Latest / Equine Assisted World with Rupert Isaacson / Ep 6: Shea Stewart - Equine Craniosacral, TX

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Ep 6: Shea Stewart - Equine Craniosacral, TX · Equine Assisted World with Rupert Isaacson

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  Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Equine Assisted World.
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  I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson.
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  New York Times bestselling author of the Horse Boy.
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  Founder of New Trails Learning Systems and long ride home.com.
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  You can find details of all our programs and shows on Rupert isaacson.com.
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  Here on Equine Assisted World.
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  We look at the cutting edge and the best practices currently being developed and,
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  established in the equine assisted field.
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  This can be psychological, this can be neuropsych, this can be
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  physical, this can be all of the conditions that human beings have.
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  These lovely equines, these beautiful horses that we work with, help us with.
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  Thank you for being part of the adventure and we hope you enjoy today's show
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  Welcome back to equine assisted world where we talk to people who are at
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  the cutting edge of this remarkable profession that we're in with horses
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  helping people physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually never has.
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  The world of therapeutic stuff with horses being as interesting as it is
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  now, now that we understand so much about the nervous system, the brain and
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  knowing more with each year, as more and more studies come out what started
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  as just adapted riding for people with physical disabilities 60 years ago has
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  now evolved into a mosaic that can be very confusing for many people, and our job is
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  to shine a light on the people that are out there doing really interesting work.
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  So I'm talking to one of these people today.
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  She's Shae Stewart and she lives in Texas.
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  And interestingly up until now, up until this interview what we've
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  been emphasizing on Equine Assisted World has been the work that people
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  are doing with people, with horses.
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  We haven't really touched much yet, but we will be doing more
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  and more on the wellbeing of the horse that does this work.
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  Because of course, is having to.
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  deliver well being to a human, to a monkey, well, it's got to have
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  well being itself, otherwise it will have no well being to give.
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  And we know that, that traditionally, in the therapeutic riding world All that was
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  really asked of a horse was to be quiet.
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  But if a horse was aching, if a horse was hurting, if a horse was sour wasn't
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  really considered to be a problem because as long as it was just safe and quiet.
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  Now of course more and more we want our horses to be athletes, to be
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  happy, to be healthy and to be joyous.
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  in their movement, which means that they've got to be really treated
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  the same way that you would treat a competition horse, just with less stress.
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  And this is something that's creeping in more and more to the therapeutic
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  world, the realization cropped, lame, arthritic horse is not going
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  to be able to do the job very well.
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  And also it's just not right to make a horse like that, carry people around
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  on their backs or do that sort of work.
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  However, there's much that can be done with horses that are aching in pain and
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  so on to put them right and to get them good in their bodies and their minds
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  again, so that they begin to dance again.
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  And we certainly do that with Horseboy Method and Athena, our
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  programs with a massive emphasis on the work in hand and long reining.
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  And lunging when appropriate to muscle the horses up and get their brains going
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  again and rejuvenate them effectively.
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  But there's more to it than just that.
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  And Shae Stewart, who's on today is an equine craniosacral person who does this.
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  Very successfully all over the place, and I first heard her on Warwick
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  Schiller's journey on podcast and then was lucky enough to meet her
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  and hear her at last year's the 2022 journey on podcast in Washington, D.
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  C.
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  In San Antonio, she was riveting and she and Jim Masterson were both talking about
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  ways of physical and neurological well being for the horses that do our jobs.
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  And I realized that when I went and had conversations with other people
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  out in the equine assisted world, well, yes, osteopathy and having
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  the horse chiropractor out, people are good about doing that kind of
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  thing these days, mostly still not as much as I would like to see.
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  But the idea of craniosacral work, it's quite new to a lot of people.
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  It's not new to me because when my autistic son Rowan was at his most severe.
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  We did a lot of cranial sacral work and for sure it helped.
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  We saw major neurological advances as a result of that.
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  So I do think it's something that any of us who are in this
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  field should know more about.
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  And we have an expert here to take us through it.
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  So Shea, thank you for coming on Equine Assisted World.
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  Shae Stewart: Thank you for having me.
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  It's so nice to see you and talk to you again.
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  And I look forward in our conversation.
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  It takes me a minute to warm up to these.
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  So,
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  Rupert Isaacson: yeah.
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  By the way, for the listeners, Shay is famously and charmingly shy.
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  So my job is to dance around in front of her in a pink gorilla suit and to
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  make her laugh so that she will relax.
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  So I'm just putting on my pink gorilla suit now and I'm doing my little
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  dance and there she's laughing.
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  Good.
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  That's good.
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  So Shay to put you out of your misery, can you help us understand
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  what is cranial sacral work?
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  What is it?
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  Shae Stewart: That is the most common question I get, and even in
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  my classes, people ask me, how do we, how do we explain this work to people?
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  First of all, there are different concepts in within the craniosacral world, and so
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  it depends on who you ask will that will determine what answer you get about what
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  is it, but it is a form of body work.
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  It's very gentle.
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  It's when you watch it, it may appear that the practitioner is not doing much.
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  It's sort of like watching somebody read a book.
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  There's not much going on on the outside, but there's a lot happening on the
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  inside and we focus on in simple terms, we focus on relieving compressions and
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  the craniosacral system, which is the skull, the spine and the sacrum and all
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  the dura that's attached to these bones.
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  What are
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  Rupert Isaacson: dura?
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  Excuse me?
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  What are dura?
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  Shae Stewart: Dura is...
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  It's like fascia that attaches to the inside of the skull bones
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  and it's what the spinal cord is made of and it's all connected.
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  So, so the dura that's attached underneath the skull comes out to through the
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  base of the skull and goes all the way down the spine and ends around
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  the , second sacral vertebrae and that Entire piece is, is all connected.
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  It's like its own form of fascia and that's where cerebral spinal
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  fluid runs up and down the spine.
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  So we work on relieving bone compressions and pressures on the dura
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  that help the nervous system function in a balanced state.
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  And it helps the flow of cerebral spinal fluid because that can get disrupted
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  with any kind of head compression.
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  That's basically like a short answer,
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  Rupert Isaacson: right?
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  So presumably if we're sitting on a horse's spine, we're going to with
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  the best will in the world over the years, put some sort of stress on it.
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  Just as if we're wearing a rucksack every day of our lives, we're going to put some
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  wear and tear on our backs as humans.
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  Right.
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  And I presume that if we were wearing helmets.
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  Every day of our lives or something like that with a chin strap or
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  something, we would inevitably cause some sort of changes in our cranial
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  skull to neck attachment areas, right?
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  And I presume it must be the same for a horse that people aren't
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  necessarily going out to hurt their horses and they might be trying to
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  look after their horses very well.
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  But if one is going to sit one's monkey butt on a horse's spine
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  and put something on his head.
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  To help to balance direct and do all the other things a bridal does,
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  presumably, even with the best kept horses, there's going to be a benefit to
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  alleviating those cumulative pressures.
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  Now, yes,
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  Shae Stewart: yes, just the nature of how we handle horses.
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  We're putting pressure on their heads, even if we're the most
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  gentle soul on the planet.
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  We're still putting pressure on their head if we're riding them, we're putting
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  pressure on their spine and their muscles that attach directly that in the base
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  of the skull that attached directly to the spinal cord directly to the Dura.
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  So, anytime a horse pulls against pressure, pulls back while tied
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  has something holding their head down, you're going to.
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  Anytime the fascia, the superficial layer of fascia gets tight, you're, you're
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  going to restrict the deeper layers.
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  Rupert Isaacson: Let's just assume that not everybody listening here
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  knows these anatomical terms.
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  A lot of people will know what fascia is.
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  But some people may not.
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  What is
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  Shae Stewart: fascia fascia?
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  There's there's different layers of fascia.
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  A simple way to look at it.
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  It's like, a living, moving layer that's the superficial layer is.
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  Like a skin suit, kind of, before our skin.
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  The
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  Rupert Isaacson: tissue that we find under the skin when we skin a deer.
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  That white stuff.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  So it seems to hold it all in place a bit.
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  Shae Stewart: Yeah, kind of between the skin and the muscle.
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  If you're peeling that apart and you can see that, that layer that
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  kind of keeps it all together.
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  That's the fascia.
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  And then there's different layers of it.
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  So that would be superficial.
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  And then there's a middle layer and then a deep layer.
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  That holds all the guts in place.
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  And
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  Rupert Isaacson: how deep is the deep layer?
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  Are we talking inches?
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  Are we talking centimeters
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  Shae Stewart: inches?
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  It's deep within the body.
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  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
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  So to work down the levels, you really, you would have to go as deep
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  as your thumb or as deep as your hand or something like that to reach
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  the stuff.
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  Or is it not that deep?
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  Shae Stewart: In a horse, if you went to the deep layer, say, like
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  the mesentery sack, which is the sack that holds the intestines.
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  So that would be, I don't know, a hand, hand width deep
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  Rupert Isaacson: or something.
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  I mean, it's good for people to get these for the, by the way, for those
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  listeners who were not listening to our conversation before we hit record
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  it's nice to live in Texas, the whole Texas thing about holding horses sacks.
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  Yeah.
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  Sacred.
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  Holden Amholster Sachs again.
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  Well, shame on you.
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  I've
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  Shae Stewart: been out doing that sacral stuff.
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  Rupert Isaacson: That sacral stuff.
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  So, okay.
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  So what is the job of fascia?
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  What does it do?
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  Why is it important?
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  Shae Stewart: Fascia?
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  Well, you can even go deeper and in a deeper sense of fascia and,
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  and call lymph, blood, cerebral spinal fluid, like a liquid fascia.
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  I
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  Rupert Isaacson: would say cells effectively, right?
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  Hmm.
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  Cells.
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  Cells that make up the matter of, of our organism.
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  Yes.
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  Shae Stewart: Yes.
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  It's like a living, its own living, breathing, moving substance within
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  our system that, that moves fluid.
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  Some people say it's, that's what our acupressure or acupuncture
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  channels are through the fascia
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  Rupert Isaacson: and.
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  So fascia, back in the days before people thought about this sort of
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  thing and we just thought, well, if you were stiff or old or you had
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  an injury or you just toughed it out and we all grew up that way.
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  I think we've all grown up toughing out our injuries and those of us
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  who've spent a lifetime on and around horses have been knocked around a
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  fair bit and have bits of our body that have taken some, some knocks.
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  One of the things which I realized in the last, I'm 56 now the last time I
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  gave myself a goodly smash was actually not that long ago, I broke two ribs,
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  but that doesn't, almost doesn't count.
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  But I, That's
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  Shae Stewart: a true
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  Rupert Isaacson: first person.
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  Yeah.
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  That was just in May, but it's gone away now, so instant amnesia.
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  The, but I did something to my knee.
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  In 2018, which took a long time to come right and I couldn't ignore it anymore.
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  The pain was keeping me up at night and then I realized that the, the pain wasn't
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  really coming from the knee at all.
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  It was actually coming from further down the leg.
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  And someone pointed out to me that maybe having the fascia there loosened
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  up and stretched out a bit might help.
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  And I went to someone to have that done.
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  And.
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  Indeed, the pain went away and when it comes back, I sort of now
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  know what to do to do that thing in the side of my side of my calf.
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  So I realized firsthand that as an older.
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  rider.
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  How useful and important these things could be, which made me
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  think about my horses, of course.
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  And I'd always been, you know, someone who would get the back quack out.
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  I like to have the chiropractor come to look at my horses every six weeks
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  or so, because they do a lot of work.
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  I like to give them the TLC I can give them just because I love them.
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  But I am now leaning more towards doing stuff with their with their cranios
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  their their cerebral spinal fluid, which of course is the craniosacral
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  work, because through one of our programs, Movement Method, we've
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  realized the importance of this.
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  Can you talk to us about craniosacral fluid and what its job is?
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  In the mammalian body is and why it's so important that it has a free flow
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  backwards and forwards along the spine,
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  Shae Stewart: Cerebral spinal fluid.
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  Well, to backtrack a little bit, the, the craniosacral, the form
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  of craniosacral that I focus on is biodynamic craniosacral.
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  Okay.
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  Rupert Isaacson: What
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  Shae Stewart: does that mean?
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  We, we get deep into the fluid body.
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  So we, we do cover a lot of embryology when we're studying.
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  And we, so the way we look at the body is when you're an embryo.
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  We're a fluid filled sack and this fluid has intelligence and this intelligence is
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  us that we, we basically create ourselves.
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  So, this intelligence knows what we're going to be, what we're going to
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  form into and so the biodynamic work.
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  And
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  Rupert Isaacson: this is not what people would call DNA.
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  That's it codes that are coming in to program program us up fluid.
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  Shae Stewart: We, we studied embryology specifically within the 1st, 21 days
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  or so before genes kick in before.
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  Before all that comes in.
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  So it's like a deeper intelligence and this, this motion that creates us from
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  our fluids is, is within us as adults, so.
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  So embryology is not something that just happened to us.
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  It's some, we created ourselves and, and our fluids have a wisdom.
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  So in, in the biodynamic world, we look at the body as a fluid body.
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  And this the innate wisdom is inside that.
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  And we just help, help the, our body find this origin, their origins.
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  Basically, so go ahead.
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  Yeah, we do go a little deeper than cerebral spinal fluid, but cerebral
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  spinal fluid is it's formed in the ventricles and which are pockets inside
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  of our brain and it comes from blood.
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  So, the blood goes through the cord plexus into the ventricles, which.
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  Which are like where there's four of them.
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  So we've got like four pockets inside of our brain inside of our head or skull and
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  blood comes through and it forms cerebral spinal fluid within these ventricles
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  and then it goes down into the spine.
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  It's a, it's a zero net gravity.
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  So it's floating, it floats our nervous system and it helps
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  cushion our brain and it's.
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  A transmitter of signals.
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  It sends signals throughout our body.
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  It helps our body detox at night when we're sleeping.
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  That's a lot of the times when the detox happens.
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  You have to forgive me because I'm still a little jet lagged, so my words get stuck.
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  Rupert Isaacson: You've been blocking that cerebral spinal fluid
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  sitting in a cramped airplane seat.
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  Shae Stewart: Yeah, it got, it had too much pressure.
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  It's not, it's not flowing well right now.
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  So it transmits nutrients.
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  It transmits it's, if you think about water, like what does water do?
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  Transmits.
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  electricity.
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  It receives information and transmits it throughout the body.
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  So cerebral spinal fluid nourishes our nervous system and helps, helps
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  it eliminate the toxins from the day.
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  Rupert Isaacson: And presumably we excrete it out with our pee, with our sweat, with
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  our tears, with our, through our blood.
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  Okay.
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  And then we create new.
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  So do we create new spinal fluid every day?
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  Yes.
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  And so I presume, I also read that cerebral spinal fluid also brings the
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  neurons that, the stem cells of the neurons that create our brain cells,
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  our heart cells and our gut cells.
