30/11/2025
This. 💯 this!!
"..this is something that most people don’t realise- your nervous system literally controls almost everything you do. Your thoughts, your reactions, your patterns, your “personality,”, your capacity, your triggers, your shutdowns… all of it..."
Most people are living from nervous system loops. Stuck patterns. Automatic survival responses, they don’t even know it... Realising this is life-changing. And it explains why so many of us feel like we’re trying so hard but nothing shifts."
Most of us have been so thoroughly disconnected from our own nervous systems that we literally cannot see stress, overwhelm, or dysregulation - in ourselves..."
Sadly the disconnect runs deep, it's an epidemic for humanity as well as the animal kingdom..."
This is the deeper layer behind what we shared yesterday, and it’s something Nicola and I are walking through right now. We’re doing the nervous-system work ourselves - facing our conditioning, seeing our reactions, catching our dysregulation, and trying to stay present even when it’s hard. It’s an uncomfortable truth but it's the MOST important one.
Because this is something that most people don’t realise- your nervous system literally controls almost everything you do. Your thoughts, your reactions, your patterns, your “personality,” your capacity, your triggers, your shutdowns… all of it.
Most people are not living from choice, nope, they’re living from nervous system loops. Stuck patterns. Automatic survival responses. And the worst part.... they don’t even know it. Realising this is an epiphany. It’s life-changing. And it explains why so many of us feel like we’re trying so hard but nothing shifts.
Most of us have been so thoroughly disconnected from our own nervous systems that we literally cannot see stress, overwhelm, or dysregulation - in ourselves OR in our horses. And this isn't your fault. This is conditioning and it's culture, it's also what we were taught. But it's also the single biggest barrier to truly understanding our horses and creating that connection with them that changes everything.
Sadly the disconnect runs deep, it's an epidemic for humanity as well as the animal kingdom.
We've been conditioned to:
Push through discomfort
Ignore our body's signals
Call exhaustion "lazy"
Call anxiety "overthinking"
Call shutdown "calm"
Call dysregulation "just having a bad day"
We've learned that emotions are:
Inconvenient
Weak
Something to control
Something to hide
Something to "get over"
And then we bring all of that - every bit of that disconnection - to our horses.
Think about what you were taught and how many of us learned to do:
Ignore the tension in our shoulders until it became chronic pain
Override the knot in our stomach that screams "something's wrong"
Push through bone-deep fatigue because "everyone else does"
Smile when we're struggling because that's what's expected
Numb discomfort with distraction, substances, busyness etc
Call our body's warning signals "dramatic" or "inconvenient"
We've been taught that our nervous system's communication IS the problem - not the things triggering it. Depending on where you grew up, what you were taught, what your family modeled - you absorbed messages like:
"Big boys/girls don't cry"
"Stop being so sensitive"
"You're fine, toughen up"
"Don't make a scene"
"Nobody wants to hear about your feelings"
"Just push through it"
"You're being dramatic"
"Other people have it worse"
"Children should be seen and not heard"
These messages didn't just shape how you talk about emotions.
They shaped whether you can even FEEL them anymore.
Whether you can notice:
When your breath has got more shallow
When your jaw is clenched
When your stomach is tight
When your thoughts are racing
When you're one more thing away from breaking
And then we go to our horses...
When we're this disconnected from our own bodies, our own signals, our own nervous system... We bring that same blindness to our horses. We miss the early signals:
The slight tension in their body
The quick breath
The tight jaw or pinned ear
The avoidance (head turn, step away)
The whale eye
The hesitation
We don't see these because we've been trained to ignore the exact same signals in ourselves. We normalise dysregulation:
"He's always a bit tense"
"She's just high-strung"
"He settles eventually"
"She's fine once she gets going"
Just like we say about ourselves:
"I'm fine, just stressed"
"I'm just tired"
"I always feel like this"
"I'll relax later"
We see behaviour, not communication:
When our horse:
Won't stand still → "being fidgety"
Won't load → "being difficult"
Spooks at something → "being silly"
Shuts down → "being good and quiet"
Bolts → "being disrespectful"
We see problems to fix instead of information to understand.
