True Nature Equine Bodywork & Wellness

06/14/2026

What does the bodyworker’s horse look like, you may ask? Well, that’s a valid question.

Here’s a comparison of my seven-year-old off the track thoroughbred from when I first got him a little over two years ago to now. I consider the transformation (still working on better balance/strength in the thoracic sling) equal parts consistent bodywork, correct biomechanical riding and training to the (hopefully) ever-improving best of my ability, an excellent environment and nutrition, a knowledgeable trimmer and attending to my own body/imbalances.

There are no silver bullets. It truly takes a village, one I have assembled - and am deeply grateful for - with great care and discernment.

It also takes patience. Slow is the fastest way to build the foundation for the most sustainable overall wellness with horses.

06/08/2026

The horse’s welfare should never be sacrificed for the rider's goals.

Stop and think about that for a minute.

I let a client go recently, one with several horses. Some of these horses were very high value, consistently high placing show horses, others were retired in their mid-teens. Still others were “performance” horses kept going with a multitude of treatments/injections/modalities. They were either shut down or living in sympathetic mode given their lifestyle. i’m quite sure the owner thought that they were doing all the right things for the horses’ welfare. But I kept encountering the same issues visit after visit until it was clear that my work was of no real use, that my suggestions fell on deaf ears - and that I was, perhaps, helping to perpetuate the owner’s perception of doing all the right things.

If the horses and the owner can not “hear” me, I’m out. It saddens me, for the horses, but it becomes a waste of time and money. This situation is rare for me, as most people find me through others who are already in the the horse-first ballpark. Unfortunately, this situation is all too common for horses across all disciplines.

I wish more people would sit with this idea, the one where our goals as riders need to match up - without extensive supports - with the horse’s abilities and well-being. The idea of being willing to let the horse have a say in what is possible - and what is not.

Thanks to The Whole Horse Journey for boiling this down so simply, yet powerfully.

05/01/2026

Here is my wish for every horse owner, trainer, horse professional or just anyone who works with horses:

Read. This. (new) Book.

No really. Invest the $23 in something that will change your perspective, change your mind, set off some lightbulbs over your head.

Through a range of case study stories, you’ll learn not only how your horse sees and responds to the world and you, but why - and what you can do to be a better horseperson.

It’s not a hard read, the science is served up in bite size pieces in the context of each story - stories about real horses that we can all relate to. I read it in two sittings.

Read it. Gift it to a friend. Keep it handy. Read it with your students and talk about it. Let it change how you train, see, are with your horse.

A Horse's Life: The Neuroscience of Equine Welfare

04/18/2026

Believe what your horse tells you.

Whether they are shouting or whispering or somewhere in between.

I am half way through a two day dissection and this really struck me. It might seem like a given, a no- brainer. But for many it is not. 

Can you train/correct an issue away with relative ease? Great. Does it take concerted effort and does that issue keep slipping back in? It is not a training issue. Or a behavior issue.

If we are going to partake in the incredible privilege of sitting on our horses backs, I do believe that we need to help them carry themselves in the most biomechanically correct way that will help ensure their long-term health.

Horses are simply not built to carry us. I think we forget this. A lot.

Part of that process is allowing them to carry themselves in such a way that works for each individual horse. There are no cookie cutters in true horsemanship. There are no guarantees that your lovely fill-in-the-blank prospect actually has the ability to fulfill that particular purpose.

We have to listen and allow. Be willing to pivot, be willing to substitute our personal goals with, when they don’t align, what our horse actually needs, what our horse is actually capable of doing without being crammed into a frame, drilled into the ground, strapped into place.

Mostly, we need to slow down and just listen and let the horses truth be our truth, too.



04/02/2026

I was working on a similar post, then I read this one and thought well she said it just as well as I could have.

Not too long ago I had a client tell me that her trainer, who said that she could see the changes in the horses that I worked with, still just didn’t get it because it looked like I “wasn’t doing anything.”

