Equine Voices Podcast

Interview with Jane Pike - Confident Rider Online

May 16, 2022 Ronnie King Episode 42
Equine Voices Podcast
Interview with Jane Pike - Confident Rider Online
Show Notes Transcript

Interview with Jane Pike - Confident Rider Online.
I was very pleased and excited to announce an interview with Jane Pike from Confident Rider (New Zealand)

Jane has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to people and horses.
Her work with the nervous system within humans and horses is something I am excited to understand more about, for a deeper understanding into the mind and body and how it not only affects people but how it affects our horses too.

So sit back, relax and I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did making it.
Jane's work is fascinating, whether you're in to horses or not and as they say, it's all in the mind and that's a great place to start.

Jane Pike.
Jane works with riders to change their nervous system patterning from reflexive and reactive to adaptable and responsive.

With a background in behavioural science, motor repatterning, and movement education, Jane has worked with both competitive and recreational horse riders all over the world, inspiring them to new levels of confidence, connection and performance.

Her approach combines mindset, movement and holistic biomechanics with a specific focus on nervous system awareness and understanding.

For more information about Jane and her work, click on the links below.
https://confidentrider.online

https://www.facebook.com/TheConfident...


Interview: video version
https://youtu.be/-MwcznPiYrE

https://www.facebook.com/equinevoices...


Video version (alongside applicable podcasts) can be viewed on facebook and YouTube.
https://www.facebook.com/equinevoices.co.uk
https://www.youtube.com/@equinevoicesuk
https://www.instagram.com/equinevoices.uk

Contact Ronnie.
mailto:equinevoicesronnie@gmail.com


Ronnie:

My name's Ronnie from equine voices and welcome to my special guest jane pike kept from New Zealand and it's 7:00 AM in the morning there. So we're very, very lucky that she's agreed to come on because I'm not sure I'd be up for chatting to somebody at that time in the morning. I'm going to bring her in and she can introduce herself and talk about her work and I'm so excited because I'd like to know more about the mind and body when you're working with horses. Okay. So here we go. Hi, Jane.

Jane:

Hi, good morning. Good evening. We should cover all bases. Good evening afternoon.

Ronnie:

It's good evening here, but good morning where you are.

Jane:

Someone will fit somewhere in the range of those two parameters. Absolutely.

Ronnie:

Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us about what you do and then we can go in to a bit more depth.

Jane:

Sure. Yeah. So I have a business called confident rider and I work mainly from a writer based perspective with mindset, movement, biomechanics, and all things to do with emotional health in the saddle. And I do so from a nervous system perspective. So when we're considering biomechanics, we're considering how the nervous system and how the brain informs the structure of the body. When we're looking at behavior and the mental, emotional side of riding and wellbeing, we're also considering that through a nervous system lens. And so my approach. Is very holistic. I'm not looking at segmenting a specific part of the body, or I'm a part of our experience as far as how it shows up in the saddle. But I'm really interested in looking at how we work together as an integrated system and how ultimately the brain is making choices in our best interest. Based on the information that it has and that feeds through to every aspect of our experience. And so that's in a nutshell what I do and where I spend the majority of my time is focused on those elements.

Ronnie:

So if we go back a little bit how did you get into horses and what took you on this particular route?

Jane:

I have been involved with horses my entire life. My mother was horse mad and she had a horse called icon who was a Arab cross. I think she was originally from Dorset in the UK and she was one of the$2 ticket on the boat, out to Australia travelers back when that was a thing, when they were trying to get more people into Australia. And she met my father out there and she had horses in the UK. She had a little. Piebald pony called Mr. Pig's lead. And they used to break into the staple chasing track and go around at night and all sorts of crazy things. But she's always really well. She brought to me the love of horses absolutely. And then growing up horses were what I lived and breatherd. And I considered school to be somewhat of an inconvenience. In the showing circuit in Australia, I did that really successfully in my teens and coming into my early twenties and always as part of that life, or as part of that experience, I was always interested right from the beginning in how I could better manage myself, I guess if I could think of it that way from the beginning, which sounds a little bit clinical, but I was always really fascinated by, you know, what it was that we needed to be able to get ourselves it's into a place where we felt like we kind of had it together because I suffered quite badly from nerves as a rider in the competitive instance and also on a personal level. I was really deeply affected by people, very close to me who suffered quite severely with different mental illnesses and also anxiety. And I remember just thinking from a very early age, when I grow up, I want to work in ways where people don't have to suffer in the way that I see people suffering. And so that was a huge driver for me. And I think that horses were the lens through which I practiced through which that came to life and they were also my solace And anchor point, I think for much of my life and so I'm very grateful to them for that practice. I really haven't had a very linear trajectory in terms of career paths. It's something I find a little challenging to talk about, cause it's not like, you know, I do this and then this was four years. And then I went into this job, it's such a winding road. And I spent a long time as an emergency aid relief worker working with violence and trauma overseas. And I've done so many and varied studies in behavioral science and all different types of alternative therapies and mental skills coaching and different psychological studies. For me, as I kind of brought my twenties to a close, I really was thinking about, okay What is it that I want to be doing? How is this working out? And I had some people suggest to me or come to me interested in on a personal level, just helping with nerves from a writing perspective, like how we can get more confident and it kind of gave me the idea that maybe this could be something that I would do professionally. But at that stage, you know, what I'm teaching now is not something that you would ever consider as a landing point. Like it's not something that you've trained to do as such. It's something that you create, if that makes sense and it really has been an evolution. I started the work that I'm doing very much from mental approach to riding as far as like being mentally strong, you know directing your focus to what it is that we want and positive thinking and all of these sorts of lovely ideals that we have and concepts that are very familiar to many of us now, but perhaps weren't so much so 15 years ago. And I had success with that. Absolutely. I wouldn't say that that was without its benefits or without its happy endings, but it was limited and I recognize over time that I would be able to help some riders I will be able to help myself in certain instances or certain situations. And then there were those situations where it wasn't enough, you know, you couldn't think your way out of a situation, you couldn't mentally override your thoughts. They were too strong or the situation was too in golfing. You know what it is that you're experiencing for you to be able to just decide your way out of it. And so it's been very much down the rabbit hole progression of getting deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into what it is that truly drives our behavior and responses. And what it is that is ultimately about creating harmony, you know, harmony with ourselves, harmony with our environment, how many with our horses, but not in the traditional sense of wanting to land on this island of calm, which I think is where so many of us end up. We have this internal world that perhaps feels a little flurried or unsettled or uncontrolled in some way. And so the place that we're wanting to get to is one where we're neutral, where we're calm, everything is good. And for me, what I'm searching for now is adaptability and responsiveness, which is being in the full range of life and being able to meet the reality of that moment and be accepting of that, without trying to escape it without trying to be something else, just to be able to meet that moment, to process that moment in whatever way is honest and truthful for what that presents and then to move on to the next thing. And so that really understanding more about the brain and the nervous system for me has been the linchpin in all of that. Because you can't be intuitive, you can't be creative, you can't be full of humor. You know, you can't be light if you're living in your survival nervous system. And so all of the elements of kind of understanding your body and your physiology and why it is your brain is making the choices for you. That it is, is to me, the liberation of being able to step outside of that and bend the rules and have fun and to approach life with a certain degree of creativity and curiosity and to do the same with our horses. So, yeah.

