To Connect With Horses, Blend Into Their Heads and Hearts

Source: Pixabay/Pexels

Horses are deeply emotional beings and have been shown to be able to help adults and children heal from a variety of psychological and physical conditions.¹ In her book Soul Connection with Horses: Healing the Mind and Awakening the Spirit through Equine Assisted Practices, Dr. Suzanne Court explains how working with horses as equal partners in the equine-assisted space while respecting their intuitive wisdom leads to life-changing psycho-spiritual understandings, learning, and healing. Through this approach, horses help re-establish natural bonds and intuitive ways of knowing that have become obscured by conditioned thought and ineffective individual narratives. Horses show us that we can trust our intuition and learn how to live from the soul while making meaningful connection with ourselves, other people, other animals, and the natural environment.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Soul Connection with Horses?

Suzanne Court: I ask myself the same question. Unlike the book I’m writing currently, it more or less wrote itself. When the world was essentially locked down from the COVID epidemic, I started to organize notes that had accumulated over the previous decade of working as an equine-assisted therapist. These easily coalesced into chapters, and from that a book emerged. This was definitely the easiest way to write a book since there was very little pressure coming from my own expectations.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

SC: Once I realised I was actually writing a book, I tailored it towards equine-assisted practitioners in the first instance, but in a broader sense I wanted it to be of interest to anyone exploring the spirituality of connection with horses. Such connections can of course be made between humans and any animal, or any aspect of nature for that matter, as I have alluded to in the book. Exploring the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and horses came to me through my clients initially, as they were naturally drawn to the soul-to-soul space with horses. Such is the power of this beautiful animal.

Source: Suzanne Court, used with permission

MB: What are some of the topics you consider and what are some of your major messages?

SC: In Soul Connections, I explore concepts of human awakening and experiences of inner spaciousness as commonly understood in many spiritual traditions, and I offered suggestions of how horses can lead us to rediscovering our true selves. If we disrupt our expectations of animals obeying us, or of working for us, we can approach the horse as an equal being and establish meaningful connections. By considering how horses experience the world through their senses, how they process emotion, and how they cooperate with each other, they provide models of social, psychological, and spiritual ways of being.

If we are open to it, other animals, and nature in general, lead us to understandings that the human animal once knew when life was less complex. We only need to look into the beautiful big brown eyes of a horse and mentally ask the question “Who are you?” to feel the depth of the question “Who am I?” Horses look back into our eyes and reflect honesty, trust, and something unfathomably deep that undoubtedly comes from millennia of generational connections with them.

The second half of the book explores lines of communication among practitioner, client, and horse, and suggests how horses can be involved in the constructed stories of who we are. Narrative therapy techniques are adapted to the equine-assisted space, drawing on the natural human tendency to project meaning onto others and to live through personal story-making. Through simple interactions with horses, clients’ personal narratives are identified, questioned, externalized, and finally, re-conceptualized. People learn from horses reacting to us, inviting us to step out of old ways of thinking and being and step into healthier connection and wholeness.

MB: How does your work differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

SC: Most, but not all, books on equine-assisted therapy explain how a particular model of practice works and many include client case studies. To a lesser extent I’ve done the same, with the point of difference being that I’ve taken inspiration from sharing space with horses—from meditating with them—feeling for who they are without expectations for them to perform in any way. Naturally, this is an understanding that words can’t fully encapsulate, nonetheless, that’s what I’ve attempted to do in my writing. My hope is that readers will not take my word for what I’ve experienced, but will follow a few suggested exercises and make similar discoveries for themselves. A few authors have written books along similar lines, my favourites being Adele and Marlena McCormick’s Horse Sense and the Human Heart and Allan Hamilton’s Zen Mind, Zen Horse, but of course personal accounts such as theirs and mine are always going to be uniquely different.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about the rich and deep emotional lives of horses, they will come to appreciate these amazing beings for who they truly are and treat them with more respect and compassion?

SC: I absolutely am hopeful for that. In my second book (with the working title of Science-Informed Equine-Assisted therapy), a third of it is devoted to the welfare of the horse and the ethics associated with how we regard them and “use” them. Humans have a history of at least 6,000 years of working with horses, much of it falling into the category of exploitation made possible by their willingness to be trained and to cooperate with us. Hopefully we no longer ask horses to work in dark coal mines, plow fields, and fight in wars, but there are still too many instances where their well-being comes second to satisfying human needs and desires. Such attitudes, if we are not careful, can be brought into the equine-assisted therapy space, which is why I firmly believe that the work always be invitational for the horse. Although ethically it makes sense to respect the horse’s right to exercise agency and be treated with respect, it also makes sense on a practical level since it seems obvious to me that people are unlikely to learn or experience much of value in a therapeutic space if the horse feels coerced or fearful.