I spoke with Shea Stewart on June 25, 2021. She shared about how intuition shows up in her work as an equine cranial sacral practitioner and she also shared how a tragedy brought intuition in her body to her awareness starting her intuitive path.
Bio Horses have been a part of my life for the majority of my life. I founded Stewart Ranch in 1998 in the beautiful Santa Cruz Mnts, near Santa Cruz, CA. I focused on creating a holistic environment, and incorporating educational seminars and clinics. I found myself with a ranch that had huge potential, so I spent the first year renovating it and creating a home for me and a peaceful environment for horses.
Every 6-12 months or so, I would bring in a professional to teach a clinic on some aspect of horse well-being. And I also taught clinics, trained horses from starting young horses under saddle, to re-educating the most difficult horses, to having other horse trainers bring me their horses to help them get to a better spot. I had a strong client base with boarders who were in some kind of lesson or training program, and every year I spent 6 weeks with Harry Whitney to enhance my own skills. Usually bringing the most challenging horses I had in training, or a young horse to start under saddle.
Around 2007, I found myself with a full load of training horses with extreme and dangerous issues. It was around that time that I started exploring equine craniosacral therapy. I was familiar with craniosacral therapy because I had been receiving it since the late 80's so I knew how powerful it was. As I completed each workshop, I incorporated what I learned with the horses in training so I could practice my feel. I found that I had a knack for this work, and it resonated with me on a deep level. What kept me intrigued was the change I was seeing in this group of training horses that I had at the time. There was a settledness that the horses had, a lightness in their riding and just an ease to their expression.
I started getting interest from other clients and friends throughout CA once they heard about this work I was doing from my postings on facebook and seeing results of horses they knew that I had in a training program. So, about a year after my first craniosacral course, I branched out and began working on horses outside of my ranch. I still felt like I had barely scratched the surface of this therapy, but the feed back from clients was remarkable to me, and honestly that feed back is what kept me motivated to offer this service as well as lessons and training. In 2011, I decided to relocate to Texas. I immediately found a human craniosacral practitioner who taught classes in biodynamic craniosacral. I enrolled in every level completing up to the advanced levels. This training was life changing in my equine practice. I am able to practice with more precision, get deeper changes, and have a clear understanding of what is happening during a session with a horse that I was not understanding during that first year. I have steadily built a strong client base in TX all through word of mouth. With my background in horse behavior and my dedication to craniosacral therapy, I feel that I bring into each session a unique quality to help each horse individually, and teach their owners how to support them as well.
In 2012, I began saddle fitting as well. With my back ground in functional anatomy, and saddle fitting all types of saddles, this transition became very easy for me. I know how important saddle are for a horse's well-being after all of my years of training troubled horses and finding solutions for them. I now have a full-time business offering saddle fitting for all major english brands, and western saddles as well. I currently work in the N. TX area offering craniosacral session, and also saddle fitting and saddle sales.
Welcome to Sears beers, knowers, and doers, a podcast about intuition. Do you know what that is? Intuition to me, is that inner sense for knowing that something is true and yet I have no proof, but there's so many definitions and there's so many ways it can come and go even to bring together and share with you. Some amazing guests, you have some amazing life stories and also some insights into how intuition can come. And I'm looking to gather those crows in the trees. I hope you're one of them. I hope that this podcast inspires you to be more connected to your intuition. And I hope that by doing that, we make the world a better place. Thanks for coming on this journey with me
Speaker 2:
Before we get started today, I would love to share some tools with you to help with stress and feeling overwhelmed, especially for the energetically sensitive person. Feel free to go to my store on my website at www dot healing, vitality.ca. Thanks so much for coming on this journey with me. So I'm super, super excited today to connect with another being on this planet, who, who graciously said yes, when she doesn't know me from a hole in the wall, all because I presented the topic to her and how she loves talking about intuition. So I'm really excited to see where it's going to go today. Thank you so much, Shay Stuart's for thing. Yes.
