Linda Tellington-Jones - founder of TTouch®
Tellington TTouch® gets its name from its founder, Linda Tellington-Jones. Linda had spent a lifetime living and working with horses when in the 1970s she decided to train in the Feldenkrais Method, a system of non-habitual movements aimed at helping humans to have better proprioception (awareness of the various parts of your body and where they are in relation to each other) and to have easier movement and better posture, with the knock-on effect of having better self-confidence. Moshe Feldenkrais said, "Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the process, and you improve the quality of life itself."
Linda took the Feldenkrais training and decided to see if any of it could be applied to horses. She began trying things like moving their ears in a non-habitual way (eg in circles), moving their legs in small circles, and found to her amazement that there was indeed a knock-on effect, with horses becoming easier to catch and calmer in their outlook. Linda took not only the knowledge she had gained from Feldenkrais but also her own immense knowledge of horses and developed a method that included bodywork (hands-on non-habitual movement) and groundwork (leading horses over and around obstacles in new ways which helped them develop awareness and confidence). Over time she tried using the method on dogs, and found that it also worked on them. From there she realised there were endless possibilities and that her method could be applied to any species from horses to snakes to giraffes.
Today there are over 1000 TTEAM (horses) and TTouch (companion animals) practitioners worldwide.
"Making the impossible possible; the possible easy; and the easy, elegant."
- Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc.