Meeting The Energy Where It’s At: Working With Flight, Fight & Freeze

Beating yourself up for not maintaining a solid baseline of calm with everything that is going on? You’re not the only one! But the thing is, we aren’t designed (nor is it preferable) for us to be calm all of the time. In an environment where there are lots of triggers ringing our nervous system alarm bells- from the sounds of actual alarms in our physical environment if you’re in the city, to a flooding of pandemic social media posts, to more distressed looks on the faces you see- it’s a very functional response of your nervous system to be moving more into flight and fight, and for some of us freeze.

All of these functions have healthy expressions, it’s just that for most of us (in my work and experience anyway) we have come to associate all energetic activation in the body with fear. That also means that when we are presented with a horse with a big amount of energy or a situation that requires us to embody more energetic charge, we find ourselves unable to cope with it- physically, mentally and emotionally.

The learning, then, is to begin to condition (or re-condition in the case of any pre-existing trauma) ourselves to a higher energetic frequency in our bodies as a vital response of the body; vital in as much as it’s an expression of vitality as much as it is communicating a message. I believe this to be of fundamental importance not only in successfully navigating the global situation that we find ourselves in, but in developing the emotional and energetic agility needed to work with our horses.

In this episode, we discuss this and other points including:

⭐️ Healthy ways of meeting and discharging the flight and fight response

⭐️ Understanding freeze: When to take energy away and when to add it

⭐️ Stuck on a channel: Why we need to develop our physical and energetic range for the sake of ourselves and our horses

I’m so passionate about the messages I’ve shared in this episode and would be so appreciative if you shared this post or the podcast episode in whatever way you see fit with your friends or riding buddies.

You can tune your listening ears in here, or via your favourite podcast app:

I hope you find it useful!

❤️ Jane