Speaker 3:
Well, thank you for giving me that opportunity. I'm very excited to talk about intuition. Okay. I'm
Speaker 2:
Going to be interested to see where this goes because we don't plan any of this stuff and it just kind of goes where it's supposed to. So would you mind telling us a little bit about you?
Speaker 3:
Sure. So I am an equine craniosacral therapist and I also work with horses and other ways I do saddle fitting. And at one point I had a training barn when I lived in California. I currently live in Texas and back when I lived in California, I had, I had trained for oh probably 15 years or so and focused more on a relational type training. I did a lot of rehab training work with troubled horses would come in. People would break horses that were really messed up and I would work with them in a way where we both had a, more like a mutual communication and I would talk, teach their owners how to read them and listen to them and build a relationship with them. So that's kind of more my adult life when I was a tile and I, we grew up in, um, a very rural town and I was pretty shy and soft-spoken, and it was more of a community where it really wasn't even a town. And my only friends are really just my animals, my horses. And then at one point we moved to a bigger town, still a small town, but it was a little bigger. And it was around this time when I, for the first time I felt the relational field that bonds us with our loved ones and each other. And I didn't know what, what I was feeling at the time, but there was a, a, um, incident that happened. And, um, I was jumping right into that, how I first started learning about intuition. That's cool. Like
Speaker 4:
I see there's no agenda.
Speaker 3:
Okay. So certainly after we've moved in going to this new school and I was, um, I was sitting in a classroom and all of a sudden it really was all of a sudden I felt the air around me getting very thick and by test getting heavy. And I knew that something terrible had happened, but I had no idea what it was. I just felt something's not right in the world. And, um, I was thinking, gosh, it's something happened on my horse. You know, all these things are going through my head. And even my friend that was sitting next to me noticed, and she said, are you okay? Cause I was just like, and I said, no something has happened, but I don't know what it is. I just feel like something bad has happened. So that was my first, well then later. So they got me out of school and that was what happened was my mother was Edmond, tragically killed. And that was a terrible thing to go through, especially at, I was only 11, but one of the things that always stick out to me, it was that sensation that I had that felt sense of something happened. And I didn't know what it was. And I was, I was curious, where did that from? How did I know, what was that? What was this unseen, esoteric connection, you know, that changed or shifted that I could feel. And I would talk to people about it and adults, and they would dismiss me or accuse me of having an overactive imagination. And then that made me wonder, what is our imagination? Like, where does that come from? Is it, you know, like random activity in our brain or are we connecting to something that we're not aware of or getting ideas or information from some sealed out there that, you know, so these are the kind of things that I would think about
Speaker 2:
Because really that bread crumb that not, not taking in the discounting and continuing to pursue your truth is I'm full of goosebumps. Like for an 11, yes. For an 11 year old to not, not discount your own inner knowing, even though adults are saying now no child, like, I mean, everybody was probably processing the tragedy in their own way. Um, and you may be, we're like showing up in the, in a way that they couldn't understand, but for you to continue to pursue your own truth, following your breadcrumbs, like right down to where does an imagination come from? Honestly, Shea, nobody's brought this up before in 80 podcasts. So I am. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And the strength of spirit I'm going to say to keep you on that path of discoveries is a per an 11 year old is pretty incredible. So thank you for sharing and I'm interrupting you so I'll
Speaker 3:
No, that's okay. That's great. That's nice to hear, because I guess if it's a tragedy that was a gift that came with it
Speaker 2:
Well and some times, well, oftentimes I look for those silver linings is how I cope. And before all of that occurred was there. I would suspect that your connection with your horses and probably your family was very deep on an energetic level and maybe you weren't even processing it as something that was different or something that doesn't happen to everybody because people weren't present enough for it to happen. I think it can happen for everybody, but when your world is not full of distractions and you're living in that very small community and, and the beings around you happen to not speak English, that presence shows up and allows you to hear differently. And I would assume I'm making a huge assumption, but I would assume that your early childhood experiences with your horses and there being such a large part of your community and family would have shown up later in your training, just as an innate ability that people would be like, what are you doing? Can you put that in words? Like, does it, is that true?
