Riders.
R
2 44.
Good boy.
Good
boy.
This is very good boy.
Yeah,
you're a good boy. Yes, you are.
Yeah,
Winston Churchill is known for having said
there's something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.
Horses can't tell if a person is in a wheelchair.
They don't understand if a person is autistic or they have a traumatic brain injury.
The horses just except everybody for who they are
horseback riding,
for people with disabilities got a real inspiration in
the 19 fifties when a woman named Liz Hartel,
who had polio rode in the Olympics
in those Olympics, men and women are all together.
So she was the second best of all the other riders
and she rode in a wheelchair.
There's something about
touching a horse
and it actually, and it touches my heart.
You know,
it's a way to connect. It's a way to bond.
I'm not
a boy. I
just,
the time you spend in the barn with your horse
is your opportunity to bond with your animal and to,
and to just think a little bit more about the horse.
It's not a machine like a bicycle.
You don't get on it and run and then get off and drop it.
I think it's healing for people
to spend time putting their hands on an animal that's got some sense
and watch their ears and watch how they are in the barn.
Uh, it's important to develop that relationship before you get on.
I
think the other thing that's offered when you're out of a wheelchair and on a
horse is the extraordinary mobility to go
anywhere through the woods across the fields,
you're not confined to a cement pad that a wheelchair would be confined to.
You would be going through the woods and the streams and the valleys and up
on top of the hills and somebody in a wheelchair doesn't get that ability.
But on a horse or a pony cart, you can go wherever your little heart desires.
Christine had a difficult time at birth. She suffered from a loss of oxygen
that would now be considered cerebral palsy.
She's been doing this for two years.
Her co ordination, her walking is so much better.
I think that she likes riding on top of the horses and feeling
their fluidity and she kind of carries that through once she gets off,
they also have her do obstacle paths and walk all around,
which helps with her balance.
The
part
of
we have had students who've come who have disabilities that make
it very difficult for them to walk or maintain balance.
And there is no machine in a gym that can give you what that horse can give you,
which is the movement most similar to the human walk.
When the horse is moving,
you're actually moving forward and back up and down and side to side all at once,
all three dimensions.
And that's similar to the neuromuscular pathway stimulation. When you walk,
when you walk and swing your arms and move your hip side to side,
that same three dimensional movement occurs
what we do going uphill, right?
We gotta lean forward, get off his back and help him off
her gait in walking her equilibrium, her co ordination,
that's all improved in the last two years.
She looks forward to coming here every week.
So to me that improves her quality of life,
whatever
just say up, down, up, down your head,
wait till the next long side. OK.
I've been riding horses since I was about 18 months old. I'm
almost 24 years old.
I have cerebral palsy and I also have Asperger's syndrome.
When I started riding. I didn't have any muscle tone at all.
My father described it as being a rag doll
and
the exercises that I did on the horse.
They helped me develop muscle tone in my back so that I could sit up.
I just kept developing strength until
I was three. That's when I had surgery on my spinal cord
to allow me to walk. And Pegasus further strengthen
my walking once I started walking
and now look like very much.
Yeah,
in between red and blue. Straight to that co
riders tell us that there's an extreme feeling of
freedom and independence when they're on the horse,
there's a bond with the horse. There's a feeling of not being judged
that they can or cannot do something.
And this is very important for everyone with a disability.
Joshua slowly lost his vision over a period of years after an illness,
a viral illness he had
when he was 12
and he has some other neurologic problems.
The occupational and physical therapists encouraged him to try this out.
It was a little scary thinking about it, but he finally got up the courage to do it
and loved it
and it's almost flying when he's cantering on the horse
and it looks like so much fun to me.
It's great.
The work that I do is all done on the ground. There's no riding the horses at all
and the horses are at liberty, which means they have no bit, they have no bridle,
they are allowed to go wherever they want to go and respond to the people.
However, they want to respond
to me. It all has to work together.
Me as the facilitator, it has to work for the horse and it has to work for the human.
We're all in this together.
My first session with Pam.
I
walked into the arena and I was really afraid, afraid of the horse.
Am I doing it right?
You're doing it right. Girl,
since they are prey animals in the wild horses, innate
ability is to detect danger from
quite a ways away.
So how that helps humans is that they respond to our energies.
So what the horse does for us then is to mirror
exactly the energy that we're exuding.
So it's really, they help peel away the layers
to get you back down to who your true authentic self is.
Have
a
and it has a brown leather strap at the top.
And if he got stuck somewhere and pull
that trap will break.
So that's why the weather part was up at the top.
When I was 18,
I had what most people would call a nervous breakdown.
It was an event that led me to a hospitalization
and uh it took me a long time to recover. I barely graduated
high school that year.
Well, you look so beautiful potter.
I was diagnosed bipolar.
I couldn't think clearly. I couldn't relate to others
in ways that would make sense to most people.
