What is Equine Assisted Psychotherapy
I have worked my clients in therapy over the years, sometimes enlisting the help of my own beautiful herd of horses, in the creative application of Equine Assisted Psychotherapy. I feel this work reflects the value of using creative applications in the practice of Psychosynthesis. Many people ask me how this therapy works and so below is an excerpt from Chapter 28 of my Transpersonal Autobiography Parallel Worlds.
Equine Assisted Psychotherapy engages the ability of the horse to mirror unspoken human behaviour and emotions. The therapy, is considered to be short term, solution based, allowing the client to regain their faculty of personal choice over their reactions within relationship with themselves and others.
What is it about horses, that makes them so capable of this work and produce results so swiftly? For me the answer is found in their high sensitivity. Horses have to live very much in the moment for their daily survival – they have a powerful fight or flight survival mechanism and they are totally honest. Their senses are finely tuned to their environment and other herd members and they can pick up human thoughts and emotions and interpret body language and reflect it back to us for us to see. They allow us to see our patterns of relating and give us the opportunity to experiment with changing those ones that do not serve us well.
For me horses are telepathic, you cannot lie to a horse and so, ultimately, you cannot continue to lie to yourself. Horses can help us to become authentic, remembering who we really are beyond our masks. To me they are the essence of Psychosynthesis.
I need to write a little more, in general terms, about the upsurge in the use of horses worldwide in Equine Assisted Therapy in recent years, because over time I have seen examples of horses being abused for this purpose. Possibly not intentionally by those who set out to work humans with horses, but through lack of understanding, on the part of the facilitators and trainers also, of the high sensitivity of horses. They deserve our utmost respect, for horses are in touch with profound abilities that we humans, in most cases, have long forgotten are still available to us. It is these dormant abilities that horses seek to put us in touch with again and this is their gift to humanity, especially in a time when many speak about feeling totally at a loss about the purpose of their lives. People speak of feeling as if something is missing and the search for this missing inner peace leads to an external search for meaning. Dangerous diversions then have an opportunity to take a grip by way of addictions. The gift the horse offers is to help us to be put in touch with our authentic selves, so that we learn to relate to our true selves and not to the myriad of false selves we have adopted to survive our challenging lives. Many people today live very sterile, material lives, in urban environments where contact with the natural world is extremely limited. It is by turning back to the natural world that we can learn to live within the same energetic flow, to get back in touch with and trust our intuition, to feel our energetic responses within and make the right choices and responses in our relationships with ourselves and others.
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