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  into place, like almost like a conveyor belt each day because we're
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  regenerating those cells every day.
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  Yes.
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  It's a very efficient conveyor belt that it sort of brings them down
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  and they go kachung here in the brain, kachung here for the heart,
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  and then kachung here for the gut.
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  And then we excrete that out.
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  We create some more cerebral spinal fluid and the next neurons come down when
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  those old ones, the next lot of old ones have to be taken to the waste basket.
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  With all that in mind, I could now understand, I think, how
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  compression that might affect the flow of that cerebral spinal fluid
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  might be detrimental to well being.
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  Would that be correct to assume?
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  Shae Stewart: Oh, absolutely.
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  And I have some, I know some people doing dissections and they're looking at
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  this specifically with horses that have had a, that seem to have a decrease in
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  their cerebral spinal fluid from head injuries, head compressions, and they
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  have, the area seems a little dry and we, they're wondering about neurodegenerative
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  diseases, even things like Cushing's.
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  Is that really about the pituitary gland or could there be a component of
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  cerebral spinal fluid that's not flowing being produced enough and it's, it's
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  a, it's a great, it's also known as a crystalline matrix, a liquid light.
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  So it's.
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  We could also look at it as one of our sensory receptors.
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  It reads our internal environment and helps send signals
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  all throughout our system.
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  So if that's failing, then our system isn't going to function.
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  There's a man named Maro Zapatera.
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  Have you heard of
• 22:15
  Rupert Isaacson: him?
• 22:16
  I have not, but I'm going to write it down.
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  How do I spell Maro?
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  Shae Stewart: M A U R O.
• 22:21
  Rupert Isaacson: M A U R O.
• 22:23
  Zapotera.
• 22:24
  Is that a Z A P?
• 22:26
  Shae Stewart: Z A, let me see exactly.
• 22:28
  I think it's Z A P P.
• 22:33
  Z A P P A T E R R A.
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  Zapotera.
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  He is a, a medical doctor who, I believe he studied biodynamic
• 22:49
  craniosacral and he is.
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  Studying cerebral spinal fluid, and he has some really great lectures and he
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  talks about how the neurons that are cerebral spinal fluid washes over are
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  very similar to the same neurons that are found and invertebrates in the ocean.
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  Okay, so, like, sea worms or starfish and these neurons.
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  That these invertebrates have read the oceanic environment, and
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  that's how they, they know what's going on in their surroundings.
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  Rupert Isaacson: I see what you're saying.
• 23:38
  So it's a, it's a, it's a conductive fluid.
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  Yes.
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  Crystalline would mean conductive that therefore can transmit
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  intelligences or signals that can be.
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  interpreted by the brain into intelligences, right?
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  In the same way that an electric, a sound wave sensor could, or a, because
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  all of these things are vibrations at the end of the day, are they not?
• 24:09
  The, an electromagnetic, an electric, an electric charge is A series of waves.
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  So if that's being conducted through something like cerebral spinal fluid,
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  presumably the cerebral spinal fluid must be reading or conducting signals
• 24:29
  that are coming in from other nerves, other stimuli to presumably, would that
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  be to the autonomic nervous system?
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  Is that where they would, is that where those signals would be?
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  Delivered to I think the Vargas nerve and the, and then up to the brain, the
• 24:50
  Shae Stewart: entire central nervous system, our entire nervous system, but
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  he even, he even goes a little further and talks about how it's cerebral
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  spinal fluid is a conduit of cosmic consciousness to our physical bodies.
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  So not only can it read and send signals.
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  On the inside, but also on the outside and what's coming in,
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  Rupert Isaacson: right?
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  I'm looking.
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  I'm as soon as you said Dr.
• 25:24
  I began to Google him as, as we're talking and he is indeed a medical doctor
• 25:29
  and a researcher and a sports medicine physician in Pasadena, California.
• 25:34
  And yes, he is talking about consciousness.
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  And.
• 25:42
  This fluid he's I happen to know he's not the only one in history.
• 25:46
  It's interesting when one reads the old Brahmic texts, and some people
• 25:51
  say that there's the Indian texts.
• 25:53
  And some people say that the New Testament is in fact a, an allegory of what goes
• 26:02
  on with cerebral spinal fluid and that Christos Christ is the oil that goes up,
• 26:09
  you know, two and a half days at the.
• 26:11
  Okay.
• 26:11
  Beginning of each month, two and a half to three days, it goes into the
• 26:14
  tomb, into the skull, and then comes back down with consciousness and so on.
• 26:18
  What I, what I do know is that, or what I think I know, perhaps you can
• 26:24
  tell me if I actually know this is that
• 26:30
  if enough cerebral spinal fluid surrounds the...
• 26:35
  Pineal gland in the middle ventricle of the brain, which of course all animals
• 26:39
  have but, but we have a really big one and it's called pineal gland because it
• 26:43
  looks like a pine cone and it sits in right there in the middle of our brain
• 26:47
  that inside that pineal gland are also crystals salt crystals which can with
• 26:53
  enough pressure on them with enough several spinal fluid pressing around
• 26:58
  the pineal gland can then create an electrical charge, a small electrical
• 27:02
  charge, and that the pineal gland, I understand, produces melatonin, which
• 27:09
  governs our sleep cycle, and also, which is a tweak on serotonin, so it's the
• 27:16
  same chemical, but the pineal gland does a little tweak on it to, to create our
• 27:20
  melatonin but then if there's enough pressure from the cerebral spinal fluid
• 27:27
  around this pineal gland that chemical, that melatonin becomes something called
• 27:34
  DMT, which is what makes us see angels and talk to God and that sort of thing.
• 27:39
  And there are, there are plants that create this, like the plants in
• 27:44
  Ayahuasca that the shamans down in.
• 27:47
  The Peru in the Amazon use and certain types of things like
• 27:50
  morning glory and so on that are known to be heavy hallucinogens.
• 27:54
  They call these, you know, the God plants and some people would say,
• 27:58
  Oh, well, in that case, no one ever talks to God or see angels.
• 28:00
  It's just cerebral spinal fluid pressing on the pituitary on the pineal
• 28:04
  gland and causing us to interpret these electrical signals in this
• 28:08
  way as light and sound in our brain.
• 28:10
  And then other people would say, or does it allow you to see what's really there?
• 28:16
  Either way, it would seem to be.
• 28:18
  At the very least important because it's bringing these neurons into place
• 28:23
  and also, as you say, acting as a sort of shock absorber brain cushion
• 28:28
  between the brain and the skull.
• 28:29
  So it seems to do an awful lot of things, cerebral spinal fluid,
• 28:33
  and I could see how getting in the way of it could be problematic.
• 28:39
  How do you unblock it?
• 28:45
  Shae Stewart: Through craniosacral, so the biodynamic work, we we do have
• 28:51
  specific contacts that we put our hands on, on the skull, the spine, the sacrum.
• 29:02
  When you get into the more advanced biodynamic work, the contacts are less
• 29:07
  specific and more covering the whole.
• 29:15
  We believe that cerebral spinal fluid is moved by a field of motion
• 29:23
  that we call primary respiration.
• 29:27
  And it's...
• 29:31
  Some of the older biodynamic osteopaths or osteopaths talk about how there's
• 29:38
  a rhythm within our body and that this is what moves our cerebral
• 29:44
  spinal fluid and even moves like our capillaries because our capillaries
• 29:50
  are not moved by our heartbeat.
• 29:53
  And
• 29:57
  so some of the, I mean, I can talk about the different rhythms.
• 30:03
  If you'd like, please.
• 30:06
  Okay.
• 30:09
  I'll talk a little bit about the history and how this came about.
• 30:13
  So the and anyone who studied craniosacral might be aware of some of this stuff.
• 30:20
  The man who created the first school of American this first American osteopathy
• 30:26
  school, he was a medical doctor and he spoke fluid fluent I'm in, I'm in fluid
• 30:38
  brain, he spoke fluent Pawnee, so he was part Pawnee and this was back when, you
• 30:47
  know, the settlers were taking the land.
• 30:49
  From the natives and his family was on land that also belonged to the Shawnee and
• 30:59
  the land next to them was Cherokee land.
• 31:02
  So he, in a sense, became their medical doctor, but.
• 31:07
  I think they taught him more than he, more than he helped because he, he
• 31:16
  started to get very dissatisfied with the medical world and he lost some of his
• 31:21
  family members and he couldn't save them.
• 31:24
  And he started looking at the the way to heal a little differently.
• 31:29
  And he started this school where he focused on more
• 31:35
  physical, aligning the body.
• 31:38
  He talked about moving what he called nerve force and although he, he doesn't,
• 31:45
  he doesn't credit that he learned all this stuff from the indigenous people.
• 31:53
  It is pretty obvious that a lot of this work came from them.
• 31:59
  And he, he often spoke as when someone would come to his, him with a problem,
• 32:04
  he would say, I'll take, I'll.
• 32:07
  I'll do it.
• 32:08
  I'll take an Indian.
• 32:09
  I look at the body.
• 32:13
  So this was back when they, when he, the, the.
• 32:19
  European settlers, European land robbers, , however you wanna call 'em.
• 32:26
  They looked at the colonialists, let's say.
• 32:28
  Yeah.
• 32:28
  Yeah.
• 32:28
  The colonialists.
• 32:29
  Colonialists, they looked at the skulls, a solid piece, and it was one
• 32:33
  of his students who saw some skulls 'cause back, this was the after
• 32:38
  the Civil War, and there were human skulls everywhere, so they could
• 32:41
  just study bones, and he saw that the bones were actually meant to breathe.
• 32:51
  So our skull is joined in pieces, we have multiple skull bones, and they're
• 32:56
  joined by what's called sutures, so little joints, and he saw that this looks like
• 33:05
  it is meant to breathe and his words were like the gills of a fish and So he
• 33:12
  started prying bones apart and looking at how they're joined and he started this
• 33:19
  lifelong study of how this moves, what's going on in the body to cause all of this.
• 33:28
  And he concocted a helmet where he tightened different pieces of it.
• 33:35
  That would restrict a certain bone in the skull and then he would
• 33:40
  make note of where in the body this was affecting and his wife was a
• 33:46
  great resource and helped write.
• 33:48
  He wrote a book.
• 33:50
  And I'll have, I would have to look up the book's name.
• 33:53
  It's out of print, but you can still get it.
• 33:55
  You can find it every once in a while.
• 33:57
  It's like 400, but it's, it's where he documented all the
• 34:01
  different changes in his body, both physical, emotional, and spiritual.
• 34:07
  Oh, he did this to himself.
• 34:10
  Did it to himself.
• 34:11
  What was his name?
• 34:13
  William Garner Sutherland.
• 34:15
  Rupert Isaacson: William Garner Southerland.
• 34:18
  Okay, please go on.
• 34:20
  Shae Stewart: He's considered the grandfather of craniosacral.
• 34:24
  So even though we've Learned that this is a form of body work that has been called
• 34:34
  been titled craniosacral by William Garner Sutherland, although it's been around
• 34:40
  since the beginning of time, since the beginning of human time, we've had the
• 34:48
  original healers who connected the source and help the body find their origins.
• 34:56
  there's a ancient book and Chinese medicine where they state keep the.
• 35:03
  When you keep the hips still, the sacrum, the sacrum gets stuck, the heart suffers.
• 35:14
  So it's, it's a concept that's been around forever, but William Garner
• 35:18
  Sutherland and, and most of these things get passed down through stories
• 35:24
  and you know, it wasn't written.
• 35:26
  So William Garner Sutherland was the first person who studied it
• 35:29
  from his, his mindset and wrote down what we now call craniosacral.
• 35:38
  And he found, so he started working on people in this subtle way, and he found
• 35:44
  that, yes, there is movement in the bones and he, he found within himself
• 35:50
  that there was areas that would get restricted when, like, the frontal bone
• 35:54
  was, was not moving how it should, or the occiput or, or whatever bone and.
• 36:02
  As his palpation skills grew deeper, meaning he could sense more in the
• 36:08
  body on a deeper level, he found that it wasn't the bones just moving, but
• 36:14
  there was a fluid moving these bones.
• 36:19
  And so he started working on the fluid restrictions in the body.
• 36:26
  And then as he, as he kept going in this work, he, he started, he was
• 36:35
  called one day to work on a dying man and he felt a presence in the room.
• 36:42
  And this is when he realized that there was a presence that moved
• 36:49
  our fluids that moved our bones.
• 36:53
  And this is what he called primary respiration, or he turned, he,
• 36:58
  he coined the term, he called it the breath of life because he
• 37:02
  was a, he was a Christian mystic.
• 37:05
  So they looked at things from the Christian point of view, the Holy Ghost
• 37:13
  Rupert Isaacson: effectively.
• 37:14
  Yeah.
• 37:16
  Okay.
• 37:18
  Interest.
• 37:19
  This is interesting because of course, as you know, that in, in, in the
• 37:21
  Hindu tradition, you have Kundalini, which means the coiled one, you know,
• 37:26
  energy at the base of the spine in the sacrum that you can bring up.
• 37:31
  And then back down again for well being, physical, mental, and, you
• 37:35
  know, and, and also, you know, contact with the divine, the Bushmen of the
• 37:39
  Kalahari, the San, Khoisan people who I have a lot of experience with, they
• 37:44
  talk about something called Ngum, and Ngum is exactly the same thing.
• 37:49
  And they describe it the same and they have a way of.
• 37:52
  Manipulating it into the abdomen and boiling it so that it
• 37:56
  boils as it goes up the spine.
• 37:58
  And when you touch them, they becoming extremely hot to the touch.
• 38:01
  And and this is what they can then sort of effectively burn your illnesses
• 38:07
  out of you when they're in this state.
• 38:09
  And of course, they go into the spirit world this way.
• 38:11
  So, but it all seems to come down to cerebral spinal fluid.
• 38:13
  When as you know, when my son Rowan became verbal in the saddle in front
• 38:17
  of me through, and I noticed that.
• 38:20
  The more collected the horse went the more his hips moved and therefore it's
• 38:24
  softly and in rhythm, the more he spoke.
• 38:27
  And I had this.
• 38:30
  Explained to me as predominantly the production of oxytocin,
• 38:34
  which is, of course, not just a happiness hormone, but a feel about
• 38:37
  about a communication hormone.
• 38:39
  But then I started also wanting to find out how I could do that when he
• 38:44
  wasn't on the horse and that became the basis of something which we now
• 38:48
  call movement method, which I'm always.
• 38:50
  Wanting therapeutic riding people to learn because of course, most of the
• 38:54
  time that the person is with you, they're actually not on the horse.
• 38:57
  So what are you doing with the rest of that time?
• 38:59
  And I began to use a lot of sacral rocking.
• 39:04
  With him and then with other people lying on the ground, you put the hand on the
• 39:08
  sacrum and you rock gently and we began to call it the diaper shake because
• 39:12
  it reduced people to sort of a happy toddler stage, you know, within seconds.
