With Jalila at my house, I was able to shift 100% to working in Equine Standard Time[i] and it was the best thing for both of us. I can go out to her pen 3 or 4 times a day and explore just a little awareness or release some tension without making her suspicious or frightening her. To help keep myself on task, I started calling Jalila “Jillie” after a friend and colleague, Jillian Kreinbring, in Texas who inspires me to exercise patience when working with horses.

[i]  I learned this term from my friend and farrier, Doug Frazier, Big Piney, Wyoming, who taught me a lot about patience, saying, “It don’t pay to hurry a horse. they’ll let you know when they are ready and, until then, you’re on Equine Standard time.
 

The first thing I notice about horses is their posture and overall balance. Jalila is high headed, even at rest and cannot comfortably extend her head and neck forward and down. She is disconnected front to back at rest and in movement.

Body Out Of Balance = Mind Out Of Balance And Vice Versa
I chose these photos out of several pictures of Jalila standing in her pen. All of them reveal her lack of balance and connection front to back and top to bottom. When a horse never stands at ease in a weight bearing, or balanced posture with a leg at each corner and canon bones perpendicular to the ground, it is a sure sign that they lack balance and confidence. Until a horse is comfortable in their own body, they are challenged when asked to interact with the outside world, especially when humans make demands of them. In the photo on the left, we see the horse standing in a posture that leans out over the forehand with her head high. On the right, her legs are more under her, but she is standing base-wide in a braced-to-balance posture that is heavy on the forehand.

​Aside from the unsettled expression on her face, Jalila demonstrates an affected gait pattern in her walk.
Note the way her reaching hind leg has come to full extension in the air and is about to slam flat to ground. She is not lifting in her base and the right front leg id “hanging” off the shoulder instead of being elevated and propelled by it. Her legs were all going in different directions.

​Behavior: Any inadvertent contact with Jalila elicits a flight response of tensing in her body, throwing her head up with wide eyes and flared nostrils. Left unattended in her pen, she is flighty and paces the fence line, occasionally running at the fence and pushing her chest at it. She is terrified of the hay string curtain that hangs in the shed doorway if it moves in the breeze. I understand that horses get upset by new surroundings, and activity such as I am describing can result from that cause.
I did notice that the new surroundings perplexed Jalila and I was impressed by how levelheaded she was about analyzing her new surroundings. She came from a wooded, riverside ranch in a narrow valley where there were lots of other horses. My place is out in the open high dessert and my horse, Parker, an older Appaloosa/Mustang gelding was suddenly her only company. There are not even any other horses in sight from the location of her pen. I think her biggest adjustment was to accept feeling a bit lonely, but she handled it remarkably well and it helped her bonding to me.

Over the next week, I continued to release tension from Jillie’s body in short sessions that I knew would have a cumulative effect. The shear in her lumbars was greatly improved after the vascular work in that area, so I enhanced the rhythm in the kidneys and hooked up the ureters. Both kidneys were stuck in the filling phase of the vascular cycle and were out of sync with the ureters. This situation is often caused by tension around pain in the S.I. joints and, once the pattern is set up, compensation that affects range of motion in the hindquarters, from stiffness to lameness develops and persists. This pattern was more pronounced on the right side. After this session, Jillie’s ability to rock gently from side to side improved. Following the energy restriction into her hind legs, I released the Chopart joints in her hocks to insure good circulation and checked in with the nerve roots down both sides of her spine to relax her musculature. 
​I was hyper focused on the rotation in her front legs. How much of the toed-out position I was seeing was postural and how much of it was conformation? I knew there would be more to learn about this situation as I continued my investigation and as releases continued to revel new levels of Jillie’s body’s ability to repair and heal itself. With every session, new issues revealed and resolved themselves, cementing my belief that bodywork does not fix issues and continual attention must be paid to changes, shifts and maintenance in any living, breathing, moving being.
I added a series of PT exercises to loosen and straighten her shoulders and front legs. These include shoulder delineation, leg circles, extending the front legs out and across the midline, wither rocking and, when working on a line in the arena, leg yielding, which will also build strength in her hindquarters.

I want to make it clear that I am not a TTEAM practitioner. I have friends who are and my understanding of Linda Tellington-Jones' work comes from working with them, my work with Peggy Cummings and I have taken TTEAM clinics. That said, I can't imagine working with any horse without employing Linda's life changing methods.

​In order to gain Jillie’s trust and establish myself as a predictable and considerate companion, I employed a number of TTouch and TTEAM techniques, including mouth work, front leg circles, and Abalone touches, like the ones I had to use that first day in order to be able to touch Jillie’s right side, that are used to calm reactive horses and improve acceptance of touch over large areas of the body.