I could go on about cognitive dissonance, or about how we are so adhered to our old beliefs that we can’t accept something new even when we see it with our own eyes, but I’ll just leave you with this: quiet and gentle can be very potent, focus on the results and not the need to be impressed by performance.

I would never have thought that such quiet work would have such impressive results. He’s been amazing since you were here last.” - K.K.

Where’s the “Wow”?

A trainer I work with recently reached out about a horse that had been feeling stiff and reactive during training. He wasn’t moving comfortably, and it was starting to affect their rides.

We scheduled a session, and from the start, the horse responded really well to soft tissue work. He softened, relaxed, and began to let go of tension in a way that felt positive and productive. We finished the session and scheduled a follow-up.

Later, the trainer shared something with me.

After I left, she and the owner talked about the session—as they should. The owner said:

“I wasn’t very impressed. I don’t see how such gentle work can make any significant difference. I just wasn’t ‘wowed’ by it.”

The trainer simply replied:

“Okay… let’s see how he responds.”

The Real Results

About a week later, the trainer returned for their next lesson and asked how the horse had been.

The owner said:

“Excellent. He’s been so good—I’m so happy with him.”

And the trainer replied:

“And there’s your WOW.”

Why It Doesn’t Always Look Impressive

In the equestrian world, there’s often an expectation that effective work should look dramatic.

Big reactions, something you can clearly see, maybe even hear happening. And to be fair, many horsemen incorporate a bit of showmanship into their work as part of how they present and sell what they do. My old coach used to call it “smoke and mirrors”, techniques used by magicians to entertain and draw the eye.

And there’s another idea at play—many of us have been taught, directly or indirectly, that for something to work, it needs to be intense.

“No pain, no gain.”
“Go hard or go home.”

So when we see quiet, gentle work, it can feel like not enough is happening.

But horses don’t live in that mindset. In fact, many of them tell us the opposite—they ask for less.

And when we listen, when we soften, when we do less… we often get more.

But massage and myofascial therapy are different.

When done well, they are:
• Quiet
• Subtle
• Gradual
• Responsive to the horse

There’s no forcing, no wrenching, no sudden impacts.

And while the changes may not always appear dramatic, they are immediate and significant—seen in improved tissue texture, posture, ease of movement and emotional state.

These are meaningful shifts within the nervous system and musculoskeletal tissue, even if they go unnoticed by the untrained eye.

The goal of this type of bodywork isn’t to override the body, but to work with it—safely, effectively, and in a way that supports lasting change.

These changes don’t need to be dramatic to be effective. In fact, they’re often more lasting because they’re not forced.

A Different Way of Looking at Results

It’s completely understandable that some people expect to feel “wowed” during a session—you’re investing in your horse, you want to see that reflected, and many people are used to that being combined with a sort of entertainment experience.

But sometimes, the most effective work doesn’t perform for the human audience.

It allows the horse to process, adjust, and improve in a way that sticks.

In the end, that quiet session—that didn’t seem like much had happened—resulted in a horse that felt great after and was able to safely, kindly and comfortably do his job.

And that’s the kind of “wow” that truly matters.

https://koperequine.com/exploring-fascia-in-equine-myofascial-pain-an-integrative-view-of-mechanisms-and-healing/

03/04/2026

Do you remember the first time you ever sat on or interacted with a horse?

I can. I was nine. That combination of fear, thrill and awe is still palpable inside that memory. It was that first experience of connecting to something so true, so real, so primal that I had never felt before.

Horse are perhaps the most tangible, living, breathing connection in our domesticated world that we have back to our own truest nature. These 1,000 pound prey animals are whispering to us to remember. I think it's why we crave being with them, whether we realize it or not.

The reality is that no matter how hard we try in this modern life, we can not (much, perhaps, to our chagrin) completely obliterate this connection to our wild, a deeper knowing and connection developed over eons. The harder we try to do this, the sicker we become – of body, of mind – just look around at what is happening today at pretty much every level of society. We suffer deeply from this disconnection from nature and thus from self.