• 39:17
  And I was giving a training.
• 39:20
  I was thinking, well, this is oxytocin, right?
• 39:22
  And then I was giving a training to a an autism dad from Canada.
• 39:29
  And I showed, we were doing the diaper shake part of the training
• 39:32
  and he said, where'd you learn this?
• 39:34
  And I said, Oh, I learned it from a physiotherapist who showed me how to get
• 39:39
  walking again after a ruptured disc and seemed to work very well, but it makes you
• 39:43
  feel really good in kind of a similar way.
• 39:45
  And I presume it must be oxytocin because, well, it is oxytocin and
• 39:48
  serotonin, but it's more than that.
• 39:49
  He said, Rupert I'm a, I'm a, I'm a spinal surgeon.
• 39:53
  That's my job.
• 39:54
  And I'm not just a spinal surgeon.
• 39:56
  I'm an engineer that designs instruments for spinal surgery.
• 40:01
  And he said, in my spinal unit.
• 40:03
  Whenever anybody comes and has had spinal surgery or if they come with
• 40:07
  an injury, we prescribe this sacral rocking that you're doing because it
• 40:13
  makes you generate massive amounts of cerebral spinal fluid which has
• 40:19
  all these effects that you've just.
• 40:21
  Detailed.
• 40:22
  And this was interesting to me because, you know, I had gone to
• 40:26
  a cerebral a craniosacral, very good craniosacral practitioner
• 40:30
  when Roan was much, much younger.
• 40:32
  And it had really helped.
• 40:35
  She would do it to him while he slept.
• 40:37
  And it really helped with some of his more agitated symptoms back then.
• 40:41
  And I began to put two and two together.
• 40:43
  So.
• 40:44
  Now, if we turn our attention back to the horse that, for example, I see a person
• 40:50
  coming in who seems agitated and upset.
• 40:55
  I'll often try to get them to accept this diaper shake thing
• 41:00
  knowing that it will help.
• 41:01
  And if I'm feeling in any way agitated or upset or even have pain in my body, I
• 41:09
  will ask friends or family to do it to me.
• 41:12
  So I can recognize behaviors.
• 41:15
  Where it could be helpful, perhaps that's what you would call from
• 41:20
  William Garner Sutherland looking with the Indian eye or whatever.
• 41:24
  Now you are looking at your Indian eye at horses.
• 41:30
  So let's say I bring my, I've got a little therapy herd of seven horses.
• 41:37
  And if I invited you to stay with me here in Germany, which I'm going to, because
• 41:41
  of course I want to completely plunder your knowledge and I would wheel my
• 41:44
  horses out to you and say, okay, Shay.
• 41:48
  Cast your eye on them and do your magic and let me know
• 41:52
  what you think they might need.
• 41:53
  What typically.
• 41:57
  Do you see come up again and again, just the kind of, is there like a checklist
• 42:01
  of five things that you kind of always see with your average horse that's been
• 42:05
  a riding horse for X amount of years?
• 42:08
  And do you have a sort of series of go to's that you do as your initial work
• 42:15
  with these things before you go deeper?
• 42:16
  Like what, what, what do you, what do you typically see?
• 42:20
  What are the patterns that you.
• 42:22
  That you've noticed that perhaps it would be helpful for us as horse owners
• 42:27
  and people who work with horses to also begin to look out for, like, physically,
• 42:32
  Shae Stewart: like, if I'm standing
• 42:33
  Rupert Isaacson: there, because they're going to show initially
• 42:36
  anything through their body and their movement as much as they would show
• 42:40
  it through their emotional state.
• 42:45
  Shae Stewart: Oh so probably one of the biggest things I
• 42:51
  see is a dysfunctional posture.
• 42:56
  They may stand there.
• 42:57
  You walk out with the horse and the horse stops, you stop and the
• 43:02
  horse stops and they may stand there and, and look completely relaxed,
• 43:08
  but their posture to me says.
• 43:12
  That their nervous system is not balanced and a posture and balance is a big one.
• 43:23
  And I, I also see asymmetries in their face swelling in their face
• 43:29
  that, that may, may not be obvious if you haven't seen them without it.
• 43:36
  But the typical posture imbalance would be when they stop their front legs or are.
• 43:45
  more back behind them.
• 43:48
  So it looks like they're leaning over their forehand and their legs are
• 43:53
  not directly under their shoulder.
• 43:57
  I, I'll see the base of their neck looks a little dropped.
• 44:02
  The croup might be level or higher than the withers.
• 44:08
  The neck, their head may seem a little higher than it should in a relaxed state.
• 44:18
  And those are the biggest changes I see in the cranial sacral.
• 44:22
  The other thing I see are what I would call a headache look, which
• 44:29
  is the eyes, the eyes will be maybe drawn down, narrowed, darker.
• 44:38
  I'll watch, how, how are they?
• 44:41
  Engaging with their environment, are their ears moving?
• 44:45
  Are their eyes looking around?
• 44:46
  I watch eyeball motion.
• 44:49
  Like, if when you turn the horse 1 direction, and they look, do their eyes
• 44:54
  track smoothly and have a full range of.
• 44:58
  Lateral motion, or do their eyes stop at a certain point, and then they
• 45:03
  tilt their head in a awkward position to look, or when they're looking
• 45:11
  to one side, do their eyes make a weird skipping or tracking to them.
• 45:17
  I see that a lot and usually I motion has to do with sphenoid bone compression,
• 45:25
  which is the bone that the brain sits in.
• 45:30
  And all the ocular nerves run through this bone and so any tension and fascia
• 45:40
  can, can pull on the little holes we called for a man that are in, in the
• 45:47
  bones at the cranial nerves run through any, any tension in the fascia, any head
• 45:54
  compression can put compression on these.
• 46:03
  I'll look at how are they holding their tongue, does this, does their
• 46:08
  mouth feel dry or does it feel too wet?
• 46:12
  Is there too much saliva in their mouth?
• 46:15
  Is there not enough saliva in their mouth?
• 46:18
  How are their ears moving?
• 46:20
  Does one seem to kind of look weak and not maybe move well with the other one?
• 46:27
  Do they move at all?
• 46:28
  Some horses just may stand there and their ears kind of off to the side.
• 46:33
  I look at how are they breathing?
• 46:35
  Is it just, can you only see motion in their belly when they're breathing?
• 46:42
  Or does their entire ribcage move?
• 46:46
  Even the muscles in their back should move when they breathe.
• 46:50
  I watch, how are they holding their tail?
• 46:54
  Is it soft?
• 46:55
  Is it off to one side?
• 46:58
  Is it, does it seem tight?
• 47:03
  I look at their fur.
• 47:05
  The hair on their coat should all go in the appropriate direction.
• 47:12
  And sometimes you'll see a weird patch of hair specifically on the neck that
• 47:18
  looks like it's growing straight up, but that's the fascia pulling the
• 47:23
  hair out of alignment, so to speak.
• 47:26
  Oh look, does their coat seem dull?
• 47:29
  Does the hair seem like it's tight?
• 47:32
  And flat on their skin, or is it soft and, and fluffy and relaxed?
• 47:40
  I'll look at how they're, how they're landing on their hoof.
• 47:45
  Is it balanced?
• 47:47
  Do they stand too much on their toe?
• 47:51
  Those are basic things I look at.
• 47:54
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 47:54
  And so let's say you, would you normally see all of those things or
• 47:59
  would you normally see, say three of those things or five of those
• 48:01
  things together in a given horse?
• 48:04
  Do they tend to come in little clusters, depending on the type of horse or the
• 48:10
  type of work the horse has been in?
• 48:14
  Shae Stewart: Those are pretty common things I see in almost every
• 48:16
  Rupert Isaacson: horse.
• 48:17
  Okay, all of that together?
• 48:19
  Mm hmm.
• 48:20
  And so where, what's your go to?
• 48:23
  Where do you begin?
• 48:26
  Shae Stewart: Well, I begin with myself.
• 48:29
  So, in order to do this work, you have to get out of your thinking brain and be...
• 48:37
  Embodied and horses are highly telepathic and
• 48:52
  I have, I have what I call a cycle of attunement exercises that I'll do.
• 48:57
  I'll check in with my breath.
• 48:59
  Where's my brain?
• 49:02
  I'll ground myself and then I.
• 49:07
  Expand out.
• 49:08
  So I do a meditation where from my midline, which is our spine, I'll
• 49:19
  tune in there and I will expand out three feet from my body and
• 49:25
  I'll expand out through the barn.
• 49:27
  I expand out through the environment and I invite this slower rhythm
• 49:35
  to present itself, and then I will go to a contact on the horse.
• 49:44
  A lot of times I'll start at their sacrum,
• 49:49
  or I'll start on their temporal bones, and then I'll do that same cycle of attunement
• 49:57
  where I'll, I'll check in with my breath, I'll find my midline, and I'll expand
• 50:08
  out, and then with the flow of this rhythm that comes from nature, your mind kind
• 50:18
  of naturally drifts, so I'll pull, get pulled back into their temporal bones.
• 50:25
  And I might hang out there for a little bit in my mind's eye.
• 50:31
  Maybe I'll track down their body.
• 50:34
  Most horses will tell you where they want you to be.
• 50:38
  They'll either tell you, don't leave my temporal bones.
• 50:42
  And they'll, they'll show you that by when I do leave the temporal
• 50:47
  bones, they'll snap out of the zone they're in and they'll glare at me.
• 50:51
  Some will even pin their ears or they'll, they'll toss their head
• 50:56
  away, or they'll show me some sign that they're disconnecting.
• 50:59
  So I'll go back to the temporal bones and they'll go right back to where to
• 51:05
  that healing state that they get into.
• 51:11
  And it's usually usually in the 1st, few sessions with the
• 51:15
  horse, they're pretty specific.
• 51:17
  with where they want my mind to be when I'm with them.
• 51:21
  Rupert Isaacson: When your mind is, say, on the temporal bones or on the
• 51:25
  sacrum, what are your fingers doing?
• 51:26
  What are your hands doing?
• 51:28
  Shae Stewart: It's a very light touch, like the weight of maybe a sheet of paper.
• 51:36
  So I will wrap my hand around their temporal bone, or I'll place my
• 51:41
  entire hand on their frontal bone.
• 51:44
  Some bones are a little deeper, like the sphenoid bone is.
• 51:49
  Deeper inside the skull on a horse on a human, you can feel it, but
• 51:54
  on the horse, there's a specific contact and then you go in with your
• 52:04
  mind's eye deeper into that bone.
• 52:09
  Rupert Isaacson: I presume when you were learning to be a craniosacral
• 52:15
  practitioner did you initially learn to be that on people and did your tutors.
• 52:22
  Do you use these same techniques these psychosomatic techniques that
• 52:28
  you're talking about with yourself, or are these things that you came
• 52:33
  to in the course of your career?
• 52:39
  Well,
• 52:42
  Shae Stewart: I started receiving craniosacral in 1989.
• 52:49
  So I was 20, well I'm 55 now, I was 21, 22, something like that.
• 52:57
  And
• 52:57
  Rupert Isaacson: why did you begin to
• 52:58
  Shae Stewart: receive it?
• 53:00
  So I was, my sister was a professional ballet dancer and they were, you know,
• 53:06
  they always were getting some interesting form of body work and this was before
• 53:13
  spas and massages were a big deal.
• 53:15
  And maybe even before chiropractic, I mean, chiropractic was around, but there
• 53:20
  wasn't a chiropractor on every corner.
• 53:23
  And I was having migraines and a lot of neck pain.
• 53:30
  And my sister recommended this craniosacral therapist.
• 53:35
  And I just moved to San Francisco and so I went to see her and I did not know
• 53:42
  what she was doing, but it felt amazing.
• 53:45
  And I realized that my migraines were a symptom of a dysfunctional nervous system
• 53:54
  and it, it changed my life receiving this.
• 54:03
  So I was familiar with craniosacral before I started learning it.
• 54:08
  I was also familiar with tuning into nature.
• 54:13
  And I was also familiar with I guess you can say telepathic communication.
• 54:19
  The women in my family were psychically connected and.
• 54:27
  Rupert Isaacson: Why?
• 54:28
  Hmm?
• 54:29
  Why?
• 54:29
  Did they, did they come from a particular tradition?
• 54:32
  Or was there a story behind that somehow?
• 54:37
  Shae Stewart: It just, I don't know.
• 54:39
  My mother...
• 54:40
  My mother died when I was 11.
• 54:43
  So I would love to talk more about this stuff with her.
• 54:46
  She was into Sufism but that wasn't until the last couple of years of her life.
• 54:53
  My grandfather's grandmother, I believe it was his grandmother, was Cherokee.
• 55:00
  And so he had a, he just had a different way of looking at life.
• 55:07
  He hung out with With indigenous tribes and the Amazon and up in Alaska.
• 55:12
  And so he would tell these stories and the, the women and my family were
• 55:19
  just all connected, like they would send each other messages and there
• 55:25
  wasn't any kind of tradition or.
• 55:30
  Ceremony around that.
• 55:32
  It was just, you know, my mother would say, oh, I need to talk to her cousin.
• 55:37
  I'm going to go think about her and she'd go outside and kind of tune in.
• 55:42
  And then, you know, an hour later, my cousin would call
• 55:45
  and or whenever the phone would ring, they all knew who it was.
• 55:50
  They'd pick it up and go, oh, hey, you know, so and so, or whatever their
• 55:55
  name was without even saying hello 1st.
• 56:00
  So that was.
• 56:01
  That was kind of part of some of my upbringing and then it kind of
• 56:09
  went away a little bit when my, after my mother died and when I
• 56:14
  went and got my first craniosacral session, a lot of these things that
• 56:21
  I had forgotten about came back.
• 56:23
  And so it was a form of body work that I was always seeking to receive.
• 56:30
  And it was hard to find back then.
• 56:33
  And it was around 2006 or so that I started studying it on horses.
• 56:44
  And I met a lady who came to, I had a horse facility and.
• 56:49
  The Santa Cruz mountains in California, and I was studying
• 56:54
  all different types of body work.
• 56:57
  And I met a woman who taught equine craniosacral and to answer your question.
• 57:03
  No, none of this was talked about in those initial classes, but
• 57:08
  that was a long answer, but no,
• 57:10
  Rupert Isaacson: it was a great answer.
• 57:11
  And I do see that there's an indigenous tradition line coming
• 57:14
  through here, both within your family.
• 57:18
  And of course, within William Garner Sutherland.
• 57:22
  And that I begin to see these patterns coalescing.
• 57:25
  That are traditionally, traditional esoteric body work.
• 57:30
  That's now coming to the western mainstream.
• 57:32
  Talk to us about your horse background.
• 57:34
  Why were you in horses?
• 57:35
  Why did you have an equine facility in the Santa Cruz mountains?
• 57:38
  How did you get into horses?
• 57:40
  What's been your horse journey?
