What the Horse and the Bike Have in Common

By Robert Chuvala

A field-study note on the trainable mechanism above the specific instrument.

Kirsi asked me if I wanted to be in one of her sessions. Her therapist runs horse-assisted rhythmic riding EMDR. I asked someone to explain what that actually was, mechanism-deep, because I’ve been around enough therapeutic vocabulary in the past few years to know when a name is doing the work of obscuring what something is.

Here is what I learned. EMDR is the trauma therapy Francine Shapiro developed in the late eighties. APA-recommended for PTSD. Well-validated. The mechanism most researchers converge on now is working-memory taxation: hold a traumatic memory in mind while doing something rhythmic and bilateral — eye tracking, finger taps, tones in alternating ears — and your brain gets too busy parsing the rhythm to keep the memory in its trauma-frozen state. The memory re-consolidates as ordinary autobiographical memory. The somatic charge drops out. The memory becomes describable instead of re-experienceable.

The rhythmic-riding version replaces the eye tracking with the horse’s gait. A walking horse moves left-right-left-right at around fifty bpm. A trot is closer to a hundred and twenty. Both sit inside the bilateral-stimulation range. The gait becomes the metronome. The patient doesn’t have to perform the bilateral stimulation deliberately because the horse is doing it for them.

What the horse adds that fingers and eyes can’t is co-regulation. A regulated horse’s nervous system carries a dysregulated rider’s. Horses read HRV, breath rate, and postural tension in real time and mirror it. They are the somatic mirror you don’t have to construct cognitively. For a sensory-sensitive nervous system, this is the difference between trying to talk yourself into regulation and being regulated by something that won’t lie to you about your own state. Plus the present-tense forcing function. You cannot fully dissociate on a twelve-hundred-pound animal whose balance depends on yours. The body stays in the room.

I read all of that, and the inside of my chest said: that’s what the bike does.

The mechanism, mapped

Pedaling cadence is left-right-left-right at exactly the bpm range EMDR uses. A spinning interval on the trainer is in the ninety-to-one-hundred-ten range. A technical trail descent is higher and uneven and that’s better, not worse, because uneven rhythm tracks closer to natural bilateral stimulation than metronomic. The cadence is the metronome.

Technical riding occupies working memory completely. You cannot rehearse a trauma narrative while you’re parsing a line through wet roots. The trail is the working-memory tax. It is doing exactly what the rhythmic eye-tracking is supposed to do in a clinician’s office — keeping your working memory occupied so your brain can re-consolidate the target memory without it staying in trauma-frozen state. Except the trail is more honest than the eye-tracker, because the eye-tracker doesn’t punish you for spacing out and the trail does.

Co-regulation is the trickier piece. The bike doesn’t have a nervous system. But the bike is the most honest object I own, because every choice I’ve made about it — titanium handlebars on a steel frame, the specific tire I run, the bar tape that’s worn enough to feel through — is engineered for feedback. The bike tells me the truth about the trail and about my own body, with no latency. If I tense my shoulders, the bike rattles. If I drop my weight, the bike floats. The bike is a non-lying mirror in the same way Kirsi tells me a regulated horse is a non-lying mirror. Different substrate. Same property.

Present-tense embodiment is the forcing function. I crashed at Quarry Ridge in early 2025. About twenty-five miles an hour, six or seven feet of drop, a golden retriever off-leash in the landing zone. Two-hundred-seventy-five dollars worth of MIPS helmet, bleeding on the brain afterward. I am very clear on the price of dissociation at speed on technical terrain. You don’t get a do-over. The bike teaches you to stay in your body the way the horse does, with the same lesson plan, just on a steeper learning curve.

Non-judgmental witness is the trail. The trail does not care who you are. The trail does not interpret your suffering. The trail does not assign meaning. The trail is, and you ride it or you don’t.

Every mechanism the EMDR literature names, I have been running on the bike for years, without language for what I was doing.

The instrument that injured is the instrument that heals

This is the part I want to sit with for a minute because it’s the part I keep coming back to.

The crash at Quarry Ridge was on the bike. The processing I have done since the crash, and especially in the past year, has been on the bike. The instrument that took me down is the same instrument that has been bringing me back. This is not coincidence in my architecture. It is the same surface playing both roles.

There is a class of recovery framework that assumes the activity associated with injury is the activity you stop. After a crash, you sell the bike. After a fall, you put away the climbing shoes. After the addiction, you avoid the bar. The framework calls this prudence. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the activity is just where the injury happened, and the injury is what needs avoiding, and the activity is fine.

But the bike isn’t where the injury happened. The bike is where the processing happens, and the injury was a feature of the surface that processing already lived on. If I had not been on the bike I would not have crashed. I also would not have processed eighteen months of grief and reorganization that the rides since the crash have been carrying. The same surface played both roles. The injury and the recovery have been continuous through the same instrument.

This matters because the Return Protocol I am building with my fiancée on Wisconsin land is structurally a methodology that generalizes this pattern. Different visitors will arrive with different injuries, different cultural firmware, different bodies, different access to instruments. The protocol’s job is to offer multiple delivery surfaces of the same category so each person can find the medium that fits their body. Mountain biking is one of those surfaces. It is one I have field-tested on myself, with instrumented data, for six years of sobriety and a year of post-TBI recovery, with no map and no peers. The bike was the field study.

