the first muscles to react to stress, anxiety and trauma, as well as the trapezius and the respiratory diaphragm, all of course, which can then affect the physical performance of the horse.

Yes! The mental health as well as the physical health of the horse IS important! The body, the mind and the soul all work together.

18/11/2025

As I was in the middle of the treatment the owner asked me what I would say if somebody called and asked me to treat a 6 month old c**t with 3 large dogs running around? Well, that was exactly what I was doing! When it came to treating the legs of the extremely well behaved c**t, I was though then at doggy level and found it difficult to focus with a tongue in my ear, so we shut them out until I had finished, which was just no fun at all in their eyes!!

12/11/2025

This horse is deep in his healing process after an Equine Bodyhelp treatment.

If you too would like to ease any pain and tension in your horse, so creating peace and total relaxation in their body and helping them to heal and rebalance, then check out more about what I do as an equine bodyworker.
You'll find lots of detailed info on my website, about me and about the way I work, but also what the horses think about it all! https://equine-bodyhelp.jimdosite.com/

On YouTube, you'll find several videos showing how I work in practice as well as some tutorials that guide you through some of the basic techniques so you can help your own horse.
https://www.youtube.com/

If you then still have any questions, please feel free to message me! 😊

05/11/2025

If you too would like to create total peace and relaxation in the body of your horse, thus helping them to heal and rebalance, you might like to check out more about what I do as an equine bodyworker.

You'll find lots of detailed info on my website, about me and about the way I work, but also what the horses think about it all! https://equine-bodyhelp.jimdosite.com/

On YouTube, you'll find several videos showing how I really work in practice as well as some tutorials that guide you through some of the basic techniques so you can help your own horse.
https://www.youtube.com/

If you then still have any questions, please feel free to message me! 😊

29/10/2025

Just treated this cutie! A 6 month old c**t who had slipped on the field and twisted his pelvis and back. Having had minimal handling we weren't sure how he would respond to the treatment but within seconds, literally, he was enjoying the slightly weird goings-on in his body. I'm hoping he gives his older 2 year old sister a few tips on how to behave! 😅

23/10/2025

23/10/2025

As we celebrate Small Business Week, please remember this:

Running a business is not for the faint of heart.
It’s long hours when no one’s watching.
It’s pouring your time, money, and energy into something that only exists because you refuse to let it fail.
⠀
It’s the doubt that creeps in when things go quiet — when orders slow down and ideas stall — and you wonder if you’re still on the right path.
⠀
But then there’s that spark. ✨
That message from a happy customer.
That small win that reminds you why you started.
And that’s when you dig deeper.
⠀
Entrepreneurship isn’t luck. It’s grit.
It’s resilience.
It’s love for what you’re building, even when it feels impossible.
⠀
Success isn’t about getting it perfect — it’s about showing up again and again, even when it’s hard.
⠀
Because at the end of the day, there are only two options:
Give in… or give it all you’ve got. 🖤

22/10/2025

Well, this one had a BIG release!! 🤣 He has arthritis in his neck and I'd been working with this together with some cranial work. I think he rather enjoyed it!

I'm an equine bodyworker, based in Ellesmere, North Shropshire, and work with the beautiful, gentle, yet powerful releases of orthobionomy. These can dramatically help relieve pain and tension in your horse. Am happy to chat if you have any queries about your own horse. 😊😊