• 57:43
  I,
• 57:44
  Shae Stewart: when I was about six or seven, I met my first horse
• 57:49
  and was completely obsessed and my dad had had horses as a child
• 57:56
  and rode, and this was in Texas.
• 57:58
  And so they put me in lessons and about a year later we were, had moved
• 58:05
  out to the country and we had horses.
• 58:08
  My dad, I had a horse, my dad had a horse, my brother had a horse.
• 58:12
  I had horse people in my family and I was taking jumping lessons and
• 58:20
  we lived so far out in the country that there weren't many kids.
• 58:24
  And I preferred.
• 58:27
  Being around animals anyway.
• 58:30
  And so that's how it started.
• 58:37
  And I rode things, things kind of went awry when my mother died and
• 58:46
  I lost the love for much in life.
• 58:51
  You know, it was like just a shell of a person.
• 58:54
  And then in my twenties, I started riding again and I was leasing horses.
• 59:02
  And it was a matter of time.
• 59:03
  I just, I ended up with a horse and I was had a knack for them.
• 59:08
  I was just good around horses and I could, I was really good at horses that were.
• 59:17
  Troubled and heightened, I could, I was really good at bringing them
• 59:23
  down and I started I bought a place out in the Santa Cruz mountains when
• 59:30
  the area was depressed because of the earthquake in 89 and right after.
• 59:37
  I bought a house, the area boomed and the place where I kept my horse, they decided
• 59:45
  to move and so I was able to buy it.
• 59:49
  It was really run down.
• 59:51
  You know, I had, you know, I got a deal because it was needed a lot of work.
• 59:55
  And that's when I started training and I had a mentor that I met.
• 1:00:02
  Probably the late nineties and he was just amazing.
• 1:00:07
  He really worked with the horse's thought.
• 1:00:10
  He talked to, he talks about directing their thought helping them feel
• 1:00:14
  better about what's being asked.
• 1:00:17
  And that's who I studied from.
• 1:00:19
  And I would spend like five weeks a year in Arizona bringing
• 1:00:24
  the most messed up horses.
• 1:00:27
  You could think of, and because that's how, who came to me, people, I was like
• 1:00:33
  the last straw, can you fix this horse?
• 1:00:37
  So that's how I got into hoof trimming and saddle fitting and body work.
• 1:00:42
  Cause it all, it all, you know, you have to know you can't just
• 1:00:47
  train behaviors out of them.
• 1:00:53
  And I did that for 15 years or so.
• 1:00:58
  Who was this
• 1:00:59
  Rupert Isaacson: mentor?
• 1:00:59
  What was his name?
• 1:01:01
  Harry Whitney.
• 1:01:02
  Harry Whitney.
• 1:01:04
  Mm hmm.
• 1:01:05
  Shae Stewart: He is in Arizona.
• 1:01:09
  He used to be in Arizona.
• 1:01:10
  He travels all over the U.
• 1:01:12
  S.
• 1:01:12
  and teaches clinics.
• 1:01:13
  He's still around.
• 1:01:14
  Yeah, he's still around.
• 1:01:16
  He flies under the radar.
• 1:01:18
  He, have you ever heard of Tom Dorrance?
• 1:01:21
  Yes.
• 1:01:23
  Okay.
• 1:01:25
  He was friends with Tom.
• 1:01:29
  So,
• 1:01:29
  Rupert Isaacson: okay.
• 1:01:30
  How did you, how did you meet him?
• 1:01:35
  Shae Stewart: He, when I first moved to the Santa Cruz mountains and first thing I
• 1:01:40
  did was look up a place where I could ride horses and like the first or second week
• 1:01:46
  I was there, he was coming for a clinic.
• 1:01:48
  Okay.
• 1:01:50
  And I didn't even know what a clinic was.
• 1:01:52
  This was before horse clinics were a thing.
• 1:01:56
  And and the woman who owned the place said, do you want
• 1:01:59
  to sign up for this clinic?
• 1:02:01
  I was like, sure.
• 1:02:03
  So that's how I met Harry.
• 1:02:06
  Rupert Isaacson: And what were you doing for a living at this point?
• 1:02:08
  You weren't a professional with horses at this point, were you?
• 1:02:12
  Shae Stewart: No, I was not.
• 1:02:13
  I was a flight attendant.
• 1:02:15
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:02:17
  And you did that for a number of years, I presume.
• 1:02:21
  Shae Stewart: Yes, I got that job.
• 1:02:24
  I was in college and I was knew what I wanted to get into art therapy.
• 1:02:30
  And I wasn't being very supported from the parents, my dad and his
• 1:02:38
  wife thought that was just nuts.
• 1:02:41
  And so it kind of killed my confidence of what do I want to do?
• 1:02:46
  What do I want to study?
• 1:02:48
  And so I thought, well, I needed a new reality.
• 1:02:53
  I needed a, I needed, I knew I was not in a good place and I needed
• 1:02:59
  something I needed to change my reality.
• 1:03:03
  So I ended up, I knew a woman who was a flight attendant
• 1:03:08
  and her husband was a pilot.
• 1:03:10
  And I thought, well, that that will be a cool job to get me out
• 1:03:16
  of here and go see the world.
• 1:03:19
  And so I started that when I was 20,
• 1:03:23
  Rupert Isaacson: I could also imagine that it would lead to
• 1:03:26
  quite a lot of exhaustion jet lag.
• 1:03:28
  And if you were, if you were compounding that with grief from this untimely death
• 1:03:34
  of your mother, that at a certain point.
• 1:03:37
  your body might take you by the scruff of the neck and give you a bit of a shake.
• 1:03:42
  Did that indeed happen?
• 1:03:44
  And, and did craniosacral, is that partly why you sought
• 1:03:49
  out craniosacral for yourself?
• 1:03:52
  Shae Stewart: Yes, that's the, it was, yeah, the migraines were debilitating and
• 1:03:58
  craniosacral was it was life changing.
• 1:04:01
  It was like that part in the, you know, the movie The Wizard of Oz.
• 1:04:08
  When it's black and white and then she gets to Oz and
• 1:04:11
  everything's in this vibrant color.
• 1:04:14
  Yeah, that's what I feel like after my first session.
• 1:04:17
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:04:19
  All right.
• 1:04:19
  Well, I'd like to lead the conversation into some, some practical areas because
• 1:04:26
  those of us who work with horses all the time, we want our horses.
• 1:04:34
  To feel as good as they possibly can, particularly if their job is to
• 1:04:37
  transmit well being to other people.
• 1:04:39
  But also, as I'm sure you know, in the therapeutic world, we
• 1:04:44
  mostly deal with donation horses.
• 1:04:46
  And people donate horses for a reason.
• 1:04:49
  Usually they come.
• 1:04:50
  Fairly messed up.
• 1:04:51
  And so as I said at the beginning of this conversation with Horseboy Method,
• 1:04:55
  with Athena, with our mounted, with our horse equine programs, we spend a lot
• 1:05:00
  of time with lunging in hand work, long reining work, giving horses crazy time,
• 1:05:05
  free jumping, lots of trail riding, lots of unmounted work, lots of just
• 1:05:10
  rebuilding them and rebuilding them.
• 1:05:11
  We get good results.
• 1:05:13
  But we're always looking for how to be better.
• 1:05:18
  I asked you also about certain patterns that you see.
• 1:05:22
  when horses come in front of you.
• 1:05:23
  So I definitely see a certain number of patterns.
• 1:05:26
  We now have over, you know, probably over a hundred locations that
• 1:05:29
  do say horse boy in the world.
• 1:05:31
  And I'm always going out to them and there's their new crop of donation
• 1:05:34
  horses and go, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:37
  So I could identify sort of five or 10 things that I see regularly.
• 1:05:43
  Could I, and I'm sure a lot of listeners do, could I ask you about those things?
• 1:05:49
  Through your lens, and perhaps you could give us some insights into
• 1:05:54
  what could be behind them and what could be good approaches for them.
• 1:05:59
  I think people would find that very helpful.
• 1:06:02
  Could I start with the first one?
• 1:06:04
  The first thing we almost always see is
• 1:06:12
  congenital weakness.
• 1:06:15
  In the loin and the stifle that Lee that shows itself almost as,
• 1:06:22
  as, as, as lameness, but not quite.
• 1:06:25
  And we spend a lot of time strengthening those 2 parts of the horse.
• 1:06:33
  But we definitely noticed that almost every horse that comes
• 1:06:35
  in front of our eyes has this.
• 1:06:40
  Why is that?
• 1:06:40
  Do you think?
• 1:06:42
  And what's your go to there?
• 1:06:50
  Shae Stewart: I think they get weak there from
• 1:06:57
  a posture imbalance.
• 1:07:00
  And how they're ridden and any kind of head compression can cause this weakness.
• 1:07:08
  It'll throw off their posture.
• 1:07:10
  And so you get on them and, or you do in hand work and you train,
• 1:07:17
  try to train the correct muscles.
• 1:07:19
  But if their nervous system is not regulated, if they're stuck in a
• 1:07:25
  heightened state and their nervous system, you're going to be fighting
• 1:07:29
  against that because it's the brain telling the body how to be.
• 1:07:33
  It's not.
• 1:07:36
  a muscle that just needs to be strengthened.
• 1:07:39
  Where craniosacral shines is the work on the nervous system.
• 1:07:46
  So I believe that's where it starts and that's where you
• 1:07:51
  can see the biggest change.
• 1:07:56
  I had another thought, but it went away
• 1:08:00
  Rupert Isaacson: about that.
• 1:08:04
  Perhaps it will come back.
• 1:08:06
  If we turn our attention to another thought, maybe that
• 1:08:08
  thought will come back because I would like to hear it if possible.
• 1:08:11
  I'm just going to move up, move up the body a little bit.
• 1:08:15
  So there are two other ones, which, you know, we often see.
• 1:08:19
  Kissing spine is something we often see thoracic kissing spine in horses
• 1:08:24
  that have been jumpers and lumbar kissing spine could be from anything.
• 1:08:31
  Again, we have ways of addressing it and sometimes we can be quite successful.
• 1:08:36
  However, I would dearly love to know more.
• 1:08:41
  And again, can you just tell me your thoughts on, on those two
• 1:08:50
  Shae Stewart: things?
• 1:08:50
  Well, another thought about this whole thing is, we, we, any mammal, humans,
• 1:09:02
  horses, Dogs, you know, whatever can have what's called a contract.
• 1:09:07
  Who force.
• 1:09:09
  So say, you know, horse gets runs into a fence on their shoulder, their
• 1:09:17
  left shoulder, and that force can travel down through the body and end
• 1:09:22
  up causing an issue and the right hip.
• 1:09:27
  So pinpointing where some of these things are from, this is why craniosacral
• 1:09:33
  helps because we don't go in and try to fix, we try to expand health.
• 1:09:39
  And plus the, the point in the body that might be hurting might not have anything
• 1:09:47
  to do with where the initial problem is.
• 1:09:53
  Kissing spine is very common.
• 1:09:55
  I don't know if it's because now we can, we have better imaging, we can see it.
• 1:10:00
  You know, maybe it's been there this whole time and now we can diagnose it.
• 1:10:05
  It's usually the, there are surgeries, but the surgeries are not a one and done deal.
• 1:10:10
  Usually there's problems in the entire spine, not just the thoracics.
• 1:10:16
  Or the
• 1:10:18
  Rupert Isaacson: the things that stick up off the top of the spine
• 1:10:19
  Shae Stewart: that stick out from their spine,
• 1:10:22
  So there can be arthritis in the actual vertebrae as well with kissing spine.
• 1:10:29
  And, you know, once again, I'll take it back to the nervous system.
• 1:10:35
  Yeah.
• 1:10:36
  The fluid body, the, and even, even when you do a therapeutic approach,
• 1:10:41
  like chiropractor, chiropractic or osteopathy, it's still, it's introducing
• 1:10:49
  a force into the system and there can be a ripple effect of that.
• 1:10:57
  And that's where craniosacral can come in and help help
• 1:11:01
  those rhythms match up better.
• 1:11:06
  The breathing rhythms in the system,
• 1:11:10
  Rupert Isaacson: arthritis, of course, you know, one is obviously
• 1:11:13
  going to be seeing a lot of this.
• 1:11:14
  Most horses that are donated are older and have had careers.
• 1:11:18
  So there's wear and tear on the body on the cartilage and on the bone.
• 1:11:22
  Let alone, you know, tendons and ligaments to with.
• 1:11:26
  Arthritis.
• 1:11:28
  One thing that we have seen is that what can appear to be really chronic
• 1:11:33
  arthritis, we often find kind of, at least symptomatically, kind of goes away.
• 1:11:40
  When we do a lot of gentle in hand work, we, we find the same thing with
• 1:11:46
  a lot of the kissing spine issues, but we have to take some time over it.
• 1:11:50
  This is not a rushed process.
• 1:11:52
  There's that word again, the processes, they're in process but when, when when
• 1:11:58
  arthritis, for example, seems to dissipate
• 1:12:04
  is in fact, what we think of as bone deterioration, is it
• 1:12:10
  actually more tightened fascia?
• 1:12:13
  Shae Stewart: I wonder about these things because I've seen one of the places I
• 1:12:19
  teach is a YMCA camp and they, they're, they have all their horses are donated and
• 1:12:32
  they, they're all arthritic.
• 1:12:37
  And the, the ease of movement that comes, you know, we're helping the
• 1:12:41
  body get back to its original source.
• 1:12:44
  Remember the health, we're, we're holding the whole system to help find where's
• 1:12:52
  it not hurt and can we expand this.
• 1:12:55
  Instead of trying to fix something.
• 1:12:58
  And we're also talking a lot about physical problems and there's more
• 1:13:04
  than just the physical, there's the mind and the spirit as well.
• 1:13:09
  Indeed.
• 1:13:12
  And horses and I've worked with quite a few quite a few places where they
• 1:13:17
  have therapeutic horses that, that are donated and they come with a lot
• 1:13:24
  of other stuff that's attributing to their physical problems as well.
• 1:13:31
  Rupert Isaacson: One of the things which I find.
• 1:13:33
  Sometimes troublesome about going to equine conferences and such where
• 1:13:41
  people are speaking is that often it's held up as a sort of abuse if
• 1:13:48
  horses have been kept in stables and boxes now and that sort of thing.
• 1:13:52
  And often the people saying this just happen to live in geographical areas
• 1:13:59
  of the American West where they have access to an awful lot of space.
• 1:14:05
  And one of the problems I have, it's not that I think they're necessarily
• 1:14:11
  wrong, but it's not helpful for somebody who's, say, keeping a horse in suburban
• 1:14:18
  New York, or you Frankfurt or London and what's available to them that they don't
• 1:14:27
  even own the facility that they're at a boarding stable there, you know, and they
• 1:14:32
  don't have power over the environment.
• 1:14:34
  And so I started thinking about this quite seriously, because a lot of a lot of the
• 1:14:40
  therapeutic riding stables we're dealing with were in urban or peri urban areas.