My gelding likes to really look me in the eye, up close. I feel like he is letting me, for just a brief moment, see our commonality. He also likes to share breath – you know, when a horse raises their head and gets close to breathe you in. It strikes me as one of the most intimate things a horse can volunteer to do with us. I feel like it is a reminder of a basic, primal connection. This sharing of not just oxygen but the rhythm of breathing together, the syncopation that is everywhere in around us, in nature. It is not just a cute, awe-shucks moment, if feels like an invitation to align at a beautiful, basic level. For a fleeting moment, I feel a shift (if I am present), any semblance of hierarchy or control or intellectualizing or anthropomorphizing dissolves. Then p**f, the moment has passed, and I am back at the surface of things, where most of us spend 99.9% of our day.

As much as we might try to extinguish that wild light in them, and so in us, it still burns at least on low, no matter how hell bent we are to douse the flame. They reflect our wildness, and in so doing put us in direct conflict with a culture that values control, compliance, appearance, performance, success.

These days when I watch most “upper level” riders what I see are humans that are so disconnected from themselves, so desperately in need of conquering any scintilla of the wild within that they are doing everything they can think of to impose that same clamped down control over their horses, sometimes with pretty harsh results.

I got the same feeling listening to a recent podcast in which the concept of respect in relation to horses was discussed. This is such a loaded word. Sometimes it is about semantics, “respect” gets conflated with “boundaries”. But just as often, I think the word carries the weight of the person’s need to be seen as dominant, to be revered as the superior being who must be complied with, no questions asked or answered. And when the horse does not adhere (because their brains are not capable of the nuance of respect by this definition), the person takes it personally, becomes angry or frustrated or shamed – how dare my horse not respect me!

It also brings to mind a clinic I went to audit a few years ago. Women, all of a certain age, as they say, were being taught by a man how to be the center of their horse’s attention – or else. Fairly aggressively getting after their horses to “focus on me!”

We bring the weight of our own internal disconnection from our true essence, our own wounding, into our interactions with our horses. And it gets in the way. If we are constantly running from ourselves, no one, not even the horses, can catch us.

How to begin to excavate the lost path back to the nothing-less-than splendor that is our true selves? It will be different for each of us. Perhaps it starts with presence, with breath, with a willingness to slow down. It is the invitation the horses are issuing to us, every day, in every interaction.

I believe it is their greatest gift to us, if we can accept it.

03/02/2026

"It means we rule out discomfort before we assign character." I need to put that on a tee shirt.

And yes, it is likely that your horse has had, currently has or will have ulcers at some point in their ridden life.

“It seems like every behaviour issue now has a medical explanation. They’re not just bad… they all just ‘have ulcers.’”

This was said in response to someone suggesting that a very girthy horse might warrant medical attention.

It’s almost like research has found that gastric ulcers are extremely common in horses in work, with some groups reporting rates as high as 80–90%.

When a horse shows significant sensitivity to girthing, that is information.

When a condition is statistically common, considering it is not coddling. It is due diligence.

Acknowledging pain does not mean horses are fragile.
It does not erase training.
It does not eliminate boundaries.

It means we rule out discomfort before we assign character.

When discomfort is common in working horses, it deserves to be considered.

Ruling it out is not over-medicalizing behaviour.

It is part of responsible training.

02/27/2026

A tale of two ulcers

I worked with a horse who was recently diagnosed with grade four ulcers and put on meds to heal. I saw him about four weeks into treatment and was told that his owner wanted to start riding again. The trainer and I talked it through and agreed that that he needed at least two months off. We communicated this suggestion to the owner together, and after some push back about being disappointed that their teenager couldn’t ride for a bit, they agreed. Victory for the horse, and maybe some education for a young owner/rider about what putting the horse first looks like.

