A little bit about this post. This blog post has been adapted from a seminar that Brittany gave down at the United States Olympic Training Center about a year and a half ago. She was fortunate enough to be able to co-instruct down there with Daniel Stewart with the Equestrian Athlete program. Part of what Brittany does as an Equine Facilitated Psychotherapist is working with athletes and working on their mental health and how their mind can impact their performance and emotional wellbeing.
We’ve split this seminar into 4 different sections. This week is Part II
Last week we talked about how being in connection with horses can make us feel better because of all those feel good hormones that our brain releases, so working with horses can improve our mental health.
Today, we’ll address how we can be cognizant of this when we are working with horses.
As a recap from last week:
Being around horses in a connected, fully present way, can REDUCE our feelings our fear, stress, anxiety, and depression while INCREASING our feelings of safety, security, happiness, and being loved.
What our brain is actually doing is training us to seek out these situations in which we feel good. So when we’re around horses and we FEEL good, we’re going to keep going back to them. And that programming of our brains is what we call a neural pathway or neural programming. We build routes along our brain to process information, sensations, feelings, etc. and the ones we use all the time are like deep ruts; we’re habituated to using them.
So the question you might be asking yourself right now is, what does mental health have to do with my ability to perform as an equestrian and an athlete? How do horses play a role in this?
There is this great meme that I love:
Trainer: “You’re riding so poorly because you’re so stressed”
Me: “so it’s unfixable”
Trainer: “No you just need to relax and chill TF out”
Me: “so it’s unfixable”
Now I don’t know about you.. but I feel like this all the time. And I am a therapist… But sometimes it’s like no matter how hard I try, how hard I prep, all the practice the time, lessons, and coaching… It’s like I just can’t seem to CHILL out when it really counts.
And this idea is at the core of how mental health plays a role in our riding and our partnership with horses.
So before we go on… What IS mental health? We talk about in our society today about “mental health issues”, but not a lot about what it means to actually be mentally healthy.
Anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, stress, suicidal ideation, insomnia, etc…are all examples of “mental illness” and are all things that most of us struggle with at some point in our lives- that’s normal. But that’s a whole other topic that we can talk about later…
Dan Seigal, (a big important guy in the psychology and therapy world) has this great metaphor for what mental health is: picture a peaceful river running through the countryside. That’s your river of well-being. Whenever you’re in the water, peacefully floating along say in a canoe, you feel like you’re generally in a good relationship of yourself, other people, and your life. You can be flexible and adjust when situation change. You’re stable and at peace.
It sounds like a good state of mind to try and to ride from!
Now, I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t really sound like a state of mind that I really live in… I feel like I bounce around a lot more… And I am a lot more stressed out sometimes than blissfully floating along down a river!
Imagine this… as you float along, sometimes you veer too close to one of the riverbanks. One bank represents chaos, where you completely feel out of control; we’ll call this right bank. This means that the left bank then represents rigidity and control; now this may SOUND better, but this bank is the side that is completely unwilling and unable to adapt, compromise, or negotiate.
The Right bank: extreme chaos; Left bank: extreme rigidity. When we are too close to either of these banks; that’s when we are the furthest away from “mental health”.
Now, what if I told you, that the left bank is really the left side of your brain. The left side of your brain is all about being logical, linear, linguistic (it likes words), and literal. It also really like lists and order. Very much a black and white place to live in.
If the left bank is the left side of your brain, the right bank can be understood as the right side of the brain. This side of the brain is responsible for being more holistic in its world view. It’s associated with the arts, nonverbal side of things, feelings, emotions… Etc. the right brain is very much the big picture thing.
Now, for ease of going forward- let’s say the left brain is the head; and the right brain is more about the heart/body.
