Our nervous system state is inextricably tied to both our emotions and our physical posture. No matter who I’m teaching or what they’ve come to learn, I find myself always coming back to the concept of the nervous system— the big, broad general umbrella of all the systems in our body that work to keep us alive. And how when we or our horses become dysregulated, we trade our ability to live in the moment to simply survive instead.

The last 2 clinics I attended— the first as a participant, the second as a clinician, changed me. I grappled for an explanation of what happened there and within me and within all of us who shared those spaces. And this poem came through me.