Ronnie:

Can you give an example from a human's perspective, if you're in flight mode, nervous system, the majority of the time. I'm assuming it doesn't mean that you're always wired, Yeah can you explain what that would look like or how that would feel for a person that's maybe not aware that's where they are?

Jane:

Yeah, absolutely. So if we cycle back even further, I think it's useful to understand the basic tenants of the nervous system and the autonomic nervous system specifically. So when I refer to the unconscious brain or the unconscious nervous system, we're referring to the autonomic nervous system and basically our brain is gathering sensory information from our environment all of the time. And it's using that sensory information to make one decision, which is, am I safe? Am I safe in this situation that I'm in? And based on that information, it has two choices. It can either respond in the parasympathetic system. Which is where all of the information that I received from my environment goes through a part of my brain called the sensory motor cortex. And I send out a response that is a new response that my body hasn't made before my brain hasn't decided to respond in this way before based on the reality of what's going on in my environment, in my situation. And so when we're in the parasympathetic system and we're functioning in that way, we're essentially meeting reality, we're adaptive, we're responsive. We're not stuck on a story. We're not cycling through. We're not predicting we're in the here and now essentially. So that's one set of possibilities. The other set of possibility is where my nervous system, for whatever reason or my brain, for whatever reason goes, we are not safe in this situation or we're not sure if we're safe. That's another thing. The brain always ERs on the side of caution and the sympathetic nervous system has a series of seven different motor reflex response. And those motor reflex responses are the fight response, the flight response, the freeze response, and then different stages of conservation of energy mode or collapse response. And so in the sympathetic system, essentially, we're moving towards a lack of movement. We're moving towards a shutting down of the system to essentially prepare for death. If you want to think of it in very black and white terms and in the parasympathetic system where moving towards life, we're moving towards more openness in the system, we're moving towards more movement in the system overall. And so each of the seven motor reflexes of the sympathetic system has a set of structural changes that occur in the body. And when I refer to structural changes, I'm referring to how our bones articulate, how our organs are placed, how our fascia is hydrated or not. And they have a set of behavioral responses as well. That match the need for that survival reflex to be active. And so the very first stage of sympathetic activation or the survival nervous system activation is the startle response. And basically all I'm doing in that stage is really trying to narrow my focus. So I can decide was the situation that kind of caught my attention, something that is worthy of further investigation, so that I go further into my sympathetic response. Or can I kind of check that out and then just go back to what I was doing. And so if we consider. Person who is perhaps like you and I, where we're not on the frontline fighting, we're not in a situation where our physical reality is under threat. For us, we would want to be what I would consider a parasympathetic dominant, which is for the majority of our day, we're operating from our parasympathetic nervous system. And we're coming in and out of our sympathetic nervous system, only when necessary, which is like the stage run of sympathetic is what we use to wake up in the morning, for instance, or if the brain perceives that something is getting a little low in the system. And so we need a bit of a jolt that will go into the first stage of sympathetic to kind of rev us up a little bit. But beyond that, all of the sympathetic reflex is really only present when we're under physiological threat. So our physical existence is in some way threatened, and that is what is predominantly the reason why they sympathetic reflexes exist. Our modern life, however, has pulled us out of functioning in a way where our survival needs require us to be in life. If you like. So if we think back, not that long ago in order for me to get food, in order for me to get shelter, in order for me to have my basic survival needs met, I needed to be active. I needed to be moving around. I needed to be engaged just to survive and that's not necessary anymore, we don't need to be, me and you can sit in our office and order our food online. We can talk with people online. We can essentially be sedentary and have all of our basic survival needs met. We may not be happy as such, but it's possible to be in life and to do that. Which means that the way that our brain challenges normal situations, which is in movement. So if I have a threatening situation or if I have something, which I perceive to be a trauma, now I can sit in my office and stew on that all day and I don't go out and have my brain engaged. And my body engaged in my sensory nervous system, engage in a way that balances out that situation and allows it to be relegated to the place that it ideally would be, which is kind of in the past. And now my experience in life becomes really cognitive. And so as we move through the survival nervous system reflexes as well, what happens is the sensory nervous system starts to go offline and the purpose for that is if I'm being chased by a bear or someone attacks me, I don't want to feel all the feels like it's not useful for me to have a really heightened sense of sensory input at that point, because it would distract me from my purpose, which is essentially to survive. And so as we find ourselves in modern life, what happens is that we start to move into our sympathetic chain, but we no longer have sensory information coming in. That would cause us to be able to move out of it. And so for many of us, for instance, we have a. Favorite, if you like, or a dominant reflex pattern that we fall into, which is maybe I've practiced, or my brain has chosen for me to flight response, which is what you're referring to when you talk about anxiety. And so the flight response has a certain set of structural indicators that go along with it, which is you know, my asymmetry is a really common experience of the flight response, where the shoulder blade on one side sits closer to the spine. On the other side at six, further away, one foot is angled slightly out one foot is angled slightly in. And essentially it's because I'm looking to exit stage left or exit stage, right. Depending on which way I'm going. And so if I think about a dominant flight response to the right, for instance, would be commonly what we'd understand as a scoliosis towards the right, because I'm looking at leave. Right. And so the organ bag sits in a specific location and so on and so forth. So I can get a little deep with this. I apologize Ronnie if it's getting confusing,

Ronnie:

I'm amazed, I mean, my memory is not brilliant. Okay. I'm writing the big word down and I still can't remember. How do you remember all this stuff.

Jane:

I live and breathe it. I literally live and breathe it all day long. It's just such a fascination to me and it's been, yeah. Such a liberation and an unlocking of so many questions that I've had in the past in relation to why and how we do the things that we do and why and how our horses do the things we do, because the same patterns applied to our horses.

Ronnie:

I think most people will understand what stress does to the body, to a certain degree. And when you work with horses as all, you see what happens, but I never thought about the exit route, that's common sense it wouldn't be that way wouldn't it? But it's not something you think about in your day-to-day work. So that was fascinating you go as deep as you want jane that's absolutely fine.

