Horses have been a focus of intrigue and wonder for centuries. They have the innate ability to capture your attention, read your mood, and give immediate feed-back to human behavior.
Horses are very much like humans. They are social animals experiencing many of the same emotions as humans. They have defined rolls within their herd as well as distinct personalities, attitudes, and moods. They play, fight, and communicate within their relationships. Horses are loyal, obedient, and faithful. They are grand in size and in spirit. The respect of a horse must be earned and their trust is easily marred.
Because horses are prey animals, they are intimately aware of their environment and are tuned into the non-verbal communication cues surrounding them. For this reason, horses have an innate ability to mirror our emotions and body language, thus making them profound messengers.
Working with horses creates an opportunity to overcome fears and to gain confidence, patience, trust, empowerment, self-awareness, self-esteem, and compassion. The various roads leading to accomplished tasks while working with horses provide wonderfully rich metaphors to life’s various challenging situations.
The horse’s honest interpretation of body language is an incredibly useful tool in exercises with clients. The client can easily sense how their demeanor affects the horse and in turn can relate the horse to others in their personal lives. They can experience immediate results in their relationship with the horse.
In short, horses have amazing spirits, they are captivating and interesting. Their immense size can be intimidating and then empowering. Horses are fantastic teachers because of their response to human behaviors. It is with this incredible horse to human interaction that people become physically, emotionally, and spiritually more aware.
