WHY WORK WITH HORSES?
Horses are beautiful, strong and gentle animals. They are both prey animals and herd animals and offer an exquisite combination of sensory and feeling awareness, and fullness of contact. Horses can provoke strong images and feelings, deep yearnings, projections, transference, and profound embodied experiences in many people.
As Freeman (2009) states ‘horses live the essence of Gestalt’ in their natural capacity for awareness, contact, congruence and organismic self-regulation. These capacities are incredibly potent for many people out of touch with their own sensitivity and immediacy of experience.
People challenged by patterns of incongruence (for example, having an inner experience of hurt that is disconnected from, or covered by a bodily or behavioural pattern of holding/tensing and smiling), receive immediate non-judgemental feedback by the horses.
Because horses are prey animals they are tuned to the inner experience of those around them so as to keep them safe from predators. If a lion, full in the belly and needing a drink from the water hole, approaches, the horses sense the lion’s intention, and continue grazing with awareness. If that same lion is hungry and stalking, the horses respond by fleeing to safety. Incongruent humans who approach are responded to by horses with either confusion or stress, or, they respond to the inner experience, rather than the behaviour that is presented. These are the gifts they bring to the therapy process.
Kohanov and McElroy (2007) in The Way of the Horse suggest that we can explore the wisdom of non-verbal, non-predatory, heightened sensory and extrasensory being that horses embody.
Specifically Linda suggests that learning about a horse’s way of being honours and speaks to trauma survivors, people who feel powerless and sensitive people who feel betrayed by our aggressive, disconnected and mechanised culture. Linda describes how horses model strengths of cooperation over competition, relationship over territory, responsiveness over strategy, emotion and intuition over logic, process over goal, and the creative approach to life.
When we respectfully climb on their backs, walk beside them or sit in their presence, these animals interrupt the hypnotic effects of our own human conditioning giving people unusually efficient access to forms of healing, perceiving, and relating. (Kohanov & McElroy, 2007, 206)."
Reference: Journal Article by Meg Kirby 2010 on Gestalt based Equine Assisted Psychotherapy GANZ Jounal Vol6 No2 May 2010 – Gestalt Equine Psychotherapy.