Jane:

Yeah. I saw a poster recently on our horse bodywork related site. And they were saying, oh, it's really interesting. Like my horse says this asymmetry and his right foot is always slightly angled out he's always looking slightly towards the right. I can recognize that his shoulder blades are uneven if I look from the top. And from a neurological perspective, it's a classic flight, a classic flea pattern and neurological flea pattern in the body. And so it it's an example. The reason that I flagged that up is it's an example, because for many of us we're looking at the body from a compartmentalize point of view, which is like, oh, the muscles are imbalanced or the shoulders are imbalanced and so we need to correct the shoulders or we're looking at the feet and this foot slightly steeper and this foot slightly flatter and. When we cycle back and go, okay but the unconscious brain is essentially, so the autonomic nervous system that we discussed at the start is underneath the banner of the motor reflex chain overall, which means that every time my body makes a decision on a nervous system level, something structurally in the body changes, the nervous system is in charge of the structure of the body. Why and how our bones are placed in the way they are. Our organs are placed in the way they are, the way that our fascia is moving or not moving in the way that it is, that is ultimately what is deciding that. And if we override things at a conscious level, through manipulation or force, and it hasn't been the choice of the unconscious brain to do that, then the body will always revert to what it was because the brain will bring the body back to what it perceives to be the necessary choice for that moment. And to me, this was such a light bulb moment where in so many instances you say people saying, oh, I went and I had this adjustment and I wonder how long it will last or I do this to my body and usually I have to see this person every two weeks or every one week to get the same thing. And we might do that for years, have the same adjustment, had the same manipulation going on in the body believing that our conscious brain can override what it is that the ultimate choice of the body has been. And so it does cycle back to appreciating the wisdom of the unconscious brain and how the sensory information that the unconscious brain has that is informing its decisions or doesn't have in the case of it being limited windows, that information when we've got ourselves stuck in a pattern or stuck in a cycle that might be related to trauma or otherwise. We have attitude, I think generally, culturally, speaking of an arrogance, if you like, and I don't think it's necessarily intentional, but this arrogance that our logical thinking mind is the, is the one that knows all. And actually our unconscious brain, our sensory system, everything is so infinitely intelligent, so infinitely wise in the choices that it's making, that we really want to start to learn in my opinion, ways of supporting that rather than trying to be at war with ourselves and constantly like in these push polls scenarios yeah.

Ronnie:

Fascinating. I'm really enjoying this chat. So my limited understanding of what you've just talked about, I'm aware of through a friend, she used me as a Guinea pig, which I was fine about, and she works very much with Different modules, she does lots of things, not just one. She happens to be an animal communicator and she's a psychic. So she brings everything in and while she was doing some of her training, cause she just lots of different elements. She would come around and we'd go through a few things. And it's so funny because once you become aware, so it doesn't mean I'm fully aware of everything in my body, but once you become aware of certain things. She would start to ask me some questions and it wasn't didn't to the question point and I would get uncomfortable and I would say like, okay, so I know that something's coming up here because my body is fidgeting. So I'm aware that it's coming to a place where it's getting a bit guarded. And it's quite funny cause you look at yourself like two different people and I said, I don't know the answer to the question you're about to ask me and it's no. And she says, okay, let's try it. And it was, it was no, because I knew from what my body was doing, that it was, no, it was, you know, it was no. And I didn't even know what she was going to ask me. So that was quite fun because you do start to understand your own movement and that's just coming because we're going to talk about that too. So I find that fascinating how your unconscious mind yeah how you think you're in charge but there's that part? You need to almost get that on side. Is that a right explanation?

Jane:

Yeah, it's always on the side. One of the things to keep in mind, is that your never trying to actively work against yourself, your brain and body is always working in your best interest. That's always a hundred percent, 150% of the case. It can be the situation where your brain only has a limited amount of information to go on, which means that its decisions aren't accurate for your reality. That is a very different experience to it. Actively trying to work against you or bring you down or some of the rhetoric that we can get into, especially if we're in a situation that we would really like to not be in be that like feeling anxious or being unwell or some aspect of that Then we think my body's letting me down, or my body's failing me or my mind is failing me and that is a hundred percent never the case. It is always working for, and with your best interest and your unconscious brain is always wanting to acquiesce and please your conscious brain, if you like. So an example of that would be that our body and brain are designed to communicate to us all day long. We are supposed to get a lot of sensory information coming in a lot of changes that are happening, that is what we're designed to do. And sensation in the body is essentially information that something has changed. My structure has changed in some way in relationship to my environment and I may not consciously understand what that change is, but I register it in the form of sensation. And so the fact that my conscious brain receives a sensation means that it's novel, there's novel input in some way, because things are happening all day long in the body that are just regular. And we only receive information about it consciously when it's novel, when it's different. And so what can happen a lot of times is that we start to understand, or we start to interpret sensation as alarming. And that way we can map, it's called mapping in sensation in our brain where, if my conscious brain says, I don't want to feel this, I don't want to feel this way, it's too much, I can't handle it. Your unconscious brain essentially. And this isn't exactly how it works, but if we were to sort of make it a lighter experience, we'd go, oh, Jane's really finding this too much. She's not interested in all of these messages that we're sending her. We're just going to shut that down. Let's just shut down that sensation. And so that's an example of the unconscious brain going. We recognize that Jane's not interested in this information, it's too overwhelming to her. So we're going to shut down that level of sensation. So she feels nothing for instance. And so on a nervous system level, that would be moving me closer towards conservation of energy mode or a collapsed response where there's no sensation happening in the body. I'm essentially kind of neutral. But the conscious brain and the unconscious brain are on the same page at that point. What you've asked for, if that makes sense. And so one of the challenges, I guess, and one of the reframes that I'm constantly reiterating in my own work is that if you're not interested in feeling and experiencing more, this is definitely not the practice for you because we're bringing your sensory nervous system back online, which means you're going to get more information and you now need the means to be able to interpret that information in a way that is objective and not subjective. Because a lot of us have developed relationships with our body where we have interpreted a specific state of being. So perhaps I feel tight chested, or I feel like a fluttering heart. And that means I'm anxious. That's my subjective interpretation of anxiety living in my body. And so every thought that we have has a motor pattern has a way that it expresses physiologically. And so every time I think I am anxious, I fire off the motor pattern for anxiety and this is where I start to say oh this is my physical experience, this is my label and now this is the pattern that I'm going to fire off. And I create this loop based on sensation in my body. And that's where being able to separate things out and say, what is truly happening in my body can be very different to what I think is happening in my body. And what I think is happening in my body is often wildly incorrect and the seed of all of my challenges. And so that's where I give people, hopefully a template of understanding or being able to interpret what truly is happening in their body on a nervous system level. So they can go, oh, isn't that interesting? I have for my whole life interpreted this as meaning this when actually I recognize my body's actually this, taking the structural indicators. And that allows me to start to decouple my emotional reactivity and experiences from the sensation that is occurring in the system or in the body.