Speaker 3:
Yes. Yeah. I would have to say that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm sure
Speaker 2:
They would, they would have stood by you through this tragedy without a dope, because the bond would have been so rich. Yeah, they, yeah. So yes, you want intuition to land on your lap.
Speaker 3:
It didn't show me though at a very young age that when you do get these felt senses these biological sensations or this intuition, that it's real, it's something to pay attention to. And I've always tried to pay attention to that. And every time I've gone against it, it's proven to me that I should have listened.
Speaker 2:
Mm Hmm.
Speaker 3:
So my, my life has been formed around with that fact that this intuition a real thing, these, these images or thoughts or feelings, it's definitely something to pay attention to.
Speaker 2:
So you would receive in all those different ways, is that how it comes to you various ways or as a package, how does it work for you Shea it's
Speaker 3:
Various ways. And it depends on the situation. So in my work with the craniosacral, there's a lot of, one of the things, one of the aspects of craniosacral that I've studied is called biodynamic. And are you familiar with that?
Speaker 2:
I know a little bit about it, but I probably the listers don't have a clue what we're talking about. So,
Speaker 3:
Okay. So do, I can talk a little bit about craniosacral. Okay. So they, of course, cranio central is one of those hard things. Know
Speaker 4:
There's this thing with cranial sacral, and you have to be intuitively
Speaker 2:
Connected to feel the body and hear the body and listen to the rhythms. And it's like a symphony that's going on underneath your skin and your nervous system. I don't know. That's my understanding
Speaker 3:
Of
Speaker 2:
Cranial sacred and it can do profound things, emotionally, energetically and spiritually, as well as to the physical body. So, you know, but that's only as a receiver of cranial sacral therapy, you know, in English. Does that, does that help
Speaker 4:
Or hinder what your explanation is?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, well, so in craniosacral we are trained, there's basically four identified rhythms within the body and the craniosacral realm and there's primary respiration, which is what biodynamic craniosacral practitioners aligned with. And that's what we orient to. And it's a very slow rhythm. And it's a field that is not only a rhythm inside of our bodies, but it's also outside of this. And it's a very slow rhythmic and collation and exhalation. So it's about one inhalation will take 50 seconds when exhalation will take 50 seconds. So it was very slow and it's even found. And that motion is even filmed at conception. And an egg embryologist have found that as soon as it meets the egg and the spark of life happens, the embryo starts to unfold with this expansion and contraction and this slow rhythmic motion, 14 separate kick in.
Speaker 2:
Okay. So this is, to me, that is the rhythm of the spirit.
Speaker 3:
Oh, okay. Awesome. It's where our, our inmate biology connects to its original blueprint. It's where our, our biology recognizes this rhythm and where it learns to release what no longer serves. This is where we orient to health. And then there's, there's other rhythms. So there's the middle tied, which is more of our body. It's a little bit faster rhythm. And a lot of craniosacral therapists are taught to orient, to what's called cranial rhythmic impulse, which is the bone and tissue motion. And that's probably a 13, 14, second cycles. So it's a little faster, but it's been found, it has been identified that this cranial rhythmic impulse couldn't be a product of a faster paced society because it was never taught or talked about until mid fifties, mid 1950s. Okay. TV showed up television, right? Yep. All that external input from TV and visual stuff. So when I, and that's, and it's even the reason I was taught to orient to when I started learning the eight Klein cranio cycle, but I could never find it and the horses, and I would even ask them a couple of their friends. I took the classes with like, I'm not sensing this time. I'm sensing something slower. And they agreed. And so then I kept training looking for when I moved to Texas, I found a practitioner who was teaching craniosacral classes and B, he said, I could come, even though it wasn't in the human world. Right. And it was focused on biodynamics. And that's, that's when I started learning about the primary respiration. But then I realized it was that slow rhythm that I think connected to for a long time. And even in the theoretical physicists, talk about that. They've actually discovered that the empty space between us is not actually empty as full as measurable electromagnetic fluctuations here. And they talk about how it moves like a, like a flute fluidic medium. So it's almost like we're all floating around in a giant sea and connecting it, all of us to everything. I love following a lot of their teachings and the Quanta real, I guess you can say.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's fascinating because to me, it's them putting on word, putting words on things, because they have the words, but all of us know it somewhere in us that it exists. And it's just, when you talk about the rhythm that you couldn't find in the horses, I think if we remove that rhythm from the human existence, then we all know that this other place exists. Like it's. Yeah. Anyways, I'm just going to ramble on about that because that stuff gets me excited. So