• 1:14:46
  And why we couldn't just go to them and shame them and say, well, you guys suck
• 1:14:50
  because you know, you're not in Wyoming.
• 1:14:52
  And so, well, we know we're not in fucking Wyoming.
• 1:14:53
  That's why we're trying to do.
• 1:14:55
  That's why we're serving these kids from the local housing estate.
• 1:14:58
  Yeah.
• 1:14:59
  So, how do we make it better as best as best as we can.
• 1:15:02
  So we started looking at how can we emulate as much as possible.
• 1:15:07
  Horses in a natural environment in herds, if they have to be
• 1:15:09
  kept in confined areas a lot.
• 1:15:12
  And we work with a.
• 1:15:14
  A really good urban project in Dublin, in the middle of Dublin, you think of
• 1:15:17
  Ireland as all green fields, but this place is like right in the center of
• 1:15:20
  Dublin, doing a really crucial service for kids in a pretty shitty area.
• 1:15:25
  And we had another place in the middle of Amsterdam and another, you know, we've
• 1:15:30
  had quite a few urban horse places and I'm intrigued by these because they,
• 1:15:34
  they suddenly are a real challenge.
• 1:15:36
  And so they're getting.
• 1:15:37
  the crocked horses and they don't have much option about how to keep them.
• 1:15:42
  So one thing we began to experiment with was just the
• 1:15:45
  emotional well being of the horse.
• 1:15:46
  So we said, well, what does that come down to?
• 1:15:48
  Really?
• 1:15:48
  It comes down to, they've got to be in a herd, right?
• 1:15:50
  And if they're in a herd and they can touch up against each other but if they
• 1:15:54
  can't do that all day, what's the maximum we could give them and how could we do?
• 1:16:00
  And then there was a curious.
• 1:16:02
  They don't want to do the same thing every day anymore than we do.
• 1:16:04
  The axons and dendrites in their brain, you know, become rusty, just like they
• 1:16:10
  do in ours if we don't do new stuff and novel movement and blah, blah, blah.
• 1:16:14
  So we came up with this idea of crazy time, that you could, in arenas,
• 1:16:19
  you turn horses out in groups.
• 1:16:21
  And you encourage them to play, but you don't chase them around
• 1:16:26
  too much, you interact with them and you build playgrounds.
• 1:16:29
  So if the horses like to jump, well, okay, we will jumps and things like that.
• 1:16:33
  But we also have other things in there for enrichment, like balls that might
• 1:16:37
  move or other interesting objects.
• 1:16:39
  And then if they don't jump, well, maybe it's poles on the ground.
• 1:16:42
  There's a large element of choice.
• 1:16:44
  They choose a bit like kids in the playground, are they gonna go up
• 1:16:46
  the climbing frame or aren't they?
• 1:16:47
  But the climbing frame needs to be there.
• 1:16:49
  But of course, horses are essentially playful and playful even when they're old.
• 1:16:54
  And, and playfulness of course is wellbeing.
• 1:16:57
  When some, when a playful animal ceases to be playful, you know, it's in trouble.
• 1:17:01
  When a kid ceases to be playful, you know, that kid's in trouble or even an adult.
• 1:17:06
  So, We encourage play and teaching people enough tact, equestrian tact, to keep the
• 1:17:13
  play going, because the horses actually enjoy that interaction with the monkeys.
• 1:17:16
  They're like, well, what's next then?
• 1:17:18
  And then also to change up the playground every two, three minutes.
• 1:17:23
  You change the jumps a bit.
• 1:17:24
  You change what's on the ground a bit.
• 1:17:25
  You chuck a ball at them.
• 1:17:26
  You do this.
• 1:17:26
  You do that.
• 1:17:27
  You put some interesting object there.
• 1:17:29
  You take it away just so that they're like, oh, what's next?
• 1:17:32
  And we found that if we dedicated.
• 1:17:36
  X number of hours per week to doing this in these areas, which were by
• 1:17:40
  no means ideal for keeping horses, everything in the horse has changed.
• 1:17:45
  Physically, as well as mentally.
• 1:17:47
  And then we had to come up with, well, how do you make this not a time conflict?
• 1:17:51
  Because, of course, these stables are seeing, you know, a lot of clients.
• 1:17:57
  And then we said, ah, but what if that was the session where
• 1:17:59
  you're seeing the client?
• 1:18:00
  And then what if, so we, we now have a whole.
• 1:18:03
  set of things we call crazy time because kids want crazy time too and adults
• 1:18:07
  want crazy time and it becomes about teaching them horsemanship or it could
• 1:18:11
  be about teaching them maths because we can mark out the distances and the
• 1:18:15
  heights and the widths of the fences and all the materials that are the types
• 1:18:18
  of wood that the jumps are made from or the poles are made from or any number
• 1:18:22
  of things that we can do and so that that those crazy time sessions are paid.
• 1:18:28
  So there's no time conflict anymore.
• 1:18:30
  So it's a kind of win, win, win the horse gets what they need.
• 1:18:33
  The client definitely gets what they need.
• 1:18:35
  And you, the facility owner get what you need, because not only are
• 1:18:39
  you serving your client, but you're serving your horse and but it.
• 1:18:43
  It was looking at the site, as you said, that beyond the body, and we found that
• 1:18:51
  the body stuff then obviously responded better to the body stuff that we were
• 1:18:56
  doing with the lunging and that sort of training and the, the, the in hand work.
• 1:19:02
  But really it seemed to me that what we were coming down to was happiness.
• 1:19:05
  And that could take many forms and then I began to look at horses that were kept
• 1:19:10
  in large pastures and realizing that they weren't necessarily that happy.
• 1:19:14
  They definitely, you know, it was more optimal than horses that were kept
• 1:19:18
  in boxes, but I began to see plenty of depressed horses in pastures.
• 1:19:21
  And that was intriguing to us.
• 1:19:22
  Well, why would they be depressed in a pasture?
• 1:19:24
  Because surely they're getting kind of what they need.
• 1:19:26
  But it seemed to me that the quality of the interaction with each other and
• 1:19:30
  with the humans, if that was somehow lacking, that could lead to boredom.
• 1:19:35
  And which is a sort of form of unhappiness, even
• 1:19:38
  though they're eating grass.
• 1:19:40
  What do you think about that?
• 1:19:41
  This, this idea, it seems to me more and more that the curiosity and play
• 1:19:47
  are really at the root of well being.
• 1:19:53
  And that this is something that is not really looked at in
• 1:19:59
  organisms of any kind really.
• 1:20:00
  And where might this come into the cranial sacral and nervous system?
• 1:20:05
  What, what, what's going on with that?
• 1:20:06
  Do you think?
• 1:20:08
  I think
• 1:20:08
  Shae Stewart: that's all a great idea.
• 1:20:10
  And when I, when I trained and, and studied with Harry, he,
• 1:20:17
  he talked a lot about that.
• 1:20:19
  Getting the horse make helping the horse find interest in what you're
• 1:20:24
  doing and be mentally engaged and, and not stressed out or not shut down.
• 1:20:33
  I've seen horses that lived in her.
• 1:20:37
  Outside and pastures, but it was such a dysfunctional herd.
• 1:20:41
  They, they were just difficult, difficult horses to handle.
• 1:20:46
  And my place in California, they lived in small paddocks cause it's, it was
• 1:20:51
  on the side of a mountain and we did the best we could and they, we rarely
• 1:20:59
  had colics, the vets would always.
• 1:21:03
  Say, why don't you have colics here?
• 1:21:05
  The place down the street, they call it every week, somebody's
• 1:21:08
  colicking and there just wasn't that much, there was not much injuries.
• 1:21:14
  So I think there's a lot to that, keeping them curious.
• 1:21:20
  Changing thing up things up.
• 1:21:22
  We had barrels in the arena.
• 1:21:24
  We do all kinds of things with those and where the cranial
• 1:21:27
  sacral comes in as it helps.
• 1:21:30
  It helps the body let go helps the nervous system.
• 1:21:34
  The body let go of stresses inside the system that it that
• 1:21:40
  it's been holding on to and.
• 1:21:45
  And the craniosacral work is giving their nervous system a safe place to let things
• 1:21:53
  that have been stored deep in the cracks.
• 1:21:56
  Help those cracks open and let them out, whether it's you know, an
• 1:22:00
  injury or, or some emotional thing in there that's stored, that's, you
• 1:22:10
  know, trapped in the system, so to
• 1:22:13
  Rupert Isaacson: speak.
• 1:22:13
  When you say in the cracks, do you actually mean in cracks, like in the
• 1:22:16
  cracks between the plates of the, of the brain, of the, of the skull?
• 1:22:22
  Metaphoric cracks.
• 1:22:24
  Metaphoric cracks.
• 1:22:25
  Yeah.
• 1:22:27
  But I guess it is true, is it not, that People say I don't,
• 1:22:31
  do you think this is true?
• 1:22:32
  That memory is to a large degree carried in muscle.
• 1:22:37
  And that's why people say, Oh, you know, I did this yoga pose and then
• 1:22:41
  suddenly there's my grandfather.
• 1:22:43
  I remember my grandfather telling me this joke, you know, that
• 1:22:46
  I've completely forgotten when I was five or something like that.
• 1:22:48
  Do you, this, this idea is, I'm a bit intrigued by what you said just now about.
• 1:22:54
  That where the cranial sacral will come in is that it helps let go of stored stress.
• 1:22:59
  Shae Stewart: Yes.
• 1:23:00
  And, and the, my training, we look at it as stored in the
• 1:23:05
  fluids and the fluid body.
• 1:23:09
  So it goes deeper than muscle memory, deeper than cellular memory.
• 1:23:15
  It's, it's stored in the fluids.
• 1:23:20
  And if you think about, imagine that we have inside of our skin,
• 1:23:29
  if we were like a water balloon.
• 1:23:34
  And there's different there's slower rhythms down in the deep.
• 1:23:40
  And then as you get more surface level, it gets faster.
• 1:23:43
  The faster rhythms are usually where the dysfunction is stored.
• 1:23:48
  And the slower rhythms can't push that out.
• 1:23:53
  Because it's, it's trapped in there.
• 1:23:55
  And it's, it's deeper than a muscle memory.
• 1:23:58
  So in a craniosacral session,
• 1:24:03
  sometimes like I was working on a horse not too long ago, and I
• 1:24:08
  got as a sense of, I had a vision of the horse just standing in the
• 1:24:15
  pasture, staring out into the forest.
• 1:24:20
  And I felt the sense of emptiness, just empty.
• 1:24:30
  About five minutes of the horse processing this and I was getting this vision about
• 1:24:39
  five minutes later, the owner said, I'll tell you about the horses that just died
• 1:24:45
  and she told me about how the two oldest horses had died pretty close together.
• 1:24:52
  And she said, ever since.
• 1:24:55
  They died, this mare that I was working on stands out in the pasture
• 1:25:00
  and just stares out into the forest.
• 1:25:03
  And she doesn't follow the other herd when they go to the next pasture.
• 1:25:07
  She just stands there and stares.
• 1:25:10
  And situations like that happen often in a session.
• 1:25:15
  And the way I look at it is the, the sadness, or I don't know if
• 1:25:23
  I want to use the word trauma.
• 1:25:25
  But the, the, what the horse went through is processing out of the system.
• 1:25:34
  And I believe that's why I get the vision.
• 1:25:38
  And then the owner picked it up too, without realizing what she was picking up.
• 1:25:44
  Rupert Isaacson: When you get that vision, do you feel, and when that
• 1:25:48
  horse is exhibiting that behavior, the staring, is that the sadness
• 1:25:53
  going through its process, bubbling, bubbling to the surface, and then
• 1:25:56
  eventually being able to be released.
• 1:25:59
  Yes.
• 1:26:00
  And is your job to expedite that process, basically, to help smooth
• 1:26:07
  Shae Stewart: out the process?
• 1:26:08
  To hold space.
• 1:26:09
  Yeah.
• 1:26:09
  Hold space to allow it to happen.
• 1:26:12
  And by me becoming aware of it does help reinforce the system to let it go.
• 1:26:22
  Rupert Isaacson: Have you seen a change in the mayor?
• 1:26:23
  Mm hmm.
• 1:26:25
  Shae Stewart: Yeah.
• 1:26:26
  She, and when this.
• 1:26:28
  I've had it happen.
• 1:26:30
  Sometimes when when things release from the horse's system, it, you may feel heat,
• 1:26:38
  actual heat come off right under my hands.
• 1:26:41
  It'll get maybe even sweaty or these visions.
• 1:26:45
  Of of an image of whatever they're processing.
• 1:26:51
  I've I've seen an image of the horse pulling back and
• 1:26:55
  cross ties and falling down.
• 1:26:58
  And when it when it releases, there's a shift in the tide.
• 1:27:04
  That I'm surfing on in the system, it'll, there'll just be a shift
• 1:27:09
  and everything will slow down.
• 1:27:13
  Rupert Isaacson: It's this thing about faster rhythms and slower rhythms.
• 1:27:19
  This seems to me to have a parallel in brainwave states now.
• 1:27:24
  So if the accepted wisdom is that the slower your brainwave state,
• 1:27:33
  the more functional in certain ways.
• 1:27:39
  So if you're tied up to an EEG.
• 1:27:42
  Machine that's measuring your brainwaves, for example, if you had
• 1:27:45
  epilepsy or something and they were that if you were having fits seizures.
• 1:27:53
  Brainwaves would be going very fast and anything that slows them down seems
• 1:28:01
  to be better and it seems that the the main Functional states that have
• 1:28:08
  been identified in a crude level of beta, which is the sort of functional
• 1:28:14
  cheerful All right, how's it going?
• 1:28:15
  It's my job in it.
• 1:28:16
  All right, mate.
• 1:28:17
  All right, you're right.
• 1:28:18
  I'm right then to alpha being okay now I need to get Deep breath focus.
• 1:28:28
  I've got to take that drop kick over the bars of the goal for this.
• 1:28:32
  I need to come into slow my brain, slow my breathing, slow my, and that would
• 1:28:37
  be measured as an alpha brain state.
• 1:28:39
  And then if one went a little bit further than that into a very meditative
• 1:28:45
  state, perhaps even slightly between sleeping and waking, that might be
• 1:28:49
  a theta state where people report getting a lot of inspired thought.
• 1:28:54
  And then for.
• 1:28:55
  When people are in deep REM sleep Delta.
• 1:29:00
  And it seems that if people can consciously go into Delta, like some
• 1:29:04
  shamans and some indigenous cultures, they hooked up EG machines and found
• 1:29:11
  that they're in waking lucid Delta in their trances, that seems to be
• 1:29:16
  when they can almost bend reality.
• 1:29:18
  And now.
• 1:29:19
  Even further states, gamma states are being, it seems the more they
• 1:29:23
  go into this, the more they find.
• 1:29:27
  And of course, these are electrical currents.