Ronnie:

I think I'm going to have to replay that and listen to that again, because some of it went in and I was like okay. It's fascinating and yeah, I would definitely listen to this again and absorb it a bit more. So when a client comes to you, I know you do online work and online courses, and you also have a group, is it called joy rides,

Jane:

joy ride.

Ronnie:

So when somebody approaches you, what sort of things you'd be asking.

Jane:

I asked very little, these days., I asked very little and one of the reasons I asked very little so well let's approach it from a different perspective. Everyone has their process. Everyone has their process in terms of what they are needing in that particular moment and what outcome they're looking to create and from my perspective as a coach, and this is something that not only I practice from a professional perspective but that I practice from it personal perspective is that I recognize how strong our thought patterns are in creating our lived experience and creating what expresses through our body. And so every time I meet with someone and every time I see someone I'm really interested in whatever way is possible, for me being human and being on my own journey and being wildly imperfect at the same time in seeing them as new in just seeing them for how they present right now, like how I see them right now, rather than thinking, oh, this is Ronnie. And she has a problem with their horse and she's anxious. And she's this, that, and the other because the lens that I start to see you through informs what I see. And so from my perspective, I don't really need to know anything prior to someone coming in. I don't have a set of pointed questions that I asked. I'm just really interested in observing. And then the person presenting to me what it is they would like to share or what it is that they would like to express and the way that they do that gives you information. So if someone's very attached, you know using really emotional language, very in what it is that they're saying, that it tells me that a certain amount about their patterns and what it is that's going on. And if someone's very neutral, then that gives you information about their state of being as well. But for the most part I really am interested in giving people information that allows them to better know themselves and better trust themselves and make changes themselves that I really had nothing to do with. And so. The way that I work with people is very, movement-based, I'm really interested in them gaining more awareness about how their body is moving. The pathways that it's taking, the way that it's moving, so that they can start to understand more about their own structural indicators. And when I talk about structural indicators, what I'm talking about is there are certain black and white indicators in the body that tell you whether you're in the sympathetic reflex or whether you're in the parasympathetic. And if I can start to give people more awareness about those indicators and how it is that their body is working, they can start to use them as an anchor point. If you like through the day to be able to better understand their body and how it is that they're responding or behaving in response to what's going on but I think I'm probably getting in a little bit too deep with it. If someone was to come to me, we would just decide what it is they were ultimately Here for, I think and then I'm trying to think of a process that is abundant to articulate on, on this interview that's not going to be too confusing or sort of overwhelming basically we're looking to change patterns of behavior and patterns of movement out of any thing that they recognize as being habitual. So as soon as I can predict a behavior or predict a response, I know that that response is part of my sympathetic reflex, because if I'm in the parasympathetic, I'm making up responses based on what's happening right now. And because I don't know what's going to happen next. I can't predict how I'm going to respond next, does that make sense? If someone was to come to me it really depends on what they're presenting with, do you have an example of something.

Ronnie:

Crikey, that's putting me on the spot.

Jane:

Well, let's just use anxiety, let's say someone's coming to me with the anxiety is a really common experience and one that most people have some personal understanding of and interesting. So if someone's coming to me with an experience of anxiety, there's a few things that we want to address. We first want to address the the mental associations with anxiety in terms of like, what are the situations? What are the circumstances that you are experiencing this anxiety in? And when you're in those circumstances, what are the thought processes that you are aware of? What words do you talk to yourself with? What labels do you use? What is your narrative when you're in that place, what is the story that you, that you tell yourself? And that's one thing that we want to use. The second thing is to recognize that as soon as we have a conscious awareness of a pattern playing out. So as soon as I am aware that I'm anxious, now I have a choice, right? If I'm not aware that I'm anxious, I don't have a choice because now just something is playing out through me. Something is expressing that I am not consciously in command of. And so that's just going to run its course. And we find ourselves in situations all the time where we might reflectively look back and go, oh gosh I really let got carried away on that train. You know I wasn't aware of that happening and I wished I had some kind of like interjection. So at the point where people recognize that they have a choice at the point where there's consciousness to the process. Now we recognize that there are two possible paths that this journey can take. One is I can just let this pattern play out. So if we think of anxiety, just being a dominant expression to a particular situation, I can just let the anxiety play out. And every time the anxiety plays out, it reinforces itself. So it gets stronger. So basically I'm strengthening that dominant expression. I'm strengthening that dominant pattern, or I can start to interrupt the pattern. I can start to say, okay, if I take my little dropper of food dye and I pretend that this is me interrupting the pattern and I drop it into my cup of water, which is my dominant pattern, the more drops I drop into that cup, the more influence it's going to have over time. And I start to change little bit by little bit, the way that my body expresses in response to this particular situation. And so we change patterns and we change dominant expressions and we change kind of stuck experiences by first understanding when we have consciousness, we have choice. And secondly, by giving very specific practices that relate to the movement work, I do about changing a sympathetic motor reflex into a parasympathetic pattern so changing out of that stuck mode of operation. And then there are various things that we would do to support that that would be individually specific depending on what it is that the person is going through. Yeah does that clarify things a little bit?

Ronnie:

Yes. Thank you, Jane. You went into details that so when you say movement so please forgive me if I'm misinterpreting this, but when you're looking at movement, when you see a person coming towards you and you're looking for the movement, say, they're talking about their anxiety with their body, match their anxiety as they're talking about it in the body, would that sort of match, is that correct?

Jane:

Yes, generally. So the motor reflex patterns and I'm in the stages still of developing my eye at something, I think you need decades to be able to interpret accurately. And that's something that I'm constant working on or working with yes so every motor reflex pattern that exists in the sympathetic chain has its own set of behavioral expressions. And so the flight response, for instance, which is usually where anxiety sits as part of a flee response, there's a dissociation that exists there. There's a need to ask'em questions of a lot of things and to get outside support and validation, there's a need to go all over the place except to discuss the essence of what it is that's happening. And so there's a lot of different manifestations that can occur behaviourally that would match what was happening structurally in the body. And within the within any motor reflex that we have within any way that the body moves. So if I'm walking for instance and I'm just walking around the way that the body walks could be in a sympathetic pattern, it could be in a parasympathetic pattern, or it could be a combination of both and our motor reflex patterns or the way that our body chooses to move can then be informed by a couple of different things. Essentially growing up, we mirror our primary caregivers, motor patterns. And so that's where we might find ourselves expressing the same thing as our mother or our father or our primary caregiver. Because the way that they're structured is if they're stuck in a collapsed response or they're stuck in a flight response, we growing up will start to mirror how their body behaves and moves. And so we start to express similar qualities through our being. And so we can have a walk for instance, that has Nothing to do with a thought process or a trauma experience, but we have a walk that is sympathetic, which means that the way that my body is moving is part of the sympathetic motor chain. And so that every time I walk, it fires off my fight flight nervous system. And so I'm afraid that I don't want to be losing you as we've been going through this to.

