Harmony in Motion: Creating Lasting Improvements for Horse & Rider #85

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In this episode, we conclude our six-step series on creating horse-human harmony. Step Six is the crucial final step: exploring and enjoying movement with your horse, both on the ground and in the saddle.

Key highlights:

- A comprehensive review of all six steps to horse-human harmony
- Practical Feldenkrais-inspired exercises to improve your body awareness and movement
- Tips for integrating improved movement into your daily interactions with your horse
- Techniques for enhancing your horse's athletic performance through mindful grooming and tacking up
- Insights on how to deepen your connection with your horse through breath work and intentional movement

You'll hear about the importance of integrating all six steps for maximum benefit.

Whether you're a competitive rider or simply want to improve your horse's well-being, this episode provides valuable tools to enhance your equestrian journey.

💥Want to learn more? Join the Move with Your Horse waitlist!💥 https://www.marydebono.com/joinhorse 🐴

Remember, you and your horse deserve to feel great. Together!

Resources:

Creating Horse-Human Harmony Series:
Overview of the Six Steps: https://marydebono.com/blog/h81
Step #1: https://marydebono.com/blog/h82
Step #2:  https://marydebono.com/blog/h83
Steps #3-5: https://marydebono.com/blog/h84

Series on Rhythm Circles with your horse:
How Your Hands Can Improve Your Horse's Mood: https://marydebono.com/H14
This Small Move Has the Power to Heal: https://marydebono.com/H15
Talk to Your Horse's Brain, Not Muscles: https://marydebono.com/h16 

Questions? Email [email protected]

All information is for general educational purposes ONLY and doesn't constitute medical or veterinary advice.  

TRANSCRIPT:

Well, today we're at step six of the six steps to creating horse human harmony. So thank you for being here. I'm super excited to share this last step with you. It's going to be a pretty full episode. So let me just review the six steps so you have an idea of what they are. And if you haven't listened to the other episodes where I go into detail about the other steps, I hope you do that.

Okay, so the six steps are improving your movement and your self awareness using the Feldenkrais method. The Feldenkrais method is a very gentle, very powerful approach to movement, re education. So you could learn to move with ease and grace and really a sense of effortlessness. So. And by the way, you can improve at any age, and no matter what level of condition you're starting with. Okay, so what level of fitness or anything like that, the Feldenkrais method can help.

It's super powerful method, and it's really different than most other approaches to performance, to improving athletic performance. And by the way, I want to say it doesn't just improve your athletic performance, but improves your mindset so much as well. So, again, that's the first step, is really focusing in on yourself, improving how you move, how you feel, how you think, how you breathe, how you sense your environment, and how you respond to your environment.

All that can be helped through the Feldenkrais method. Number two is using your intention, your breath, and your loving energy to connect with your horse. So, again, I went into detail in a previous episode about how to do that. So make sure you check that out, and I'll link in whatever. Just, you know, wherever you're watching or listening to this, I'll make sure that there's links to the other episodes so you can check them out.

Number three is using a hands on method that we call Debono moves. I created it to relieve your horse's tension, and that's tension in body and mind. Okay, number four is, again, using de Bono moves to remind your horse how they can move with ease and elegance and be more athletic, again, at any age. And despite whatever they're dealing with, we've worked with horses with severe neurological problems, very advanced age, coming back from, you know, chronic injuries, all kinds of things, as well as horses at the very top of their game, you know, at the very highest levels of competition.

And the de Bono moves method has helped them so much. Okay, so that's step number four. And again, I talked about ways that you can apply this in the previous episodes. Number five, is tension free. Tacking up. How you can use tacking up to not only put the saddle and bridle on your horse, but to do it in a way that actually improves your horse's athletic performance because you build in de Bono moves as you're doing it, but also improves your movement.

Okay. And deepens the bond between you and your horse and really refines your communication. So, again, it's all about having that sense of harmony between horse and rider. So now we're at number six. And number six is that whether you're on the ground with your horse or in the saddle, learning how to explore and enjoy moving with your horse. And here's where the rubber really meets the road, so to speak, where you'll learn.

I'll share some things with you today. You'll learn to. How to, like, take the improvements that you got from the previous steps, from those steps one through five, and really integrate them into your interactions with your horse and in such a way that you and your horse both improve. This work, to me, is always about a win win. It's about you and your horse moving and feeling better than ever.

