RELEASING FEAR AND ANXIETY AROUND RIDING HORSES

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We love to ride our horses, but at this point in our lives, we often have anxiety and even fear around riding.  Especially when taking our horses to new places, going by that one spot where your horse always spooks, or feeling more and more nervous when your horse starts getting nervous.

So much of our anxiety is normal.  We’ve taken some hard crashes.  We don’t bounce as well as we used to.  Our horses are big and powerful and unpredictable.  Horse riding is one of the more dangerous sports…  All of this is true.

But, the real truth is, we’re not going to give up riding.  We love it.  We love the feeling and the amazing places that our horses take us physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually…

So we deal with the anxiety in the best way we know how – to keep doing the thing that we love and keep reassuring ourselves that it’s going to be ok.  We’re good riders.  Our horses are trained and steady.  We are mindful of dangerous situations.  We have a lot more wisdom than we did when we were younger.  All of this is true too.  But, there’s still that underlying anxiety of the “what ifs”… and it prevents us from fully feeling great when we ride.

It’s a big dilemma for a lot of us who ride horses, but:

• What if there was a way to release that anxiety on a deeper level?
• What if we could regain our confidence and feel secure and steady in the saddle?

We all know that visualization, coping skills, or simply telling ourselves not to be anxious, just don’t provide long term solutions. We try to calm our nervousness down because we know our horses can feel it, but it seems impossible to talk ourselves out of it.  The reason it is impossible to talk ourselves out of it, is because it’s true and our bodies don't - they can't - lie.  It's impossible to use our intellect to convince our nervous systems there is no danger.  Our bodies remember the falls and near crashes, and the memories are stored in our bodies.  

The place where the anxiety and fear is stored is in our bodies and the deepest most primitive parts of our brain, the limbic system, offers us a constant reminder.  These places CANNOT be accessed through the power of our higher thoughts which are based in our cortex.  The patterns must be worked on and accessed through our bodies and through our more primitive brain structures that access reactions (fight, flight, freeze) and not on thoughts.

Cognomovement is a new technique that is based on the science of NLP*, EFT*, EMDR and Traditional Chinese Medicine which assists the body in accessing and processing unresolved memories.  Through simple exercises, it is a way for your body to release unwanted and stored emotions, habits, thoughts and patterns that create stress.  

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The Scientific Basis of Cognomovement:

*Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) therapy incorporates NLP, a set of language- and sensory-based interventions and behavior-modification techniques intended to help improve the client’s self-awareness, confidence, communication skills, and social actions.

*Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is an extensively researched, effective psychotherapy method proven to help people recover from trauma and other distressing life experiences, including PTSD, anxiety, depression, and panic disorders.

*Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is a therapeutic approach based on the premise that emotions are key to identity. According to EFT, emotions are also a guide for individual choice and decision making. This type of therapy assumes that lacking emotional release/awareness or avoiding unpleasant emotions can cause harm.