Tag: dressage

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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Spiritual Guidance Sessions – Empowerment, Healing and Focus

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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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The Spiritual Meaning behind the Purpose of Forward in Dressage.

Catherine Louise Birmingham2 Comments

 

1392014_309493629204117_270881939745473352_nLife is like riding, you will only have harmony once you stop fighting it.

Mainly during my first years of riding as a young teenager but also during various places and stages in the past, I attracted often  the ‘bolter’ horse that is sensitive, very electric and always running away. This was a strong connection of who I was at the time. It was a reflection of issues that I was learning from and working through in how I dealt with my own life – flee, run, don’t reflect on things just quickly get to the next place. I was afraid of confrontation, scared and with a belief that I was somehow wrong no matter how much I had come to learn from experience and others.

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A Seminar Of Change – Spiritually Riding in Germany

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From left: Marvin Engels with Böckchen , Me! hehehe, Kerstin Isabel Kutting with Jerome, Wolfgang Kutting and Kristina Alina Kutting with Smarty

It was to be the first of its kind. The focus was on the 7th neck vertebrae and its problems stemming from a widely chosen form of training with Dressage and Showjumping horses at the moment. Firstly a biomechanical riding and judges aspect of the damage of Roll-Kur, a veterinary explanation of the health damage and well then came me – the Spiritual side.

The night before, our participating vet called to inform us that she was extremely sick and would not be able to join the seminar. So it was now up to Wolfgang and I to provide as much information we could ourselves to cover the afternoon ahead of us.

That turned out to be not a problem!

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Coming Out – Where Dressage Meets Spirituality

Catherine Louise Birmingham2 Comments

gato nov 3
Catherine Louise Birmingham with the remarkable stallion Gato. Photo taken by the talented Nabila Putri Shariva.

Not long ago I published an article with LinkedIn on the ego in our industry and if our love of horses could overcome it. I wanted to share it here but with some more detail and personal additions to it.

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Slowly the equestrian world has begun to part waters and form a rift between two worlds – one of professional sport and the other of naturalists and therapy work.

I believe in both.

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The Art of Finding Balance

Catherine Louise Birmingham2 Comments

When riding, the front is a mirror reflection of the hind. In life what is happening outside of you is a mirror reflection of what is happening inside of you.
When something is showing up in the front when riding, that you wish to change, you can’t change it through the reflection, you must go to what is creating the reflection.
The hind.
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Conscious decisions can change your ride

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Baronetta 2 (640x589)Riding a horse is the same as living each day of our lives and every step is a decision making process from you whether you are conscious of it or not.

Every decision you continually make, conscious or unconscious, to either act or not to act, are determining the responses we get back from our horse and our life.

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The Role of a Teacher

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The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, merely a symbol of what each of us become through the growth challenges of life. Catherine Louise Birmingham
The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, merely a symbol of what each of us become through the growth challenges of life. Catherine Louise Birmingham

The horse first teachers us to be the leader of them to help us become the leader of our mind. To focus the mind, to create, not to be the victim of our thoughts, feelings and actions.

They are the doorway that they carry us through to change our state of awareness.

Wolfgang Kutting, a brilliant rider that has a profound connection to horses in the art of Dressage, describes this unity of a teacher with a horse in a beautiful way. In a translation ‘Horse and Trainer see as one’. Both horse and trainer tune together as one to work in enlightening the rider.

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Mirror Theory

Catherine Louise Birmingham

Mirror Theory

Article by Catherine Louise Birmingham

thank you crystalAfter Masaru Emoto’s discoveries of the effect of thought on water, it is now known just how powerful our thinking is and how connected we are to the horses being while riding.

The concept of ‘the horse is a mirror image of the rider’, is the horses way of showing us just how much effect our thoughts have over our life and over the situations we have at each moment. Because there is more than one reason for our current thoughts – mind, body and spirit, history and experiences/influences of this life and others or current state of awareness, the mirroring of what is, is only one aspect and stage of awareness that horses are assisting us in moving into and moving through.
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