• 1:29:29
  And these electrical currents are going through a brain, which is composed
• 1:29:32
  of fascia tissue which is composed of liquid, largely, and vibration.
• 1:29:40
  Cells vibrating at a distance from each other.
• 1:29:44
  Is that what's going on when you're doing your work, that you're
• 1:29:48
  bringing those rhythms into those.
• 1:29:54
  Is it, are you bringing those rhythms, those, those vital rhythms, which
• 1:29:59
  might be measured in a brainwave state, might be measured in a heart rate,
• 1:30:02
  might be measured in flow of cerebral spinal fluid or lymph or blood perhaps
• 1:30:07
  would be measured, breathing might be measured in all of them at the same time.
• 1:30:15
  Are you bringing those into a slower resonance?
• 1:30:19
  And is that what allows something that you said earlier, which
• 1:30:23
  I found intriguing, that
• 1:30:29
  of health to be re accessed?
• 1:30:35
  Yes.
• 1:30:36
  Because nothing's now in the way.
• 1:30:37
  Is that what's going on?
• 1:30:38
  Yeah,
• 1:30:38
  Shae Stewart: that's exactly what's going on.
• 1:30:41
  That's why it's so important when you learn this work to understand
• 1:30:46
  how to orient to the slower rhythms.
• 1:30:50
  And there's, there are documented rhythms that have been timed and it
• 1:31:01
  might not be a rhythm that you feel moving Because it's too slow, but
• 1:31:07
  it's a total quality of that state.
• 1:31:12
  So there's.
• 1:31:13
  The long tide or primary respiration, and that's the 100 second cycle
• 1:31:20
  rhythm that's, that has been, they find references of this and all over
• 1:31:28
  the world and nature and science.
• 1:31:32
  There's even slower rhythms.
• 1:31:35
  So it's the same with the brainwave studies, the biodynamic world,
• 1:31:41
  the more people get into this, the more they find deeper and slower.
• 1:31:49
  They call them tides, but it's more the tonal quality or the visions.
• 1:31:55
  So there's even there's a 300 second cycle.
• 1:31:59
  1 that's been talked about.
• 1:32:01
  There's a 20 minute cycle.
• 1:32:03
  1 that is being talked about and there's.
• 1:32:08
  The rhythm that we all kind of settle in, which is a mid tide, which is two, two and
• 1:32:14
  a half cycles a minute, and that when you can palpate, and then there's a cranial
• 1:32:21
  rhythmic impulse, which is a faster rhythm and this might be controversial
• 1:32:29
  to other craniosacral people what I'm about to say, but the faster, the.
• 1:32:34
  Cranial rhythmic impulse is not a therapeutic tide, and it's not something
• 1:32:42
  that the even the older osteopaths even recognized, and in this day and age,
• 1:32:48
  it's taught as a rhythm to look for.
• 1:32:52
  But in my training, it's, it's taught as a rhythm of dysfunction, a rhythm of a,
• 1:32:59
  of a dysfunctional state of the nervous system and working with the horses.
• 1:33:08
  I did go off and do a 2 year, 10 level biodynamic.
• 1:33:13
  Program for humans, but working with the horses is what got me to understand the
• 1:33:19
  slower rhythms because they live in that.
• 1:33:22
  And I feel a faster rhythm in them.
• 1:33:25
  Sometimes it's usually an area that was an acute injury or.
• 1:33:32
  A recent you know, fall or something or a recent form of body work where
• 1:33:37
  they put something in the system that caused a faster rippling to happen.
• 1:33:45
  Rupert Isaacson: How do you feel that rippling?
• 1:33:48
  How do you feel it faster or slower?
• 1:33:51
  Shae Stewart: If it's a dysfunctional rhythm, it's a faster rhythm and I can
• 1:33:56
  feel it through my hands and in my.
• 1:33:59
  In my sensories, however, I'm receiving the, the, it's, it's considered a
• 1:34:07
  perceived sense or a felt sense.
• 1:34:12
  Would you feel it as vibration?
• 1:34:13
  Would you feel it as pulse?
• 1:34:15
  What would you feel it as?
• 1:34:17
  The faster dysfunctional rhythms, I would feel it as a slow vibration
• 1:34:24
  or just an irregular motion.
• 1:34:28
  So the bones in our system do have a pattern of a healthy motion that
• 1:34:33
  they should move in, you know, like the frontal bone, the lateral
• 1:34:39
  edges flare in cranial rhythm.
• 1:34:43
  And so what I would feel in a dysfunctional pattern, maybe one
• 1:34:48
  side is not moving at all and the other side is moving too fast.
• 1:34:52
  So I don't feel that fullness coming into my hands.
• 1:34:59
  Rupert Isaacson: And why in some forms of cranial sacral would they think
• 1:35:04
  that the faster rhythm is a good thing?
• 1:35:07
  I don't know, do they say it's a good thing because you feel for this because
• 1:35:15
  Shae Stewart: it could be the, the original osteopath who designed the
• 1:35:23
  program worked in the faster rhythms.
• 1:35:27
  I have seen and some of the equine osteopathy, they will feel if they don't
• 1:35:37
  feel a rhythm, they go in and adjust and then feel for that rhythm and it's the
• 1:35:44
  faster rhythm that they're feeling for.
• 1:35:46
  So they did disrupt the system to bring that rhythm, but in the biodynamic
• 1:35:51
  world, we work within the slower motions.
• 1:35:56
  Rupert Isaacson: When I heard you talking at Warwick Summit you talked
• 1:35:58
  about a 50 second rhythmic cycle and you seemed to feel that that
• 1:36:05
  was fairly optimal or desirable.
• 1:36:11
  Can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and why
• 1:36:15
  that would be a good thing?
• 1:36:17
  Shae Stewart: Yes, that, that is what we call primary respiration,
• 1:36:23
  primary respiration, and it's a 100 second cycle with the phase
• 1:36:28
  change every 50 seconds or a minute.
• 1:36:32
  You can, you can say it's about a minute.
• 1:36:36
  That is the, that is the primary respiration is what biodynamic
• 1:36:41
  craniosacral practitioners orient to.
• 1:36:45
  And.
• 1:36:46
  And this is what we're taught is the healing rhythm that comes from
• 1:36:53
  nature that flows through our bodies.
• 1:36:58
  And it's measured in a 100 second cycle minute or cycle.
• 1:37:03
  Tied.
• 1:37:07
  Rupert Isaacson: I'm just looking this up here.
• 1:37:09
  The first thing that came up when I typed in primary respiration is.
• 1:37:18
  Good old Google.
• 1:37:19
  The primary respiration mechanism, PRM, tell me if you think this is
• 1:37:24
  true or not, is a functional unit based on the accommodative actions
• 1:37:31
  of cranial articular surfaces.
• 1:37:35
  Is a cranial articular surface the bones in your skull?
• 1:37:40
  Shae Stewart: Maybe the cranial sacral mechanism, which would be part of
• 1:37:46
  that would be the bones in the skull.
• 1:37:49
  Rupert Isaacson: PRM has five distinct anatomic slash physiologic components,
• 1:37:55
  colon, the inherent rhythmic motion of the brain and spinal cord,
• 1:38:00
  fluctuation of cerebral spinal fluid.
• 1:38:05
  So reading between the lines of that is what they're saying.
• 1:38:10
  If you're in this primary respiratory rhythm that you're talking about then
• 1:38:18
  your or the horse's flow of cerebral spinal fluid Which we began this
• 1:38:26
  discussion with talking about all the reasons why that that's a good thing
• 1:38:31
  if it's in that rhythm Is that the optimal in terms of source health?
• 1:38:37
  Is that where you ought to be when you're a kid and things
• 1:38:44
  have not yet messed you up?
• 1:38:47
  Yeah.
• 1:38:50
  Shae Stewart: Yeah, this is a, this is the yeah, the, the source it's the,
• 1:38:56
  it's where, where, where it's all at.
• 1:38:58
  It's the original source that's found in nature and inside of us.
• 1:39:04
  Rupert Isaacson: Do we see these same things like in the plant kingdom?
• 1:39:06
  Do we see them in, in osmosis and do we see them in photosynthesis
• 1:39:10
  and that sort of thing?
• 1:39:12
  Does it, do we, do we even reflect it in other?
• 1:39:15
  Shae Stewart: Yes, it's been measured in the plant world.
• 1:39:19
  There's I think his name, I think his first name is William Seifrietz.
• 1:39:24
  He was a botanist from the 50s and he measured the you can
• 1:39:29
  look up the YouTube videos.
• 1:39:31
  The original videos are still on YouTube with where he studied slime mold.
• 1:39:37
  Rupert Isaacson: Protoplasm.
• 1:39:39
  That was him.
• 1:39:40
  He was the slime mold guy.
• 1:39:42
  Shae Stewart: Yep.
• 1:39:42
  William Seyfritz.
• 1:39:44
  Rupert Isaacson: William.
• 1:39:46
  I'm typing in William.
• 1:39:48
  How do I spell Seyfritz?
• 1:39:56
  Seyfritz or Seyfert?
• 1:40:01
  Seyfritz.
• 1:40:02
  I thought
• 1:40:03
  Shae Stewart: it was Fritz, but I might be.
• 1:40:05
  Rupert Isaacson: Slime mold.
• 1:40:06
  Let me.
• 1:40:06
  Do I have to type in slime mold guy?
• 1:40:10
  Shae Stewart: I found it.
• 1:40:11
  S E I F R I T Z.
• 1:40:14
  Rupert Isaacson: F R I T Z.
• 1:40:18
  Shae Stewart: Cyphretes on protoplasm.
• 1:40:22
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, tell us what he found.
• 1:40:26
  Shae Stewart: He found that there was a motion within this protoplasm and you
• 1:40:31
  can see in the video it looks liquid running up the protoplasm and it'll go one
• 1:40:42
  direction for 50 seconds, pause, and then it'll switch and go another direction.
• 1:40:51
  And they've He, they started playing with putting toxins in the mold
• 1:40:57
  to destroy some of it to see what would happen in the slime mold.
• 1:41:02
  And they found when it regenerated that motion, it didn't pick
• 1:41:11
  up where it was left off.
• 1:41:13
  It picked up with the rest of it.
• 1:41:15
  And he, so he determined that it was being moved from an external source.
• 1:41:27
  Rupert Isaacson: Did he know, did he speculate about what that source was?
• 1:41:31
  Not
• 1:41:32
  Shae Stewart: that I have found.
• 1:41:33
  It could be in some of his
• 1:41:35
  Rupert Isaacson: lectures.
• 1:41:38
  And just so that people know what protoplasm is, protoplasm is the
• 1:41:44
  colorless material comprising the living part of a cell, including
• 1:41:50
  the cytoplasm nucleus and other.
• 1:41:52
  Organelles.
• 1:41:53
  So what we're talking about there is the stuff of life, right?
• 1:41:58
  The stuff that makes up one's cells, if that is being animated.
• 1:42:03
  It's interesting if a botanist in the 50s was speculating that it's
• 1:42:08
  being moved from some outside source.
• 1:42:11
  Are we getting, is that what we call God?
• 1:42:15
  Shae Stewart: That's where we can get into deeper conversations depending on
• 1:42:20
  what your source is, whether it's God
• 1:42:25
  I could look at it as God.
• 1:42:26
  It feels like when you step into that when you step into primary
• 1:42:32
  respiration, it feels like you lose sense of, of a definition of body.
• 1:42:47
  And there's a connection to all
• 1:42:49
  Rupert Isaacson: life form.
• 1:42:55
  The web rather than the matrix.
• 1:43:00
  Is that love?
• 1:43:03
  I
• 1:43:03
  Shae Stewart: think it...
• 1:43:04
  It can boil down to unconditional love.
• 1:43:09
  Rupert Isaacson: It sounds like it.
• 1:43:10
  When, when I've ever asked a a traditional healer, I've worked with
• 1:43:15
  different ones around the world, and whenever I've asked them in whatever
• 1:43:19
  tradition, whatever geographical location they're in, could be as diverse as
• 1:43:23
  subarctic Canada to the Kalahari to Australian rainforest to other places.
• 1:43:34
  And I've said, well, what is it, this force that you're using this
• 1:43:41
  cerebral spinal fluid, this Kundalini, this chi, this key, this num, I
• 1:43:47
  get the same answer every time.
• 1:43:50
  What they always say is, Oh, that's easy, Ruth.
• 1:43:53
  That's just, it's just love.
• 1:43:55
  But with a certain training process, you can learn to direct it.
• 1:44:00
  And I think I've heard that answer about seven or eight times now among people
• 1:44:09
  who certainly were not interacting with each other over the internet, living
• 1:44:14
  in Hudson, Siberia, or, you know.
• 1:44:18
  under trees in the Kalahari.
• 1:44:20
  What, how, how would we know?
• 1:44:22
  How do you know if you're breathing and existing in this minute cycle,
• 1:44:29
  this primary respiration cycle?
• 1:44:32
  What are the signs to look out for in yourself?
• 1:44:34
  What are the signs to look out for?
• 1:44:37
  Shae Stewart: It's always there.
• 1:44:38
  Never stops.
• 1:44:40
  It can present itself, so to speak, when you're in a more expanded state, instead
• 1:44:46
  of compressed, narrowed in on something.
• 1:44:50
  There are external signs, like when I work with horses, there can be external signs
• 1:44:56
  like a sigh, a bird flying by a breeze.
• 1:45:05
  It's a very quiet state and time stands still.
• 1:45:09
  He totally lose track of time.
• 1:45:13
  It's very connected.
• 1:45:16
  It feels palpable.
• 1:45:19
  So it feels like.
• 1:45:23
  The air around us, instead of feeling you know, airy and it feels, it
• 1:45:30
  feels thick and moves almost like a slow ocean and every cell and
• 1:45:39
  the body syncs up with that motion.
• 1:45:43
  It's the, the best place to explore it is for me is either in the woods
• 1:45:51
  where you're surrounded by trees.
• 1:45:57
  Or in the ocean, you know, out in nature.
• 1:46:01
  Rupert Isaacson: It's not really...
• 1:46:02
  Do you know you're entering it?
• 1:46:04
  It just happened to me while you were talking.
• 1:46:06
  You know, sometimes you do one of those involuntary...
• 1:46:09
  Mm hmm.
• 1:46:10
  2 3 phase.
• 1:46:11
  Breath and...
• 1:46:13
  And you didn't do it because you were looking to do it.
• 1:46:15
  It just kind of happened as a reflex.
• 1:46:18
  It's that release and you feel in that good place, that's a return
• 1:46:26
  into that primary respiration thing, a more agitated state.
• 1:46:34
  So it would seem to me then that what you're talking about, we started with
• 1:46:39
  the wellbeing of horses and therapy.
