Did you know? A horse can hear a human heartbeat from four feet away.
Dirk Stroda, of Kelowna, BC, is a High Performance Mental Coach for top athletes and corporate leaders of multi-million dollar companies. Stroda has also conveyed his expertise as the Team Mental Performance Coach to Equestrian Canada at the World Equestrian Games, PanAm Games and the Olympics. He works with Olympic Champions, World-Champions and Canada’s top corporate performers and public figures. He often speaks about the horse/human heart connection in many of his seminars and the role it plays for improving your mental performance game.
With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, here are a few tips that Stroda shared with WHR a while back regarding the heart connection.
Modern science has allowed us to understand the invisible magnetic forces that affect virtually every circuit in biological systems. Studies have revealed that biologically relevant information is encoded in the time interval between hormonal pulses. This hormonal pulse correlates with heart rhythm.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of the naturally occurring beat-to-beat changes in heart rate that has proven to be invaluable in studying the physiology of emotions. Negative emotions such as anger, frustration or anxiety shows an erratic and disordered HRV graph, indicating less synchronization between the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Conversely, positive emotions such as appreciation, love or compassion are associated with highly ordered or coherent patterns in the heart rhythms, reflecting synchronization between the two branches of the ANS.
Stroda states that further insight into the dynamics of non-physical interactions among humans and humans with animals must be conducted and explored.
“I believe that the electric and magnetic energy generated by the heart plays a highly important role in the rider’s mental high performance state, that which should be non-mental, and immediately affects the relationship between the rider and his/her equine partner,” Stroda says.
“This ‘Oneness’ helps to synchronize the HRV from human to animal. This state known as being ‘in the zone,’ can be trained to a level of perfection and high level of resiliency.
“The mind is contaminated by emotions, paranoias, fear, regrets, guilt, worry, anxiety, poverty, old age, all of it. Here’s the answer. Love and the connection with your heart. We have to understand that the heart is not just a pump.” – Dirk Stroda