Ronnie:

No, no I'm really listening to it, this is new, it's deeper, so.

Jane:

Yeah. So if I just pre face it, and I think this is the key information that allow you to make sense of it at the start, which is how the body powers movement in the sympathetic system. So in our survival nervous system and in the parasympathetic system is very different. In the sympathetic system, it's really prioritizing force output, which is like, I just need to be able to kick strongly or punch strongly or escape quickly. Those are the priorities of the body and so it prioritizes certain muscle groups. It prioritizes certain structural points in order to maximize my force and acceleration and those points are my lumbar spine. My lumbar spine goes in and out of the tube of the body, if I consider my outer structure of my body to be achieved, the lumbar spine moves in and out of the tube of the body to allow my legs to move and so now I have a lot of force output basically in the sympathetic system, everything moves closer towards midline. So we get compression. So the outer surfaces of acceleration are closer together and in the parasympathetic system, no one part of the body is compromised. So it's operating on a different articulation, that's operating on a different plane. Which means that as I move through space in any one movement, my body is either choosing a movement based on the sympathetic system or choosing a movement based on the parasympathetic system. Now, if I have learned a particular way of moving that is rooted in my survival nervous system, every time I move my body in that way, I'm firing off my sympathetic system. Does that make sense?

Ronnie:

Yes, yeah.

Jane:

Yeah. And so this is where movement becomes so integral and so interesting to the process, because if we aren't addressing our movement patterns, we can be inadvertently creating survival, nervous system responses just by the way that the body is moving. And so that's where we're looking to change. The underlying neurological template, that sort of motivating movement so that we can have a different experience basically in what it is that where we're interested in exploring.

Ronnie:

That's really fascinating. As you were talking about the two different systems. It wasn't even a memory but I could feel my body responding to what it needs to do internally. When you said that the organs restricting and it's almost like something made sense, but I don't know what it is. So on one level, it was like, there that's why you feel like that at times. So that was really interesting, really, really interesting.

Jane:

On a basic level, if you can think that in the survival nervous system, everything condenses towards midline, so everything gets smaller and more compact and closer together and my organs get closer together. They swing to one side so that the blood flow only has to go to a specific part of the body. The structure gets closer and the reason for that is that we want more bone on bone surfaces so that I have more surfaces of acceleration to power. The fascia dehydrates to bring the structure together and so everything gets more condensed, more compressed And just basically sort of closer together, whereas in the parasympathetic system, everything starts to open out and expand and there's space and room. And my, my center line, you know, my fascial trains start to slide, everything is more available and that is sort of the essence of how the body changes its shape between the two. So in one, we're starting to move towards midline and compress in the other we're starting to open up and expand and in the parasympathetic system, no one part of the body is compromised. So everything stays open to an equal extent and amount. Whereas in the sympathetic system, we essentially sacrifice parts of the body, knowing that for instance, bone on bone is going to give me more acceleration, but it's also going to cause degradation. Right? So but we do that because we understand on an ideal level that I'll only be in my sympathetic system for a short period of time and so I just want to get away from whatever it is I'm looking to escape from or defend myself and then I'm going to flip back to parasympathetic. But now we have situations where in modern life people aren't moving out of their sympathetic nervous system and so they're getting degradation in the body because of this condensation and suppression and structure. And so when that doesn't change, then we start to experience different pathologies based on how the structure of the body is moving in and living yeah.

Ronnie:

And I understand that more with the horse side because of how how that affects fix them. Yeah, this is fascinating, this is really fascinating. I almost want to get a cup of tea and sit back and just listen to your chatter away.

Jane:

Look at how I can run away with myself, doing like this to make it more simple.

Ronnie:

Life isn't always simple. So we've got Kathy I hope she's still with us she says, hi Jane, ronnie said great to see you both and Kerry white, she says she finds your work. Fascinating. I certainly do, definitely and more so now that I'm actually chatting to you. I've seen you on YouTube and Facebook and obviously your website. You know, sometimes people cross your paths and I always liked your posts, some of them are really short and sweet, but they say what they need to say. So I was so excited when you finally agreed to have a chat with us. Kathy is still here. We met through synchronicity yeah that's another story yeah, a lovely lady. Okay let's catch the horses now. So in your work, where would you go with the horses? Is it mainly to do with the human side and they would come along or they would show you something and then you'd work with a human or would you work with both of them?

Jane:

I predominantly work with the humans in my own practice, I'm working with my horses as well. I'm playing with my horses and I'm transferring. I was talking last night in the workshop that I taught that my thesis at the moment is really figuring out how to make sense of what it is that I'm talking about and apply it to our horses. Because the essence of it is that if we're looking to change any pattern in the body, there's a couple of different elements that need to be present and the first is conscious attention. So your focus, you have to have a focus. You have to have novelty, there needs to be some form of novelty as far as input and repetition and so when I'm working in my membership group, we do a number of live movement sessions a week where we focus on specific body parts. The reason for that is that and I'm coming back to your question. It's sort of like give some background information as to why this is relevant, but basically the essence of what we're doing is looking to bring the sensory nervous system back online because the brain is using or searching for sensory input all of the time to make accurate decisions about our safety in our environment, if we were to think about in that simple way. So sensory input comes in, my brain goes, what's going on here? What response should I send out? And that's the same for our horses when we've been living in our survival nervous system. Like I mentioned previously, our sensory nervous system starts to go offline. And so the amount of sensory information that my brain has coming in becomes limited. And so it can only make information based on a limited amount of information. And so this is where we get stuck in these habitual cycles. And so the movement work that I do is really about activating sensory nerve loops in the body so that your brain starts to have more information coming in. We're starting to habituate the sensory nervous system, and it has more accurate, more real time information coming in. So it can make more adaptive and responsive decisions to what's going on. And from a human level, we do that by placing our conscious awareness on two points of awareness, either in the body or one in the body and one outside of the body. And we start to notice how the body is moving and how the body is responding, in a nutshell, it's a little more complex than that, but in a nutshell. And so when I think about taking that over to my horses life. Horses in some ways more simple and in some ways more complex in that more simple in that they're honest, their response is always honest to what's going on in relationship to their environment. Whereas we have a very complex emotional brain that can really create elaborate stories and, you know, elaborate situations in our mind, which can mean that we're responding to anything, but honestly, to the moment and so there's another layer with working with humans that we have to move through, but our horses don't have that, they're very honest in their interpretations. So if I recognize that my horse is expressing one of these patterns or is kind of stuck or going into a sort of shutdown mode or, you know, whatever it is that our horse has has adopted as their key way of navigating through life in response to humans. My goal is to say, okay, how do I change the sensory input in this situation? So that my horse is attention is now peaked, you know, like oh, I need to pay attention I have their focus and so then when we have their focus, then things start to be possible because now I can go, okay. How about we move your body in this way without forcing, but making a suggestion and then we'll just see what happens. And the, see what happens part is really asking ourselves, did what we just achieved. Did did this action line up with the intention that we had and it might be well, that was way off or it might be, yeah, that was pretty close, that was pretty good. So now how is it that I can, again, that moving away that has my horse's attention, that allows more sensory information to come in, that doesn't result in punishment or a box ticking type scenario where we're just sort of exploring and in that way you start change patterns, essentially, you start to create experiences where different things are possible. Because just like with our horses, you know, if they've been forced into different frames, if they've been constrained in some way where there weren't options in how they responded, it was just like, you must move like this. Then we can extrapolate from that situation that they are definitely moving in a way that is survival nervious system oriented because their brain would have gone right we're constrained, we can't make choices. So the way that I'm going to trot in this movement, or the way that I'm going to canter in this movement is going to express a sympathetic motor pattern, which means that over time there's degradation there's the system is wearing and you see this in the competition world all the time, horses 8, 9, 10 out. So that's my quest at the moment to really understand that and to be able to integrate ways of working with their body that promotes their own awareness and their own intrinsic changes and I know that there are ways out there as well, that are doing this all the time and amazing people that are doing this sort of work but for me, it's just a real curiosity to keep applying it in different ways and to be interested in looking at what happens.