On a previous visit to this barn, I had seen another gelding who was in poor shape. At the time I did some ground work to help him settle as hands on bodywork was out of the question. The trainer and I both thought it very likely that he had ulcers. When I returned several weeks later, the vet had seen him and the amount of scarring and current bleeding ulcers told the story of years of untreated pain. I declined to work with him as I felt that he just needed to be given time to let the meds do their work. Frankly, this horse needed to never have anyone sit on him again. The trainer agreed, and was already laying the path for that to happen.

The first horse looked pretty good to the untrained eye - he would do his job (under duress given the severity of his ulcers), trying his hardest to comply with riding and training like so many do, moving a bit stiffly and stoically. The second horse, well, you needed to be blind to miss the fact that he was suffering. He was 200 pounds underweight, severely wasp-waisted, unable to stand still, and bucked off anyone who tried to ride him. In “horse”, he was screaming. But he was used up by a trainer at his previous barn in a lesson program until he’d bucked one too many kids off and then sold (don’t ask me about who would buy a horse in this condition, I don’t know the particulars).

Horses tell us time and time again who we really are. But do we want to listen?

What makes me saddest about the second horse’s story (in addition to his pain) are all the kids that were taught that it was okay to see a horse in that kind of horrible body condition and (attempt to) ride him - until he made that impossible. And then he was sold on without treatment or zero thought to his well-being or the safety of the next person that would own him.

If we are teaching kids that this is okay, what are we expecting they will be like as adult riders or professionals - or humans, for that matter? Instead of teaching young/new equestrians how to tune into the horses, sometimes we are actually teaching them to tune out.

Are you nodding your head thinking, yep, happens all the time. Maybe you’re thinking I need to get over it because it’s “just the way it is.” Can we please just stop. Stop and consider what we are normalizing? And let me be clear as we think “I’d never do that”: we are all complicit. Silence is complicity. Ignorance is complicity. Laziness is complicity. Sacrificing values to money, to winning, is complicity.

The trainer/barn manager mentioned above that I work with has a thriving lesson and competition program. Her kids learn groundwork and horse care. They created an actual charter together, an expression of their collective values that guides the work they do every day. They read it out loud together at the start of every competition and more importantly, they live it. She’s created a supportive barn culture of learning AND fun that supports the horse, first and foremost. Is it easy? Hell no. But the kids in her program give me hope, she gives me hope.

So don’t tell me it’s not possible. Don’t tell me that it’s just the way it is. The bad seeds are sown at the local every-day level - and so are the good ones. The change the horses need starts with us, not with the big names who are too cowardly to change because they think they have too much to lose - or they believe that they are insulated from accountability thanks to the false validation of fame and money.

Look around you. Start with your own horse. What do you need to learn, do differently, get curious about? Do something about that feeling that something in your training/barn culture/horse keeping isn’t quite right. Ask some questions. Get some answers - and if your vet/farrier/bodyworker/trainer/barn manager won’t have a conversation because they must always be right, stop being made to feel like an idiot or stepping on egg shells and find a new one.

We all have the ability to choose to be the person your horse really needs, backed by intention, commitment and action. Every day.

Drawing credit: from an equestrian affirmation deck developed by Katherine Lowry of Biomechanics

02/21/2026

What if we just did it for the joy?

Someone told me recently that I smile a lot when I’m riding my newer horse, Ticket and that when I used to ride Lila, I didn’t smile much. This observation came as no real surprise given my mindset with Lila the past few years. I’m working on shifting that these days to a place of more ease, less expectation, less push. She had some physical issues and has healed nicely. In that time, I’ve discovered that my mind doesn’t need to be “set” in a certain way with her. In fact, I’m asking my brain more often to take a backseat to my heart.

Watching Alysa Liu win the women’s Olympic figure skating competition brought tears to my eyes because I could actually feel her joy, her freedom and her relaxation that resulted in a gorgeously fluid performance. Of course it takes a ton of hard work and commitment to get to that level. But this 20-year-old had already retired from a sport that wore her down, and decided that she’d come back to it on her terms, with joy and freedom and living a more balanced life at the forefront.

