WHY HORSES?
- Horses are magnificent creatures that are truly beautiful and intelligent. They are powerful and strong, yet gentle and sensitive too.
- Calm and healthy horses can assist in co-regulating a client's nervous system.
- Horses model healthy functioning and offer experiential learning opportunities throughout the session, engaging clients in the learning process.
- Horses have an innate ability to be authentic to their feelings and emotions, constantly living in the present moment, which allows them to lead a healthy life, stay safe and communicate clear boundaries and intentions to others in the herd, modelling healthy ways for us to learn from.
- Horses don’t classify feelings as positive or negative, they simply act on what they are experiencing before they go back to homeostasis. As such, this horse wisdom allows for clients to experience and explore an acceptance and welcoming of their own feelings and emotions, and along with the practitioner, offer teachings to the client of ways to connect to oneself, regulate and build resources that can be used in their everyday lives.
- Horses evoke strong feelings and emotions in people and these can be explored in sessions to discover ones own patterns of feelings, thoughts, beliefs and behaviours.
- Horses are social beings, living in herds and constantly living in connection and relationship with each other in authentic ways. Therefore, they offer a safe and unique way for clients to enter into a non-judgemental relationship so they can explore their own experience in relationship and new behaviours.
- Horses bring a richness and authenticity to sessions, interacting in unique ways with each and every client, giving the client unique bio feedback which can then be explored, whilst also offering the experience of touch and being held, in a way that human practitioners can not.
- Being out in nature, with horses, can also contribute positively to therapeutic outcomes for clients.