Are you struggling in your relationship with your horse? Feeling helpless, frustrated?
Are you struggling in your relationships with humans? Feeling helpless, frustrated?
I have a story to share with you and some information regarding services to help you understand your horse and yourself. Actually, it can help all of your relationship patterns, by giving you a view from a new perspective.
So, here I am, facilitating my first one-day workshop as an Epona apprentice in 2006, sitting next to the most famous quarter horse trainer in the area, feeling this incredible sadness in him. You see, I am like a horse: I’m able to sense emotions of people in physical proximity to me — an ability that we call empathy. He didn’t open up much as we proceeded through the educational processes of the day. That is, until the wrap up session when his grief broke through and he shared the cause of his sadness.
You see, his heart was broken because, as a very good trainer, he had what is called “a feel” for horses. He had a reputation for bringing along these young colts and fillies, all finished and ready to please their new owners. And this is the point where his heart often broke: new owners didn’t have his “feel” or his sensitivity and knowledge of what their newly acquired horse was feeling. He came to understand that many of these horse owners didn’t even know what they were feeling themselves. This dynamic, this lack of emotional intelligence skills – or “horse sense” – creates a huge problem in equine/human relationships.
Many of his youngsters developed defensive “misbehaviors,” behavioral patterns to cope with their owners’ emotional issues, and were either returned to him or sold off to lead sad lives with sad endings. Because he couldn’t endure the heartbreak and felt helpless, unable to help his horse buyers learn his skills, this well-renowned trainer was ready to quit the business.
So, what were we doing at Epona that touched him so deeply? We were teaching people how to “feel,” teaching them what he already knew: how to have horse sense, how to be emotionally honest, congruent, authentic. Another trainer who performs clinics in our area describes it like this: it is the human’s responsibility to come to a horse’s presence with ZERO emotional baggage that will contaminate the horse/human experience.
Instead, people show up in their horse’s space without being fully present, on their cell phones, not grounded in their physical bodies, some perhaps haven been on their computers in a virtual reality all day. Sometimes they show up to work with the horse carrying an anger that they have not expressed appropriately and direct it at their horse.
As prey animals, horses survive by their ability to instantly send and receive emotional information to their fellow herd members. Conversely, they instantly receive their owner’s state of physiological arousal and emotional state as well, often from a huge distance away, up to 20ft or more. Epona has developed experiential learning exercises using a horse’s natural way of being in order to train humans how to be better humans. That is, they help humans to be effective leaders, emotionally and physically congruent, able to use emotions as information to make healthy life choices, able to use power effectively and authentically and understand how to develop and use intuitive insight.
Since horses relate to us primarily through nonverbal signals, it is critical for us to notice what we are communicating to them not only through visual body language but through such things as the quality of our breathing, our heart rate, blood pressure, physical proximity and quality of our touch. As we become more aware of this nonverbal dimensional way of how we relate, we begin to understand the mixed messages that we send to humans as well.
Epona Equestrian Services is an internationally recognized center, located in Tuscon, Ariz., that trains instructors from all over the world in equine experiential learning. Instructors come from diverse backgrounds: lawyers, medical doctors, psychotherapists, corporate leadership, horse trainers, holistic health practitioners, interior designers and more, all with a passion for horses and their ability to help humans evolve.
By Sharon Bringleson, AAI, Epona Advanced Approved Instructor in Equine Experiential Learning
Sharon Bringleson began her apprenticeship in 2006, became an advanced instructor in 2010 and now offers individual and small group instruction in this work. For more information call Sharon at 970-631-2379.