Right together. Okay, so let's start with you. So some of these will apply to being on the ground with your horse. Some of them will apply to being in the saddle, and many of them will apply to both. Both being on the ground doing this and in the saddle. So. And yes, yes, I do have notes, because you know me, I want to make sure you get every bit of goodness.

I don't want to miss a thing. Okay, so the first one I want to talk about, it seems like such a simple little movement lesson, a little exercise, if you will. And it's inspired by the Feldenkrais method, but it's a short. It's like a little mini review. And what it entails is what I call, like, closing and opening like a flower. So you can do this standing up, you can do this sitting in a chair, and you can do this on your horse if it's safe for you to do so.

Okay? Safety is paramount. So only do what's super safe for you. But what it involves is you sit comfortably, right? And if you're sitting on a chair, you don't want to sit all the way back. You want to sit a bit forward to the front of your chair and just have your hands resting in your lap again, if you can. Now, if you're doing this on a horse, I would suggest if you want to do the full thing, that, number one, actually, you do it in a stationary saddle first.

Like, if you have a sturdy saddle stand that will support your weight, you can try it there. If you want to do it on your horse and you feel that's safe for you, of course you're going to have the proper safety gear on and have someone maybe holding your horse by the bridle. Okay? Super important. So don't do anything that puts you or your horse in any kind of danger.

It's just not worth it. But so we'll assume you're in a safe place. You have your hands just gently on your lap, and you start to round your back and look down, and I'll go ahead and do it. So for those of you watching this on YouTube or wherever, you can see me do it, and as you do it, okay, I'm going to interrupt myself because I'm going to talk you through it.

So you're going to round down, and as you round, you're going to notice how your lower back rounds, your whole back rounds, and you go on more onto the back of your seat bones, okay. And as you do that, you just gently, internally rotate your, your knees and your arms. So in other words, you close like a little flower that maybe closes for the night. You know how there's some flowers that do that?

So you just close down and then you start to open up. You start from your pelvis. So you start to take your pelvis forward. And then you start to bring your knees outward. So you start to externally rotate the legs and the arms, and you look up to the ceiling. Okay, now, I'm trying to talk into the microphone as I do this, so it's not about watching me.

The idea is you want to think of rounding your back, looking down, letting your knees start to come together. Your arms start to go inward, and then you start to come out of that. You unfold, okay. Like a flower. Now, what's really important are a number of things. It's really, really helpful to exhale as you're folding. Okay, now, here is where doing other Feldenkrais lessons that I teach in my move with your horse program are so critical, because in that program, you'll learn how to use your ribcage, how to use your chest in a way that supports your back, that makes your, you know, that is very beneficial for your spinal health.

Okay? So you learn how to fold your chest, especially as you exhale and you soften. You learn how to allow your sternum and your ribs to move downward. And that also frees your neck. You can go more on the back of the seat bones and you do that. Then when you come forward, you feel again, especially if you've done the other feldenkrais work with me, you can have your ribs and your sternum come up and forward.

That's really important. And you want to think of moving your vertebrae one at a time. What this does is it helps improve your body awareness. You start to get more coordinated in your movements of your pelvis and your spine. You start to have more relaxed shoulders and hips, and you start to train your brain. You know, how all the parts can work together harmoniously. Now, again, I want to emphasize this step.

Step six is to integrate, to help you implement, if you will, the improvements from the prior steps. It's not necessarily a standalone thing. Yes, you will get improvements. If you did nothing else and just did these, you will get improvements, but you're not going to get the depth of improvement that you will if you do all the steps in their entirety as I teach in my move with your horse program.

Okay, so let's just be clear on that. So when you see these little mini lessons, they are meant as a complement to the more in depth Feldenkrais lessons. These are just little reminders for your nervous system. Okay? So keep that in mind. Yes, you will improve a little bit if you do nothing else, but you won't get that really deep learning and that really deep improvement. Okay, so, but that is a nice one to do.

So think of folding and unfolding like a flower. Okay, now remember to exhale as you fold, okay, so as you look down, you're exhaling. That allows your chest to soften and to fold, and again to move in harmony with your spine. And then you inhale as you unfold and start to look up. Now, if you've listened to this podcast before, you may have heard me talk about the importance of using variations, right?

