Its a heal of a job,
but somebody's got to do it
By: Cynthia Werthamer, Freeman Staff

SAUGERTIES - When Cindy Brody puts her hands on a horse, she's communicating with the animal. The horse, she insists, answers back. And it's not Mister Ed we're talking about. Brody does hands-on healing of animals, primarily horses, that she says is a combination of energy balancing, kinesiology - a form of muscle testing that determines areas of stress or imbalance - reiki, deep tissue massage, acupressure and intuition. She calls it synergy - "the combined or cooperative force, specifically in medicine" - which she spells "CinergE."

Brody explained her technique as she visited equine clients at Saxton Farm in Saugerties. "Everyone has energy," she said, resting her hands on Hilo, her own 10-year-old thoroughbred/Arabian. "When you're hurt, you've imbalanced your energetic system."

Using kinesiology, she determines where a horse's body is out of balance: Her fingers flick involuntarily when she passes a hand over a place that is hurt, tight or bothered by an old injury. She then takes a rubber mallet and rubber-tipped dowel, and taps gently on the spot she's discovered.
Brody explained her technique as she visited equine clients at Saxton Farm in Saugerties. "Everyone has energy," she said, resting her hands on Hilo, her own 10-year-old thoroughbred/Arabian. "When you're hurt, you've imbalanced your energetic system."

Using kinesiology, she determines where a horse's body is out of balance: Her fingers flick involuntarily when she passes a hand over a place that is hurt, tight or bothered by an old injury. She then takes a rubber mallet and rubber-tipped dowel, and taps gently on the spot she's discovered.
The tapping, she said, "unblocks the blocked energy to facilitate healing." She also uses reiki, "a channeling of universal life energy," to assist healing.

"Horses are ultrasensitive to energy because they're very energetic creatures," she said. "They have a tremendous amount of it and you can feel and see the energy coursing through them."

Brody explained her technique as she visited equine clients at Saxton Farm in Saugerties. "Everyone has energy," she said, resting her hands on Hilo, her own 10-year-old thoroughbred/Arabian. "When you're hurt, you've imbalanced your energetic system."

Using kinesiology, she determines where a horse's body is out of balance: Her fingers flick involuntarily when she passes a hand over a place that is hurt, tight or bothered by an old injury. She then takes a rubber mallet and rubber-tipped dowel, and taps gently on the spot she's discovered.
The tapping, she said, "unblocks the blocked energy to facilitate healing." She also uses reiki, "a channeling of universal life energy," to assist healing.

Using a rubber mallet and a rubber-tipped dowel, Cindy Brody works on a horse.

"Horses are ultrasensitive to energy because they're very energetic creatures," she said. "They have a tremendous amount of it and you can feel and see the energy coursing through them."

She said she has healed horses suffering from arthritis, colic, joint inflammation, bad backs, even fear. Sometimes, she knows what's wrong by asking the horse, verbally or without words, and intuiting the answer.

"I stumbled on it by using intuition and kinesiology to see where the pain is," Brody said. "Anyone with a pet who says, 'Are you hungry?,' and the dog wags his tail, is already communicating." She has gotten images from horses that are confirmed by their humans - for example, ways in which the person incorrectly rides the horse that causes the animal discomfort.

Plenty of folks start out not believing the 43-year-old Woodstock resident, but change their minds when they see how their horses improve.

On this day, she works on Nelson, a 7-year-old thoroughbred that was injured rolling too close to a gate and is on stall rest. He belongs to Maura Ellyn of High Falls, who said, "She saw (Nelson) resisting a canter, and a lot of people would think he's being disobedient, but she saw his shoulder was sore." That came from being confined to his stall.
"When I got Nelson, he was very head-shy, but through a lot of work Cindy's done, now I can do all kinds of things," she said, adding she wasn't skeptical because she'd seen Brody work on a friend's horse.

"You can see how much the horses love it, and you can see how much better they're moving," Ellyn said.

She was so impressed, in fact, she took a class Brody taught on energy balancing. "I let her work on me too," she added.
Brody, who has studied energy work for 20 years, said the kinds of energy-balancing she does is not a mystery: "Anyone can do it. If you don't believe it, rub your hands together, then hold them an inch apart, and tell me you don't feel energy."
Denise David of Kingston - whose American warmblood, Crescendo, has worked with Cindy for five years - bore out Brody's thesis. "I've felt that with us working together, through her regular visits and my intuition, we can find out what he's feeling before it becomes a problem," she said.

But with all her equine and human validation, Brody said she doesn't consider herself a healer.

"That healing comes from the animal and I'm just helping them to access their own healing energy," she said.

See Cindy's feature article from the Woodstock Times
January 2, 2003

Wildwood Farm clinic Oak Harbor, Washington article

Rosendale Blue Stone Press
Susan Krawitz (7/7/2000)