I haven’t written much around the ‘Laminitis’ topic for a while, and this morning I felt drawn to just update everything a bit, and provide a bit of information from my perspective and learning.
The one thing I have found prevalent in many guardians of laminitic animals is the need to worry about them, and fix them. Or the need to move them on, one way or the other. When these feelings are constantly brought to an animal, the animal eventually abandons itself. It stops self regulating itself. It stops looking after itself, healing itself, balancing itself. This is the spiral that has to be brought back into balance.
It is difficult, as a human, to stop worrying and stop wanting to help or fix things, make things better. It makes us feel good to work with the symptoms – the feet. It is difficult to even consider to start working with the underlying emotional imbalances. It takes a lot to take a step back and manage things without emotion. It feels like you are abandoning them, and yet you are not. In reality what you are doing is giving them back their self-empowerment, there ability to self regulate. It takes years to remove the layers, particularly with older equines that have been moved around from one human to another, all of which will have had similar emotions they were sharing.
So, with that in mind, what are we looking at when we look at the human / equine relationship? What feelings and emotions are being shared between the human and the animal? Is the human in a self-abandonment relationship themselves which is being shared? Does the human have a lot of guilt around not being able to ‘help / fix’ a relation / friend who has a chronic dis-ease. Has the human taken on laminitics as rescues because they want to be rescued themselves? Is the human self-regulated emotionally and physically?
With all this in mind, any level of peace will help the human and the animal. The Present Moment and Mindful Regard Techniques taught by Trust Technique Practitioners, and Healing Space Creation Techniques taught by all energy workers / teachers / healers, help us to understand that we can work with what is happening in the moment, rather than worrying about it based on past experiences. The human can start to release guilt feelings, the feeling sorry for emotions, and the desire to control the animals welfare to within an inch of its life. Don’t kill with kindness..
This is the key to helping the human understand the concept of creating a space for emotional and physical healing of themselves and their animals.Then the human can help the animal to start to self regulate and balance again, and in many instances the actual reason for the laminitis (which is, in my limited experience, only a sypmtom of something deeper) can start to be seen and understood.
An example is my oldest pony. She is 25 now and is healthier than she has ever been. She started her working life at a riding school for children. The gentlest pony you ever new who started throwing children off her, so she got moved on, but kept doing that. I took her on as a companion for my horse. That was 12 years ago. We have been up and down since, bad years, and better years. The last two to three years, she has not had laminitis, or even a hint of it. She self regulates beautifully. It took a lot of emotional work on my part, and she helped me really come back to self balance, regulation, and my own spiritual awareness.
We have done the work together and we help others in the same way.
The pony that came to me five years ago had abandoned herself completely. It is only now that she is really starting to come back to herself. She has not had a physical full on laminitic attack since arriving with me, but we have had to manage the physical daily, always as it presents itself in the present moment, and following and believing in intuition completely. Whatever comes to me to do from a place of peace, without any attachment to right or wrong/success or failure, we do. No question.
This year she is on grass with the herd and we are in the middle of May. Something to celebrate, yes. But not in her presence. Celebrating the good days is as emotionally unbalancing as worrying about the bad.
I pull together physical, emotional, and spiritual options, from different sources. I have done a course in Self Energy Management, worked with Energy healers, and become a Trust Technique Practitioner for Equines. I have an amazing herbal balance for laminitics that targets the whole body (not just pain management) which was provided by Rachel Maxwell (Animal Botanicals). Reiki helps hugely – both animal and human (Michaela Jayne Marcham), and I use my own form of spiritual communication and connection to open healing space and help the animal come back to considering their ability to self heal and self balance.
As in all things it is the relationship between animal and guardian that is the key. Where is the relationship spiralling and is the human willing to meet their own selves and work with that, so they can truly help their animal?