News from HEAL

I feel I was called back to horses by an Appaloosa gelding in 2006. He came my way 'by chance', shortly after a near-fatal episode of pneumonia. I was physically and emotionally weaker than I had ever been in my life, had two small children, and permanently scarred lungs that were causing chronic infective illness and fatigue. A year before, I had suffered post-natal depression and had remembered all the abuse of my early childhood. I was in intense therapy and trying to piece myself back together. I was low, low, low. And Nocona, my Appaloosa boy, was all FIRE, FIRE, FIRE! He was young, basically untrained, and traumatised by having had six owners in his first five years of life. On the surface, we were a terrible match. Everyone thought I was nuts! But there was just something about him. And there was just something about me that was starving hungry and needed him badly. But I had to let go of all my preconceptions about what this young horse needed. I was in no shape to ride regularly, or train him in the traditional sense. He immediately developed what I now understand to be stress-related illnesses - mud fever, rain scald, repeated foot abscesses - and needed two operations to rectify a massive infection in his jawbone, which ruled out riding with a bit for the foreseeable future. Not to mention the fact that the mere sight of a saddle made him nearly disintegrate with terror. What a pair! All I knew was that this horse needed time to heal, to decompress, and to receive unconditional acceptance, all the things that horses have given me throughout my life.

Over the first year, all of Nocona's physical ailments healed and have not returned. Today he is strong and healthy, usually happy to be ridden, and always eager to connect with people. I say 'usually' happy to be ridden because sometimes I get the distinct impression he is saying, "Now mum, we have other work to be doing!" I have recently started using him for EFL sessions and he has been wonderfully sensitive and responsive. But there is another side to Nocona that I want to share with you, a side that has left me oftentimes speechless and stretched to capacity in my efforts to make space within myself for the things he shows me.

Nocona Face

It began one day, about two years ago now... I went up to the field, upset and tearful, straight from my own therapy session. I had been working on my childhood abuse issues and felt incapable of doing anything more than sitting in the grass and listening to the munch munching. After a little while, Nocona came over, walked very deliberately up to where I was sitting, stopped, and put his forehead against my own. It lasted just a second or two, then he pulled back, snorted, and shook his whole body. And he went back to grazing. What was amazing was that I felt better, dramatically better! It was as if he had drawn my emotional pain right out through his own body, and then, most importantly, let go of it. I sat there stunned for a few minutes, long enough for my mind to kick in with lots of explanations to distort the depth and immediacy of the experience, but none of the arguments were strong enough to prevent the experience coming back to me again and again in the days and weeks that followed. His 'ability' was confirmed for me a few weeks later when he performed a similar 'miracle' on a headache just above my left eye; and again a few weeks later when a riding buddy of mine said, "Whenever we are alone, Nocona spends a lot of time resting and breathing against my chest, on the very place that I had cancer."

To add to these weird and wonderful experiences, I began to notice that Nocona would sometimes rest his chin in my hands, his eyes would go soft and go to half-mast, and his legs would nearly buckle beneath him. In this state he could be rocked and swayed on his feet without 'waking'. A few times this went on for so long that I would have to leave him in the field in this trance-like state, to go home and cook dinner, and always he would be fine and awake when I returned later. What is particularly interesting is that I would become 'sleepy' with him; it was as if I was being drawn into a trance-like state with him, being invited to journey with him to a place in a faraway world. I would see colours and moving shapes, and sometimes hear single words or see a flash of an image. In those early experiences, I was always the first to pull myself back; I would feel a little scared of Nocona, and of 'it'. But I was intrigued, beyond intrigued! I began to seek out others who were open to the possibility that my experiences were 'real', even when often my own mind would cast doubt. I discovered (was led to) Linda Kohanov's book, The Tao of Equus, and suddenly felt I had a 'home', and that there was indeed a place in the world for experiences like mine. I had never felt so inspired and fascinated by anything in my life, and ultimately I found myself in Leigh's Invisible Horsemanship™ workshop, which, by some miracle, was not taking place in Arizona, or Washington, or anywhere else out of reach of my finances, but right here, an hour away from my home in England.

I could fill several more pages with all that I discovered in that first workshop, but for today I will focus on the aspect that has so dramatically changed my life. Somehow, even after reading Linda's book, I was still expecting a Natural Horsemanship-esque experience that weekend, and was expecting to ride! I had no idea that I would instead be meeting myself in a profoundly meaningful way. Simply put, I discovered that my body has wisdom, and was in fact a way OUT of my traumatic past, rather than just a constant reminder of it. For someone who had made an art out of dissociating from her body, here I was being asked to feel into my body, to ask it for information, to use it as a means of communication with the horses. I was terrified at first, but then delighted to find that my body is indeed wise beyond measure, and that it had been waiting all those years for me to find a way to access my innate wisdom. I could say I found it through 'The Way of the Horse', and in a way I did, but I feel it is actually the natural 'Way of the Human' too, and that horses are the ones who have never forgotten and can therefore teach us the way 'home'. It is our birthright to have one foot in each world, just like the horses. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience here on earth, just like the horses.

Discovering that I could communicate with the horses, that I could feel their pain in my body and see glimpses of their stories, changed my life completely. On the one hand, my mind started spinning wildly about how there might indeed be a place in the horse world for me, that I might finally have something to offer that did not entail compromising or hiding aspects of myself. But it went far deeper than that. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I had a real felt-sense of there being something beyond our day-to-day reality, that there is a spiritual dimension, and it weaves its way through our days, often without us even noticing. Experiencing in the workshop how emotions move between us, and how images and information can be 'sent' energetically, gave me a graspable, bodily sense of a spiritual reality. In the most profound sense, I was no longer alone. I was connected to the horses, to the people around me, and to that which is doing the connecting. Sure, I had read books of various types about existence being large beyond imagining, and even had momentary glimpses of it myself, but experiencing EFL for myself, with my own body as the sensing device, bypassed my over-active brain and brought the reality home to my heart. And that's what changed my life.

Horses speak this body-spirit language. And I'm all ears!

I went on to train with Leigh and Kathleen in 2008 and am now an EFL facilitator. I spoke a little in the Nickers section about my work, but now that I have introduced myself more fully I would like to add that my work also includes animal communication, healing and psychic mediumship. I believe my career in EFL will be a life-long learning, and I am interested in weaving together the various strands of my interests into an EFL practice that nurtures the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of both the human being and the horse. A core principle behind my work is that we must work towards being 100% incarnated in our physical bodies, sending roots down deep into the Earth, while still remaining open and connected to the world of spirit. We are here to be physical beings, and to literally embody spirit.

I bring to my work a strong connection to Native American traditions and an interest in shamanism. I believe the animals are working with us on all levels, all the time, if only we can learn to open "the ears of our heart" to hear them. I am also planning to train as a psychotherapist in the near future, and hold a firm commitment to the study of human development, behaviour, trauma and healing. I feel blessed to have had Leigh, Kathleen and the horses as my guides, and to have EFL as my work in the world. As far as understanding Nocona's gifts, and what they indicate about the healing potential of horses, I still feel as though I am in Kindergarten, but I'm committed to listening and discovering all I can...

I hope that this short walk along my healing journey gives you some sense of the way I work with horses and with people, and the vision I have for EFL in my life. Like so many of us, horses have been my greatest healers, and I feel honoured to be a part of bringing their wisdom to the world.