Ronnie:

Yeah amazing and obviously, you two this with your own horses.

Jane:

I do yes.

Ronnie:

If you couldn't do it, you may even have the best.

Jane:

Yeah. It's, it's pretty, it's pretty fun and I think Ronnie the big thing that this work has taught me is there is no right or wrong, there is no right or wrong. There is only, we'll make a decision, we'll take an action and we'll see what happens. And it was like, oh, that happened. Okay. And so now let's try something else. So let's try that again and there's a liberation in letting go of the rules, in riding and on the ground and in everything else in terms of like, there's no functional purpose to the brain of judgment or or perfectionism, or it being correct that only ever pulls us into our survival nervous system and so if you can let go of all of those Conditions that we put on ourselves and all the rules around movement and the rules around how things should be and just allow yourself to explore. Then there can be a lot of freedom and relief in that.

Ronnie:

Sometimes, I think I was having this thought today, actually, when you get excited and when you're learning something, you're really hungry, like a sponge and you want to absorb it and you look at lots of things and at the minute I really into podcasts and listening audio because I can do that when I'm out and about if I'm driving in my car, which I know you focus on driving, but I find them fascinating. But today I was thinking, we do think too much some times. We take things apart. We look at things, we dissect things and then we put them back together, which is part of what we do but sometimes it's quite mindblowing and just to be, as you said in that moment and do what you need to do, and then think about it. We tend to think 30 miles an hour, we do something in our thoughts are already out there and it's the same if we get excited, you're just miles away thinking about all these thoughts instead of actually processing what just happened and thinking, wow, isn't that an amazing thing? So I suppose it's about finding a balance of where your thoughts take you of just bringing it back and seeing where you are now the same as listen to your body. Okay. What's going on my body and I compare that to how my life is at the minute. I'm always looking, I'm always looking at me and if something happens externally, okay where am I? And I don't mean that I'm perfect. I'm always thinking, okay, what's my emotions doing? What am I projecting? But not heavily, I'm just thinking about it. Sometimes. It's like, whoa, okay. What did I do there? Especially if it's animals cause they give you instant feedback and you go, okay. And it's, it's finding a balance of not overthinking something to the point that. It's taken you away from what you should be doing and just coming back and centering yourself and thinking, okay, let's look at that again. I suppose sometimes looking at it from the outside, does that make sense if I made any sense.

Jane:

Yeah, yeah. You have many of us, I think use our conscious brain as a mean to constantly control our future reactions. So we're trying to not only engineer the future, but we're trying to think about how we are going to respond to a situation which we think might happen in the future and it becomes a exhausting process of micromanagement of thinking about something of considering something of projecting of like, considering that again, of questioning and in that process, we train ourselves out of the action taking portion of the situation, which is my brain can only make an accurate decision based on action, taking realities, meaning that I can think my way into 50 different scenarios, but if what's happening, if I think about it this way, my unconscious brain is always responding based on sensory information happening right now. So as Ronnie sits in her office, as I sit here my unconscious brain is feeling into my environment and picking up on all of the sensory input that's coming in and making decisions about my safety on that. If my conscious brain, is then in Corfu or my conscious brain is like somewhere else now where my attention is and what my sensory input is doesn't match, does that make sense? So my unconscious, brain's going, Jane's in our office and now she's thinking about the house in Miami with the five different bedrooms and the dah dah, dah and we don't understand where she's going with that and so we're going to activate our survival nervous system because the conscious brain and the unconscious brain out of sync yeah. So overthinking when we're taking ourselves into all of these various scenarios and it's not based on what's happening right now is seen as alarming to the system because we might miss something happening in the present. Like now we're not paying attention. It doesn't matter where we're going, but now we're not paying attention and so the unconscious brain fires off the just in case Nick aneurysm, because where our thoughts are and what our reality is, is in two different situations. And so if we think about overthinking, because it's such a lovely example and one that's so common basically I make a decision. So I'm in this situation, I make a decision, I take an action. This is how the brain learns anything. I make a decision, I take an action and I observed the consequences of that action. And then my unconscious brain decides how far away I was from my original intention. And then it tries, again, it goes through the process, but if I get stuck in the decision-making phase where I'm like, maybe I should do this, what about that, what about this? What about that? I don't get to the stage where I have an experience to learn from because I've never actually taken an action. And this is all the domain of the emotional brain where we get of. We have thoughts about things and we imagine ourselves in different scenarios and again, if you can think back to the fact that every thought that we have has a motor reflex pattern, every time I'm thinking that something's expressing through my body, and now I'm responding to something that's not actually happening here, it's happening up here. And so I'm again out of sync with what's going on. But the most useful thing, I believe that it's been useful to me anyway, to think about that as far as the conscious brain goes, is that the conscious brains role is of the decision-maker and the action taker and the observer but it's not the information collector that is the unconscious brain's job by the sensory system. And so if I'm constantly trying to analyze and break things down consciously, I'm using my conscious brain for purposes that it wasn't designed for and I'm most likely going to be chasing my tail. Instead the unconscious brain gathers information and it kind of like shoots things through to the conscious brain, like a projector on a movie screen. And so I get information sent through that I can then act on, but if I'm really analyzing and thinking and overthinking, then I'm probably going to get myself into a situation where I'm tying myself in knots, because it's all based on thought rather than sensing.

Ronnie:

That was a lot of information there. I was liking that too. I knew it's not the same at all, Recently my thoughts have changed. So I bring my thoughts to me. So instead of looking outward you know you're looking at something and you're putting your thoughts out there and you sent them them out there. It's more now what I do is the feeling and I bring it to me, I don't know if that's the right explanation, but it's the feeling. So it's not on the actual picture or words, it's the feeling of what that would mean to me but do you see where I'm going with this.

