Why Healing with Horses?

Imagine yourself being a big wild animal. Instead of a predator, you are a prey one. What would you need in order to survive in the wild?

• For safety reasons you would feel the need to belong to a group
• You would have to learn skills in order to save energy for when it is needed (flight)
• Saving energy means not fighting among the group, but instead, developing a precise language for a skilful communication, a communication that leads to harmony
• Finding ways to liberate the stress caused by moments you’ve been chased is also fundamental! Otherwise you would constantly live under pressure, traumatised, showing clear symptoms of post traumatic stress. Which again would consume your energy.
• Reading the environment to keep yourself and your family safe is also very important.

All those characteristics mentioned above perfectly describe the true nature of the horse. Although ethologists have been studying the behaviour of domestic horses for many years, there is now a new field opening doors for us to really understand the essence of horses: the study of wild horses, being observed in their habitat, within the HERD. They not only live in herds, but when observed form above, while escaping from threat, they move as a flock of birds. There is never one or another horse starting the movement, but the group as one piece. Ethologists believe horses are so sensitive and so skilful while reading the environment and the body language of every single member of the herd, that some go further believing they can read the Morphic Field created by every single change in the system (for more on this topic, see Rupert Sheldrake). In doing so it is not a mystery or magical to say they are capable of reading human’s body language, our emotions and, why not, the Field created by us. A field that contains information from our subconscious, from our past; everything that builds our true story, who we are. Not a story or a narrative we keep repeating for ourselves, but the one we are not aware of, most of the time. While being with horses, we have the opportunity to get to know parts of us that have been hidden, suppressed, ignored. Integrating those parts are fundamental in a Healing process.

But more then showing us the truth about our selves, horses can also help us move on. By interacting with them, we learn, not with our understanding, but through experience, how to be in the present moment and accept what they have to give us: a non judgemental relationship, based on trusting on what is happening here and now. If we are not present, they will find ways to clearly communicate our lack of presence. If we enter their field and allow our selves to be as present as they are, they will know what is the missing piece in our lives, the one that can finally brings us peace of mind, happiness, fulfilment.

After putting together the missing pieces, horses can also show us how to live peacefully and in harmony within a group. Be it in the immediate group or, in a bigger picture, society. Just like the Herd moves together as a flock of birds, reading the field, all at once, we slowly start to understand/experience that everything is connected. Our thoughts, emotions, attitudes, they all have an impact on the big field called Humanity.