Ep. 62 Geometry - whether sacred or not

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 62. What we're doing, in a way, as we build riding skills, is building a structure. A structure within your own body, a structure within the horse's body, and a way that they can optimally fit together in its simplest form. The model I've built to explain riding skills is geometry. It starts with the rectangular box of the rider's torso, which has its long axis vertical, and the rectangular box of the horse's torso, which has its long axis horizontal. Of course, we're significantly more complicated than rectangles and have, you know, bulging bits here and there as humans and horses do. But overall, rather than being rectangular, we tend to be parallelograms squiffed off towards one leading shoulder or one leading leg. We may have curved sides, so the whole thing's somewhat banana shaped with a longer right and shorter left or the other way round. And then you can add some other weird shapes, tilts, kinks. Within that, there are floppy bits, what we could consider understuffed, and there are overstuffed bits that are rather stuck. We're wanting a body quality between those two with a body that transmits force well and has positive tension. The understuffed bits just have not enough tension, so they bloo, bloo, bloop around the overstuffed bits are too. Huh? But we're trying to build equality between those two, which we may not have naturally, unless, of course, we have talent. I want to tell you the story of a bodywork treatment I had recently from a wonderful woman I met in Chicago. It was more really of an energy treatment. It involved some strokes of the length of the body, some connecting one place to another using her two hands, some movements that were almost like a pinch of taking energy away from the body. Not very much seemed to happen, but, my gosh, it was remarkable. It changed the position of my left shoulder blade phenomenally. It tends to go up around my left ear, and it sits now much closer to my spine and much flatter on my back than it did. And I. I asked this person about her treatment, and she said, well, all I'm really doing is giving your body information. It's about sacred geometry and the golden mean. The golden mean relates to repeating patterns that you see in nature, like the whorl and the shape of a whorl in a snail shell or the structure of a pine cone. Now, perhaps our bodies all are sacred within this geometry. I don't think that the model I've come up with is sacred. I Think it's very kind of factual and useful and down to earth. And the way we learn it is via developing body awareness and body control, through noticing, through putting chunks of information and skill and feel together, maybe attaching one apparently unrelated piece to another as it begins to, as we say, come together. I had a wonderful analogy on the radio one day comparing the process of learning and building a skill to sewing a quilt. I'm not sure what the content of the skill was, but actually that really doesn't matter. This is a generic idea across different skills. So if you imagine sewing a quilt that's made of squares of material, each square would sew to four other squares along each side and would have a connection to four more squares at each corner. If we were doing it with triangles again, there'd be three main pieces connecting to each side and three connecting at the corners in hexagons. Everything would be more equal. So as you sew these pieces to each other, some of them may have different weight in the way they connect together and you begin to create larger pieces and patterns. You see how these patterns interrelate. Maybe you make larger pieces and maybe you do or don't know how those different larger pieces will relate together once sewn into the entire quilt. But there comes a day when you wake up and you realise that with all this labour where you couldn't totally see and tell what you were doing, you have actually made a viable quilt. Of course, you could always act to it, you could always add to it. We might consider that it's never really complete, but it's a lovely way, I think, metaphorically, to think of the learning process. Our metaphorical quilt could be thought in another way too, and not just be the quilt that's built from individual pieces of learning. It's almost like our bodies are like quilts and so is the horse's. But this quilt is three dimensional and actually more like a spider's web. When all works well, we share it with the horse with lines of pull that connect between us within the fascial net. Now, those of you who listen to my previous podcast will know a bit about this, but many of you may not. Fascia is to muscles what sausage skins are to sausages. So the sausage skins encase each sausage, they link the sausages together into chains and they also separate one sausage from another. It takes a little bit to get your brain around this. So you've seen fascia as the white skin that surrounds muscle on a chicken leg, and that skin around the muscle becomes the tendon which becomes the ligament around the joint capsule, which becomes the joint capsule and the next ligament, the next tendon and the next muscle. This means that muscle and its connective tissue are connected together into chains, known as myofascial chains. And together the various chains are called the fascial net. Within our own body, we're aiming to untangle the tangles and the stuck places in this, to reconnect them, reorganize them, make everything much more streamlined. Another thing you could think of, maybe, is of an old fashioned telephone switchboard, which you might have seen in an old movie, with wires, go to different places and rather a tangle, and we're untangling everything to line it all up, to make it work together in a more streamlined way. The main chains of muscle and fascia are the front of the body, the back of the body, the two sides of the body. So there, there's a right and a left chain, as indeed there are on the front and the back a chain that is your core, that includes your organs. It goes right into your innards. And if the layers are bunched up and stuck together, there's not going to be free movement. Now, if we as a rider are going to have influence over the horse, we have to be able to connect our fascial net more like a spider's web to his. And this is an important, very important piece that makes a massive difference in skill. And we can demonstrate it through a simple exercise which we have done before, but I think it bears repeating. Put one hand on your thigh and move that hand up and down over your trousers or whatever you're wearing. You might just hear the movement of my hand on my trouser leg here as I'm making friction. Then can you keep your hand in the same place and move it towards your knee, Taking the tissue of your thigh with you, move it back towards your hip, taking the underlying tissue with you, move it to the inside of your thigh, move it to the outside of your thigh, move it in circles. Now, this is the kind of connection that I described with the phrase plugged in. The version that's friction is a disconnect and it means you're separate to the horse in a really fundamental way. And of course, many people do that because they think they should be supple, go with the movement and they're overdoing it, often