Follow-up Rhodiola Complex

To access the podcast click on the title

These days most of us spend a lot of our lives rushing around. It is a bit like being on one of those hamster exercise wheels – constant motion. We want everything to happen right away. We want to see results right away, and if the desired results do not happen quickly then we get impatient. We live in a culture that encourages us to move too fast and do too much.

Now let us think about this in terms of food.  There is “fast food” and “slow food”, the kind people have always made, and when it comes to taste and nutrition, I think there is no doubt which side wins! If we slow down a bit and take time to look around and listen to the world around us, then we begin to see things that we would never see when we are in a rush, and hear things that get drowned out in our mental chatter. The birds sing, the flowers bloom and we can take all that in and enjoy it.

When we slow down, we can become more aware of what we are seeing and hearing and reflect on what we are experiencing. We can take a deep breath, and with our exhale allow any tension we may be holding to dissipate. We can integrate our experiences. These days mindfulness has come centre-stage in many circles and that is the key.

In terms of TTouch this concept of “the mindful pause” surfaced at an Advanced Training held in New Mexico. Sally Morgan, who is a TTouch practitioner but also an Upledger CranioSacral Instructor, was attending the training and teaching the other participants some craniosacral techniques.  One of the benefits of craniosacral work is helping a being achieve ‘Stillpoint’.

When a Stillpoint is achieved, the craniosacral rhythm comes to a pause, inducing a state of deep relaxation. As a result, this causes the sympathetic nervous system to turn down the volume which, in turn, reduces the fight-or-flight responses. This then allows the healing and restorative powers of the parasympathetic system to come to the fore.

During this training some dogs were brought in from a local shelter and Sally noticed that when Practitioners were doing TTouches on the dogs that ‘Stillpoint’ was often achieved on the pause of the end of the circle.

This was the birth of the “mindful pause” concept in TTouch. Pausing at the end of each circle and a quarter helps the person stay mindful of what he/she is doing. The pause can be short or long.

So, when might we pause?

Some instances when this could make an important difference are:

1. When we first make contact with an animal
2. When we give a signal – such as picking up the hoof of a horse; giving a forward signal when leading; when signalling for a stop; asking a dog to sit or stay…
3. When we bring an animal towards an obstacle and we feel the slightest hesitation, we should pause before going over or onto it
4. When we feel any resistance or reluctance to comply

Making Contact

Pausing when we put our hand(s) on a body before starting TTouches is like greeting the animal. A connection is established and gives the being a moment to decide whether it is comfortable with this connection and wants to continue.

A moment of stillness when we approach an animal can make all the difference to how the session and interaction will develop later. When we want to engage a horse, dog or person, instead of just marching up to them, if we walk a few steps and then stop for a moment, exhale and diffuse our gaze, this causes an animal to feel less invaded and it then allows them to meet us in the approach.

Giving signals

When doing groundwork or training or any other activity and we give a signal – such as asking a dog to come forward: people often give a signal and immediately pull if the dog does not comply.  We have to remember that when we want to give a signal, this involves a number of different steps:

1. the signal goes from our brain (the idea);
2. to our body (to give the signal);
3. to the animal’s body (through the lead and harness or collar);
4. to its brain (registering the request)
5. and finally back to its body (to respond).

We can also liken this to when we press a remote control to open a garage door. There is always a slight delay between pressing the button and the door beginning to open.

When we repeat the signal too soon or become insistent, it can put the animal off balance which means that he would probably adopt a less functional posture. The result is that the movement becomes less precise.

What we do with our body has a huge influence on the way animals respond to us.  If we are unsure or hesitant ourselves, the pause gives us a moment to exhale and become more grounded.   If we are out of balance, whether it is mentally, emotionally or physically, animals can ‘feel it’ when we interact with them, and this can affect how they will respond to us and what we ask them to do.

If we ask a dog to step on to a strange surface and he doesn’t comply, we should just give him a moment and exhale.  The animal will then often do as we are asking. If he is still unsure, then we have to ask whether our communication is clear, and one way to remedy that is to divide what we are asking him to do into smaller steps which can make it easier for him to assimilate. Sometimes, just taking a break is enough. During that pause the animal has the chance to mull over what was being asked, and then he might be able to do it at the next try. It is a bit like taking a break from the computer when it does not do what we want.

