Horse and Human Emotions Intertwined

I was recently in attendance of an interactive Zoom podcast hosted by Lockie Phillips, the creator of Emotional Horsemanship. I have been following Lockie since his appearance on the Warwick Schiller podcast in January 2023. His approach resonated with me and was congruent with the work we do with horses and humans on an emotional level in our Equine Experiential Learning practice. It felt like it was an expansion on this whole energetic and emotional puzzle. It fit like a glove.

When I found out he was coming to our area to host a clinic in in the spring of that year I knew I had to go. Its funny when you walk into a space with so many like minded people it feels like home. Everyone was very engaging and conversation just flowed. The space felt electric. Nothing like clinics I attended in the past.

He did a group mediation/body scan with un mounted horses and their humans standing in the centre of the arena with the auditors participating at one end. As the meditation flowed you could feel the electricity and high energy in the air move into the ground. The space became lighter and relaxed and then a couple horses laid down.

Of course they did.

This for sure was home.

When I had the opportunity to join this interactive podcast I was all in. It was a fabulous conversation and I could really feel these people. There was so much resonance and coherence. The conversation turned to one of emotional maturity in the horse and I was struggling a little bit with the maturity part. Was it maturity really and what did that mean from the perspective of the horses behaviour. It wasn’t that though, what was clouding me was the 2 words together. It was a trigger. A trigger to the emotional maturity of my son Dylan.

Dylan who had taken a journey at around 16 flowing into a world of addiction, incarceration, precarious housing and sometimes homelessness. Why? Childhood trauma from being abandoned pretty much at birth by his birth mother. What does a baby do? He can’t run or fight, he was too young to fawn, he froze or shut down. This trauma sits in his body. These emotions fester unless they find a way out, or a way to suppress them. His way out as a teen, was suppression through drugs and everything that goes with that. It was all about the trauma. His self medication and then fleeing into the world when he was not emotionally ready caused another form of shut down. A shut down, or pause in his emotional maturity. Today I would say intellectually he is a very sharp 30 year old, emotionally he is about 16.

Then it occurred to me. It is the same with horses. Of course it is. My horses Quinn and Lily were taken away at 5 months of age from their dams, put in a trailer and taken to me. At the time ( 17 years ago) that did not occur to me to be trauma. Upon arrival, Quinn jumped out of his stall in a couple of hours.

Flight

Lily stayed put.

Freeze

Lily grew into a lovely sensitive mare, very alert and aware. If she gets scared on the trail, her instinct is to freeze, look, and self regulate. She has a good window of tolerance. Quinn’s instinct is to spin and go home. Small window of tolerance but does look to me for confidence like a toddler would.

I wish I had known this at the time when I bought them as weanlings. It was wrong to tear them away from their mothers so young. I think about them, never having been handled, being loaded into a stock trailer, probably screaming, and terrified.

My heart breaks.

I think about my young son, left alone as a baby, crying, hungry, not being held and then taken away from his birth mother.

My heart explodes.

I know I can’t change any of this and in the case of the horses I know better, do better and continue to learn better. They respond. They have forgiven me and hold space for me.

In the case of my son, I can’t fix the deep hurt, I can’t make the trauma or his suffering go away. All I can do is hold sacred space for him and love him unconditionally.

All of this has acquiesced in me. The horse and human emotions are intertwined, spiralling like strands of DNA.

The fact I partner with horses to help people with their emotions, is not lost on me

It is no coincidence.

In reality it is all about love.