Trusting The Horses Part II: This Lies A ...

Trusting The Horses Part II: This Lies At The Very Heart Of Equine Facilitated Practice

Jun 05, 2022

Key themes: Trusting the horses, equine wisdom, inter-species partnerships, nervous system, heart field, entrainment, healing, balance, facilitation skills.

Without the horses there is no equine facilitated or assisted practice. Yet, in our typical human-centric fashion we can easily forget or limit the intrinsic and powerful role the horses play. We also forget or can’t yet hear that it’s the horses themselves offering this support to humans. The horses know where we need to shift and how to get there much more readily than we do, and they eagerly offer us a route to healing and change, if we could only quieten down our mind and ego enough, and step into a space of open-hearted possibilities that can flow from being in the same healing space as them.

When we find it difficult to trust another species we must question ourselves and look to where we are still needing to hold on to a sense of control in our lives, including in our professional work.

So, we must regularly ask ourselves:

·       What makes it hard for us to let go and allow another being to guide the process and bring to the session a very different and heightened state of sensory and energetic awareness and subtlety?

·       Why do we feel the need to rely on scripts, structure, tools, exercises and the like? Rather than just BEING in the same shared space, respecting each other and allowing what wants to unfold happen.

Often it our ego and externally-focused persona which feels compelled to keep a tight hold of the reins, metaphorically speaking. Letting our intuition and heart guide us can feel scary for many people. Yet, in my experience, it is exactly these states of being that the horses respond much more positively to, as they find the former too rigid and pressurised.

Yet, once we know we can trust the horses to quite naturally ‘do their thing’, then the real work begins.

Here’s one just one key way which exemplifies why we partner with horses in particular and what they can offer:

Horse naturally inhabit the parasympathetic state the majority of the time, unless living in stressful and pressured environments themselves. So, if we keep our horses happy and healthy and as naturally as we can within our domestic settings, then they will inhabit this relaxed, calm, open state and usually be very happy to step forward and engage with us and our clients.

So long as their fundamental needs are met as grazing, non-predatory, social mammals, then the healing work they seem keen to offer people can take place.

It is this which enables people to start to shift out of their habitual, heightened arousal states of the sympathetic nervous system mode, and into the horses’ much calmer and peaceful parasympathetic state.

There we can begin to re-work, a little at a time, the tight knots in our body; the racing torrent of thoughts and the ever present sense of being ready to react at any moment. Instead, we can begin to entrain our heartrate, breathing and nervous system to that of the horses.

And what’s more, this doesn’t even need to take place through direct physical contact with a herd of horses, i.e.: we don’t need to be close and/or touching a horse/s. Indeed, it can happen from some distance and including over the fence line. This is because the horse’s electromagnetic heart-field and edge of their nervous system touches the edges of ours quite naturally from several feet away.

It is in this shared, mutually respectful space where the work begins as the horses sense something not quite balanced and healed in a person’s nervous system, so they go to work helping to rebalance, realign and release some tension, pain, trauma, old wound or recent imbalance energetically sensed and felt by them through their nervous system.

As facilitators our ongoing task in the realm of trusting our equine partners involves gently releasing our ego and persona’s need to always know, lead and control the experience. We must learn to temper these aspects of ourselves, which paradoxically, comes through greater ego strength, as we acquiesce and allow another species to show us just what they can offer us when happily and freely able to.

THAT is when the equine magic takes place: when we and our clients open ourselves up the mystery of another being who can sensitively and gently guide us towards wholeness, healing and joy.

©Angela Dunning, The Horse’s Truth, www.thehorsestruth.co.uk

Image by Inesa Cebanu, Shutterstock.

Enjoy this post?

Buy Angela Dunning of The Horse's Truth a coffee

More from Angela Dunning of The Horse's Truth