That that gets the attention of your nervous system. Novelty and variation really get the attention of your nervous system and help lay down new neural connections. So we can add some variations to this. We can add some challenges, if you will, to this. So for example, one thing you can do is, as you know, we're doing the folding. You're looking down, you know your head is down, you can actually have your eyes go opposite what your head is doing.

So I'll go ahead and do it. So my face is looking down, my back is rounding, but my eyes will look up towards my eyebrows. Okay. And you want to still breathe. And then when I start to unfold and my face goes towards the ceiling. My eyes look down towards my cheekbones. Right? And then again, I reverse that. The trick is to keep breathing. Go slowly. When you do this variation, it's really, really nice to be able to get the attention of your nervous system in a positive way, help you have more independent use of your parts.

Now, let everything go together. So, in other words, the eyes can lead the way, both directions. And you may notice that the movement got smoother, that you were using your spine in a better way, that your pelvis was more responsive. Okay? That's how this works. And again, this is inspired by the work of Doctor Moshe Feldenkrais, the originator of the Feldenkrais method. And that's a big part of my teaching.

So these are just. You can also do other combos that I teach in the program. So just give you a little taste of what we're talking about here. Now, another one you can do that you might find really helpful is something we call the pelvic clock. Okay. And the pelvic clock, frankly, it's been co opted by a number of different modalities, different approaches. It's something that Doctor Feldenkrais came up with many, many years ago, and it's a really effective way of helping restore movement, really free movement, to the pelvis, the hips and the back.

Okay? So I'm going to tell you briefly. It's. It's like you imagine you have a clock on your. Under your seat. So we'll say we're sitting in a chair. By the way, when you're doing this in a chair, pick a chair with a flat seat, like a kitchen chair. Not something that's too cushy or anything like that. You don't want to do this in a cushy armchair, for example.

You can do it on a tack trunk if it's the right height for you, or some kind of just regular chair. Um, some people use a mounting block if it's an. If it's high enough for them. So you can do these kind of things. So you. Wherever surface you're sitting on, you're imagining that you have a clock under your pelvis, okay? And it's oriented in such a way that if you were to arch your back and push your belly forward, you would be on 12:00.

And when you round your back, right, and you bring your pelvis back, you're on the back of those seat bones. You would be on 06:00 okay? So that's the orientation. And of course, that means that 03:00 would be near your right hip and 09:00 by your left hip. So what you want to do is you go to 12:00 and then you start going around the clock with your pelvis.

Now, what's really important is that you take your time with it and that you think about touching every hour on the clock, and maybe you find like, hmm, it's not so easy to go to four and five. Well, you can just hang out in that little quadrant there for a little while and kind of smooth it out. The other thing to remember is that you can make your clock as small as you want, because what's more important is the quality of the movement, not the size of the movement.

So. And can you change direction easily? Right. Maybe it's challenging to go counterclockwise, but it was easy to go clockwise. So start to play with this. And again, I want to emphasize this is an adjunct to the full pelvic clock lesson that we teach in the move with your horse program. So this is a way to help remind your nervous system, help make the improvements sticky, if you will.

Help you integrate the improvements into your life, into your riding. Now, yes, this can also be done in the saddle. Again, with the caveat. It has to be safe for you and your horse to do this. Okay, don't take a chance. But it can be very nice. Now, it will be different when you're in a saddle. When you're in a saddle, you know, it's not like sitting in a flat chair.

So they will be differences, and that's fine. But it may really open your eyes to how you use your pelvis in the saddle, how responsive your pelvis is. If you feel like you're stuck on one seat bone more than the other, if you know that affects one leg more than the other. Another thing I want to point out is this lesson. The pelvic clock, again, especially in its entirety, which we do off the horse, is so good for hip tension.

It's incredibly effective for hip tension. Right. For tightness. People often complain about their hips being tight, sore, things like that. This can help so, so much because you're actually moving your pelvis relative to your hip joints instead of the hips relative to the pelvis, which is what we normally do in life. So it's a great way to change up how the muscles around your hips are organized. Okay, again, this is from Doctor Feldenkrais.

Now, we can also add some variations to this. You know, again, we're really big on variations here because that is how you really deepen your learning. So for example, you can do the pelvic clock in such a way that your whole body is really getting into that movement. So you see that my whole back is rounding. You know, I'm side bending. Very obviously, if you're looking at this on video, right.

