The Insight Out Group
SOMATIC EXPERIENCING WITH HORSES
Engagement with horses through real, ground-based horsemanship skills focuses on the body’s natural response to unresolved stress or trauma from the past or current environments We believe, as do experts in the field of neurobiology, that our reactions to overwhelming events and stress remain in the nervous system until they are metabolized and discharged. The goal is to restore nervous system regulation and learn to recognize and repair habitual patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that no longer serve us from the bottom up … offering profound and practical tools for continued recalibration and renewal.
Humans have developed many strategies to avoid revealing what we are really feeling. It is in the nature of all predatory creatures, including us, to mask our true intentions and sometimes lose touch with them ourselves.
This masking of fears or concerns, anger, sadness and vulnerability however is expensive to our nervous systems because these are all still carried inside the body.
Horses however, have three things to offer us a way out of this costly dilemma:
– They are inherently congruent.
– They are extremely attuned to the inner landscapes of anyone within 30 feet.
– They never take sides or judge us, so we can be honest and practice emotional congruence without fear of repercussions.
– When we learn to heed their signs, they will always let us know when something feels ‘off’ and give us the chance to explore and acknowledge the source of our distress.
Somatic Experiencing®, the foundation of our experiential approach with horses, is a body-centered approach. Rather than focusing only on thoughts or emotions associated with past events that inform our approach to the present, we use ground-based horsemanship skills to teach clients how to identify, release and redirect habitual patterns that arise as a result of overwhelming situations in real time. Through this embodied approach, they learn to cultivate successful and satisfying relationships among those with whom they live and work.