Balanced Equine Energy with Shannon

05/28/2026

I learned about Equine Hanna Somatics® about three years ago, after purchasing the little intro course. Then I focused on other horsey things and basically forgot about it until trainer Annie Dillon started raving about it. I've been following her for a while and love her base of knowledge and her welfare-first approach, so with my interest piqued again, I signed up for Level 1. I thought Eason would be my practice horse, but EHS teacher Alissa Mayer recommended against using complicated horses for the first level of training, so I connected with Lexi's love lease "owner" and she became my demo horse -- and a marvelous one she was.

Unfortunately I had to send Eason home last September, through no fault of anyone's. For seven months I made the three-hour round trip to visit her once or twice a week.

Then, in April, a fortuitous lunch date led to a wonderful arrangement with a long-time retired trainer. Eason gets to live 30 minutes away on his little farm with his retired mare and his young horse. And in the month we've been there, what progress we've made, especially since I was able to get her moved at the beginning of my Level II course in EHS!

Today, this is what happened... (See pictures).

And quite frankly, I attribute a fairly big chunk of this magical moment to Equine Hanna Somatics. Yes, getting her welfare situation right helps: She has room to move, friends, and access to 24-hour forage to munch on. And yes, bodywork has helped her, as has Jamie working on her challenging feet. But, with EHS, as her body lets go in ways it never has before, a new Eason is unfolding. Her hamstrings, always so contracted, are letting go -- even the one on the right -- and staying that way. Her quads are filling in. The dip in front of the wither is almost gone. Today I saw the muscles on her back, on either side of her spine, flexing and lifting.

Along with that, she is welcoming grooming -- this sensitive-skinned mare who has not fully enjoyed touch in the past.

She stands calmly for me to put the saddle on. No need for tie up or even a halter. She has become more and more willing to play the games we play. She is reaching forward into her bitless bridle rather than curling behind as she did before when long-lining. And today she welcomed me on her back. We walked a little. She took a deep, fluttering breath after a perfect halt (last picture). And I hopped off. Not once did she grab the reins or indicate any uncertainty or worry.

After unsaddling we went for a walk down the road. She wanted to sniff the garbage cans and go into every driveway. As we headed home, she decided we needed to keep going, so we passed the entrance to the farm and continued exploring other driveways and garbage cans. She was marching, sniffing, looking, and loving every minute, even the moments when something scary showed up and her head shot up and her heart rate sped up. Every time, she stood, thought about it, took a breath, and dropped her head. Then on we walked.

I am so grateful for all I have been learning, for finding a modality that I believe has the power to literally slow down aging and help restore full function to injured and aging muscles, and for my relationship with Eason.

04/24/2026

It can be hard to get people to commit to more than one session of "bodywork" at a time, although many horses need multiple sessions to break out of old patterns of compensation and co-contraction. We have a "fix it now" mentality, without an awareness that patterns of movement that have been laid down over months or years are not simply going to disappear overnight.

That being said, Equine Hanna Somatics®️ can be truly amazing. Yesterday, during the human session doing jaw movements from EHS Level II, Ryan Moschell instructed us to feel our jaw moving by putting our fingers gently (GENTLY!) on our cheeks under our TMJs. I immediately found myself biting my cheeks, especially my right cheek. That's not unusual. I have bitten my cheeks for decades and have scarring from it. What was mind-blowing was that after the sequence of jaw movements Ryan had us work with, I repeated the check on how my jaw was moving and I wasn't biting my cheek any more!

Not only did my jaw move in a significantly different way, but it felt as though the muscles somehow knew how to organize themselves so they didn't push my cheeks into my teeth. It was a weird feeling, and it has lasted.

So sometimes the changes can be amazing, literally immediate and striking. But sometimes it takes time. It took multiple sessions for my banjaxed knee to let go of co-contractions that kept it locked up for over a year. PT helped, but it didn't fix it to a level where I could comfortably kneel, squat or sit/lie on the ground with my knee straight and gravity pulling it down. Now I can do all those things without pain and without fear of the searing agony that is my popliteal cyst getting angry.

Sometimes with horses --as with humans -- it takes multiple sessions. Sometimes the first one or two sessions are the horse coming to trust that I'm not going to push them beyond where they're comfortable. Only when that happens can the horse let go enough to address long-standing contractions, long-standing anxiety.

04/14/2026

Recently I received a couple of lovely texts from a client. Her horse had developed some swelling over his SI area. They seemed painless and the vet didn't identify anything problematic, but they lingered. In addition, he was an anxious fella, often irritable and worried. Imagine my delight with these texts after our EHS session.