Speaker 3:
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Very cool. And I think we talked a little tiny bit of vocal maybe before we started and I don't want to spend a ton of time on it, but I find that COVID took away some of that stimulation in some people, because more people weren't gardening, more people bring animals and pets and they were connecting with the nature. Cause that was the way they could get out of their house. And, and those things actually connect them to that primal rhythm that you found in the horse at this 52nd thing. And if they chose to disconnect from media and so forth, then they weren't overstimulating that other rhythm. But if they stayed connected to their media,
Speaker 4:
Then that rhythm
Speaker 2:
Would be overstimulated. And we get into like the sympathetic systems being overstimulated and that creating all the whatever's that is somewhat out of balance and people. So I just pennies dropping is also, yeah, it's very cool. Very, very cool.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, for sure. COVID cut. I think it helped a lot of people learn how to slow down and I think people enjoyed that.
Speaker 2:
I think so. And I think there's a bit of a revolt happening in terms of the opening up and people being put back to work in offices. So it'll be interesting to see what happens because the, the freedom of working from home though, for extroverts, it was a little bit difficult for some the freedom of being able to go in your back deck at lunchtime and water your plants, or take your dog for a walk and not worry about a commute to do those things. So those rhythms are what is really natural to us. Like if we think about our, our pioneer selves or our cavemen selves, yeah. It's more intuitive than our societal norms that we're, we have a percentage of the population striving for. So anyways, it's just, it's really interesting. And that's not really totally on topic, I guess, but just a observation. Do you have any stories to share about how intuition, I mean, you shared a huge, massive one at the very beginning and how kind of that role do you in like almost initiated you into the understanding that this exists?
Speaker 3:
Totally. There are so many, there are so many stories there. So I can talk about some of my experiences with the craniosacral work or with the animals. One that stuck out to me was not too long ago. I was driving to an appointment. And a lot of times when I'm driving to my appointment, I'll think about, I'll be thinking about what I'm meant to do. Who am I working on? I'll just start thinking about the horses or the people I was on my way. I randomly thought randomly, I started thinking about mentor back. And I guess this was early eighties when we were hearing about these orphans and Russia being chained or thinking about that, and who's going, this whole story was in my head, remembering those stories on the news and thinking about these kids. And they don't know this, this went on for probably almost my whole drive, which was about 45 minutes. I was thinking about this. And then finally I was like, what am I doing? I need to focus on my next appointment. Give me a, why is this? I just thought it was random Ted or my brain, I guess. So I get to, and this was a horse that was doing, creating a state called this was a horse I had been, I'd worked on for a few years. And so I got there and I started working on her. And when I can, I did with her Lloyd phone, which, for people who aren't anatomy, beaks bone is inside of our head. And that's the bone that our brain sits in and comes up behind her eyes. And this phone can become very active when we are, we have dreams and I, and also it can hold on to PTSD. It can be very active when there's PTSD in the system and active meaning a faster rhythm and that erratic type motion. So when I connected to this horses bone, it was very active. It was, it was almost human-like. And what I mean by that is when you work on, when you do cranial sacral on a person versus a horse, is it's a totally different experience because horses are people we tend to hold on to stress. And we, we just live in at least faster rhythms in life. And so working on a person it's like touching a thousand marching bands, okay. And working on a horse, it's like floating in a slow rhythmic ocean.