• 1:46:41
  Well, but of course, you know, this is what we're looking for if we're in the
• 1:46:45
  therapy world in our clients, of course, and of course, if we're, we're the ones
• 1:46:52
  responsible for the well being of the horses ultimately, and if we're also
• 1:46:58
  responsible for as much of the well being of the human as it comes under our care.
• 1:47:06
  Hands are under our care as is possible in that time that we have them.
• 1:47:11
  It would seem that, again, the horse can't transmit that well
• 1:47:15
  being if they don't have it.
• 1:47:17
  And we can't transmit that well being very well if we don't have it.
• 1:47:21
  So it seems to me that what you're talking about with the cranial sacral
• 1:47:25
  might be three fold useful for the horse, for the client, and of course
• 1:47:35
  for us who are connecting those two.
• 1:47:39
  And what's going on.
• 1:47:41
  If someone is, is listening to this podcast and says, well,
• 1:47:44
  okay, that will make sense to me.
• 1:47:45
  Great.
• 1:47:46
  What's my next step?
• 1:47:47
  How do I, I've got a, I'm, I'm a, I'm running a stable, I'm busy.
• 1:47:51
  This is yet another thing I now have to think about.
• 1:47:54
  I'm not gonna get stressed about de-stressing.
• 1:47:57
  Yeah.
• 1:47:58
  What is the least stressful way that someone could go about.
• 1:48:03
  Engaging with this equine craniosacral work and indeed with the crossover
• 1:48:08
  to the human that could cause the least disruption to a busy week.
• 1:48:15
  Like, what would you suggest people start to do?
• 1:48:20
  Shae Stewart: You mean like in their own daily life or finding a cranial
• 1:48:25
  practitioner to come in and help?
• 1:48:27
  Rupert Isaacson: Yeah, I mean both I should imagine because
• 1:48:30
  one predicates the other, no?
• 1:48:32
  Shae Stewart: Yes.
• 1:48:33
  I would, I would say look for a craniosacral practitioner.
• 1:48:38
  You could even Google a human practitioner and see if they work on horses.
• 1:48:47
  And I would even go a little further and say look for a biodynamic
• 1:48:54
  craniosacral practitioner.
• 1:48:56
  A
• 1:48:56
  Rupert Isaacson: biodynamic craniosacral
• 1:49:05
  practitioner.
• 1:49:08
  Okay, so.
• 1:49:09
  What we need to do is go online when you're, not while you're driving your
• 1:49:14
  car, listening to this podcast, but when you've parked your car, go online
• 1:49:19
  and look for a biodynamic craniosacral practitioner somewhere in your hood.
• 1:49:27
  Yes.
• 1:49:29
  Are there a lot of them?
• 1:49:31
  Are they easy
• 1:49:32
  Shae Stewart: to find?
• 1:49:33
  They're probably easier to find in Europe than the U.
• 1:49:38
  S., but there is a school, a biodynamic craniosacral school in the U.
• 1:49:44
  S., so they're becoming more available.
• 1:49:48
  Where is that school?
• 1:49:50
  They're all over.
• 1:49:51
  It's called, of course, I can't remember what it's called, my
• 1:49:54
  human teacher teaches for them.
• 1:49:58
  I can't remember.
• 1:49:59
  It's like biodynamic.
• 1:50:00
  Can we look it up quickly?
• 1:50:03
  Craniosacral of North America.
• 1:50:06
  There's one in the UK.
• 1:50:07
  Michael Kern has one in the UK.
• 1:50:10
  Rupert Isaacson: Michael Kern.
• 1:50:11
  Is that K E R N?
• 1:50:12
  K E R N.
• 1:50:18
  Shae Stewart: There's all kinds of people.
• 1:50:20
  There's actually going to be a Breath of Life conference.
• 1:50:25
  And Colorado in September,
• 1:50:28
  Rupert Isaacson: Breath of Life Conference, Colorado, September.
• 1:50:31
  I'm writing that down.
• 1:50:33
  We're in Colorado.
• 1:50:34
  Shae Stewart: It's in Estes Park.
• 1:50:36
  Okay.
• 1:50:37
  My friend and teacher has a, or had, but it's still out there, a podcast
• 1:50:46
  called the Craniosacral Podcast.
• 1:50:49
  Okay.
• 1:50:50
  And he interviews all the leaders in the industry.
• 1:50:54
  And you can learn a lot about it.
• 1:50:58
  By going on his podcast.
• 1:51:01
  There are a couple.
• 1:51:02
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, go ahead.
• 1:51:03
  Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
• 1:51:05
  Shae Stewart: His name is Ryan Holford and it's called the Craniosacral Podcast.
• 1:51:11
  Rupert Isaacson: The Craniosacral Podcast.
• 1:51:17
  And I've, okay, I found your Breath of Life conference and this is the
• 1:51:22
  Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy Association of North America.
• 1:51:29
  Yes.
• 1:51:29
  Okay.
• 1:51:30
  And then you say, is it Michael Kern, K E R N, in
• 1:51:33
  Shae Stewart: the UK?
• 1:51:34
  K E R N.
• 1:51:34
  He has a school in the UK.
• 1:51:37
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 1:51:38
  And then I suppose if we type that in for other countries, we might find it.
• 1:51:43
  Yeah,
• 1:51:43
  Shae Stewart: if you type in biodynamic craniosacral, you'll find.
• 1:51:48
  Either through the association, there'll be a list of people, or it'll pop up.
• 1:51:55
  Rupert Isaacson: And if this person, if one found this, this let's say I'm
• 1:51:58
  sitting here in Wiesbaden in Germany and let's say I found, I will of course
• 1:52:02
  quickly go Google someone after this podcast is done and probably have
• 1:52:06
  them come out to My Horses and Me.
• 1:52:09
  And then my clients
• 1:52:12
  is somebody, do the people who are doing it on horses need a
• 1:52:16
  special horse training or is it sort of ubiquitous across mammals?
• 1:52:20
  Shae Stewart: It's ubiquitous across mammals.
• 1:52:23
  I've done, cause I, most of my training is human.
• 1:52:27
  There aren't a lot of equine trainers and there's specifically, I mean, there may
• 1:52:32
  be a couple of us focus on biodynamics.
• 1:52:38
  It's, it's a little bit more of a deeper part of craniosacral,
• 1:52:47
  but you can learn it on humans and just think about the orientation of the
• 1:52:56
  bones is different for the different.
• 1:53:00
  I've worked on zoo animals deer chickens.
• 1:53:06
  I've worked in all kinds of animals, dogs, cats, goats, cows.
• 1:53:15
  Rupert Isaacson: You have a very chilled out husband.
• 1:53:19
  Shae Stewart: He's pretty, he's pretty calm.
• 1:53:21
  He's got more, he's, he gets more, has more nervous energy than I do,
• 1:53:27
  but I can calm them down pretty quick.
• 1:53:30
  Rupert Isaacson: So he's got it on tap.
• 1:53:34
  We just, you just adjust his, his frontal lobe.
• 1:53:38
  Shae Stewart: I just start talking slower and I could just see him kind of
• 1:53:45
  Rupert Isaacson: You have a vision of him sitting in a cafe with a beer in his hand.
• 1:53:48
  Yeah.
• 1:53:49
  Under the sunlight of vine leaves or something.
• 1:53:52
  There he is.
• 1:53:53
  Yeah.
• 1:53:54
  Great.
• 1:53:56
  If people want to contact you obviously you have a lot of insights
• 1:54:01
  into this, particularly with horses and, you know, in our world.
• 1:54:05
  The set equine assisted world, we're always looking for that win, win,
• 1:54:08
  win, something that serves the horse, something that serves the client,
• 1:54:10
  something that serves the practitioner.
• 1:54:12
  'cause there's also a lot of burnout.
• 1:54:14
  It's, it's, it's it's not just the horses that, you know, get broken, it's, it's
• 1:54:18
  also the people working in the field.
• 1:54:20
  How do people find you and contact you?
• 1:54:22
  She,
• 1:54:24
  Shae Stewart: I have a website.
• 1:54:25
  It's equine balance.net.
• 1:54:30
  Rupert Isaacson: Equine balance, all one word?
• 1:54:34
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:54:35
  dot net.
• 1:54:36
  Okay.
• 1:54:39
  Shae Stewart: And I do have a Facebook business page, which is the same along
• 1:54:48
  with my name and I try to stay active on that and write up thoughts and things that
• 1:54:59
  people can think about when they're around their horses or just in life in general.
• 1:55:05
  And that's equine balance by Shea Stewart.
• 1:55:11
  Rupert Isaacson: This is on Facebook equine balance.
• 1:55:14
  By Shea, S H E A.
• 1:55:19
  Stuart with a W, Stuart, like the Scottish royal family who were the
• 1:55:29
  Catholic branch of the English royal family of the same name in the 17th
• 1:55:34
  century, who then launched the Catholic rebellions in the 17th and 18th century
• 1:55:40
  against the British crown, who had turned Protestant at that point, and
• 1:55:45
  caused the centralization of Government in England to then regulate the British
• 1:55:53
  Empire it was the Stuarts who kicked out.
• 1:55:56
  Oh, really?
• 1:55:57
  Yeah.
• 1:55:58
  The, and that was the age of enlightenment in in England.
• 1:56:01
  So the, the Stuart dynasty came in after the Tudors the French Scottish, that
• 1:56:06
  was James the first after Elizabeth the first, who was a bit paranoid.
• 1:56:12
  anti witches and he was the guy who sent, he was the guy who sent the, and didn't
• 1:56:15
  like religious extremists, he sent the first religious extremists out on the May,
• 1:56:20
  a vote called the May Flower after putting them in a prison called the Clink Jail
• 1:56:25
  in the South Bank in England, and they thought maybe we should get these guys out
• 1:56:28
  of England and they can go do their stuff to each other and the Native Americans,
• 1:56:32
  so pack them off to the New World.
• 1:56:35
  And so now they're considered to be very blue blooded in America, but
• 1:56:38
  actually they were political agitators.
• 1:56:41
  In in England, and then he was the Protestant line, and that was why
• 1:56:47
  he was allowed to come onto the throne in England because the father
• 1:56:51
  of his predecessor, Elizabeth the first had turned English, England.
• 1:56:57
  Protestant so that he could divorce Catherine of Aragon and try and get a son
• 1:57:00
  with Anne Boleyn, which didn't work, by the way, so we cut Anne Boleyn's head off.
• 1:57:04
  And then, as they did back then, as they did back then, repeatedly and
• 1:57:08
  then the, he died with no male issue.
• 1:57:13
  So that created a problem.
• 1:57:16
  And there were two branches of the Stuart line.
• 1:57:19
  Sorry, I'm wrong.
• 1:57:20
  He did die with male issue and he, and his, his son was Charles the first, but
• 1:57:24
  Charles the first was a secret Catholic and fell foul of parliament and that
• 1:57:29
  then the English civil war happened.
• 1:57:31
  These are the Stuarts and they cut his head off.
• 1:57:34
  We were the first country in Europe to cut the King's head off.
• 1:57:38
  And then we realized that that didn't do us any good.
• 1:57:40
  We just got a different bunch of gangsters in.
• 1:57:42
  So after they had dealt with Oliver Cromwell and his gangsters under a
• 1:57:47
  Republic briefly, we brought back the monarchy under the Stuarts, which was
• 1:57:51
  Charles II, the Merry Monarch, who was the great patron of the arts and sciences
• 1:57:55
  and founded a little thing called the Hudson Bay Company and a little thing
• 1:57:59
  called the East India Company but was also a secret Catholic and a bon vivant,
• 1:58:05
  and he left no legitimate male issue.
• 1:58:08
  So then there were wars, civil wars between the French Scottish Stuarts
• 1:58:14
  and the distant cousins of the Stuarts that the aldermen of the
• 1:58:18
  City of London would bring in to sit on the throne at any one time.
• 1:58:22
  William of Orange And people like that, and all of them failed to have sons,
• 1:58:28
  so eventually they had to bring in some German cousins called the House
• 1:58:32
  of Hanover, and that's the Georgian period, those are the Georgias.
• 1:58:35
  And of course the Stuart line, financed by France, who was always
• 1:58:40
  going to agitate a little bit to make life difficult for England, would
• 1:58:43
  occasionally field once a generation.
• 1:58:47
  a descendant of the original royal line to have a go at the English throne.
• 1:58:51
  And the last one happened in 1745 under Bonnie Prince Charlie, Charles
• 1:58:56
  Stewart, Charles Edward Stewart, who rallied the Scottish clans and they
• 1:59:00
  got within a hundred miles of London.
• 1:59:03
  And that's when the British government said no more.
• 1:59:06
  And they smashed the Scottish clans, cut down all the forests
• 1:59:08
  in the Highlands, sent all the inhabitants out to the Americas.
• 1:59:12
  That's why the Appalachian hillbillies have muck and
• 1:59:16
  then, and Mack in their names.
• 1:59:18
  And versus indentured laborers.
• 1:59:20
  And then they went and ran hogs in the, in the, in the appellations.
• 1:59:24
  And if they were lucky, that's what happened to them, they
• 1:59:26
  weren't hanged or unaccorded.
• 1:59:28
  And they created the patchwork countryside that we see today in the British
• 1:59:32
  countryside of hedgerows to create a landowning, taxpaying middle class that
• 1:59:38
  was loyal to the crown that, unlike those pesky aristocrats with private armies
• 1:59:43
  that would occasionally get drunk and decide to have a crack at the crown.
• 1:59:47
  And so there you are, Shea Stewart, that's your history.
• 1:59:51
  By the Cherokees, who of course met.
• 1:59:54
  Well, because they, of course, met those Scots Irish emigres who were thrown
• 1:59:59
  out there by the British when they were tramping up and down the Appalachians
• 2:00:02
  and they encountered people like the Cherokees and the Lumbees and the
• 2:00:05
  Iroquois and intermarried with them.
• 2:00:08
  Shae Stewart: You're amazing.
• 2:00:09
  It's like walking
• 2:00:10
  Rupert Isaacson: history book.
• 2:00:11
  It's just my shtick.
• 2:00:12
  I like history.
• 2:00:14
  There's many things I don't know.
• 2:00:15
  I just happen to know that small thing.
• 2:00:19
  It's my cerebral spinal fluid at work.
• 2:00:22
  Shae Stewart: It must have a really good flow.
• 2:00:26
  Rupert Isaacson: Well, I guess like anyone, when it's interested in
• 2:00:27
  something, it sort of perks up a bit.
• 2:00:30
  Yeah.
• 2:00:31
  Including...
• 2:00:34
  I find the whole subject of cerebral spinal fluid fascinating, and the
• 2:00:38
  further I go into it, the more I do see that does indeed seem that the mystic
• 2:00:46
  core of all religions in the world seem to deal with Thank you very much.
• 2:00:51
  Allegories around this process of cerebral spinal fluid and the middle ventricle
• 2:00:55
  of the brain and the pineal gland and the interplay between the pineal and the
• 2:00:59
  pituitary gland and so on and so forth.
