“Through
my work as a horse trainer and equine-facilitated therapy specialist, I’ve
observed that feelings are contagious. They expand outwards like sound waves
travelling through the air and affect others in predictable ways – even across
species lines. No matter how good you are at hiding feelings from yourself and
others, your nervous system involuntarily broadcasts what you are really
feeling – at a frequency horses are especially good at tuning into.”
So
writes Linda Kohanov in her book Riding Between
the Worlds. She is best known for what she calls ‘equine facilitated
psychotherapy’. She founded the Epona
Equestrian Services, a collective of riding instructors and counsellors for
equine-facilitated psychotherapy sessions, located in Tucson, Arizona. There
are, of course, many riding schools that use horses to facilitate people with
physical difficulties – but this one is different.
Kohanov sees the horse as almost the perfect
counsellor: non-judgmental; perfectly in tune with a person’s emotional state
and extremely sensitive to any psychological incongruence [1]any
inner conflict or self disharmony. So much so that the horse will straightforwardly
react to the emotion a person is trying to suppress. The horse will pick up
falsehood and pretence in an instant, she assures us. This isn’t just a theory.
Linda Kohanov demonstrates this in story after personal story in her book,
leaving one in no doubt as to its authenticity.
It
is worth noting that children too, even before they can talk, are also able to
pick up incongruence in adults; and I think young babies even more so. Like
horses and some other domesticated animals they have no awareness of deceptive mind-games
and are open to the physical emanations of our
animal nature. In human families where there is a huge discrepancy between what
people are pretending to be and what the actually are can drive children to despair.
What
children obviously see as reality is totally denied by an adult conspiracy of
lies which the perpetrators even believe themselves. This causes the child to
doubt their perception of reality. It is the stuff of insanity and is known as
the ‘double-bind’ syndrome’[2]
Conversely,
the horse comes from a family that is at one with its own nature, unaffected by
the advantages and dangers of symbolic language. The horse has a direct
non-verbal perception of reality. Its mother, father and the herd have no use
for prevarication; their being is identical to their appearance; what you see
is what they are. There is no such thing as pretence; and apparently they just
can’t stand incongruence. “Unlike human
beings, horses don’t judge or reject us for what we’re feeling; it’s the act of
trying to suppress our emotions that drives them crazy”. With their ability to
see directly into our nature and accept us as we are, they are perfect
psychotherapists, being fully there, but counselling nothing – no advice or
clever interpretations. And if a person can tune into a horse’s nature they
benefit by osmosis.
In
the wild, a herd of horses depend for their survival on a sense of danger being
instantly communicated to each other. A lion with a full belly can walk close
to the herd without alerting them. But the moment a lion is on the hunt, a herd
of horses or zebras will react instantly as a whole. Putting it in human terms
you could say that they have the ability for instantaneous emotional
communication with each other. And it is this ability they have carried forward
in their domesticated life with us, giving them fine intuition and empathy.
They are actually better at it than we are. Even though we ourselves, for most
of our evolution, were also prey animals[3] like the horse, we have since lost
touch with our primal senses.
Such
are the attributes of the horse that are so useful in Kohanov’s kind of
therapy? She uses the immediacy of their
nature, without all the mental trappings of human culture, to draw out that
part of our own nature that is intuitive, communicative and empathic – in fact,
all the qualities that we ourselves have beneath our educated mind. In our
wordless encounter with this animal it is as though a mirror is held up showing
us how we are deep down.
There
are some passages in the book, where the author strays from the importance this
wordless encounter and uses the style of most self-help books. I find this at odds with the implicit psychological
insights of the horse/human relationship. She will occasionally step outside
this magic place and give us a popular self-help mode of cognitive analysis and
prescriptive advice. For example, she suggests that when you are feeling ‘vulnerable’
ask yourself, “What belief, behavior or perception is being challenged?” Apparently
a useful question, no doubt. The problem is that such an approach will put most
people straight into their thinking-heads to look for an answer. This is not a
good guide in how to relate to one’s emotional self – in fact, it is
counter-productive, validating entirely the wrong way to relate to bodily feelings.
There are a number of examples like this in the book. Where they occur they
impose an artificial analytical approach instead of using a natural process –
which, after all, is really what the book is all about.
Such
slips are perhaps forgivable for she does see the difficulty, which is
precisely finding an adequate concept of the relationship between feeling and language.
As she says, “To share this equine inspired wisdom with others I had to point
to non-verbal realities with words and procedures.” Had she known ‘Focusing’
and Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the Implicit she would have found the task a
good deal easier.
[1]
“Incongruence” See my last blog: The Vale
[2]
Bateson, G. (1972). Double bind, 1969. Steps to an ecology of the mind: A
revolutionary approach to man's understanding of himself, 271-278. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press
Contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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