Well, it showed. And she won.

I think we take joy for granted. I think we assume that, well, of course joy is important to us with our horses, but then we neglect it. And it kind of dies on the vine. Yes, some things are hard and need focus and even a bit of tension, risk and fear to get to the other side. Maybe your horse is troubled and you are working together to help him/her through it. Maybe you’re going through a rough patch in your life, it happens. Maybe you just don’t emote much, that’s fine. But what is your factory setting with your horse?

If it’s not in close proximity to joy, I just think we’ve gone astray. I don’t care what “level” you are at - as Alysa has shown, joy is her not-so-secret sauce at the highest of competitions. Don’t we often desire a state of flow with our horses? Well, I believe that joy is a critical component of that flow. 

We’re working with sentient beings who can feel our energy, our “settings” before we even touch them. Imagine if, more often than not, they felt more lightness and less heaviness, more openness and less correction and control? Here’s the catch: we have to authentically let ourselves, yes allow ourselves, to feel the goodness, not fake it. Because the horses feel our internal-external disconnection, and they want no part of it. 

Maybe we’ve had it drilled in too deeply that this is hard, serious work, so be about it. No pain no gain. Push that envelope. Conquer your fear. Control that animal. Maybe we’ve been questioned, ostracized, or worse, shamed when we try a different path. Maybe performance has become too much about the tension of chasing perfect ex*****on and not enough about actually feeling the happiness of being in it with your horse, not just on your horse.

Anyway, Alysa is my hero this week. Because this young woman did a very extraordinary thing - she got herself to the very top of her sport and didn’t care about winning, she cared about just having made it there, to revel in being there, enjoying the supreme moment. The rest was gravy. And that was really beautiful to watch.

02/17/2026

If you are a professional working in the equine world, I cannot imagine at this moment in time a better investment in yourself. Helen and Ellen are a dream team, I know and have worked with both. If you are feeling the need to find a space with peers to get real about powering up not just your business, but your own personal potential within your work with the horses, this is for you. These 15 people will be very lucky and they will be transformed at the end of this experience. 🔥

The Awakening 🐎🔥

Today, the cycle shifts.

It’s February 17th—the start of the Year of the Fire Horse. In the Chinese Zodiac, this is a 1-in-60-year alignment. It represents a rare surge of independence, passion, and natural leadership.

But for those of us in the equestrian industry, "leadership" is often a word we only use for the horse. We rarely apply it to ourselves, our businesses, or our boundaries.

I’m looking for 15 people who want to change that.

I’m opening the doors to the EquiClarity Collaborative. This isn't a "course" you watch in the dark. It’s a 10-week, LIVE professional cohort modeled after the most rigorous leadership programs in the world.

This is for the professional who is ready for:

The Rigor: A curated reading list that challenges how you think about money, psychology, and systems.

The Peer Group: A small, high-level cohort where you give and receive feedback in real-time. No "business as usual."

The Expert Guidance: Weekly 90-minute sessions with myself and Ellen Stroud (equestrian AND licensed therapist).

The Celebration: A formal completion of the work. Because professionals finish what they start.

We aren't fixing "difficult clients." We are mastering ourselves. We’ll be breaking "poverty vows," building sustainable business models, and applying Maslow’s Hierarchy to professional development.

The Details:
📅 Starts: April 1st (Live on Wednesdays at 7pm EST)
👥 Capacity: Strictly limited to 15 professionals
🎓 Investment: $2,497 (Payment plans available)

The Fire Horse doesn't wait for "the right time." It recognizes an opening and it runs. I have no other sessions on the calendar for 2026. This is the work we are doing NOW.

Are you one of the 15?

https://app.heartbeat.chat/equiclaritycollaborative/invitation?code=BC7473