Hypnosis for Horse Riders - Realising our Human Potential
I wrote my self-hypnosis audio CD, Hypnosis for Horseriders to help horse riders make the most of their human potential to overcome difficulties.Self-hypnosis is the ultimate self-help tool. It’s versatile, safe, fast, simple, pleasant, effective, non-invasive and non-addictive. Nearly everyone can do it and it’s stood the test of time - humans have been doing it for thousands of years! Best of all, it encourages self-sufficiency because it empowers us to use our own resources to help ourselves.
1.It will help you to access your creative ability to find solutions to problems so that ideas, insights and constructive information become more readily available.
2.It will create an environment where you are able to accept positive and helpful suggestions without the restrictions ordinarily imposed by your conscious abilities and responses (as in “yeah but - it won’t work for me, I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to …” for example!).
The effect is compounded because as you transform your cycle of negative thinking into a positive cycle
·Your positive beliefs give birth to a more positive attitude that in turn leads to more positive expectations.
·This expectation means that you start noticing when you behave differently and more positively and so you start to notice the small improvements
· The positive cycle continues because as you notice these improvements, so more positive beliefs will grow.
Humans have an entirely natural ability to use hypnosis.Like the flight, fight or freeze response it’s part of our human inheritance. Althoughwe must have always utilised trance states, the first records of humans deliberately using hypnotic phenomena date back about 4000 years to the Egyptian priest, Imhotep who used hypnosis in his ‘Sleep Temples’ and to the ancient Greeks who dedicated their ‘Sleep Temples’ to the healing god Æsclepius.
In spite of its early associations with sleep, hypnosis is not sleep -it’s a natural suspension of awareness somewhere on a continuum between wide-awake and fast asleep.Modern biofeedback methods show that when we use hypnosis, we slow our brainwaves from mostly beta to alpha and theta.The advantage of this, as the ancient civilisations discovered, is that the slower brainwaves create physiological and psychological changes that enhance our natural human resources.Alpha brain patterns for example are associated with an increase in the production of serotonin (the ‘molecule of happiness’) and theta brainwaves offer us potential for behavioural change along with heightened levels of learning, memory and creativity.
Human beings have not survived so long by giving up easily.Most riders struggle with nerves and conflicts, sometimes unsure if we want to continue riding but not quite bringing ourselves to hang up our hats either.We optimistically enter ourselves into dressage or jumping classes when they’re several weeks away and then on the morning of the event wonder what on earth possessed us.Even if we do manage to get ourselves into the arena or jumping ring, only part of us wants to be there while the other part wishes we were somewhere (anywhere!) else.We’d love to be in the ribbons but deep down we’re afraid that it might affect our relationships with our friends or our family (or even with ourselves and our riding]).
Conflicts like these waste a lot of energy and result in a loss of motivation and commitment.They can also cause a lot of damage to our confidence and self-esteem because we focus on the miss-match between what we (or others) think we ought to be able to do and what we find we actually can do.We begin to value ourselves for what we can (or cannot!) do, rather than for who we are and then get caught up in a cycle of negative thinking, negative self-talk and anxieties.
“Just a horse” is the thing that keeps me from being “just a human”
and I’ve been thinking about that ever since!
What is so seductive about horses that we happily invest our time, money, energy and emotions to a level that non-horsey humans often find difficult to comprehend? I’d guess that perhaps it’s because they offer us an opportunity to reach out, to extend and challenge ourselves; to be more than ‘just a human’ to be extra-ordinary in fact.
Our basic human instinct to be at least wary of something that has the potential to hurt us is quite normal and has ensured our survival as a species. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being nervous on (or around) horses except that it can be unpleasant and unhelpful if you want to ride. The first challenge for horse riding humans then, is to overcome the conflicts caused by our natural human instincts.
A primitive human survival mechanism means that when fear alerts us to potential danger, we respond with our own particular version of ”fight, flight, freeze or foetal crouch’. Whilst this was crucial for our caveman ancestors, it doesn’t do much for us when our nerves cause us to
‘fight’ our horse (and ourselves) resulting in a cycle of tension and anxiety. We exert even more willpower and determination but a bit like getting to sleep, the harder we try the harder it is! Horse and rider get frustrated and annoyed. Our horse becomes resistant and ’spooks’, ’shies’ or ‘refuses’. We each lose confidence in the other and the rider loses the ability to respond rather than react to challenges.
‘freeze’ so that parts of our body just won’t do what they’re supposed to do! We simply can’t seem to ‘give’ the rein or release our back or our shoulders for example. Even worse, our mind ‘freezes’ too and we forget to breathe, or forget which jump comes next or what’s supposed to happen after we’ve entered the arena at ‘A’
‘foetal crouch’ - curling up our body to protect the chest and stomach, which as our ape-ancestors knew, are our most vulnerable parts. Unfortunately in the crazy process of attempting to adopt this position on horseback, we lean forward, pulling our hands and elbows in to our chest and raising our knees and heels in a direct contradiction of everything our riding instructors ever taught us.
