In today's climate of economic uncertainty and escalating costs, it is easy for a sense of alarm to take hold.   My colleague Kathleen Barry Ingram likes to say that "horses help us move from survival mentality, to a state of thriving".  How can horses help us find an antidote to the anxiety thrust upon us by the relentless messages which forecast economic gloom and doom?  

When we look to horses as teachers who have something important for us to learn about ourselves, instead of simple-minded vehicles for our recreational needs, we begin to understand that accessing our own power and choice, and following our own inner compass (or recalibrating it), is the most important step we can take in these confusing times.

In EFP/L, we focus more on what horses have to teach us about being human, rather than on what we teach them about carrying a rider.   In my own life and for many others who have attended HEAL workshops and clinics, I have seen tremendous changes take place; changes that often seem to defy the human "laws" of logic and rationality.  In the many evaluations received from classes and workshops, the most often cited phrase is "life changing".  And in these changed lives, "synchronicity"*  is the hallmark, the rule rather than the exception.  By working with horses, students literally learn to court synchronicity and find it (sometimes literally) in every turn.  Many students naturally begin courting synchronicity in everyday life, and then...

Our classes look straight into the heart of the human-horse relationship.  Taking a bio-psycho-spiritual** approach to understanding both parties, the human and the horse, students are amazed and delighted to find that naturalness with horses is not something that takes years of learning to develop, but rather it is an innate capacity that each human has, once we are empowered to be our selves.  Often, we have to "unlearn" limiting patterns, outmoded survival strategies, and clouded views that limit our own perceptions.

When people can seriously engage with the idea of the horse as mirror to themselves, remarkable things happen.   Authentic, mutually collaborative relationships with horses require people to call forth the most important and invisible attributes of the soul:  courage, empathy, authenticity, present moment awareness.  These are qualities of heart, not head.  Not only horses respond!  For more information on the possible effects of focusing consciously on heart/brain coherence, visit the Institute of Heart Math.

* synchronicity: unexplained or unexpected 'coincidences' that seemed to be influenced or known ahead of time by intuitive knowledge or emotional energies.  back

**  Bio-psycho-spiritual: An approach combining body-based awareness and reverence for the body's messages with psychological health and principles of spiritual meaning and maturity.  back

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