I'm arching up when I go to 12:00. It's a big movement. That's one way of doing it. That's totally fine. But I also can do it so that it's very subtle and that I'm doing it right now and I'm just moving my pelvis. There's little echoes of the movement higher up, but it's very, very subtle. Okay. Very subtle. And notice how subtle can you make that movement? How quiet can you keep the rest of yourself?

So really play with that then another thing to do is to think about, can you make circles with your head? Okay. This is a great way to train your brain to have independent use of your parts, which is so important for horsemanship. Okay? For good horsemanship. So, for example, you can think that you have a laser beam or a huge pencil coming out of the top of your head, and you're drawing a circle on your ceiling or in the sky, whatever you want to think.

And again, you can do that a number of different ways. One of them is to think of your whole body moving kind of like a stick, right? So I'm changing how my weight is distributed on my pelvis. I'm moving from one spot to the other. So of course my head is following, but I can also do it where it's just my head moving my head and neck. And I can go in the other direction.

Do these, by the way, very slowly and mindfully. It's about the quality of your attention. I'm going faster than I normally would because I just want to kind of get through a number of them to give you the most value for this podcast episode. But really take your time as you do these. Okay? Now, another fun thing to do with the head circles is we're talking about a pencil or a laser beam coming out of the top of your head.

Okay? And that's great. But now let's think about doing a circle, like in front of your face. How would you move your head? Maybe you have a pencil coming out of the tip of your nose. How would you create a circle that way? And again, go in each direction a few times. Go slowly. Notice if you start to raise your shoulders, tighten your shoulders, or hold your breath when you do it, or maybe one direction more than the other.

You do that so now, what is it like if you think of the back of your head moving in a circle? It's funny how that can be different, isn't it? So if you put your attention on the back of your head, doing the circle rather than your face, now go back to doing circles, head circles on the ceiling. Maybe you notice that's easier. So these are all fun ways to, again, improve your body awareness, improve your coordination, and really help integrate or make sticky the improvements from the full Feldenkrais lessons that you do, for example, in my move with your horse program.

So another one, you know, you hear people talking about doing, like, little twists in the saddle. Like you're moving your shoulders, say, to the right and looking over to the right and then to the left. Now, that's all well and good. That's all well and good. However, I will say something that if you haven't really uncovered your, for example, biases in your rib cage and pelvis, you may just be exacerbating poor or maladaptive habits that you have.

Okay? So simply doing a movement over and over is not necessarily helpful. Okay. So just turning to one side and the other, if you're just doing it in your habitual way, isn't going to be helpful for you or your horse. It just will simply exacerbate those habits and create them even stronger. Right. They'll kind of reinforce them, but we don't want that. So again, when you do the full.

For example, we have lessons that involve a lot of spinal rotation, and you learn how to move evenly and rotate your spine one way and then the other. This is so, so helpful for helping you really have a stable, balanced seat. Okay. So once you get that, then you can help reinforce it or make it sticky by then playing around either in a chair or in the saddle, of turning from one side to the other.

But by then you'll be aware of your habits and you'll notice, oh, am I collapsing on one side as I do it? Am I shifting my weight unnecessarily? You'll become aware of all those things. Okay. And then I want to just pop in and say, you can also add those wonderful variations of differentiating your eyes, your head, your shoulders in the movement. So, for example, you can take your shoulders one way, but your head and eyes the other way.

You can take your shoulders one way and your eyes the same way, but your face the other way. These are lovely, challenging variations that then will help you improve even more. Okay. And again, this is a really, really great for promoting neuroplasticity for promoting the creation of new neural connections and helping you be more coordinated and more balanced. Right. And having better body awareness. So again, I'm kind of going through these quickly, but they're done very, very mindfully and slowly for the most part.

Okay. When you're doing them, this is just to give you some ideas of what to play with. Okay. But again, you're going to get the most benefit from the full program. Now, something else. So people will talk about relaxing your shoulders, and they'll talk about doing shoulder rolls, right? Shoulder circles, right. You can do one, you can do the other, you can do them together, you can do them opposing.