04/05/2026

Aaall the kisses. 🥰 This fella wasn't on the schedule, but he gave me kisses anyway. 😍

03/23/2026

Today I returned from a bodywork trip to Bend, Oregon, where I saw my usual clients, plus a new horse, a two-year-old Fjord. 😍

Lots of lovely results and happy horses. Usually I don't take pictures (I get too into the moment for that), but I did with this mare, and I think I should remember to take more. A lovely difference in her posture and the quality of her muscles before and after.

Grateful for the horses who teach me so much, and who thank me so kindly.

03/20/2026

Three sessions of equine hanna somatics®, and this lovely boy is comfortable enough to hold up his hind legs for the farrier. 😍https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18ERKBQ6Pg/

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03/10/2026

Years ago I was a stable girl at a farm where an Olympian was in training. She was a stable girl too, but elevated far above me -- selected to represent Ireland in eventing in the 1984 Olympics in LA. She became a friend during those months together, and as she was conditioning for her role on the team, she and I would often run down the hill of the estate where we were working to the river, swim against the current for a while, and then run back up the hill together, our legs pumping in rhythm, our breath unified. One day, after training horses together in the ring, we took our equine partners out for a hack, and Sarah offered for me to ride Chunky, her Olympic horse (official name, Rathkenny). My heart pounded as I mounted the magical beast, knowing that he had been ridden only by two or three people in his life. The honor of getting to sit on him as we clip-clopped down the Irish lanes together rendered me almost speechless.

As we passed over a bridge spanning the local river (the Barrow, if I remember right), Sarah said something I have never forgotten, and that has guided my approach with horses ever since. She spoke of the awe-inspiring and fearsome responsibility of having a relationship with a horse. When I raised my eyebrows, she replied, “If I asked Chunky to jump over the parapet into the river for me, he would do it, even though he knows it would kill him, because he knows I would never hurt him.”

And that -- I think -- is the crux of the connection between horse and human. Those words of Sarah’s follow me still, more than 40 years later, a drumbeat guiding me as I question my own role in every equine relationship. Would my equine partner trust me enough to jump into a potentially deadly situation or navigate through something terrifying based on our connection? For me, it’s not about submission, not about obedience, but about trust. And how do we build that level of trust -- the trust Chunky had in Sarah, and that she had in him, that they could compete at the Olympics in one of the most demanding and arguably dangerous sports in the world?

Listening, not telling. Partnership, not domination. Connection, not obedience.

03/06/2026

“Calm, Forward, Straight.” Those words were spoken like a mantra 40+ years ago when I worked with horses in Ireland. I heard them again recently in William Micklem’s webinar “Training Scale: Misconceptions and Simple Solutions” today. The presentation was excellent, thought-provoking and deeply science based

It’s past time for a conversation about the dressage training scale, and about the challenges that translation from German to English have created in how the training scale is understood. William focused on the need to consider the mental state of the horse, something not reflected in the language used currently. Relaxation is the bedrock for everything else, and finding a more intentional way to include it (and for judges to reward it) would make some powerful shifts in the industry as it currently exists.

Part of the issue is the language. The German word “losgelassenheit” has been translated to mean suppleness, but it might as easily mean relaxation. From a bodyworker perspective, muscles can’t be supple unless they can relax, and if a horse isn’t relaxed in his brain, he’s not going to be relaxed in his muscles. But since the word “relaxed” isn’t in the modern training scale, and since “submission” is one of the categories scored in all dressage tests, people focus not on relaxation but on submission.

To me, no amount of nitpicking the concept of submission into a version of relaxation can overcome the connotations that come with the word. The first definition for “submit” in Google is to “accept or yield to a superior force or to the authority or will of another person.” We are asserting our superiority over the horse when we demand submission and obedience, and thus its inclusion as a required category has always irked me. As a result, I was delighted when I saw the slide that said that “Xenephon is considered the foundation of classical dressage, advocating for a ‘dialogue of courtesy and finesse,’ rather than submission” (Micklem). And that was 2,400 years ago. William noted that the current dressage scale was introduced less than 50 years ago, in 1985, and the pyramid concept wasn’t added until 2006. These are new concepts -- and do not serve the horse well.

The webinar went on to propose William’s new “scale” for training, one that would include jumpers and eventers as well as dressage horses, as the current scale does not serve jumping or galloping horses well. Not surprisingly the two balanced aspects of William’s scale, the “constants” and the “variables,” begin with the concept of “calm, forward, straight.” The basis, the foundation, for everything else in his training program is the horse’s mental state.

To my knowledge, there weren’t many American coaches and other horsepeople participating in William’s talk, and that’s too bad. His message is a worthwhile one not only for the Irish and British and Europeans, but for those of us is the U.S. too. The webinar I attended was apparently a pilot of sorts, with the plan to roll out a more inclusive and much bigger one in the future. I would love to see a replay of the recent webinar available, but whether or not that is possible, I’m looking forward to seeing William’s ideas gain a wider audience.