Sometimes we have to ask why the animal is finding that thing difficult to do. As Temple Grandin has pointed out, animals may perceive some things quite differently from how we do, and this may be due to our relatively different positions and perspectives. We see things from a different height. Our dogs are much closer to the ground so they don’t have the same perspective as we do. Many animals are reluctant to step on to grids on the pavement in cities. Temple Grandin has shown that this may often be due to the fact that the animal sees that grid as a gaping hole and so tries to avoid it by going around it. Puddles are another challenge for many dogs due to the way the light reflects on the water and that may also seem like a hole to them.

When we ask a dog to do something, like changing direction or sit or come, we can ask and then count ‘one thousand and one; one thousand and two’ before giving another signal.  If we pay close attention, we will generally notice that by the time we are finished counting the dog will have started to shift its weight, getting ready to do as we asked.  If we ask again too quickly, the dog has to stop to listen and reorganize its body again before complying.

The pause allows the nervous system to integrate the information.   This is true for people as well as animals.

When we are learning something new, we need time to process the information, to integrate it and allow the body and brain to connect what is happening.

When working with Tellington TTouch, a good philosophy to follow is “moments not minutes”.  If we do a few TTouches and then pause, this allows the animals to know that we are mindful and will give them the chance to give feedback about what we are doing.

If you think in terms of a musical score or a piece of music, if there were no pauses between the notes, what we would have is a noise, not music. It is the silences that count!

However, the pause is not restricted to Tellington TTouch. When we do a zoopharmacognosy session, we offer the animal an oil and watch carefully to see what the response will be. It may be quite obvious or very subtle, and we have to hone our observation skills to collect as much information as we can. Then we may find that the animal will walk away or lie down and after a while come back to the oil. This is the pause in action here too.

As we continue with the session, offering more oils, we may find that sometimes the animal will decide to return to one of the previous oils. Here the pause has still been working even though in between other oils have been offered. The pause gives the animal the opportunity to absorb the information transmitted by the oil, assess it and assimilate it. The results may be seen immediately in some cases or after a few hours or even days in other cases.

The same is true when we work with homoeopathic remedies. We administer the remedy, perhaps for 3 or five consecutive days and then we rest, giving the animal’s body and mind time to assimilate the essence of the remedy, just the same as with the oils.

So, in conclusion I would say that learning to work slowly, giving animals time and space by introducing pauses in our work, not only benefits the animals but maximises the impact of what we do with them.

© Mary J. Rodriguez

First of all, every cat is different, as is every other creature, so what they will want to do will do depend a great deal on the bond they have with us. Is it stronger than the bond they feel with the place where they have lived before?

I have moved house many times and never had a problem with the cats wanting to go back to the previous house. What I always did try to do was take the cats to the new place once the furniture was in place so that it would seem like a recognisable home. I also tried to take them towards the end of the day so that when they arrived at their new home, once they had had time to explore the space, they would be fed and could settle down for the evening. The other thing I did was not to change the litter tray before moving but to keep it so that it would smell familiar to them.

A South African friend once told me that his mother always rubbed butter on the cats’ paws. They would then spend some time licking it off and by then any urge to run had been counteracted.

However, that is not what I want to share with you today. This request brought back a memory of an incident which I still think is astounding.

We were moving from one friend’s house to another’s while ours was being completed. We moved our things to the new place, and decided to spend the night there but left the cats with a view to bringing them the following day.When we woke up the following morning, we were amazed to see the cats outside the new house. They had never been there before. Not only that. They were sitting right in front of the window of the room where we had slept.

To get there, they had to open the window of the room where they usually slept, climb down a steep slope, cross a dry river bed, walk along a paved country road and then a dirt track which led up to the house. How did they know where to find us? How did they orient Was it smell? Was it some other non-local intuitive sense?

To this day I have never found an explanation for this extraordinary event, but I often imagine the scene of ten cats walking in Indian file behind Pancho, the big, beautiful black cat, who was always somehow special.

We are all familiar with the expression “Oculi speculum animae”, the eyes are the mirror of the soul. When we look at another person’s eyes, we can tell a great deal about how that person is feeling at that moment: calm, afraid, angry, sad, depressed, disbelieving… and this information helps us modulate our approach.

When we are working with dogs, most people are aware that observing the dog’s eyes is key to gauging the animal’s state of mind at that moment. Is the gaze soft and gentle or hard and staring? Are the whites of the eyes visible (whale eye)? Is the expression fearful? Do the eyes communicate trust in the person? Depending on what we see in the dog’s eyes, we can adjust our own approach and behaviour. We can take things more slowly in training if we see that the dog is not confident or is fearful. We can take advantage of the dog’s enthusiasm to teach new, exciting things. The eyes are like our barometer.

