Equine Assisted Leadership & Coaching
Come As You Are
You will be invited to explore and observe your own emotions, reactions, patterns, and inner dialogues to gain a deeper understanding of yourself. Individuals and horses are on equal footing and work as partners in the healing process. Perhaps there are times when you may find yourself engaging in self-defeating dialogues and patterns of behavior, or maybe you struggle with finding the words to describe the inner conflicts that you are experiencing. It is through these connections with the horses that you gain self awareness and invoke powerful lessons. Horses bring you closer to nature, and are highly effective at mirroring back your internal thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Through this transformation you are able to mirror care, compassion, healthy boundaries, mutual respect, love, and acceptance to your self.
Equine assisted leadership offers an empowering and unique experiential approach to engage in deep self-reflection and awareness; helping you to learn more about how your thoughts and reactions impact your daily life. Gaining a deeper understanding of the roots of your struggles can restore and revive your sense of hope, purpose, self leadership, and joy. Clients will cultivate gratitude, confidence, self compassion, and trust; while learning to be free of self doubt, fear, roles, and perfectionism. The horse is an empathic, sentient being who chooses to support your nervous system in healing from the challenges of life. Healing is not just about integrating trauma and shadow work; it's also about aiding your nervous system to be in equilibrium. With these real-time shifts, you are able to find much needed respite from stressors that may have impacted you for years, deepen the self-lead connection, and finally feel more balanced to live their lives more fully.
Why Horses?
There are multiple reasons for why we choose to use horses in this work, but primarily it is due to their nature as a social and prey animal. Horses are prey animals. What this means is that they are highly in-tuned with their environment, they can readily focus on just being in the world, in the moment, which for them means grazing, moving, and interacting with herd members.
Pairing with horses:
- Helps gain self-leadership
- Transforms inner conflicts
- Hels cope with trauma responses
- Helps us to learn how to regulate our emotions
- Cultivates a sense of safety and self reflection
- Helps us learn how to form and express healthy boundaries
- Restores and reconnects to a sense of safety and belonging
When horses sense danger, they react quickly due to their nervous system becoming activated enabling them to respond primarily through flight; although at times through flight or freeze. This organic reach is very similar to the human response to danger therefore many people can relate to these responses. The human body has the same capacity to respond as horses do: react, respond, then calm down, and go back to grazing where horses are able to return to “peace”.
As a result of this nature, horses have an extraordinary ability to read our nonverbal communication — picking up on messages we are sending which we are not always conscious of what we are doing. With this, they start responding to us in familiar ways reminding us of other people and things in our life. Horses do not know our past, education, gender, race or any other labels we may apply to ourselves and each other. Horses do not judge. They are in the moment and can be a part of this relationship without the biases we humans put on each other. This provides even more value in the insight they can provide to us about ourselves.