03/05/2026

Why do I love equine bodywork? Why, the kisses, of course!

Big love from this spicy chestnut mare today. I'll take it. 😍

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02/22/2026

Here's a video of yesterday's play with Eason. We practiced matching steps and transitions, hung out at the mounting block and went on a forage walk that ended with encountering some cows. Some notes:

One: I use a lot of Tristan Tucker's groundwork movements and "tension release," touches, and those have helped Eason a lot. He doesn't use treats much, though he will use them strategically. I do too, though I recognize they can be challenging for some people and some horses. Food-aggressive horses can be dangerous, and bad timing can lead to negative outcomes. But for the most part I carry treats on my person all the time, and with the right training, a horse can quickly learn not to mug the human and that the smell of treats doesn’t mean an automatic payout.

Two: A lot of the trainers I follow use treats, not in the purist sense, but as part of a program that combines traditional pressure and release with R+. I like that combination, and Eason really likes it too. I’m planning on incorporating more of that as we move forward. By the way, Destiny Miller on the west side does lovely work with clicker training, for people interested in it.

Three: On our forage walks, I have taught Eason a cue for when she can lead the way. I tell her verbally she can lead, and I walk at hip level with a “smile” in the rope. When she’s leading, she can smell, browse, stop and graze whenever she wants. When I’m leading, she walks with me with a relaxed head and a swinging walk.

Four: The mounting block has been a place of anxiety for her for a long time. The fact that multiple times she lines up for me, that she lets me lean over her back and rub her all over (she’s not a touch-loving horse in general), that she lets me get off and on the block without budging, and that she does it all at liberty is a transformation. It’s messy, and she does it “her waaaaaay” some of the time, but she’s engaged and relaxed. That’s huge.

Five: She’s been terrified of cows. I’ve been working on helping her find more relaxation around them for a while, and I did a session a couple of months ago where I played a YouTube video of cows over a speaker to help her learn to relax when she hears cows. I guess it worked!

01/29/2026

Often, horses with severe structural issues can get short-term relief from massage; however if the underlying issue remains, their muscles and fascia can tighten up within days. I had thought the same would be said of Equine Hanna Somatics®, (even though it's not technically bodywork) but this sweet former ranch horse -- who has landed in the most loving home -- put the lie to that.

In November, after a summer of rehab for navicular in the front feet, he was scheduled for another vet check because of his inability to stand for the farrier or to have his left hind picked up. Asking for pick up elicited dangerous kicking. Unfortunately at the clinic the vet was unable to do hind limb flexions, which made it challenging to determine if hocks, stifles or fetlocks might be the issue.

I asked his owners if I could try some gentle Hanna Somatics with him. He welcomed the work with deep gratitude and offered the hind limb pickups and put downs with grace. A few days later I did another session -- and again, he melted into it.

In the meantime, the vet wanted to explore further, so back to the clinic this sweet gelding went. I met them there, and watched as this horse who had been defined by anxiety since he had arrived at his owners' two years previously stood with complete calm in the chaos of the clinic where a giant warmblood was trying to take down his stall. When the vet went to flex, this time he did so beautifully, ruling out issues with hocks/stifles/fetlocks, and indicating the issue was not with his left hind, but with the right one, likely in the hoof.

The only variable between his previous appointment where he could not flex and this one where he could was Hanna Somatics.

Hind hoof nerve blocks increased his soundness, leading to x-rays that revealed navicular in both hind hooves, as well as coffin bone remodeling in the right hind. No wonder the poor boy panicked at the thought of anyone asking him to weight his right hind. And yet despite everything, he stood rock solid for x-rays without sedation, and -- as the vet noted -- appeared brighter and more engaged than he had seen him before.

Because this wonderful boy did not have a single sound foot to rest his weight upon, his owners thought about euthanizing him, but decided to take him home and see how he might fare in retirement with light painkillers. He was already shod with special shoes in front, but they couldn't afford special shoeing in back. If the behavioral issues and anxiety returned or he indicated he was suffering, they were ready to set him free.

It's been more than two months and he has been perky, relaxed, engaged and appearing comfortable in his pen and in turnout. His owner even did light groundwork with him last weekend and the sweet boy was responsive and happy to engage.

Much like with my knee, Hanna Somatics can't fix the structural issues, but it can help the muscle contractions that occur as a result of compensations -- and boy what a difference that help makes.

In the comparison picture below, you can see how his body was pulled into a c-curve by muscle contractions. With the contractions released, he could stand straighter and felt much better.