I'm Judith, and this is the Starline Equine Bodywork podcast. This is a podcast about all of the things that I've learned and continue to learn in my career with horses. For the better part of a decade, I've been a full time equine bodywork practitioner, educator, and author. My obsession how horses really work and how to get the most from our relationship with them in training and in sport. My passion helping horse owners and body workers and aspiring body workers get going.
Unpack the latest science, research and experiences behind what we do with horses to support their potential and optimize their performance. When you've had body workers out working on your horse, you may have heard terms like integration, pause and processing. So, what this is, is terms that are used by body workers in a whole bunch of different modalities to recognize what it is that's happening in the moment.
So, you know, the horses processing refers to moments where the practitioner pauses to allow that horse time, time to respond and assimilate to the effects of body work. Now, these pauses are absolutely critical in so many modalities, whether it be bone based work, massage, cranio sacral therapy, or in our Starline method, we use them as well as they support the horses natural ability. It's body's natural ability to adapt and to heal.
So I want it to take a little time in this episode to explain the difference between integration and processing, and why this matters. Now, processing refers to the immediate physiological and neurological responses that occur in the horse's body as it reacts to the body work stimulus. This involves the nervous system interpreting and responding to the sensory input from your touch. As a practitioner, or some type of manipulation on the body.
Now, during body work, whether it be massage or even some kinds of stretching, the practitioner stimulates sensory receptors in the skin, the muscles or the fascia. And these signals are going to travel via that peripheral nervous system to the brain or spinal cord. And it triggers responses like muscle relaxation, changes in heart rate, or an actual release of tension. For example, in a horse you might see physical signs like licking, chewing, yawning, lowered head.
All of these things are indicating that the autonomic nervous system, specifically that parasympathetic branch, is activating and promoting relaxation. So if you guys were paying attention in grade 12 biology class, these are concepts that stem from the nervous system. The somatic nervous system processes sensory input from touch, while the autonomic nervous system regulates those involuntary responses like heart rate, or even muscle tone.
And processing is the body's real time reaction to these stimuli. Often they are subconscious and completely immediate, and practitioners rely on that, and they use it to their advantage. Really skilled body workers use that tissue tone change that's immediate to their advanced age. Now, integration refers to a longer term process where the body and the nervous system consolidate. These changes that are initiated during body work, adapting to, a new sensory or a new physical state.
And it's about incorporate ING the effects of a session into the body's overall functioning. So after processing that immediate sensory input, the body begins to adjust its neuromuscular patterns, its posture, and even its emotional state.
So, for example, a horse might react, calibrate its movement patterns after a session that released tense or tight muscles or, it might give them a sense of calm as that nervous system stabilizes and integration involves neuroplasticity, and this is the brain's ability to form new neural connection. And the body's homeostatic mechanisms are working to maintain balance.
The brain and the body adapt to changes from bodywork, potentially forming new muscle memory or reducing chronic tension patterns. And so this is why there's a difference between the short term and the long term. Every body is going to respond slightly different. So in practice these terms can kind of overlap as processing often leads to into leads into an integration during that pause between bodywork moves or touches or stimuli.
So for example, if a horse is processing they're licking their chewing during a pause. It may kind of be signaling the start of an integration as something in the nervous system is actually adjusting pauses and bodywork. These integration pauses are deliberate brakes, and it's where the practitioner is going to stop any active manipulation and allow that horse's body to process and integrate the work. This provides the horse, a chance for their nervous system to, to regulate.
And body work is going to be, of course, stimulating all of these sensory neurons in the skin and the muscles in the connective tissue, that fascia sending signals to the brain. And a pause allows that nervous system to process these signals without overloading or, overstimulating the body. For example, constant touch could over activate the sympathetic nervous system that fight or flight response, while a pause can promote a parasympathetic response or a rest and digest response.
Fostering relaxation. So in horses, those relaxation signs like licking and chewing during a pause indicate that that parasympathetic system is engaged, reducing stress hormones like cortisol. And we all know how important that is to down regulate those stress hormones in our horses. The other thing that happens is it begins to facilitate neuroplasticity. So these pauses are giving the brain time to form new neural pathways. So this is the process. That's called neuroplasticity.
So for instance, if body work is releasing tension in a tense or tight muscle, the pause allows the brain to kind of remap how it controls that muscle, which potentially improves movement and posture. And without the pause, the brain may not fully, adapt and it may not adopt to this new sensory input. Pauses also, support homeostasis.
So the body is always striving to maintain this balance of its internal systems, like muscle tension, like heart rate and the pause pauses allow the body to recalibrate after the changes are induced by body work. For example, releasing tension in a muscle, in a horse's, let's say, shoulder may shift its posture, and the pause helps the body adjust to this new alignment without triggering any compensation or compensatory tension elsewhere as a reflex kind of response.
Now, pauses are very important to prevent sensory overload. Continuous stimulation can actually overwhelm the horse's nervous system, and this will reduce the effectiveness of a session.
I think it's really funny when I'm working on horses, and if the owner isn't there and I have it on the cross ties and I stand back and I give it a pass, what is hilarious to me is the number of clients who have told me that well-meaning friends, barn family, other boarders have texted them and said, there's this woman standing with your horse on the cross ties just staring at, are you paying her to do that? Because she's not actually touching the horse?
Because they've caught me in one of these pauses. But the pauses give the horse time to catch up, right. It's allowing, it to catch up with all that new sensory input from my manual inputs of my body work sessions, ensuring that the body can respond effectively and this is especially important in animals like horses, which may show stress behaviors like pawing or head tossing when they're overstimulated. So we have to give them a chance to recalibrate and stop them from feeling that overload.
Now, pauses also enhance emotional and physical connection in animals. Pauses like horses, pauses allow for emotional processing as the autonomic nervous system will regulate their stress. So when a horse is processing during a pause, it may release some emotional tension shown through behaviors like a deep sigh or a yawn in human pauses. Help, integrate emotional responses in body work. Just as they do in in horses, and it's often really tied to, emotional triggers in humans.
So we can extrapolate that horses probably have the same thing. They just show it a little differently. The phrase the horse is processing is commonly used in equine body work because the horse is displaying some kind of clear physical sign responding to the touch. So there's a ton of different things that they do. It can be anything from small twitches in their lips to a deepening of their breath, a lowering of their head licking, yawning, chewing.
And all of these behaviors indicate that the horse's nervous system is actually processing the sensory input and shifting towards a relaxed state. These pauses allow the horse to fully experience and integrate changes, ensuring that the body work has a very long lasting effect, like improved movement or reduced stress. So remember, pauses are very important. That is where the magic happens.
So that immediate processing can turn into that longer term integration and adaptation, where the horse's body incorporates these changes and becomes a better version of itself.