Speaker 2:
Oh, I could see that becoming addictive.
Speaker 3:
So anyway, this horse had a very human feel to her spina Lloyd bone. And she went into this very deep processing. And, um, so after the session I was telling the owner what w what I felt and that's, that was odd. It was like she was processing some PTSD or something. And the owner used these horses for, I thought she was just using them for corporate retreats and people weren't allowed to touch them, but they would do different exercises was he recently had started, um, having teenagers come over, who were in programs at school and who had learning issues or whatever. And the one who was assigned to this horse was arrested orphan from Russia. He was a very troubled young girl and the horse was processing what this girl had been through, I think. Wow.
Speaker 2:
Wow. My full body goosebumps again. Yes. You see
Speaker 4:
Shay you think
Speaker 2:
Considering your premonition as a dry Rover, like, wow. Honestly, oh,
Speaker 3:
Isn't that wild? I was blown away. I was like, oh my gosh. Wow. I just tell her my story of my drive over. Wow.
Speaker 2:
And like, okay. So people, people don't always do math the way I do math with that. They are sent in it all knowing being too, uh, anyways, I don't put them on pedestals now. I learned that's not where they want to be, but I do have a huge respect for their capacity for so many things. And that just, that just does exactly
Speaker 4:
The reason why I use respect for horses, because
Speaker 2:
That just prove point blank, that capacity that they have to do things without being told to do things like that didn't happen because the horse was told, okay, now you're going to do this for this. Like, so the outcome is that it's just, that girl probably felt better because she was with a being that fully accepted her. And the horse is like, oh, well, let me like, thank God it had a cranial sacral treatment that day.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. It's like, the horse was like, let me take care of that for you. Yeah, totally. And then I'll process it out through cranial. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
I've got a session here with my girl, like next week. So I'll just, it'll be gone. I can, I can live with it for a week. Totally. Wow.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. And that one was very profound and I've had other stories like that where I find an injury in the horse. And so I'd tell the owner and the owner says, oh, that was an injury. I had, you know, things like that, that that's not uncommon. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Wow. Yeah. It is something to be aware of where there are so many pets now in homes is the animals will do this stuff. And we don't necessarily process that they are doing this for us, but they do do this for us. And so being aware to, uh, to support yourself with self care
Speaker 4:
So that your animals don't have to take it on, like, go do your own cranial sacral work if we can. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:
They stayed off, not speed, but they, our nervous system and it's out of whack can stress them out as well.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. I often tell clients, shake like a dog and because how often does the dog get off the couch and shake? Cause they've just shaking off all the stuff they've dusted off of us as they laid on us. Yeah. Oh, wow. Listen, Shane, this has been wonderful of you to share such such, uh, uh, like profound and, uh, hard experience from your childhood with us. And, you know, I I'm sure that you're not the only one, sadly, to have an awakening of sorts or an awareness of sorts through something so tragic, but it does serve because part of this purpose for this podcast is to inspire others, to recognize their intuition and what it is. So all when I, when I said earlier that nobody has done that yet. I mean that as a appreciation that you, you shared something so, so important in your life with the rest of us. So thank you so much for today. This has been fantastic. And I hopefully will be able to do more of these because I think there's more in you to share with this topic. I think
Speaker 3:
I love talking about this stuff. So in my daily work, I always get to talk about it. I really enjoy talking about it.
Speaker 2:
Awesome. Okay. Well, we will have to plan on part two then in part three, I'll get a wonderful, thank you so much. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
Thank you so much for giving us your time today. We truly appreciate our guests for sharing their stories and insights about how intuition has impacted their lives. And I'm so grateful for Peter trainer for his time and giving me this original music. It's now your turn. It's your turn to listen and act on your own intuition and help make the world a better place until next time, keep seeing being, knowing, and doing. If you like this podcast, please share it. If you want to find others, like it, go to www dot healing, vitality.ca or wherever you would find your podcasts. We would love to have you join us on this journey. Come be a Crow sitting in the tree, be part of our community.