Again, that's all well and good, but you get a bigger improvement if you've done the Feldenkrais lesson on the ground where you're coordinating your shoulders and your hips and you're learning how to differentiate them. Okay. But in a chair or in the saddle, you can certainly play with this idea of, like having, again, we can use the image of a clock. Like, you have a clock on the side of your shoulder and youre going clearly around the clock and do it very slowly and mindfully, noticing where the hours are easy to feel like that you can get to and where they're a little challenging.

And notice if you can reverse the movement without interrupting your breathing. Okay. And then you can do the other shoulder play with that. Then you can do both together. And then you can do one in one direction, one in the other, you know, different, different phases of the circle. You could just really have fun with this. So that is a lovely thing to do. You can also kind of bring in your hip.

So can you move the hip and shoulder on that same side in like a bicycling motion, you know, like in a circle? And then can you do the other side as gracefully? Maybe yes, maybe no. And then can you do them opposing? I mean, there's all kinds of fun things you can play with. And again, by taking them into a sitting position and, you know, if available safely to you in the saddle as well, you know, it can really help integrate those improvements, really help make them sticky for you and really transfer them into your riding, into your, all your interactions with your horse, even interactions on the ground.

Okay, so let's see. I have so many notes here for you, so I won't go through all of them. There's like, way too many. It will take up too much time for you. But let me just add another one before we get to the horse ones, because we're going to do some horse ones, too. Let me, let me bring you into one about breathing. It can be very, very helpful to think about breathing into different parts of yourself.

Breathing into your thighs, for example, breathing into your knees and your calves and your toes. It brings that awareness there and often helps to bring a sense of relaxation. Like when you think of the rhythmic movements of breathing, actually helps to dissipate unnecessary tension. So you get the benefits of improved body awareness and reduced tension. You know, you can think of breathing into your shoulders right now if you in a place where you can do that safely.

What happens if you think of breathing into your shoulders? And certainly you can think of breathing into all the places in your trunk, like, for example, you know, in your belly, like breathing into the front, into the sides of yourself, into your back. Most people neglect the back when they think of breathing. So again, you can bring this into all different parts of yourself. Breathing into your fingers, into your head, into your neck.

How does that change your tension? How does it change your body awareness? How does it improve it? But then, you know, we take a much deeper dive into breathing. We talk about what we call quadrant breathing, about kind of dividing your trunk into four parts, you know, the upper right, the lower right, the lower left, the upper left, and learning how to breathe into those different parts. And sometimes it's just a single part.

We also do, like, from upper right to lower left, and then, of course, the other diagonal, one whole side. And what's so fun about this? And you can do this in the saddle as well. When you do that, it can really improve how you're sitting on your horse. It can really improve how your weight is distributed on your seat bones and help you be more balanced and help you control your weight aids much more effectively.

Okay, so, and that's a whole thing we get into in the program about this idea of learning how to use your weight aids, you know, and how even thinking of taking your knee forward and down right changes what happens in the seat bone on that side, for example. So all kinds of fun things like that. But again, doing this off the horse first can be very, very helpful.

Like, and we found also not, we found, Doctor Feldenkrais discovered doing the different breathing lessons in different positions is really, really helpful. So, for example, doing them while you're lying on your back, lying on your side, lying on your belly, sitting, like in a reclining position where you're leaning on your forearms and elbows, having the soles of the feet together while you do that, sitting just on the floor, cross legged, sitting in a chair, standing.

I mean, all the different positions bring something new to the experience for the nervous system, and they really helps integrate it, integrate this idea of healthy breathing throughout whatever activity you're doing. And I think it's worth noting that Doctor Feldenkrais was very clear that there's no one correct way to breathe, that it depends on what activity you're doing. If you're running up a mountain, you're going to breathe very differently than if you're just, you know, sitting, relaxing, watching your horse graze.

Right. There's going to be different demands on your system. The idea is we have so many habits around how we breathe, and many of them are maladaptive, so they're bad for us. They're inefficient. They're actually degrading our performance and our well being. So what the Feldenkrais method does is it helps uncouple you from those. It helps unlock, get you out of those habitual breathing patterns and have more choice.

Another great position, by the way, we do a bunch of stuff in. It's often blended into our Feldenkrais lessons, is if you're lying on your back and you bend your knees so your feet are standing, and you cross one leg over the other, like, completely over, like, you know, the back of the right thigh, for example, is, um, on the left thigh, so completely crossed. And then you tilt your knees to the right side.