Because that's exactly how we've been taught to treat ourselves.
When the horse finally does "act out", because we missed ten thousand smaller signals then we:
Get frustrated
Take it personally
Punish the behaviour
Push harder
Demand compliance
Because that's what we do to ourselves when our body finally forces us to pay attention through pain, illness, breakdown, or burnout.
We shame it.
We override it.
We call it weakness.
We push through anyway.
And we bring that same approach to our horses.
Now this is the part that is so important and make this even more complex. Your horse is reading your nervous system constantly.
If you are:
Rushing but pretending to be calm
Tense but calling it "focused"
Anxious but masking it as "motivated"
Dysregulated but pushing through anyway
Your horse knows.
They feel the incongruence between what your body is doing and what you're trying to project. And that incongruence itself is dysregulating to them. You cannot bring a horse into regulation if you yourself are not regulated. You cannot teach a horse to feel safe in their body if you are not safe in yours. You cannot ask a horse to trust their signals if you have learned to mistrust your own.
And that is the reason why my friends, the work starts with YOU.
Not because you're broken. Not because you're doing it wrong.
But because you cannot see in your horse what you cannot see in yourself.
If you've been taught that:
Feeling is weakness
Bodies are meant to be pushed
Signals are meant to be ignored
Needs are inconvenient
Overwhelm should be hidden
Then you will bring those same beliefs into every interaction with your horse. And you will miss what they're trying to tell you.
The deepest work in horsemanship isn't about training techniques.
It's not about methods or tools or approaches. It's about coming back into your own body.
Learning to:
Notice your own nervous system states:
What does actual calm feel like in your body? (Not numbing, not pushing through - actual calm)
What does tension feel like? Where do you hold it?
Can you tell the difference between "pushing through" and "capacity"?
Do you know what YOUR early warning signs are?
Feel your feelings - even the uncomfortable ones:
Notice sensations without judgment
Let feelings be present without needing to fix them immediately
Breathe into discomfort instead of bracing against it
Recognise that emotions are information, not problems
Give yourself permission to have limits:
You are allowed to be tired
You are allowed to feel overwhelmed
You are allowed to say "this is too much right now"
You are allowed to need rest, support, space
Understand what regulation actually feels like:
Not numbing, not acting, not "being fine"
But genuine: breath flowing, body soft, mind clear, presence available. The ability to be with what is without needing to escape or override it
Once you start doing the work, your relationship with your horse will start to shift.
When you start doing this work with yourself:
You begin to notice what you're feeling when you approach your horse.
You begin to see what they're showing you before you ask for anything.
You start asking: "Is this a capacity day or a rest day - for both of us?"
You catch the small signals you used to dismiss as nothing.
You give your horse the same grace you're learning to give yourself.
You stop demanding they regulate around your dysregulation.
You stop punishing them for having the feelings you've been taught to suppress.
The horses are waiting for us to REMEMBER.
They've been waiting for us to stop performing calm and start embodying it. They've been waiting for us to stop overriding our signals and start listening to them. They've been waiting for us to stop treating our bodies - and theirs - like machines that should just comply. They've been waiting for us to come back into our bodies.
And when we do...
We stop projecting our disconnection onto them. We stop asking them to carry what we won't acknowledge in ourselves.
We can actually see them - not through the lens of our own dissociation, but as they truly are. And we become capable of being the regulated, safe, present human they need us to be.
This is the real work. Not because you need to be perfect.
Not because you need to have it all figured out. But because the relationship you have with your own nervous system is the foundation of every relationship you have with your horse (and the world...)
If you can't feel yourself, you can't feel them.
If you can't honour your own signals, you won't honour theirs.
If you can't give yourself permission to be dysregulated sometimes, you'll punish them for the same.
The work begins with you.
With your breath.
With your body.
With your willingness to feel what you've been taught to ignore.
Not to become perfect. But to become present.
And in that presence - everything changes.
