HeartStrides Therapeutic Horsemanship

01/11/2026

01/10/2026

*****Reminder Alert*****

🚨🍔 FUNDRAISER ALERT! 🍔🚨
Who’s hungry AND wants to support our four-legged crime-fighters? 🐕‍🦺💙
Join us January 9–11, 2026 at Five Guys in Lacey or Olympia and help support the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office K9 Unit!
🗓 January 9, 10 & 11
⏰ 11:00 AM – 10:00 PM
📍 Lacey & Olympia Five Guys
👉 Just show the flyer or tell the cashier you’re supporting the TCSO K9 Unit, and 20% of your purchase goes straight to supporting our K9 teams.
Great burgers. Great cause. Amazing K9s. 🐾🔥
Bring your friends, bring your appetite, and help us support the deputies and K9s who keep Thurston County safe!

01/10/2026

When We Taught Children How to Rest — And Then Forgot Why It Mattered

In the 1950s, there was a moment in every kindergarten day so predictable you could set your watch by it.

After the singing.
After the crayons worn down to stubs.
After circle time and sticky fingers from graham crackers and small cardboard milk boxes—

The lights would dim.

A record would settle onto a turntable.
The needle would crackle, then find its groove.
Something soft would fill the room. Something slow. Something kind.

And twenty little bodies would stretch out on striped mats or faded rugs. Shoes tucked under cots. Blankets—frayed, thumb-worn, familiar—pulled up to chins. A room full of children learning, together, how to exhale.

Naptime.

For millions of children growing up in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, this ritual was as essential to kindergarten as finger paint and the alphabet. It wasn’t filler. It wasn’t babysitting.

It was the lesson.

Stillness Was Once Part of the Curriculum

Educators believed something we’ve slowly forgotten:
young children need quiet.

Not just sleep—but stillness.
A pause where feelings could settle.
A space where overstimulated minds could wander safely.
A reset before the afternoon rush of blocks, numbers, and playground dust.

The science agreed. Children’s brains and nervous systems were still under construction. Rest wasn’t a reward. It wasn’t optional.

It was developmental maintenance.

Teachers became guardians of calm. Soft voices. Slow footsteps between rows of breathing bodies. A whispered story read to no one and everyone. A hand smoothing a blanket. A steady presence in low light.

A lighthouse.

The Quiet That Shaped Us

Some children slept—deep, open-mouthed sleep—exhausted by morning play and the overwhelming newness of school.

Others didn’t.

They stared at the ceiling.
Counted tiles.
Watched dust motes dance in a thin blade of sunlight slipping through the curtains.

They drifted into that rare kind of daydreaming that only happens when you’re five—when time is wide and nobody is rushing you to become something yet.

Even the kids who hated naptime learned something important.

That sometimes you have to be still, even when you don’t want to be.
That rest is not the opposite of learning.
It’s part of the work.

For many children, it was the only stillness in an otherwise loud, busy day. A quiet bridge between lunchboxes and hopscotch. Between learning letters and learning how to share.

Then We Decided to Hurry

By the 1970s and ’80s, something shifted.

Kindergarten stopped being about socialization and curiosity and started being about readiness.
Pre-reading. Early math. Staying on track. Getting ahead.

Schedules tightened. Testing crept younger. Parents worried about falling behind before childhood had even properly begun.

Naptime began to feel inefficient.
Unproductive.
A luxury we could no longer afford.

So the mats were rolled up.
The record players disappeared.
Overhead projectors replaced them. Then computers. Then tablets.

By the 1990s, naptime was mostly gone from public kindergarten classrooms—surviving only in preschools and full-day programs for very young children.

A Day With No Pause

Today’s kindergarteners move from reading groups to math centers to screens to lunch to more instruction. Recess—if they get it—is brief. Quiet is rare.

There is no dimming of lights.
No permission to close your eyes.
No collective exhale.

And we act surprised when childhood anxiety soars.

What We Remember — And What We Lost

Those who lived it still remember:

The rows of striped mats.
The scratch of a needle finding vinyl.
The smell of that one blanket that probably only got washed twice a year.
The relief of being told it was okay—expected, even—to stop trying so hard.

Naptime wasn’t just about sleep.

It taught us that rest has value.
That quiet has purpose.
That you don’t need to be productive every minute to be worthy.

It was a lesson we didn’t realize we were learning—until we grew up in a world that never stops and makes us feel guilty for needing to pause.

Maybe That’s the Lesson Worth Remembering

To parents: your kids likely don’t have this anymore—and they’re expected to perform at full speed all day long.

To teachers fighting to protect play and rest: you’re not being soft. You’re honoring what science has always known.

To anyone who feels ashamed for needing rest: we used to teach five-year-olds that stopping was part of learning.

And to those who say childhood is “too easy” now—today’s kindergarteners have more structured academic time than third-graders did in the 1950s.

We didn’t make childhood harder because it was necessary.

We made it harder because we forgot how to slow down.

We once dimmed the lights, put on a record, and gave twenty small people permission to just… be.

Maybe it’s time we remembered how.

01/09/2026

January 1st is the universal birthday for most registered horses in the Northern Hemisphere. At Heartstrides Therapeutic Horsemanship, registered or not, our Horses have a happy birthday and a happy life! 🥰🐴🐎

01/06/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17dxrYdZhE/?mibextid=wwXIfr

01/02/2026

I won’t sugarcoat it.

2025 was hard for me in ways that asked more than I expected and lingered longer than I wanted. There were moments of grief, moments of unraveling, and moments where letting go felt less like release and more like standing in the unknown. And yet, beneath all of it, something steady and purposeful was happening. I was shedding. Not because I was ready, but because my body knew it was time.