dramatically. You can do a similar exercise by reaching across the front of your body with one hand and putting it around your upper arm on the other side. Now, I love doing this exercise with Groups of people in winter, when everybody's wearing lots of layers of clothing, because those layers of clothing are analogous to the saddle and however many saddle pads you have underneath. But meanwhile, you've got whatever layers of clothing that you have between your hand, which represents the rider, and your arm, which represents the horse. Again, you could do friction moving your hand up and down over your clothing, or you could have the kind of hold that can draw the muscle of your arm down towards your fingers and move the muscle in your arm up towards your shoulder. And as you move the muscle up towards your shoulder, can you feel a tingling under your fingernails? You may sense how the pull goes all the way down your arm to underneath your fingernails. And if you go the other way, moving the tissue down towards your fingers, you'll feel a pull up around your shoulder joint. You could think of this by analogy to the rider and the horse, of the horse maybe wanting to pull you and the saddle forward towards his ears and his front end and you getting pulled with it, or you being able to induce a kind of drawing back, almost like you could draw his muscles back over his bones or draw his torso back over his legs. We're really talking here about whether you can have an influence that goes towards collection or whether your horse drags you around, drags himself muscles forward over his bones, onto his forehand. There's a wonderful video which you might want to look up on YouTube. It's called fascia and the Mystery of Chronic Pain. And what the presenter does is to bring on a colleague who's a young gentleman wearing a leotard type bodysuit, which is a spider's web, right, has spider's web painted on it. And fascia under a microscope, looks like a spider's web. It looks like that and globs of almost chewy liquid. And what the presenter does is she grabs hold of the suit somewhere under his armpit, on the side of his ribs, and scrunches it up and twists it and then says to lift your arms. And they only go up as far as horizontally, can't get them any higher. And she lets that scrumple go and gets a scrumple low down in the abdomen near the thigh. And again, once she's got hold of a handful of soot there, says, lift your arms and again he can't do it. This is potentially the cause of chronic pain where scarring, whether it's a visible scar on the outside of your body or a scar on the inside of your body, or just a place where the fascia has Got really dried out and fibrous and globbed to itself in different layers. That creates restriction in movement and potentially pain. Another theory about chronic pain that's gaining credence is that it happens when the brain is not getting that much feedback coming up through the nerves from the body. And given that blank, it fills in the blank with, you guessed it, pain. And this is possible explanation of how some people who on X rays have really significant arthritis going on in their spine and other joints have no pain, and other people who have really bad pain have on X ray, no problem. Another friend of a friend is a fascial body worker who works with horses and people, Lisa Kimball. And she gets somebody to put on a horse suit and she does a similar thing, scrumpling it here and then going. And now do a lateral movement to the right and scrumpling it there and going, how much can you lift this leg? And she'll often scrumple it low down on the abdomen. And this is your gelding scar. Now trot and go straight, which of course can't happen. Having said that, one of my vet friends in Europe thinks that gelding scars are currently the fashionable way to explain a lot of problems, and writing them is a rather too fashionable surgery. Fascia has between six and ten times as many sensory nerve endings as muscle, and it's the source of our feel. It talks to the brain, sending the brain more or less information. As we've just said, the brain cannot move it. That's one of the reasons why it's taken a long time for fascia to be taken seriously as an organ in its own right. So the brain can't tell it what to do, but it tells the brain what's going on. So we as riders who want to develop feel, to develop our body awareness and actually develop horses who really sense their own body and know what's going on with it, we want to increase and really improve this feedback. Now, horses can become very good at this, although initially they all vary in their response. When you, as the rider up there, are basically using your own fascial net and your own geometry to affect the horse's fascial net and his geometry, one of mine will sometimes go, hey, Mary, this is hard, you know, this is too hard. And he'll quite a big sort of attempt to not go there. But at other times when I can get it just right, I almost imagine that if he could talk, he'd go, oh, I think I look more beautiful like this. I think I'm more handsome. Let Me look in the mirror? Oh, yes, I really am. He thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread. Another one who's a mare is really not interested in being good in the way that he is or interested in being organised by anybody else. And really, she's quietly just waiting for an opportunity to just sneakily go back to how she likes things to happen. There are horses who, after a session where something different has happened, come out the next day and almost give you the impression that they've thought about it all night and they come out and go, no, I think I figured this out. I think what you meant was this. And almost come out and do it better. And then there are the rather rare but utterly wonderful school horses who will play this game at whatever level according to the rider, and who can rev up or rev down according to the rider's needs and be very malleable and very content at any level of the onion, as it were. Now, in talking about this, we've taken ourselves a long way from this hand here and that leg there. No one that's ever arrived in my arena has been a disembodied pair of arms and legs. Everyone I've ever met has had a torso that's more or less box like and needs reorganizing to become a box, to become maybe less floppy or less stuck, less too growing tall, less breath holding. And all of us have two legs that don't quite come out of the hip joint in the same way and operate fascially somewhat differently very often, once much more wibbly, wobbly than the other. And so our geometry begins here. It begins in a way that even in those simplest changes, can begin to affect the horse and his geometry. So in our next podcast, we're really going to talk through how this happens and do a couple of exercises. We're going to review the board's exercises that some of you might remember and add rebars, which we didn't do in, in our last set of podcasts. And once you're doing that, you're getting yourself a really sturdy, solid, organised box that helps you be, as it were, the prime organiser, being the organised rider who can organise the disorganized horse, rather than the rider who gets disorganised by the disorganised horse. On that tongue twister. I bid you farewell from now and we'll be back with you again soon.