Jane:

In terms of attracting something.

Ronnie:

It's not so much attracting, that was started of it but it's just about being present, being present, that's probably the easiest way I'm making it more complicated than it needs to be being present. So if you want to change your mood, if you want to, to attract something to you or, or feel good about yourself, it's not going to be out there, you have to do internally. It's been aware when thoughts come in that aren't actually happening today, right at this moment, then you don't need to pay those too much attention because it's not actually happening now. So it's not ignoring it, but it's just being aware of it and changing it, as you said, changing that, that loop. So changing the loop of the old thought pattern of worry, worry, worry, I haven't got this to pay that and all these thoughts come in and then before you know it, or crikey, should I bother getting up this morning is sort of take on that role you almost nip it in the bud before it becomes that. But it takes as you said, little droplets each day and you do it little by little and then it becomes a lot easier. So thought form that I used to have on a Monday morning is not so strong and sometimes not even there, because I've changed the loop, does that make sense?

Jane:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's recognizing when you're in the choice phase of okay, now I can see what's happening here, come these thoughts, this is Monday morning, this is a pattern, right? Like this is a pattern. And so it's recognizing the pattern and then taking small steps of action, not to try to escape something, but just to try to be in something. So it's like, I'm in my day, I'm in my house. Like what's the next action that I'm going to take and then moving on from there? Yeah, but along the same line of what you said.

Ronnie:

Yes, it's really hard, I can appreciate what, how hard it is for you to explain.

Jane:

I'm sure it's not, that's my experience at kind of talking about it more and more, I will get more articulate, hopefully. Ronnie I've long accepted about myself, that I'm not the queen of small talk that I just go in and like, take it all like that, come as you are kids, because this is what I am. So it's like, well, we'll just have fun with that

Ronnie:

no it's fine and we have to remember that it's early morning where you are.

Jane:

I'd probably rambling the same way at lunchtime, to be honest. So it's thank you. It's very gracious. I was being polite there.

Ronnie:

Kathy's got a question. Question for Jane. Can the body be in sympathetic and parasympathetic at the same time, or is it more a sliding scale?

Jane:

No, the body is either all in sympathetic or parasympathetic and it's not a sliding scale, it's like a light switch. It can be flicking in and out of it that fast. And so I can be in parasympathetic. I could slick into a flee response at stage four. I could flip back. I could flick into stage six, I could flick back and so it's really just happening that fast, that fast, like a light bulb or a light switch.

Ronnie:

So she talks about years ago, practitioners have a modality with studies as they work working and had a particular state where it was described as having both of the systems activated in a particular way. Which potentially could be used as a guide to see if people were working correctly in that modality. Hope that makes sense.

Jane:

The body on a nervous system level either is moving all in sympathetic or parasympathetic. It's not physiologically possible for us to be partially in one system and partially in another it's either all moving closer towards midline or it's all starting to expand out and there's no six of one, half a dozen of another, as far as having one foot in one camp and one foot in another unfortunately, or fortunately, I'm not sure.

Ronnie:

So I hope that's answered your question, Kathy. I'm sure it has. What's the next thing you've got coming up then? So where is Jane today?

Jane:

At the moment I've just started a series in joy ride. That's based on movement arcs. And so the way that the body moves in the parasympathetic and sympathetic system is very different in parasympathetic, we move in arcs and in sympathetically move in straight lines and so being able to create different patterns in terms of how our bodies moving through space and what it is we're doing with our horse starts really with an awareness of not only what's happening, but also what we want to happen. And so we're kind of exploring those angles. And I'm just looking at balance points and different structural landmarks in the body from a nervous system perspective and how we apply those to to riding. So that's something that, where we're looking at currently and it's just basically ongoing, what I'm discussing is ongoing. We do Movement practices in my membership were constantly in conversation about this sort of thing. And so it's an ever ongoing evolution of understanding from my perspective and hopefully I can impart some of that understanding and only a tiny bit of confusion to other people and start to tip that balance at least.

Ronnie:

Jane do you have any literature? Do you have any books out.

Jane:

I don't no, my blog is probably where I share the majority of the information and I'm going to start a season two of my podcast soon, but it's just been a matter of time in the day actually as to why that hasn't happened yet but yeah, I think my website where my blog is, is probably up to speed where I share soundbites about what's happening in a way that's hopefully understandable.

Ronnie:

And an accessible as well, which is brilliant. I've just remembered when I first saw more of you, it was in lockdown because I was staying, where my horse is now, my friend says, I think you've got to move in because we're having a lockdown in a couple of days. Okay. I basically moved in with them, which was brilliant because that's where my horse was and I think it was April and the weather was amazing in the UK. We were so lucky and I think you'd be sat outside and you'd be doing these little posts.

Jane:

Yeah, I haven't done anything like that for ages. And it's literally just been life I've got two little boys and I'm studying and I'm working and it's just, you know how that goes life gets very full somethings fall off.

Ronnie:

How old are your boys?

Jane:

Are six and 10.

Ronnie:

Oh my goodness.

Jane:

Well, big little boys now. Yeah.

Ronnie:

Do they like horses.

Jane:

They like horses they don't like the work involved with horses, so they really enjoy my horses and they enjoy the fact that I look after them and they get to do the fun things like, mom, can I go for a ride? Or they're constantly snuggling. So it's, it's pretty cool. Yeah, but one's an avid rock climber and the other's really into motorbikes. So I actually messaged my husband the other night saying, oh, if I have here, one more thing about pistons or fuel injection or something I might actually keel over because I just have no idea what they're talking about, but it's like, why, why is this happening?

Ronnie:

Children, when he got really Enthusiastic about something and it's exciting and it's lovely to be around them because they've got such energy.

Jane:

And I think that there's nothing better in life than to have a passion. So I don't have to share that passion, but as long as they have one I'm fully supportive of whatever, whatever that chooses to be and I get to keep my courses all to myself so that's fine.

Ronnie:

Okay. Is there anything else? I'm just conscious of the time and it is your morning.