• 2:01:02
  And I really would encourage listeners to dive down that rabbit hole
• 2:01:07
  because it informs daily life in a really interesting way because daily
• 2:01:11
  life is the rhythms of one's body.
• 2:01:12
  I mean, what else can it be really?
• 2:01:14
  And therefore the rhythm of our horses bodies.
• 2:01:17
  And it makes it all a bit more interesting than just saying
• 2:01:21
  he's got stiffness in the stifle.
• 2:01:25
  Yes.
• 2:01:25
  I love your approach of saying, well, yes, he does have a stiffness in the siphon.
• 2:01:31
  And yes, we can look at things that will ameliorate that on a, on a
• 2:01:37
  muscular and even fascial viewpoint.
• 2:01:43
  But I love the idea that you have, that you're talking about of going deeper than
• 2:01:47
  that and saying, ah, but if those joints and those fascia themselves are being
• 2:01:52
  governed by a flow of effectively liquid.
• 2:01:57
  Within the body, which we're all composed of, which we know we're composed of.
• 2:02:00
  We know we're all mostly water.
• 2:02:02
  And then if we can get that flow, right, then a lot of those things
• 2:02:05
  are going to fix themselves.
• 2:02:07
  I mean, that does make sense because if the, if, if the fluids
• 2:02:11
  around my stiff leg from that.
• 2:02:16
  Wrench that it got back in 2018 are held in a liquid that is not blocked,
• 2:02:24
  then it's going to ease that stiffness.
• 2:02:26
  And that does make sense to me.
• 2:02:27
  It makes absolute sense to me.
• 2:02:29
  But I've seen it at work.
• 2:02:31
  I've seen good cerebral craniosacral people at work, and that's why I was.
• 2:02:37
  Wanting to get you on here.
• 2:02:38
  Because I think with with we horse people, we we've been looking at things from a
• 2:02:44
  sort of anatomical veterinary viewpoint for a long time, which while useful
• 2:02:53
  and helpful is not the whole picture.
• 2:02:56
  And there are other other forces at work.
• 2:03:00
  And what's interesting too is, as you say, that the people that
• 2:03:03
  came up with this were doctors.
• 2:03:06
  And a lot of the best vets I know look very closely at the stuff that
• 2:03:11
  you're talking about because with their knowledge of anatomy and physiology,
• 2:03:19
  they're not coming at it with prejudice.
• 2:03:22
  They're coming at it from a practical viewpoint.
• 2:03:25
  So if people go to equinebalance.
• 2:03:28
  net Or they go on Facebook and they see equine balance by Shea Stewart, not the
• 2:03:34
  Shea Stewart that challenged the British crown, but the Shea Stewart that's
• 2:03:37
  going to make your horse feel better.
• 2:03:39
  So that your horse will then be able to cavalry charge the British better
• 2:03:42
  and knock those red coats over.
• 2:03:45
  What would be, we've now gone about the length of a podcast.
• 2:03:51
  There are more things I would like to ask you, particularly about the
• 2:03:56
  psychic spiritual side of it all.
• 2:03:59
  And I'm sure that a lot of the listeners will have questions, I'm going to
• 2:04:05
  encourage those listeners and by all means send your questions direct to Shay
• 2:04:09
  because you'll find her on that website.
• 2:04:11
  But if you also direct questions to me, then I can collect those
• 2:04:15
  questions, and we can have her back on.
• 2:04:19
  Would you?
• 2:04:19
  Shae Stewart: There, there are so much more we could talk about how horses
• 2:04:26
  hold human trauma or human issues.
• 2:04:32
  Yeah, there's so much more
• 2:04:33
  Rupert Isaacson: we definitely we definitely have to have that one that
• 2:04:37
  sounds like two hours right there Yes.
• 2:04:40
  All right, then.
• 2:04:42
  I'm officially asking you.
• 2:04:43
  Would you please come back and talk about?
• 2:04:45
  Okay,
• 2:04:46
  Shae Stewart: I could talk about this stuff all day every day.
• 2:04:50
  And so I'm always happy when there's someone interested
• 2:04:53
  Rupert Isaacson: How do horses hold human trauma?
• 2:04:58
  And what can we do about it?
• 2:05:03
  Okay, we need to know.
• 2:05:08
  In that case, would you, would you consent to come on sometime
• 2:05:11
  again in the next three months?
• 2:05:12
  Because I'm now Absolutely.
• 2:05:15
  Yeah.
• 2:05:16
  Yeah.
• 2:05:17
  Alright, so let's just ask the listeners quickly.
• 2:05:19
  Hey listeners, do you want to learn how horses hold human trauma?
• 2:05:24
  What we can do about it.
• 2:05:25
  Whoa.
• 2:05:26
  That was like deafening.
• 2:05:28
  Yeah, I've
• 2:05:29
  Shae Stewart: heard that.
• 2:05:31
  Yeah.
• 2:05:33
  We could talk about how things are held in other, you know, I, I, I can
• 2:05:38
  talk about experiences I've had with receiving craniosacral and things
• 2:05:43
  I went in that I thought I was.
• 2:05:45
  Helping, and it ended up being from something completely different.
• 2:05:50
  We can talk about psychic, spiritual stuff, visions of, of all kinds of
• 2:05:58
  stuff that there's all kinds of stories
• 2:06:02
  Rupert Isaacson: around that.
• 2:06:04
  Okay, we'll go firmly into the woo.
• 2:06:07
  Okay.
• 2:06:08
  Yeah, definitely.
• 2:06:09
  All right.
• 2:06:09
  It's official.
• 2:06:10
  I'd like to do it before Christmas if possible.
• 2:06:12
  Can we?
• 2:06:13
  Yeah, you're busy.
• 2:06:14
  Shae Stewart: Yeah, I can always find time somewhere.
• 2:06:18
  So yes.
• 2:06:19
  Rupert Isaacson: Grand.
• 2:06:21
  All right.
• 2:06:21
  Well, I shall look forward to it.
• 2:06:23
  Shay, thank you so much for this.
• 2:06:25
  Massively enlightening.
• 2:06:27
  I'm going to go and consider my horses.
• 2:06:30
  Cranial sacral fluid.
• 2:06:32
  And I'm going to look for a practitioner and I'm going to see if I can coax
• 2:06:35
  you out to help me a little bit.
• 2:06:39
  Cause I know you come back and forth from Europe a little bit.
• 2:06:42
  I'm grateful.
• 2:06:42
  Thank you very much for coming on.
• 2:06:44
  I'm, I'm
• 2:06:45
  Shae Stewart: grateful.
• 2:06:45
  This was such a joy and such a treat and such an honor as well.
• 2:06:50
  So I really appreciate your interest in asking me and this.
• 2:06:57
  Thank you.
• 2:06:58
  Rupert Isaacson: This was great.
• 2:06:59
  I'm sure we all feel honored too.
• 2:07:02
  So round two will be within about probably 10 weeks or so chaps.
• 2:07:07
  So, buckle up.
• 2:07:09
  We'll go into how horses hold human trauma because how can they
• 2:07:19
  not?
• 2:07:19
  How can they not know what we can do about it?
• 2:07:22
  Because that's our Yeah.
• 2:07:25
  The better my horses feel, the better they can help others.
• 2:07:29
  Yes.
• 2:07:30
  And to do that in a way without guilt and shame, I mean, that, that, that's
• 2:07:33
  something that I found, you know, off putting sometimes when talking to
• 2:07:38
  people that are or claim to be animal communicators, where, where I'm skeptical
• 2:07:44
  of the human, not, not of the fact that people can communicate with animals.
• 2:07:48
  I think that people absolutely can, but I'm not sure that
• 2:07:51
  everyone who says they can can.
• 2:07:52
  And the, the, the people who say they can, and there's that,
• 2:07:56
  there's that slight note of.
• 2:07:59
  And it's because you suck.
• 2:08:01
  Smacks of manipulation to me because it's one of those things
• 2:08:05
  that it's, it's intangible.
• 2:08:06
  You can't prove it.
• 2:08:07
  You can't, you know, so you, what one could use that in a manipulative way.
• 2:08:13
  If I wasn't coming from a pure place that said, I've also seen shamans in the
• 2:08:18
  Kalahari turn themselves into leopards.
• 2:08:20
  We can talk about that.
• 2:08:21
  You know, and what, what that, so it's not that it can't happen.
• 2:08:25
  But what they would say the animal is saying is usually got nothing to do
• 2:08:31
  with something a human is doing wrong.
• 2:08:34
  You know, it's, it's a bigger picture than that.
• 2:08:36
  Yeah.
• 2:08:36
  Yeah,
• 2:08:37
  Shae Stewart: it is a much bigger picture.
• 2:08:39
  And 1 thing everyone can could go out and do today is take some time,
• 2:08:47
  get out of your thinking brain, get into your heart space and put your
• 2:08:52
  hand on your heart on your horse and just expand your heart space.
• 2:08:57
  And watch and see what
• 2:08:58
  Rupert Isaacson: happens.
• 2:09:03
  I'm going to do that tomorrow.
• 2:09:08
  Anywhere on the horse is good?
• 2:09:10
  Anywhere they accept the touch?
• 2:09:12
  Yep,
• 2:09:12
  Shae Stewart: wherever they're comfortable.
• 2:09:16
  Okay.
• 2:09:16
  I tend to, I, I like in the back on their pelvis, you can touch them there.
• 2:09:24
  That way you're not zeroed in too much on their head.
• 2:09:28
  Hmm.
• 2:09:30
  We, we narrow our focus too much on things and that can, that can feel like
• 2:09:34
  Rupert Isaacson: pressure.
• 2:09:35
  Well, sure.
• 2:09:36
  It's what predators do.
• 2:09:36
  It's what we do before we make our pounce and kill.
• 2:09:39
  Yeah.
• 2:09:39
  Shae Stewart: Yeah.
• 2:09:41
  I feel it when I get craniosacral by someone who doesn't know how to read the
• 2:09:47
  system or expand out, I can leave with a headache if they're too focused in on
• 2:09:53
  the bone that they have their hand on.
• 2:09:55
  Okay.
• 2:09:56
  I don't like it.
• 2:09:57
  It's too much pressure.
• 2:09:59
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay, do you tell them?
• 2:10:01
  Do you communicate that?
• 2:10:04
  Shae Stewart: It depends.
• 2:10:05
  I, I don't usually go to those, those anymore.
• 2:10:08
  I don't, I kind of, the last one I went to, I had the feeling if I said that,
• 2:10:14
  I don't know if she would know what I was talking about, like, if I said,
• 2:10:19
  stop thinking about my sphenoid bone, expand out to the horizon somewhere.
• 2:10:26
  I don't know if that would make sense.
• 2:10:31
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:10:31
  So that's what we're going to do.
• 2:10:33
  Listeners, we're going to go to our horses tomorrow, but I'll hand on in
• 2:10:38
  a place that's not too monkey fixated.
• 2:10:44
  So maybe we'll avoid the head.
• 2:10:47
  And as Shay says, suggests, perhaps we'll look for the...
• 2:10:52
  Somewhere around the sacrum, if that seems okay to the horse, and then
• 2:10:56
  we're going to expand out, right?
• 2:10:58
  Expand
• 2:10:59
  Shae Stewart: out.
• 2:10:59
  Don't leave.
• 2:11:01
  Expand out from your heart.
• 2:11:03
  Expand out from your...
• 2:11:04
  Stay connected to your heart and expand out.
• 2:11:08
  You don't even have to think about the horse.
• 2:11:10
  Just think about that
• 2:11:12
  Rupert Isaacson: space.
• 2:11:14
  Okay.
• 2:11:16
  Just expand out from the heart while happening to have a hand on a horse.
• 2:11:21
  Yes.
• 2:11:22
  Okay.
• 2:11:23
  And,
• 2:11:24
  Shae Stewart: Tell me what happened.
• 2:11:27
  I will.
• 2:11:28
  Yeah, and anyone out there send me a note at tell me what happened.
• 2:11:32
  I like to hear.
• 2:11:34
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:11:35
  What should they send you a note on?
• 2:11:37
  What's the email address?
• 2:11:40
  Oh,
• 2:11:40
  Shae Stewart: Shea, S H E A at equine balance.
• 2:11:46
  net.
• 2:11:46
  Shea equine balance.
• 2:11:47
  net.
• 2:11:50
  Rupert Isaacson: Okay.
• 2:11:52
  Go put your hand on your horse in not too focused a monkey intensity
• 2:11:57
  way, check in with the heart and then without making it too intellectual.
• 2:12:05
  expand out a bit and see what happens.
• 2:12:10
  Yeah.
• 2:12:10
  Okay.
• 2:12:11
  And then the horse responds.
• 2:12:13
  The horse responds.
• 2:12:14
  Okay.
• 2:12:16
  That sounds like a good starting point.
• 2:12:20
  Thank you.
• 2:12:23
  Thank you.
• 2:12:24
  All right.
• 2:12:25
  It's, this is a very difficult podcast to press the end button on.
• 2:12:29
  So let's think of it like a pause button.
• 2:12:31
  The next one.
• 2:12:33
  Because I could, I could keep going all night.
• 2:12:36
  I know.
• 2:12:36
  Shae Stewart: I know.
• 2:12:37
  I
• 2:12:37
  Rupert Isaacson: could too.
• 2:12:39
  But there's a lot to think about.
• 2:12:40
  I'm going to go walk the dogs now and think about this.
• 2:12:43
  So you give me lots to think about.
• 2:12:45
  Shae Stewart: Good.
• 2:12:46
  Yeah.
• 2:12:46
  And then we'll have more to talk about.
• 2:12:49
  Rupert Isaacson: Oh, well, all right.
• 2:12:50
  Well, until then, sounds good.
• 2:12:55
  Try and stay out of the heat.
• 2:12:56
  I know how hard it is over there in Texas.
• 2:12:58
  Shae Stewart: Yeah.
• 2:12:58
  I don't even want to go outside.
• 2:13:00
  I
• 2:13:00
  Rupert Isaacson: bet you don't.
• 2:13:02
  I used to live there.
• 2:13:02
  I know.
• 2:13:04
  All right.
• 2:13:05
  Yeah.
• 2:13:06
  Have a beautiful rest of the day.
• 2:13:08
  Bye.
• 2:13:09
  Bye.
• 2:13:09
  thank you for joining us.
• 2:13:11
  We hope you enjoyed today's podcast.
• 2:13:13
  Join our website, new trails learning.com, to check out our online
• 2:13:18
  courses and live workshops in Horse Boy Method, movement Method, and Athena.
• 2:13:24
  These evidence-based programs have helped children, veterans, and people
• 2:13:28
  dealing with trauma around the world.
• 2:13:31
  We also offer a horse training program and self-care program
• 2:13:34
  for riders on long ride home.com.
• 2:13:38
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• 2:13:42
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• 2:13:44
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• 2:13:49
  See you on the next show.
• 2:13:51
  And please remember to press, subscribe and share.