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. ðŸ«
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.