Front leg circles, executed by slowly and carefully drawing circles in the air with the toe just barely clearing the ground, are used to improve balance and relax shoulder, neck and back muscles. This exercise also offers young or unbalanced horses a chance to practice balancing on three legs, which is useful for hoof trimming.
When I first began doing leg circles with Jillie, the circles she was able to do were no bigger than a nickel in diameter and the toe ratcheted its way around the circle in a rough, awkward way. I did just a few circles each direction on both front legs two or three times a day and was pleased as the size and ease or motion improved steadily. I could feel the movement travel clear up into the shoulders and Jillie began to enjoy the exercise.

I also stroked her with the “wand,” a stiff, fiberglass dressage whip that delivers a firm, comforting touch, stroking over, under, and across her body and legs to introduce the wand as an extension of my hand. In leading, the wand offers useful aids to indicate direction of travel, establish boundaries of personal space, and determine pace by speeding up or slowing down the pace as needed.
​

I would not make any important decisions based on popular folklore regarding the outward appearance of a horse but I do find a lot of them interesting and entertaining. The no longer purported idea that white hooves are not as structurally strong as striped or solid dark colors probably established this pre-purchase advice: Four white socks pass him by, three white socks send him far away, two white socks try him, one white sock buy him. 

Jillie has a triple swirl on her face, which is rare and generally indicates a complex individual but not an unpredictable one. According to Linda Tellington-Jones’ book Getting In Touch With Your Horse, horses with multiple swirls may initially be difficult to train but are likely to become dedicated to a single person.  Traditionally, the Bedouins associated a long wheat shaft swirl on the center of the chest with an individual who is inclined to be unlucky.

​Oh dear! What have I done? I’ve chosen an unlucky, complicated Arabian with three white socks, and a mare to boot. Anyone who knows me is laughing his or her ass off right now. 

One of the problems Jalila’s owners had targeted for me to work on when they sent her to me was that she was difficult to catch and it took a lot of patience and time to get a halter on her. The haltering process I witnessed involved holding the halter out and allowing her to put her nose through the opening several times until the crown strap could finally be brought around behind her ears and buckled into place followed by a bowl of oats.
With tension and pain on the wane, Jalila was always came right over to me when I approached her pen, but having a halter in my hand definitely aroused her suspicion. She had some obvious negative associations with halters, so I tried using a catch rope, like I would use with a foal as part of introducing the haltering process, and Jalila was perfectly accepting of it. I could walk right up to her and put the rope around her neck. She didn’t become apprehensive until the noseband was laid in place and I realized that her nose was extremely sensitive. When I added the fleeces cover to soften the contact of the rope, Jalila was fine with the idea and, once I put a fleece covering over the noseband of a regular halter, the problem was solved. Three facial swirls? Complicated?

​Once I added the fleece padding to soften the contact of the rope over her nose, Jalila accepted it. It took some time before she accepted it without anticipation, but I could tell that Jalila was thinking about what we were doing with that thing over her nose and willing to learn something new.

The next step was work with Debra Stone[i], an energy practitioner, to identify and release mental and/or emotional experiences that may have become lodged in the physical form, creating unconscious patterns of muscular holding which affect movement and behavior. While I cannot do justice in explaining Debra’s work, I have faith in the power of it and have seen amazing results from it. Her work with Jillie integrated Jillie’s ethereal body with her physical form so she can better assimilate her work with me and located some emotional lodgings that were hindering Jillie’s ability move with coordination and confidence.
In Debra’s own word’s:

This is what I remember.... 
It seemed to stem from very young in her...she took right to the work, this being her first time! Her healer within and her were very precise in their directives of what was at hand of her 'field'. Debra to approach from the right...no the left.
Everything she presented was connected and integrated eagerly:
We connected her master chakra to her shoulder. 
Her hip to shoulder was re~connected
...following her field to 8's was there...she was not crossing to whole brain integration!
Brainstem to 3rd eye
Brainstem back to jaw
3rd Eye to throat latch
Etheric body return
Central nervous system back to umbilicus...to name a few!
I sensed her need to play more in the coming weeks as she's continues to deeply integrate from a young one back to present time with the connections. As a constitutional 2nd~4th chakra horse....She is a pleaser and teacher of deep loving, fully giving and receiving! Nancy and her are a perfect match!*
Everyone near her will benefit ...Parker is in for a real treat with Jillie by his side. Delightful~


[i] Debra Stone is a Reiki Master and energy practitioner. Learn more about her at her website: http://awakenthehealerwithinyou.com