So if the right leg is on top, you tilt your knees to the right. If the left leg was on top, you tilt to the left and staying in that position, if you can do that without discomfort, right. Then you can play with this different way of breathing where you actually can play with what we call this ball of air going up and down as you hold a deep breath.

And that is a really great way to change your habitual breathing, help, you know, again, unlock your breathing so it can be more functional, it could be healthier for you. So these are all different things you can do. So even without having your leg in that position, what that does is it. I'll explain why we do that. By crossing the legs like that and tilting them to the side, it puts a certain amount of weight, you know, pulls against the pelvis, which pulls against the spine and the ribs.

So it helps change what's happening in the rib cage. Right. It helps change the musculature between the ribs and all kinds of things. So it's a. It's a great way to do it. You don't have to do it. That way. But that is one way we play with this idea of this ball of air. But just say you did play with that. You were in micro, you did that then in the saddle.

You don't obviously need to cross your legs or do anything like that. But now you have a really good idea of how you can play with pushing this ball of air up and down in these different ways in that quadrant, breathing I mentioned. And now you can again help remind your nervous system. Oh, wow. Even when I'm riding right, I have more choice in how I breathe. And this is so, so helpful because all this work will help improve not only your athletic performance, but also your emotional well being, which your horse will pick up on.

And your horse will also notice that you're breathing in a more relaxed way, in a healthier way. Because a lot of the stress we feel in our mind is, you know, it can be traced back to also our habits that we have of tension in our body because it's all connected. Right. You can't have an emotion without a physical basis for it. And a physical basis, physical holding or an excess tension will create a certain level of emotional change as well.

So they're interrelated. So when you change one, you tend to change the other. So your horse will feel that and respond positively to your positive change. Okay, I think we should skip to the horse stuff now. Yes, I have lots of notes for you. Okay. So with the horses, right away I'm going to tell you that it is so easy that once you learn, and again, we touched on some of the things in the earlier episodes about some different de bono moves.

But once you learn some even basic debono moves, you can apply them as you're grooming your horse. You can do a scan, you can do muscle lifts, you can do rocking to help your horse have better balance. I mean, there's so many things to release tension, right? You can do that as you're grooming. And then we have a whole thing. We talk about tension free tacking up, where you actually use the tacking up process to improve your horse's movement and well being.

So it feels good to the horse and improves their well being. So that's a direct way. Those are two direct ways that you're going to help improve your horse's performance, you know, and help remind your horse, like, oh, all the hands on stuff we did earlier or maybe last week or whatever it was. Now you can take that into, you know, into functional activity, into, you know, riding, into maybe you're working on the ground whatever you're doing, whatever the horse is doing, maybe your horse is retired, but you want your horse to get around better out in the pasture, right.

So you can do all this. You're still grooming your horse, right. You can incorporate it into your grooming. Okay. Another thing you can do is, and I've talked about, I'll link to, to the episodes where I talk about rhythm circles, but it's something that's very foundational in the de Bono moves is doing these little rhythm circles that are very, very specific. So they're not like anything that you've probably heard of before.

So they're very, very specific. They work with activating these CLTM receptors. They have a very specific way of doing them where we're emphasizing one direction. But you can do them, for example, all around the jaw, around the TMJ. Just say you are going to bridle your horse or even just halter your horse. You can do that first, or as you're bridling or haltering your horse, and it can really help your horse tune into.

You can help release unnecessary jaw tension and just make it more pleasant for your horse and again, improve their athletic performance as well. Okay. You can also do very, very gentle bending on the ground or in the saddle, again, to build on what you did in the hands on work with your horse. So again, this is not to replace the more in depth work that you'll do with your horse.

Okay. It's not to replace. It's to help implement or help integrate the improvements. Okay. You can gently, like maybe every time you're picking out a hoof, you can pick up the leg in a really mindful way and do very, very gentle leg circles with the horse. Okay. And that can help release any unnecessary tension and remind the horse. Oh, yeah. All that other work we did, not that the horse is going to think this intellectually, but their nervous system gets reminded of it.

Maybe you did a lot of work that I taught you on how to work with the rib cage to free up the shoulder and the neck. Well, doing the leg circles just serves as a little reminder of that. Okay. So these are some things you can just kind of weave into your everyday life with your horse and make this work so, you know, so much more powerful. And again, the idea is what we're doing is we're exploring and enjoying how you can move with your horse.

