Category: Equestrian – Life Skills Articles

Bringing Lee Home

Catherine Louise BirminghamLeave a comment

Some of you will already know my horse, Soul mate and friend over the last 16 years – Lee (Llanavar Lieber) He walked into my life with a student. I had just returned to Australia because my father was sick with cancer. A lady rang me to ask if I could help her daughter with their new horse. Her words were ‘We just bought a young warmblood from the stud and I think we need some help.’ Annette and her daughter Jessica have to this day become people I trust and know. Lee always brings together the people that need to know each other, just as his soul brother Mr William did! I remember the very first time I walked into the indoor and saw him being ridden around with Jess, I felt love at first sight for the first time in my life and never have since. I had seen a lot of horses by this time and some very well bred, trained and cared for ones but when I saw Lee I saw his light. I had never reacted the same way as I did when meeting Lee until then or ever again. 

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How and Why Horses are Helping Us Raise our Consciousness

For professionals within the Equestrian industry, you are leading the way and providing examples of change. Please do not passively pass the niggling feeling that the work you are doing and how you are doing it is no longer fulfilling, that is your Soul and the horses you work with speaking directly to you.

Catherine Louise Birmingham2 Comments

Here is a very important interview I did recently with Julie Saillant. Julie asks the important questions about horses being in our lives and their work of raising our consciousness. It is such a powerful time of change and growth for everything on this planet right now and I hope I can provide some answers here to those that are wanting to move out of the old ways and become aligned with higher vibrating newer ways of existing together with horses and this world.

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Boundaries – The Way of Self Love

Catherine Louise Birmingham3 Comments

In the first article about Self Love – The Way of Self Love, I mentioned that having boundaries is a powerful part of creating self-love and I will write another article specifically on boundaries with their importance and how to set them.

Together with Jillian at a clinic where I once helped her. She eventually helped me!

I once went to a friend of mine, Jillian Drew, who had begun doing healing sessions with her horses (Equevoke). I wasn’t really sure what to expect, I worked with horses daily and thought that if they had anything to help or guide me on in healing my past abusive relationships, they would have done by now. I knew her horses well as I had been coaching her Dressage for some time already. But this day turned out to be very different than I had imagined. I wanted to heal my past and break the cycle of attracting abusive men.
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Letting Go

Catherine Louise BirminghamLeave a comment

Catherine with Utopia and Lee ’18’

Sometimes in life, we just need to breathe and let go…..

The need to hang onto the reins and to control things, is just another way of us trying to find security in what we are doing and what is happening in our lives. It’s when that sneaking inner anxiety and fear about the future is slowly making it’s presence known but you are not aware of it yet. The tension and stress that you may not even notice in you, slowly starts to come to life. You start to notice that you are controlling everything around you and that you are hanging on to the reins.
Unfortunately in riding and in life, if what we are doing is an action driven by fear, it only produces more fear in the horse. This is where no matter what we do, we keep sending signals of insecurity, control and tension and this keeps bringing back to the same response to us from the horse.
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Horses don’t have problems – People do.

Catherine Louise Birmingham3 Comments

Working with the Andalusian Stallion, Gato, in Jakarta, Indoneisa ’14’

I have been working for a while now as a Dressage rider and coach. I went from learning how to ride bareback, no bridle, no helmet and on my own as a young child, to working with animal behaviorist, Andrew Maclean, to living and working/riding under old school Classical Dressage trainers in Germany, to owning my own stables in Australia. I have since been head coach for stables in Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and recently in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Throughout all those years, working with all these different horses – young to Grand Prix, Show Jumping, hobby riders, to Western riders, beginners and professionals, different religions, cultures and even in different languages – there is one thing I came to realise;

Horses don’t have problems, people do.

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Owning Your Fear

Catherine Louise BirminghamLeave a comment

How do we take control of fear and not let it take control of us?

Fear is not always that we are afraid of heights, dogs or snakes. With so many of us now taking on our own companies and businesses, it can be the fear of opening the post. Of reading an email from a complaining client. Not making the months bills or losing your clients. Sometimes the fear of being afraid can override the thing you actually are afraid of!

You cannot help a situation when you are living in fear of it.

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The hardest and best years of living and working with horses in Germany

Catherine Louise Birmingham2 Comments

Josef and Doris Freese

For a long time now I have been wanting a way to share with you all a very great man who is not overly well known but deserves the same focus and spotlight as everyone else.

A man who taught me not only the patient building blocks of a Dressage horse and rider but the encouragement and dedication it takes to be a teacher of horses and riders.

He always went above and beyond to teach me as much as he could during the time I worked as a part of the Freese team.
‘Geht nicht, Gibt’s nicht’ was the stable motto – There’s no such thing as I can’t.
He gave me confidence in my abilities and helped me believe in myself as a trainer. He saw me at my best and at my worst – in character and in riding. He never judged me or held me back.

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Riding – with or without a helmet?

Catherine Louise Birmingham12 Comments

ab5de5a9-1d8d-4b21-ba72-161974b9f07c-originalRiding is one of the only sports that develop areas of the brain that connect with intuition, awareness, instinct and feel. When you rely upon forms of interference within your own body as well as the horse’s body, you cut off this ability to intuit what is happening. You cut off the most powerful form of growth available to us with horses – awareness.

Today we have a never ending supply of tools that are not only taught to us by our trusted trainers but in many places they are the only option given to us either forcefully or with the use of ‘law’.
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Spiritual Guidance Sessions – Empowerment, Healing and Focus

Catherine Louise BirminghamLeave a comment
Spiritual Guidance Session with Catherine Louise Birmingham

Just under 8 yrs ago, I sat and watched the shock and horror on the face of a truly gifted woman playing a huge part in my then business and Dressage Training stables, Equinoxe Equestrian, when she told me that I could NOT use the word Spiritual in the new brochures! She was afraid that we would lose all the clients from the equestrian world and sure enough, she was right ;-). I didn’t however lose the clients who were benefitting from me fully embracing the truth of who I am and what I believe my Soul came here in this life to be and do. Those clients are still friends today and have become great teachers and riders themselves.

Have you ever wondered why certain behaviors happen with your horse? Maybe a situation in your life is effecting you or repeating itself?

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