Horse Spirit Connections

05/04/2025

05/04/2025

Thanks to Yung Pueblo

04/23/2025

How Trauma Shapes Beliefs
Survival Bias: The brain prioritizes safety over accuracy, cementing beliefs that helped us survive (e.g., hypervigilance).

Repetition Reinforcement: Chronic or complex trauma reinforces negative beliefs through repeated experiences.

Identity Fusion: Trauma can blur the line between “what happened to me” and “who I am,” leading to shame or self-blame.

Healing Insight
Recognizing these patterns is the first step to rewriting harmful beliefs. Therapy, somatic practices, and self-compassion can help replace survival-driven narratives with truths like:

“I am safe now.”

“My worth isn’t defined by my past.”

“I can trust myself to navigate life.”

💬 Reflect: Which of these beliefs have you encountered? Share your thoughts below.

04/23/2025

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant.

Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening.

Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”

~ Alice Walker

Art by Laura Makabresku

04/23/2025

Out Recovery

10/19/2024

What’s the link between Alzheimer’s and diabetes?

Research shows insulin resistance, or what I call diabesity (from eating too many carbs and sugar and not enough fat) is one of the major factors that starts the brain-damage cascade, which robs the memory of over half the people in their 80s, leading to a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.

HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
1. Eating sugar and refined carbs can cause pre-dementia and dementia. But cutting out the sugar and refined carbs and adding lots of fat can prevent, and even reverse, pre-dementia and early dementia.

2. Stress shrinks the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. So, find your pause button every day and make time for some stress relief. Whether that involves deep breathing, meditation, or yoga, find something that helps you calm down.

3. Lack of sleep can cause impaired brain function. Studies show poor sleep becomes a risk factor for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. Aim for at least 8 hours of quality sleep every night.

4. We now know that physical activity can prevent and even slow down the progression of cognitive decline and brain diseases like dementia. Even a 30-minute walk can help. More active readers might want to incorporate high-intensity interval training or weight lifting.

10/17/2024

10/17/2024

Equine Psychotherapy, PTSD & Traumatic Grief Therapist, EMDR Therapist, EquiLateral Protocol (Equine Assisted-EMDR), IFS-EMDR Equine Psychotherapy.

Approved VAC/CAF/BlueCross/WSIB provider- Military/Veterans/First Responders

10/05/2024

Therapy can feel impossibly scary if we feel we need to talk about ‘what happened’ – before we’re ready. But trauma therapy is about retraining our neurobiology to feel safe again – with or without a narrative.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/dB8t8UQk

09/21/2024

The other side of occupational risks of working in a helping profession.

All proceeds go to the Critical Incident Stress Management of York Region!

I have volunteered on this team since 2020 and we offer debriefings after traumatic events in York Region and a great team to work with!