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After an injury to her spine falling from a horse at nine years of age, plus multiple whiplash injuries as a young adult, Gabrielle immersed herself in the FELDENKRAIS METHOD as a means to prolong her agility and fend off complications from injury.
The surprise was that in doing the FELDENKRAIS Method of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM) as a practice, she found her skill in the saddle improved simultaneously without effort.
Gabrielle has been riding horses since she was small, but as a child, she only had weekly access to a mount. As a teenager living in Switzerland, she took a lot of lessons and did a lot of galloping through wooded trails over soft pine needle footing. At one point, after returning to America, she had one of those experiences where you bend over and can't get back up. It was that fall at the age of nine coming back to haunt her. Frightened and slightly desperate, she lay on the floor looking up at the cieling for three days, until and old friend dragged her to a very skilled Italian massage therapist.
It was then that she got the full impact of the power of skilled hands. She also recognized the salient fact that often something that happened twenty years ago can gradually, over time, become a chronic issue that results in complete muscular fall-out. Most people don't realize that it's not the last thing you did that sets off a problem with your muscles; it's much more likely to be the result of something you have been doing for years to compensate for an injury that may not have seemed that bad at the time.
Eventually, at the age of 26 she got serious about horses and took a working-student position in an internationally known breeding/training facility, Los Alamos Dressage Center, in Freehold, New Jersey, working with straight Egyptian Arabians and Swedish Warmbloods. Under the sharp eye of Dr. Gail Hoff-Carmona she helped with breeding, handling yearlings, grooming, tending injured horses, and organizing dressage shows in exchange for daily riding lessons.
It was at this crucial point that three life-altering events happened. Gabrielle was first taken by the combined training bug and began to check out some of the major combined training events on the East Coast. She also attended a demonstration given by Linda Tellington-Jones and was completely taken by the obvious shift of intelligence that dawned in the eyes of the demo horse as he moved from fear into becoming a willing partner. It was also at this point, after over a year of riding daily and mucking out fifteen stalls a day, that her old back injury began to bother her again.
The work of Tellington-Jones, known as 'T.E.A.M.', is actually based, in part, on the work of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais. This is how Gabrielle first encountered the FELDENKRAIS Method. After organizing a few clinics in New Jersey for Tellington-Jones, she went to a FELDENKRAIS Practitioner for her back. Needless to say, this experience was successful. So successful that, eventually, Gabrielle became a FELDENKRAIS Practitioner herself.
She attended the four year professional training in Santa Barbara, California, with two notable FELDENKRAIS Trainers who teach all over the globe: Yvan Joly from Quebec, Canada, and Frank Wildman, from Berkely, California. She also trained under several other amazing and inspired trainers, notably, Dennis Leri, Carl Ginsburg, Diana Razumny, and Elizabeth Berenger.
Other significant influences in her work include twenty years of personal forays into a variety of transformative processes including various forms of meditation, A Course In Miracles, Est, and Landmark, culminating in an advanced training that graduated on that fateful day, September 11, 2001. In addition to the FELDENKRAIS Method, she has trained in equine massage with Mary Scrhreiber, and Paul Barnes. Her work with Paul studying equine myofascial release forever changed the way she works with people. Her training under Serge Dahan prepared her well for trigger point therapy, the method used by the first equine massage therapist: Jack Meagher. This was her specialty for a long time, until she later learned how to work with the nervous system. The difference being that she's now not just working with muscles, but with the system that controls muscles to begin with.
Her spouse, Certified Journeyman Farrier, William Merfy, head farrier at UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital must also be considered a significant influence. He has given her an understanding of equine biomechanics from the ground up, immersing her in the work of Gene Ovnicek. (See Gabrielle's numerous published articlse for the Anvil Magazine.) All told, she has over 1460 hours of training and over twelve years of experience.
Her particular passion is to teach you how to work with yourself. We all need someone on the ground, but there are always times when it's not possible to have someone there, or when you can't ride because of weather, a way-too-busy schedule or some other event interferes. For the times that life intervenes, Gabrielle can provide you with the skills you need to allow your riding to improve regardless. If you take the time to learn these tools you can dramatically extend the length of your active athleticism way past what most people consider average.
Gabrielle also teaches both horses and people how to improve their self carriage and posture in one-on-one sessions called FUNCTIONAL INTEGRATION lessons. Gabrielle's work is based out of Nevada City CA, but she does travel from Auburn all the way to the Bay area.
The Learning Curve
When people first learn to ride, they learn quickly, but once at the intermediate stage, often a plateau is reached. With the FELDENKRAIS METHOD of AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (ATM), you improve your ability to learn. As you cultivate your kinesthetic skill, or your ability to sense and to use your body with improved coordination, this translates into better skill in the saddle. Horses respond to this new found ease by becoming more relaxed, and more fluid. Riding, after all, is using your body as a vehicle to communicate as a team. The better you are at applying the principles of biomechanics to riding, the better your ride. Check it out, ask your horse. Horses don't lie. (Except maybe about having been fed.)
Call today or Register On-line for any of the weekly classes or to set up a series of individual sessions for you & your horse. You will find it money well-spent. Your learning will proceed more quickly under saddle after your skill at sensing improves. This Method is a fast track to cultivating the 'feel' of the naturally talented athlete.
(530) 263-3323. Click here for pricing.
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