Of course, it is not a one way street. Our gaze will also tell the dog a lot about us and what our intentions are. If we look an unfamiliar dog straight in the eyes, this is a potentially confrontational stance. We could be infringing that dog’s personal space which would make us not very trustworthy in his eyes. When it is our own dog who knows us, is used to direct visual contact with us and understands our visual communication, that is a different matter. If we avert our gaze we can communicate that we are not a threat and respect the dog’s space. It may take us longer to reach our goal, but we will be treading on secure ground and establishing a relationship of trust and respect which will pay off in the long run.

With cats visual contact can be even more delicate. Direct hard stares will almost definitely be interpreted as confrontational and will do nothing to foster a bond between us and the cat. One of the most powerful eye strategies with cats is the slow blink. Cats use it all the time and they can recognise it when we do the same. This is a fundamental tool in our cat relationship.

This has been brought home very forcefully to me over the past 18 months. Some of you may know that a feral cat had four kittens in the loft of my garage. So successfully did she hide them that we could not find out where she was keeping them. When they were 6 weeks old, she brought them down to the garage and presented them to us, but by then they had learned the lessons she had taught them very well. At a signal from her, the kittens disappeared behind shelves or any other nearby hiding place, and getting close to them was almost impossible. Touching them certainly was, despite the fact that I would sit down close by when I fed them. All this was compounded by the fact that I had fractured my shoulder and was unable to move my left arm! Catching them to have them neutered was a nightmare, but that is another story…

Over time they have become more trusting. They know that we will do them no harm. They know that they will be fed. They know that they can sleep undisturbed. The eyes have been a major player in building this relationship of trust. At first, I averted my gaze when I had to pass close by. Gradually I was able to make more direct visual contact without frightening them. They also began to make more direct visual contact, particularly when they asked for food.

The most timid one could not be looked at at all. She was also incapable to looking at us and would hide under a car or a table. Only in the last couple of months has she begun to look directly and she can also accept me looking at her. We engage in slow blink sessions and I am convinced that this has been key to the progress we have made.

The eye lessons have not been limited to cats and dogs, however.  At the end of February, the swallows who have been rearing chicks in our garage each year arrived after their long migration. Being totally tuned in to the power of the eyes, I realised more than ever before just how our gaze affected the swallows’ behaviour. If anyone looked at them directly, they would immediately fly away. Once they had laid their eggs in the nest, we had to keep our head bowed as we passed by. Otherwise, a great hue and cry arose and they would leave the nest and fly off.

It was not just our eyes that caused a strong reaction. Even greater was the reaction when the cats looked up at the birds and understandably so. Trying to reconcile cohabitation in the same space by a family of feral cats and swallows is not easy task! The cats would sit under the nest of the cord we have strung as a night-time perch and wait patiently. That strong stare was just too much for the swallows to bear! In the end we managed to referee the situation and ten chicks were fledged over the course of the summer.

If I was already aware of the importance of our gaze, these two experiences have brought home just how crucial it is to be aware of how and when we look at another living being. The eyes truly are the mirror of the soul!

Her arrival was quite dramatic. She appeared one Saturday morning when I was not at home. She walked decisively into the sitting-room and sat on my husband’s lap. He felt that there was dampness on his legs so he put her down. She then went into the soft crate our beardie, Sasha, liked to lie in because the door, as always, was open. When I came home, I realised that probably the liquid was because her waters had broken. Sure enough, shortly afterwards three kittens came into the world.

Recently Mummy’s behaviour had changed and I felt that she was displaying symptoms akin to senile dementia.

• She would stare into space and seemed disoriented.
• She did not want to be indoors but would rush out at the first opportunity and hide in the long grass under a tree. I feel that she may have been looking for grounding by lying on the earth. The first time she did this we thought that she had been caught by another animal because we could not find her, and despite calling and calling, she gave no sign of life. Eventually she turned up asking for food at 11pm.
• She vocalised a lot when indoors especially during the night, and in the evening and at night she wanted company but at a distance. Some nights I would have to stand by her side for an hour or more around 3am.