And I want to emphasize the width your horse. So, for example, doing the leg circles, you're going to be moving your own self in this circular way that again, serves as a reminder to your nervous system about how your pelvis can move, how your spine can be long, how your skeleton can support you, how you can let go of unnecessary tension, all kinds of good things. So I'm big on the win win.

This is about helping you and your horse feel great together. Okay. Very, very important. And this is true with the other work as well, like, the tension free tacking up. That's all about you improving your movement and your communication with your horse, as well as helping the horse athletically, you know, improve their athletic performance. Um, so many different ways that we're integrating this, and I'm looking at the time here, we're already at, like, 40 minutes, so I think I'll skip the rest of these.

Maybe we can do them another time. But there's so many things you can do on the ground and under saddle. Like, once you. Once you have that experience of really sensing your horse, really paying attention to what you feel under your hands, what you notice with your eyes and your ears, etcetera, you bring that level of attention to all the interactions you do with your horse. Okay. And then you take such joy in exploring, like, the subtlest things.

Like, you're, say, for example, you're walking next to your horse. You're noticing how your breathing affects your horse. You're noticing your horse's breathing. You're noticing your horse's footfalls. You're listening, right? As well as watching. You're noticing the swing of the barrel, right? The softness of the head and neck, the movement of the tail, the undulations of the spine. Like, you're noticing this because you've trained yourself to pay attention to that same thing.

When you're under saddle, when you're just simply walking, you're on your horse and you're just at the walk, you're noticing these nuances. You're more aware of your body. So you feel how. Oh, I feel how this seat bone comes up and over. And then this one, I feel how my horse has been barrel swings. I feel the hind legs step under. I feel the shoulder blade go forward.

You know, like, you just start to feel these subtle and very important movements of your horse. And, you know, the. It's so important to tune into those details. Small things become big things, right? I often say that. So this is how you start to integrate and the movement into your everyday life with your horse, you integrate the improvements. So, anyway, let me just one more time go over the six steps again.

This episode went a little bit longer than I thought, but there's so much I want to share with you. So I'll say this next episode, we'll also dive into a little bit more of this. I'll also give you a glimpse into what it's like to be in the move with your horse program. You know what? We go over. I'll help give you some practical tips that you can use and all kinds of good stuff.

But one more time. The six steps are improving your own movement and self awareness with the Feldenkrais method. Feldenkrais method is an extremely effective, very gentle approach to improving your movement and well being. Helps in body and mind, and it's suitable for people of all ages, all levels of condition, no matter if you're dealing with injuries or other types of conditions. Right. Things can always be modified to suit you.

Number two is you learn how to use your intention, your breath, and your loving energy to connect with your horse. Number three is using dibono moves. You use your hands to relieve your horse's tension, and that's tension in body and mind. Number four is, again, using your hands. With dibono moves, you learn how to remind your horse how movement can feel free, easy and elegant. We want to associate movement with ease and pleasure.

Okay. And that also builds. It promotes enthusiasm with your horse. Right. Because your horse wants to move because it feels good. Okay. Number five is learning how to use the tacking up process to actually improve your horse's movement and their well being and to improve your own movement and well being and, and really refine the connection and deepen the connection between you and your horse. And number six, as we just talked about, is, you know, whether on the ground or in the saddle, you learn how to explore and enjoy moving with your horse.

So thank you so much for joining me. I want to just say, if you haven't signed up for my waitlist, please do. So. This is our move with your horse. Program is starting very, very soon. Doors are will be open for enrollment within the next day or so it is, yes, August 1, when this episode goes live. Doors will be open. They're open only for a very short time and on the waitlist.

The waitlist is no obligation, but I will be giving very valuable bonuses for people on the waitlist. Okay. So make sure you join the waitlist again. There's no obligation. You can join [email protected]. forward Slash joinhorse. And that's all lowercase, all one word. Marydebono.com joinhorse. And don't worry if you're driving your truck down the road with a, you know, with loads of hey in the back, you can't write this down.

It will be in the description. Wherever you're listening to this or watching it, it will be in the description. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach [email protected]. i thank you so much for listening and subscribing and reviewing the podcast, and I so look forward to talking to you again soon. Bye for now.