‘flight’ - as in wanting to give up and run away. We make excuses to avoid riding (its too wet or windy) and pretend that competitions and fun rides just don’t do it for us anymore. Our rides get slower and shorter and the routes get more and more restricted.
Hypnosis for Horseriders is available worldwide as either a CD or MP3 download. You can buy Hypnosis for Horseriders online NOW via my online shop.
To the very best of my knowledge there is no single, magic solution to all the vast and myriad challenges that arise in the sport of horse riding. I’ve spent quite a lot of time presenting seminars to riders over the past few years and in common with many of the clients who I see in my private practice, lots of them hope for nothing short of a miracle. And they think that perhaps I have the answer. So that’s the bad news for us both! I don’t. The good news is that you DO have the answer. Somewhere, tucked away in the depths of your knowledge, creativity, experiences and understandings is the perfect solution to your particular (and often unique) problem.
More good news - you don’t have to make big changes to generate big results.People are very often surprised to discover that a relatively small shift can manifest in huge differences. That’s because we’re pre-programmed to look for evidence to support our beliefs. A process called ’selective observation’ means for example, that if you get a new red car, you’ll suddenly notice all the other people who have that car, even though this information had completely escaped your attention previously. Similarly if you start with a positive belief you will consciously or subconsciously use the same process to verify that belief.
It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy because a positive belief will build a more positive attitude that in turn leads to more positive expectations. This expectation means that you will start noticing when you behave differently and more positively and so you start to notice the little improvements in performance. And the positive circle continues because as you notice these improvements, so more positive beliefs will grow.
Great! But unfortunately (as we all know), it works the other way round too. Which is why, I suspect, that if I fall off once I seem to fall off (or nearly fall off) again quite soon afterwards. I sort of come to expect it having been reminded that unfortunately these things do sometimes happen and then - I do it again! Its almost as if some perverse part is looking for an opportunity or excuse to do it. Again.
I guess that riders enjoying life in the positive circle do their very best to stay there and may not be interested in reading about how to escape from the negative circle. The reality of course is that wherever you are now, you could end up somewhere different very soon! Confidence is not a stable commodity (and yes, I do know it’s a dreadful pun!).
Which circle you are in will depend to some extent on the chemicals released into the body during the so-called ‘Fight, Flight or Freeze’ response. This, as you may well know, is a primitive survival mechanism that allowed our ancestors to speed up their reactions in the face of threat or danger. In order to keep the process as fast as possible, information is taken into the brain from the five senses and bypassing our conscious, critical facilities is matched directly against our store of emotional memories to assess, amongst other things, whether or not something is a threat. Consequently, and most importantly for riders I think, our response will depend very much on our perception of the threat. Doctor Paul Martin in his book “The Sickening Mind” defines psychological stress as
“the state arising when the individual perceives the demands placed on them exceed (or threaten to exceed) their capacity to cope”
It is psychological stress that gives rise to the ‘Fight, Flight or Freeze’ response and so this definition already offers us an opportunity - we can reduce the demands, increase the capacity to cope (maybe even both!) and we can work on an individual basis to change our perception of the threat. It has to be on an individual basis because everyone perceives threats differently because everyone has a different store of emotional memories to match them against.
It would be a very strange rider indeed who didn’t experience some arousal of the ‘Fight, Flight or Freeze’ response at some time or another. In fact, don’t most of us enjoy at least an element of the challenge it presents for us - most of the time? Liz Morrison writing about the NLP Approach to Confident Riding suggests that
“Perhaps one of the gifts a horse offers is a chance to explore constructive ways to meet danger and manage our private fears. Horses can give us confidence in our own innate resourcefulness, reminding us that we have the ability, intuition and flexibility to pass through challenging events”.
It is our perception of the challenge that determines the cocktail of chemicals released into the body and these in turn determine our emotional response. Contrary to popular belief, it is noradrenaline (not adrenaline) which gives rise to those lovely feelings of excitement and drive as well as physical strength. For this reason noradrenaline has been named the ‘kick’ or high performance hormone which in large amounts stimulates special areas in the brain that produce a feeling of pleasure. In contrast, the feelings and sensations associated with high levels of adrenaline are not pleasant - these are the ones generating the need to flee, leaving us overwhelmed, inadequate and afraid.
So if there is a secret, I think it has to be to intervene at the thin end of the wedge where its much easier to get a handle on our thoughts and emotions before they run riot with us. A good place to start would be to begin to explore, re-evaluate and if necessary modify our perceptions.Hypnosis for Horseriders offers you that opportunity - but the magic is YOU!
Hypnosis for Horseriders is available worldwide as either a CD or MP3 download. You can buy Hypnosis for Horseriders online NOW via my online shop