Riding Into Who and What We Really Are: The Power of the Horse/Human Connection by Patricia Broersma: Life Challenges

Doorways of Support and Inspiration:
Life Challenge as a Mythic Journey

Riding Into Who and What We Really Are: The Power of the Horse/Human Connection Patricia Broersma

For the past 80 years in the US, people with a wide variety of disabilities have explored new horizons from the back of a horse. People in wheelchairs have learned to walk because the complex motion of their horses stimulated their nerves and muscles in the same complex rhythmic pattern of walking. Children not speaking by the age of four or five experience from that same motion the needed neurological integration for their first spoken sentences. Individuals with autism connect with a horse as a first step for more connection with others in their environment. This is the world of therapeutic riding and miracle stories abound in the barns and riding arenas of programs all across the world.

In the past ten years, a new aspect of this work with horses has emerged. Psychotherapists and educators have discovered the unparalleled benefits that horses bring to the hearts and minds of people seeking to live their lives out of a deeper aspect of themselves. A psychotherapist working with adolescents who have committed homicide utilizes work with horses for their remarkable skill in mirroring the teens’ behavior for therapeutic interventions. A consultant in leadership development often takes corporate teams to a nearby horse facility for developing teamwork and leadership skills. Therapeutic riding instructors who previously had focused on their students’ physical issues are now addressing emotional and spiritual issues as well.

In all of these instances, people are coming to honor the sentient nature of the special horses who work in these settings as skillful and important members of the professional team. Instead of a tool utilized by the instructor, therapist or consultant, horses are increasingly emerging as beings who contribute significant insights for healing interactions. This talent stems from their birthright of exquisite sensitivity to very subtle energy in their environment, necessary for their survival as prey animals. Horses are experts, for instance, at detecting when a person is distracted by something that has preceded their arrival at the barn, often when the person is not even consciously aware of their state of dissonance. Or they pick up and respond to hidden feelings like fear or anger that is typically not acknowledged in most social situations.

When people engage in partnership with a horse with the intention of exploring these subtle talents, they have the opportunity to develop new aspects of themselves. They can develop a broader palette of communication skills and learn new approaches to utilizing power for collaborative, more effective outcomes.

These benefits of the horse-human connection are not limited to people with disabilities or mental illnesses. They address some of the problematic conditions of modern life that we all confront. Often in today’s world that emphasizes competition, action and outcome, people become disconnected from who and what they really are. They may experience, for example, a sense of self-betrayal by an affluent American lifestyle. They leave their homes early to return late after a long daily commute, their communities resembling ghost towns during the day. These men and women lock themselves into jobs that pay their ever-escalating expenses but ignore the niggling desire to engage in the deeper journey that calls them to live a deeper story. Instead, the women develop breast cancer and take antidepressants, depending on their psychiatrists for emotional stability, while the men develop prostate cancer and suffer strokes.

Yet, affluence continues to have a hold on their imaginations, fed by the media’s encouragement of the acquisitive lifestyle. Stepping into any other lifestyle feels like failure by the standards of our culture. People feel caught between the promise of happiness in buying more, and the fear of failure, a place where a sense of desperation quietly tightens its firm grip on their health and their lives. They know that something is wrong but they do not know what to do about it. The story out of which they live their lives has become outmoded. Knowing that they were called to some adventure long ago and lost their way, they are stuck in the cultural trance of our times, living a story where they set forth with high intentions for life, only to find that the way has been lost.

People in these kinds of situations increasingly are finding their way to horses where they find that they can reclaim their larger story through a potent connection to their own creative sources. Whether it is through the local riding stable, a friend’s pasture, a psychotherapy session, or volunteer work at a therapeutic riding program, they find a profoundly restorative aspect of their lives emerging. These people are not interested in entering the world of horse show competition. Rather, they are seeking a new perspective on their lives that returns them to places of deep sourcing within, where they can recognize the larger story of their lives begging to be lived.

Partly because horses are associated in our imaginations with heroic tales, just by being in their presence, we step into our own larger, mythic lives however briefly. When we pay attention to the innate wonder and excitement that we experience with a horse and allow those seeds to grow in our imaginations, the daily struggles of our day to day life become part of the grand drama of our deeper story, our own heroic journey, so to speak, where we have the leading role. Horses become important partners and companions on the journey, keeping us in touch with our mythic selves.

They do this through their particular talents in sensitive, subtle interaction, offering us a more intimate connection with the deeper story of our mythic lives. We can learn skills of compassionate, sensitive communication and other intuitive skills by developing the same attunement to subtle energies that horses demonstrate so well. When we take on the challenges of working in partnership with another species like a horse, we can learn new skills for working in other challenging partnerships and in situations of power. We find that horses evoke in our own life generative sources of creativity within.

From that place we have the tools to address not only the problems of our own lives but also the core issues that surround global problems, like fear, shame, death, and denial. From our deeper story we can more effectively develop action addressing world problems like global warming and HIV/AIDS. Many of those engaged in leadership development on a global scale, like Jean Houston in her social artistry work and Monica Sharma of the United Nations, advocate the necessity of enabling people to connect to their creative, generative core self when working cooperatively in their countries to solve complex, global problems. Programs and initiatives that are based on anything else, such as an activist dedication to solving problems, have consistently failed. Rather, leading people to their commonality that goes beyond religious, cultural, and political differences, allows them to create programs of much greater success.

Horses have consented to partner with humans for millennia – for work, competition, and sport. Today, they are taking on a new evolutionary role with mankind as a new global consciousness emerges that requires us to respond to unprecedented challenges. They take us back to who and what we really are – a place where we can source the creativity we need for building a new future.

Patricia Broersma is president-elect of the Equine Facilitated Mental Health Association, a section of the North American Riding for the Handicapped, and a registered therapeutic riding instructor. Visit her website at www.trishbroersma.com