The Year of the Wood Snake works in this way. It does not rush transformation or demand clarity before the body has found its footing. It teaches patience through sensation and wisdom through discomfort. It invites us to loosen what no longer fits and to trust that what is falling away has already served its purpose. Much of that work happens below the surface, in the nervous system, in the breath, and in the long pauses where we learn to listen rather than push.

When I learned that 2026 would arrive as the Year of the Fire Horse, something inside me shifted. A spark stirred where there had been quiet endurance. I felt the desire to take that old snake skin and set it ablaze, not from anger or resistance, but from reverence. To honor what was shed and to move forward without carrying it as a weight.

The Fire Horse is a powerful and honest energy shift. It represents movement, courage, vitality, and forward momentum, but not without awareness. Fire brings illumination as much as it brings heat, and the Horse carries that fire with instinct and sensitivity. Not as reckless energy, but the kind of strength that knows when to pause and when to run, when to gather itself and when to move with confidence across the open ground.

Where the Snake moved inward, the Horse carries us outward. A horse does not respond to force or urgency; it responds to presence, coherence, and trust. When it feels met, it moves freely and powerfully, and when it does not, it resists. The noble Fire Horse asks us to embody our truth, to move from alignment rather than obligation, and to let our actions arise from what we have already integrated.

This is the same language the body speaks.

In bodywork, we learn that healing does not come from pushing through resistance, but from creating enough safety for movement to return on its own. When the nervous system feels supported, the tissues soften, our breath deepens, and choice returns. We realize that freedom is not the absence of fear, but the ability to move with awareness rather than urgency.

So as I shed the final skin of 2025, I do not step into the new year cautiously or guarded. I step forward carrying what I have learned, with steadiness in my chest and fire in my stride. The Snake taught me how to soften, how to listen, and how to trust the quiet work of healing. The Fire Horse now invites me to move and to carry that wisdom into motion.

This year is about letting what is already alight guide the way forward. I am not dragging the past behind me, but riding into 2026 fully embodied, on a fire horse blazing.

*A special thank you to my favorite Horse Goddess and friend, Jenny, for sharing such beautiful thoughts and wisdom that helped me shape this piece. 🥰

01/01/2026

They said babies didn’t remember.
They said toddlers couldn’t understand.
They said children were too young to feel real pain, real fear, real rejection.

She listened to them anyway.

Her name was Françoise Dolto, and she changed how the world understands children—not by inventing a machine or a drug, but by taking seriously what had always been dismissed.

That children know more than adults think.
And feel more than adults are comfortable admitting.

In the early to mid-20th century, medicine treated children as incomplete adults. Their cries were reflexes. Their distress was noise. Procedures were done without explanation. Hospital stays were isolating. Separation from parents was considered necessary, even beneficial.

Infants were operated on without anesthesia.
Toddlers were restrained without comfort.
Children were lied to “for their own good.”

And the trauma stayed in their bodies.

Françoise Dolto believed this was not ignorance.
It was avoidance.

Trained as a pediatrician and psychoanalyst in France, Dolto worked with children who could not yet articulate their pain in words. And yet, she noticed something undeniable.

When children were spoken to honestly, even as babies, their bodies changed.
Their fear softened.
Their resistance eased.
Their symptoms shifted.

She proposed something radical for her time: children understand language from birth. Not intellectually, but emotionally. Symbolically. Deeply.

A baby may not grasp syntax, she argued, but they understand meaning. Tone. Intention. Truth.

Pain explained is not the same as pain ignored.
Fear named is not the same as fear denied.

Dolto insisted that even the youngest patients deserved to be spoken to—not around, not about, but to. That telling a child what is happening to their body is not cruel. It is grounding.

Her work challenged long-held medical dogma.

Doctors resisted.
Institutions scoffed.
Some accused her of projecting adult psychology onto infants.

But mothers recognized the truth instantly.

They had always known their babies sensed more than they were told.

Dolto’s ideas reshaped pediatric care, child psychology, and maternal bonding. She influenced how hospitals handle separation, how doctors communicate with children, and how parents understand emotional development.

She emphasized that symptoms—bedwetting, mutism, aggression, withdrawal—were not misbehavior. They were communication.

The body speaks when words are denied.

She also confronted something deeply uncomfortable: that adults often underestimate children not because children lack understanding, but because adults fear responsibility. If children feel pain and rejection fully, then adults must reckon with the harm caused by silence, dismissal, and avoidance.

Dolto didn’t allow that escape.

She said children deserve truth delivered with care. That honesty, even about illness, death, or separation, is less damaging than deception.

Her philosophy changed how generations of clinicians approached childhood trauma. It helped lay groundwork for attachment theory in practice, trauma-informed pediatric care, and modern approaches to early emotional health.

And it reframed motherhood in a way women felt in their bones.

That maternal intuition is not sentimentality.
It is observation sharpened by love.

Mothers had always known when something was wrong—even when doctors minimized it. Dolto gave that knowing scientific dignity.

She once said, “What is spoken is no longer suffered in silence.”

That sentence explains her legacy.

Because when children are believed, their pain becomes visible.
When pain is visible, it can be treated.
And when truth is spoken early, it does not have to erupt later as illness, fear, or shame.

Françoise Dolto didn’t make childhood easier.

She made it honest.

And in doing so, she protected millions of children from the quiet harm of being unheard.

She trusted babies before science was ready to.
She trusted mothers when institutions didn’t.
And she proved that listening is not softness.

It is medicine.

12/24/2025