Our lovely homoeopathic vet, María, prescribed Aconitum napellus at 6LM potency for 7 days. She should have the remedy three times a day. This remedy was prescribed because some of Mummy’s symptoms were textbook Aconitum, especially the desire for company but at a distance and the fact that these behaviours were worse after midnight

It was not always possible to give her the remedy three times a day because she continued to hide in long grass during the day.

Nevertheless, the day after completing the course of Aconitum, her behaviour became much more normal.

• She is no longer vocalising.
• She comes to eat and is more sociable.
• She is also sleeping through the night without vocalising

This is just another example of how dramatically homeopathic remedies can act, producing results in a gentle way.

However, this was not achieved without stress. Since September 2022 when the kittens reached 6 months of age, I had been trying to catch this kitty. The other three were not easy but this one was truly  elusive. Every attempt had met with the utmost failure. The sedative had no effect and when, last week, it did finally have an effect she hid away in the place where they were born which we have never been able to discover.

As time was marching on and cat season was upon us, catching this cat took on a whole new level of urgency: I had a strong suspicion that this was a female. Clearly it was going to be impossible to catch the cat if she had too big an area to move around in, so two days ago we decided that we were going to have to isolate her somehow.

The little family have been having access to a small area of the house with access from the garage, so we set up a “booby trap” attaching a cord to the top of the door to the garage which we brought along the wall using eyebolts. At the end we attached a weight so that, if we saw the opportunity and she was alone, the weight could be lifted and the door would close without having to approach.

During the morning I saw that she was alone – or so I thought – so at one point I lifted the weight BUT the cord snapped and I saw that her mother was also in the enclosure. In a way it was fine because the door did close and the little cat fled into the bathroom whereas her mother stood her ground and I was able to open the door a little and let her through to the garage. So far so good!

For the rest of the day, she hid in the bathroom and did not move. This was the first time that she had ever been alone. This is a very close-knit little family and they always cuddle up together. I decided to put down some neroli essential oil which is one of the major oils for separation and also some lavender as a calming oil. I put them close enough that the aromas would be perceptible but far enough away that she would be able to move away from them if she wanted.

In the evening she came out of her hiding place and lay on the carpet in the hallway. Then her mother began to call from the other side of the door and she began to cry. I spent the evening sitting on the stairs doing pranayama breathing with audible exhales. That seemed to calm her.

I put down three prawns. In one of them I had put a sedative pill. She ate two prawns and the tail of the one with the pill, but the pill remained intact. Before going to bed I put down a little more food with a pill, and in the morning I saw that she had eaten the food, but she was alert and definitely not sedated, so I put down a little more food with a pill and after some time she began to get drowsy. Another step forward …

After a while she went into the bathroom again so we left her for a while. After a couple of hours, we thought she might now be sufficiently sedated to be able to catch her but when I went into the bathroom she was nowhere to be seen. I looked under the sink cabinet, in the shower. No sign. Then I looked in the waste basket and there she was curled up into a tiny ball. She seemed to be asleep.

My husband had taken the precaution of putting on thick leather work gloves and I had a bathrobe to hand to cover her with. The holding cage was ready and waiting. When he bent over the waste basket, the cat reacted like a spring resort. She simply jumped straight up to about 1.5 metres height. I closed the door so she would be confined. Then, in a total frenzy, she began to jump up the walls. She reached the shower head which is about 2m plus from the ground. With the help of the bathrobe, she was caught and put in the holding cage which fortunately has a top opening as well as the side door. This was the first (and I hope the last) time that we had used the holding cage, but it was definitely worth the investment because, otherwise it might not have been possible to get her into a normal transporter. Then I took her to the car and covered the cage with a towel so that she would be able to stay quiet. Mission accomplished! Despite the thick leather work gloves Roberto’s hand were covered in lacerations.

This was surely a full-blown manifestation of how the sympathetic nervous system engages, even when in theory sedation should have dulled responses. If the day before she had shut down when she isolated and hid in the bathroom, this was fight and flight at its most dramatic.

The journey to the clinic was uneventful and she slept all the way. Surgery was successful and I was right: she was a female and about to come into heat.

When I brought her back, I left her in the dark in the bathroom once again until I could see that she was coming around. When she was able, she went off once again to her safe haven, the place where she was born, and did not appear for the rest of the day. Today she was waiting for her breakfast and has eaten well. The most notable thing is that today she is not running away at the sight of a human so that augurs well for the future.

Mission accomplished! I hope that I will never have to go through this experience again!