Jane:

I think that we've probably covered quite a lot of ground like I said, I'm a bit of a free roller, so I don't have anything pre predetermined that I come to talk about. But yeah, I just think it's from my perspective and with what I'm doing, there is such a a lot to be gained by understanding more about your own body and your own nervous system and how your brain makes decisions. Because a lot of what we are challenged by can be interpreted as weaknesses or failures of self in terms of like I'm not able to cope or I'm not able to manage, or if I could only do this better, you know, I'm struggling with this and everyone else in the world doesn't seem to be struggling with that, which isn't true, but can often feel like our interpretation of things. And my experience has been the more that you can understand. So much of what we are challenged by as being expressions of a nervous system, that's perhaps gone a little funky in some ways, or is working on limited amounts of information and so we're experiencing these Groundhog day type loops. You get to view yourself from a different perspective, which is one that is not so harsh. And one that is not so judgmental and one that is not so critical because instead of things being defects or flaws of personality, you can understand them as patterns that are expressing and patterns that are changeable patterns that don't have to exist in the way that they have, if only you had the tools to be able to do something different. And so I really enjoy the increased self-compassion and empathy that we can develop when we work in this way and that transfers to our horses and then, like I say, it has the capacity to Allow us to be more intuitive and creative and just have a different lightness of being, even when things perhaps are a little bit heavy yeah.

Ronnie:

Yeah and I just want you to touch on something. I think that you said earlier there's a lot of people now that are working in a similar way by that I mean, they're going by their intuition, their guidance and at that moment, it's not set in stone. It's not like in a manual, you've got to do it this way. And as you said earlier for people that work with horses, on the physical side it's like putting a plaster on it because if you haven't worked on the emotional, the mental side, Then you're just going to have to go back and sort that out again later, which I'm discovering more and more through listening to people like yourself and my own understanding, my own learning and seeing things and hearing things. I was listening to a guy actually, I think it was on Warwick schillers podcast. Dr. Will Sue. I think he was, I don't know if I said that correctly and that was fascinating about the mind and about being shut down and your body but he was saying there's no magic silver bullet. I mean, he was talking about the certain thing and he was saying, you know, people are getting excited about it because you're going to do this and it's going to sort everything, but there isn't a magic bullet because we're meant to feel we're meant to understand what this is. Another conversation that I heard, when a child would cry or you was out somewhere and you tell them to be quite or not to get upset so straight away, you're already getting them to not react. So that's the first part of it but I mean, I have done that with my own child and my parents did that with me so it becomes a habit, so I do understand that. But when you realize what it does to your mind and your body and how it impacts on not just you, but the people around you It's then I suppose, when you get older that you start to look back and start to peel the layers off and what fits one person might not fit another person. So there are a lot of crossovers and similarities. But like you said, each person has their own way and what it means for them and sharing it and for you to get your information and your knowledge out in a way that people can understand without making it too complicated.

Jane:

One of the challenges of these types of conversations is that the work is experiential and so we have these fabulous, I love talking like this, but it's very heady, you know, it's very cognitive and you can be like, oh, I don't really get it, or I don't understand and so in my membership, it's like, Let's just do it. Let's just do the work so it lives in your body and then when we talk about it, you're like, oh, I had a sense of that, I had an experience of that, which is a very different platform to begin from rather than just the talking because it is experiential it's very much has to be alive in your system to be able to truly make sense of it, I believe. And I understand what you're saying. Yeah. There's so many synergistic parts out there and different things coming together. And one of the questions, I guess, it is useful to consider for ourselves and our horses all of the time is like, why is my brain, or why is my body making this choice right now because it is making a choice. If I'm in this situation, why is my brain choosing this me. What is the benefit to being in this situation? Or what is the purpose to this ultimately in the same with our horses? If they're expressing something why are they making that choice and how can I influence them to consider things differently to perhaps create a different experience in their mind, body and soul, hopefully. I'm so lucky, Ronnie the people that are adventuring with me are so cool, they're amazing. It's such an incredible crew and one of the things that's what I've done for those who've been with me for a while is there's been a couple of incarnations to my work. I'm not afraid to completely dump something and just take on something new if I discovered that actually it doesn't line up in the way that I thought it was going to line up, or I've now learned some new information which sheds a different light on it. I'm not afraid to do that. And so there are people that have been with me for a few years, which is like the roller coaster of the couple of changes where it's like, actually, you know, this is what we're doing now and you can come with me if you want and you can check it out for yourself and make your own decisions. And it's pretty fun to have that degree of openness because to my mind, we should be doing that, right. We shouldn't be the same as we were five years ago or 10 years ago, because the amount of information that's out there, especially when you're thinking about the nervous system and mind body connections, I mean, less than a decade ago, some of these understandings just weren't even in our vortex. And so you have to kind of take it and run with it and play with it. And I'm very fortunate to have a crew of people who link arms with me and jump into the water.

Ronnie:

Under standing group that don't sit there with a notebook going, okay, cross that one out.

Jane:

They don't tell me to my face so that's okay. Things are evolving and as you said earlier, it's all right talking about it, but you've got to experience it and I understand that side. Cause to me, it's a feel, you can say lots of things and you can sound confident about it. But if you're not joining that with you connect to that to your body to you, the person, your soul then it's just words. You can say somebody, I love you, I love you but if you don't feel it and you don't mean it, it's just words. I was just going to say you also absorb or take on what's relevant to you in the moment, right? So you're in a particular situation, perhaps you or I say something or we present something and you take what's relevant from that information and apply it and that's where the real learning happens and yeah you know, for me, because I'm teaching and doing this all day, there's a thought that's relevant and a lot that I'm applying and a lot that kind of sticks. So the conversation can be up over here, it might seem a little heady or too much but there's elements of it, which is like, if you just let yourself listen to the information and you just take 5% of it and it's relevant, then that's a Juul, you know it's the same with anything that we do. Yeah that experiential part of it is so important because as soon as it becomes relevant, it becomes applied and it's living in your system and living in your body and now that's something that actually comes to life and I think that's a really beautiful part of learning.

Ronnie:

Thank you, Jane thank you so much. Is there anything that you'd like to say before you finish off, is there anything else that you'd like to add?

Jane:

No, thank you so much for having me and indulging me.

Ronnie:

Been a pleasure, but I'm telling you what Jane I want to do this again. So don't think this is a one-off cause it's not, I'm sorry.

Jane:

That's fine, well I make this joke constantly how my quest is to be more succinct, but the reality is again, I just going to accept myself and creature of long sentences and big words.

Ronnie:

No, don't worry about it. We'll maybe get some questions beforehand, that might be good.

Jane:

That's a way of like showing it in practice.

Ronnie:

Yeah, we could try that. So if you'd like to say goodbye and then I'll have a little chat with you before you go. Yeah absolutely. Thanks team. Have a great rest of your day, whatever way that takes shape. Thanks, Jane. What an amazing, fascinating lady. I was trying to really take that in and as Jane said earlier, I took what I needed in. But I'm definitely going to listen to this when I have to listen to it because I'm going to edit it, so I shall be listened to it again and again, which is quite beneficial at times as well. The amazing lady definitely, definitely would like to have her back again, I'm definitely gonna look at her website and look a bit more in-depth at myself thank you so much for your questions and for joining just to listen and just to be part of this interview this evening it means a lot to myself and my guests because they're giving their free time. So I hope you enjoyed this and speak to you soon. Thank you very much. Take care and bye for now.