The category above the instrument

What I want to name is this. The horse and the bike are not the same thing. They are different instruments in the same category. The category is the trainable mechanism. The instrument is fungible.

The category is: rhythmic bilateral somatic processing with a non-lying co-regulation partner.

Bilateral rhythm in the EMDR bpm range. Working memory occupied by present-tense demand. A co-regulating partner that does not lie about your state. A surface where dissociation breaks the practice — you fall off the horse, you crash the bike, you drop the rhythm.

Once you see the category, the partner can be a lot of things. A horse. A mountain bike. A drum kit, with bilateral hand pattern at cadence. A paddle on water, kayak or canoe, bilateral stroke and the water’s own rhythm co-regulating. A snowboard in powder, edge changes and terrain co-regulation. Cadence-locked breath walking. There are probably more.

What unites them is not what they look like. It is the structural shape. The instrument is fungible. The category is the thing.

This is why my body recognized the description of horse-assisted rhythmic riding EMDR. The category fits. I have the instrument calibrated, just in a different medium. Kirsi’s invitation isn’t an invitation to try a new modality. It is an invitation to do my existing practice through her medium for one session.

The Return Protocol’s first chapter is going to be this.

The field study, N equals me

You do not need a clinician’s certification to do this work on yourself. You need the triad and a journal.

The triad is what you measure before and after each session. Three layers.

First, distress. Subjective Units of Distress on a zero-to-ten scale, on a target you have specifically named. Specificity matters. “Process some stuff” does not work. A specific memory, a current activation pattern, a felt-sense knot. Rate the target. Note the number.

Second, body. Where does the charge live right now. Throat tight, ribs braced, low back gripped, shoulders held. Jot the location. Three words is enough. If you have HRV instrumentation, capture that. If you don’t, the somatic note is the signal.

Third, cognition. What is the current negative belief about self that the target produces. “I should have known.” “I’m dangerous.” “I’m alone.” “I’m too much.” One sentence. The belief is what the protocol is trying to reorganize.

Also name the positive cognition. What you would like to believe instead. “I did what I could.” “I survived.” “I am not alone.” “I am the right amount.” You don’t force the positive cognition. You hold it as the destination the protocol is reaching toward.

Pre-ride, sit five minutes. Name the target. Note the triad. Note the destination cognition.

During the ride, hold the target in the background. Don’t grip it cognitively. Don’t rehearse it as narrative. Let it be present in the field while the cadence and the trail do the working-memory work. The bike is the bilateral stimulation. The trail is the working-memory tax. The body knows what to do with the target while you focus on the line.

Stop at natural breaks — top of a climb, end of a descent, the trailhead. Re-check the triad. Distress dropped? Body location shifted? Cognition softer? Note briefly. Keep riding with the same target, or if something new surfaced, switch to that. The body knows what wants processing. Let it lead.

Post-ride, do the closure. Sit before you go inside. Re-rate the triad. Body scan to confirm you are regulated. Heart rate down, breath even, charge dropped. Don’t end mid-activation. Journal briefly. Target, baseline triad, ride conditions, post-triad, what surfaced. Three lines.

Eight weeks of that and you have your own substrate. You also have data — field-study data on yourself, in the native environment where the practice lives — that the clinical literature does not have on you and never will. You are the only person who can run this study on you.

What this is not for

The bike is good for medium-charge material. The editor voice. Current activations. Body-tension patterns. Recurring rumination. Recent conflicts. Grief that wants to move and hasn’t found a route.

The bike is not the right surface for class-A trauma material. Pre-verbal threat memory. Anything involving childhood violence that surfaced recently and is still volatile. Anything where the activation could spike past your ability to manage it in the next sixty seconds. The crash-risk math is real. If you dissociate at twenty-five miles an hour on technical terrain you do not get a do-over.

Save the heavy material for the horse session with a trained therapist. Or for the therapist you have. Or for the dyadic somatic work with a partner who can carry your nervous system if yours drops out. The bike is solo work. Solo work has a ceiling on what it should carry.

Honor the ceiling.

The horse and the bike

If Kirsi’s session goes the way I think it will, I will ride a horse for the first time in a long time, and I will recognize what’s happening in my body inside the first ten minutes, because the category will already be calibrated. The horse’s gait is going to feel familiar. The co-regulation is going to feel familiar. The present-tense forcing function is going to feel familiar. What will be new is having three other nervous systems in the field with me — Kirsi’s, the therapist’s, the horse’s — when usually it’s just mine and the bike’s.

That’s the thing the horse can offer that the bike can’t. Co-regulation from another nervous system instead of from a machine. The bike has been carrying me alone for six years. The horse offers carriage that’s not alone.

The category is the same. The instruments differ in what they can hold for you.

There is a sentence I have been writing toward for a long time about the healing center. It is not finished but it is closer tonight than it was yesterday.

The category is universal equipment. The trainable variable is attention.

Find your instrument.