I learned over time that the diagnosis of bipolar
is not tied to my identity. It actually has to do with fear.
So
if I don't get over that fear, I'll be stuck.
It's normal for anybody including myself when I first encountered a horse to
feel a certain degree of anxiety around this five or £600 animal.
But in the case of somebody that has difficulty dealing
with anxiety much more than most of us typically experience.
You
can do
it for them to have that anxiety arise with the horse
presents a special opportunity.
And if they can actually
experience a fulfilling relationship and have fun with the horse,
then their confidence level goes up,
their ability to deal with anxiety in other situations goes up.
So
it has an all around valuable quality to it that I like
him. Give
him a little
bit more rope for his head
because
I knew nothing about horses before I came to all riders up.
I didn't know how to look at the visual cues on the horse
when the horse has its ears pinned back,
that's annoyed. And I learned that so I can read the horse
and over time that alleviates the fears made it he's happy.
I guess
I
yeah,
horses, they're brilliant mirrors to the inside of the individual.
They learn very quickly if that person is a kind
person or an angry person or an afraid person.
And if somebody is afraid the horse will be
nervous about going forward. And if a person is confident
and happy that will be reflected in the horse.
So I always tell the kids you can't pretend that you're confident
because the horse will let me know if you are or you aren't
look at the camera man,
man,
she has what we call Asperger's and
I really enjoy her riding horses because it
gets her outside and removes her from electronics.
She uses her
muscles and
her balance.
Do
it again.
I find it easier to homeschool Katie. On the days of her riding lessons,
she has a tendency to have her a DH D moments
where her focus can be all over the place and she's easily
distracted by other things.
And on the days that she has her riding lessons, she seems to stay more on track.
If she does straight, it's
considerably easier to bring her back.
I ride horses every Thursday
and
they get that behind and say, good boy, when you're up high,
like a,
like a big person,
like a big person.
Yeah.
When we first started with this,
a lot of people felt that horseback riding was too high.
A risk for people who had disabilities.
They could only see what might happen if things went wrong.
I've been riding horses for 28 years and I'm basically blind.
I like it because it gets me out of the house and
it gave me something to do something new to try.
Right.
Ring
and
get right ring pull. Right. Good job. There you go. Josh.
Awesome.
It just seemed like a good activity for somebody with limited vision
to give them the chance to, for movement and, and, uh,
speed.
Do we want to try
can with her today?
Ok. Hold the mane with your left hand,
sit your trot, be tall, lean back and can her good,
Josh. That's amazing. He's got beautiful posture on a horse
and as he lost his vision,
his riding improved.
It's been quite extraordinary and we will go out on a trail ride.
And the only thing I have to remind him of is Josh Duck because there's a tree
right.
There is a certain risk to, to riding.
Josh has taken two or three
spills.
But, uh, I feel confident, you know, because they prepare him for
the, the, the level of riding that they ask him to do
safety precautions and experience and all that
and then
he
can
come
off.
There is certainly some risk in virtually any
physical activity and horseback riding is not exempt.
But I think it's a risk that we're going to take for an enjoyable life
good
and I'm
gonna leave
you.
Ok.
Thank you.
I just like the
freedom of writing.
You wanted to be an independent writer.
And every time you had the reins in your hands,
the horse would bob his head up and down.
The reins can be pulled out of your hands
and
that didn't work.
So he came up on his own with the idea of making these flints.
Ok. Are you ready? Yes.
So that it would hold his hand in the proper position
and he would hang on to the reins
so that he can guide the horse
otherwise he couldn't be an independent rider.
This
is
beautiful
that
yay.
Yeah.
So then at
the end of the session,
I felt my heart really breaking from
the loss of my daughter
and I, I
just took my record heart and I walked with that horse just went boom, boom, boom,
boom.
And I walked with him the whole way around.
I didn't look
better
good.
It doesn't matter whether you're grieving,
whether you're an athlete, whether you're disabled,
if you can connect
to the power of who you really are,
then that's what really helps you with self esteem and being
able to handle issues that come along in your life.
They're
such a, a quiet, strong energy.
That's the way I feel about them. They're just so powerful
and yet so gentle.
That's what really draws me.
I
think people in a wheelchair,
you're always looking at people's belts
or holding your head up, looking up at people all the time
when you're on the horses.
Somebody that was disabled is now on the same level as an able-bodied rider
seeing things the same way from the same angle.
Maybe for the first time,
we have a lot of kids that come to us that are non verbal but very quietly,
they'll start talking to their ponies.
And before you know it, they're talking to their instructor,
we had a child with autism who never spoke at home.
And after three lessons,
he went home and had his first dinner conversation with his parents.
That's another hallelujah story.
Every day. We have one
on
horseback riding. Really opened up my whole world because once I was able to
start
moving, I
could progress to walking.
So without starting at Pegasus, I don't know where I would be today.