Well

Stephanie
Speech and Language Specialist
Is well the same as happy?
The first thing is bare feet on the grass.
The smell of summer and winter evenings, when
I feel grounded, rooted.
… Being on a horse, being in the weather, being outside.
My work is all in the head. With riding it isn’t
physical, it’s about emotion and communicating
through your body. It’s about going within me
to calm down and communicate with the horse.
Thinking without having to use words.
I realised one day that my body and the horse were
all one, there was no barrier, and then I got it; you
can use your breathing to slow the horse and calm
the horse. With babies, you transmit your feelings
to the baby. I got that from working with people
with severe brain injury; using your body to feel
how they are, just being with them, seeing where
the tension is and helping to ease it through
washing and normal activities.
In the book, The Inner Game of Tennis it says
something like: don’t tell your body how to hit the
ball, tell your body where you want the ball to go.
I enjoyed work once I got out of working in a medical
model, when I started working with a social model.
Our job’s about giving people choices.
10