Rowanoak - Natural Horsemanship Learning Centre and Livery Yard

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Rowanoak Learning Centre and Livery is based in the Brecon Beacons with its tranquility, fresh air and spectacular views.

We hold regular courses, workshops, clinics and demonstrations. We also take horses in for therapy, training or re-habilitation.

If you would like to host a demonstration at Rowanoak or need more information about any of our services please contact us.

Welcome to Rowanoak Learning Centre and Livery

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Some thoughts on listening and hearing horses


Some thoughts on listening and hearing horses

Thinking about what I do, how I do it, there’s a lot of things I do and not necessarily think about consciously, picking up signals from horses, come in a lot of different ways, sometimes the horse will indicate to me by a movement, pointing of the nose, swishing of the tail, lifting of a leg, the signals also come sometimes by reflected pain, itch or irritation on my own body, sometimes the tingling, cold or heat through my hands, sometimes a smell, all sorts of smells, foul smells, essential oil type smells, hay, grass, the sea sometimes indicating an organ problem or indicating a need in the diet, sometimes an internal sound, very occasionally a vision, this has only happened in the most severe cases, if I cannot pick up the signal I ask the horse to give it to me again, if I still fail I ask the horse to give it to me again in a different form, I find sometimes having hands on helps but quite often I will stand back 2 or 3 feet to try and understand, casting my eyes constantly across the horse, I spend a lot of time twisting and moving my body to work out positions that might relate to the horse, quite often a front problem can be compensatory of a rear problem, if I fail to work out the problem it normally comes to me within 24 hrs I then have no problem in ringing the client and saying I need to re-visit the horse again and explain the reason why, I’ve never had a taste but I don’t see any reason the signal shouldn’t be in taste form, the gut feeling is normally the one to go with, if you work with this you can then continue on with other signals, I also have the ability to shut my eyes and open up a third eye which appears to be placed just above the top of the nose, I can get images through this third eye, I don’t truly understand how or why but I don’t try to, sometimes it’s just a blank screen, I do believe the carrying of crystals helps in some way, I do not understand this, but I do aim to understand crystals more, I always carry smoked quartz and a pure crystal, I have on some occasions held the crystal against the horse to try and understand, I sometimes find it very difficult to pick up the horses’ energy if there are humans present, I do not have this problem if there are lots of horses present, I can focus on just the one although in some instances I have picked up the problem in the horse through a problem in the human, human out of balance, fizzy, laid back, bad hips, bad back, stiff shoulders etc sometimes reflect in the horse especially if the horse is ridden, having said all this it is sometimes incredibly difficult for me to understand my own horses without specifically concentrating I think this is spending all my time with them, looking, listening but not always seeing or hearing, I have learnt many lessons over the last few years which have improved this, some good and some not so good , I do find that back diagnosis and leg rotation as very useful tool, I find that sometimes I have to think quite hard to relate this diagnosis to the problem as sometimes there is no apparent link, remember at the time you are treating someone else’s horse you know more about that horse than they do, in shiatsu I am not sure that you need to work an exact specific points but just need to be in close proximity to it, and till your client what you feel, no matter what this is, good or bad, they will either accept it or not, but if you don’t tell them they will not have the choice, when things are not working as well as you would like I’m sure there is a reason, I feel this is nothing to do with our ability, we just need to listen, look and learn, , every treatment I give to a horse benefits it in one way or another not always as we or the owner expects, I feel its ok to tell the owner to change their style of riding, change their tack, change their feed regime, change the way the horse is kept if this the feeling I’m getting from the horse, all sorts of problems can be purely emotional, as much work as we do to a particular horse if its life style is wrong we are fighting an up hill battle, if we drive a car without any brakes we will crash into things no matter how many times we repair the damage to the car unless we fix the brakes we will keep crashing, this is exactly the same with the horse, you resolve its problems but not the causes so we must remember to treat the whole the physical been their emotional side and the environment in which said kept always doing it was the best intent and love coming from our sole.
nick of rowanoaklivery