Horses live in a social, her structure, which allows them to teach valuable lessons about communication, boundaries, and relationships.
Despite their size, horses are prey animals with an innate focus on survival and safety. They are highly attuned to their environment, and the emotions of those around them, making them excellent at mirroring human feelings, and behaviors.
Horses are highly intuitive and can mirror human emotions and behaviors, helping individuals gain insight into their feelings and actions.
A vital part of this prey animal characteristic means that the horses need to respond swiftly and unquestioningly to unsafe conditions in their surroundings, oftentimes observed as a FLIGHT, FIGHT, or FREEZE response. To do this, horses are highly attuned to their environment and to non-verbal communication with in the herd.
To clients, these responses begin to feel very familiar in that they resemble the ways their own spouses, children, and co-workers respond, or how their additional, fears, and desires play our in their live s. The horses become very real symbols of these relationships and allow the client the opportunity to work through the way changing these aspects play out in an experiential, in-the-moment, and emotionally safe setting.
With their size and presence, it’s hard to ignore a horse. he attribute alone can create a natural, engaging, environment for clients, though it can be intimidating for many people. Accomplishing a task involving the horse despite those fears can build confidence in dealing with other overwhelming challenging situations in life. We can’t simply control a powerful horse; bring in a relationship with a horse requires using healthy relationship skills.
Working with horses, promotes personal growth, emotional healing, and self-awareness through nonverbal communication.
The horses attributes create opportunities for building trust, empathy, and meaningful connections in a supportive environment, Their interactions provides ongoing, valuable feedback and information that creates awareness of current patterns and motivates clients to adapt new one. The horses and their interactions, both with th human clients and with each other, become a symbolic reflection of what is happening in a client’s life.
Horses can be used to address a wide range of entail health, behavioral, and emotional challenges, promoting lasting change.
Just by doing, moving and reacting as they do (or by not moving or reacting in some cases) horses naturally make change happen in the clients while encouraging them also to make changes in their beliefs, actions, and behaviors in order to see different results in the relationship.