Introduction to
Equine Assisted Experiential Learning and Personal Development
Mari Louhi-Lehtiö
Healthy relationships involve responsibility, give and take, respect, trust, action, communication, and support. These can't be truly learned from books, through listening to lectures or watching demonstrations. Social emotional skills are learned in interactions with others. From learning psychology we know that learning is most effective when the topic is relevant to student, emotions are involved and studying is done through holistic approach combining sensorial, cognitive and kinestic challenges with guided reflection. In experiential team activities with other humans Equine Assisted Activities focus on forming a multi dimensional horse-human relationship as a fun, powerful and interesting educational and healing media. The activities in Cavesson's SEL with Horses are designed and facilitated to offer tangible experiences of all aspects of nonverbal communication – bodylanguage, intuition, intent and emotions as messages. Healthy and socially balanced horses respond honestly to all human communication attempts. The combination of experiential activities and communication with a large, highly social non-predatory horse with reflective processing guided by trained facilitators give clients powerful leaning opportunities. Through this process an individual is allowed to see how behaviors and patters from the past are currently affecting communication and relationships with other people.
EAL – activities are based on interspecies communication through nonverbal body language and invisible forms of messagesending. Horses’ highly sophisticated language is based on body language, emotions (as information), intent (willful energy) and intuition (understanding the other one's messages correctly). They joke but they don’t lie. To them emotions are information, not good or bad, and they always respond to the person’s authentic Self. Thousands of years with people have further honed horses’ abilities to read us. It has been a lifesaving skill for them. Consequently even today, to horses a human conveying one emotion to hide another means danger in capital letters. For a pray animal it doesn’t make sense to stay around long enough to see which one of the two possibilities is right: the human is not quite in his/her senses to notice the body’s warning signals of a mountain lion, or the human is attempting to casually feed the poor horse to it. Horses are masters at teaching emotional congruency, intuition and authenticity to us busy modern people. They live in the present and teach us the same qualities and wisdom that many people search from Eastern marshal arts, yoga and Zen – Buddhist meditation practices.
EAL – workshops also draw from the fact that the most remarkable leaders of horse herds exhibit the very same qualities that great human leaders have. The sociosensual awareness needed to successfully lead, protect others and avoid getting eaten, raise young and make life-long friends is essential for both humans and horses. In EAL – workshops people invariably see in horses personality features, typical reactions etc. of themselves and people close to them. Horses are wonderful mirrors and training partners for all kinds of human interactions and behaviour patterns because their response to us is 100% genuine. Incongruency around horses gets people nowhere. But most of all, horses model to us the prey animal side of people, the feminine or ‘Yin’, which often is overridden by the strong predatory Yang our modern Western society tends to promote. EAL offers a chance to integrate all aspects of oneself and find inner balance.
In order to survive, prey animals have to be sensitive to the emotions and intentions behind them. A lion can always hunt another day but the zebra rarely gets to practice. Contrary to popular belief even fear, frustration and anger are actually quite reasonable if one knows how to work with them. The average person can through skillfully facilitated EEL activities learn the necessary skills in a weekend and life provides plenty of practice. The challenge is that most adults have such a suitcase of drama and social conditioning to carry around that emotions have been suppressed for a long time. The simple warnings have melted together into monstrous complexes that really are disturbing to handle. The larger the suitcase, the less energy left for anything else in life. People rarely, however, need therapy and benefit from simply having the time and safe place for stopping for a day or two to just check in on oneself. In their purest form emotions are no more sinister than dashboard warning lights and our attempts to ignore them just as ridiculous.
Horses shine light on behaviors and patters that we ourselves are blind to. Horses make the subconscious conscious by picking up cues and feelings we aren’t aware of. They see our authentic inner self and allow people to see in the present moment healing taking place. Old superhighways to emotional triggers start being replaced with new. One positive equine interaction can build a tiny path that becomes a highway in the future.
Through the human history the horse has been thought, or known, to have special powers. For thousands of years emperors and great warriors were buried with their horses. In the medieval times Christian monasteries trusted the horse’s ability to develop in men spiritual and mental qualities necessary for becoming the kind of legendary knight and medieval horse whisperer who would ride to battle with his four-legged companion without the need for reins. And come back alive. In myths and stories from around the world horses are seen as magical animals able to travel between the different realms of consciousness. Often they are thought of as mediums between the spirit and the material world e.g. taking shamans on their trips to the Otherworld. Horses are believed to possess magical powers and their speed and strength are being admired. In China the Song - dynasty's horse canters on a flying swallow reminding of God’s creativity in making him so fast and bringing wealth and prosperity to all. The unicorn is seen solitary, and appears to mankind only when a king of highest benevolence sits upon the throne, or when a sage is about to be born. (According to Chinese tales it has been last seen when Confucius was born.) Arabic tales tell about the horse’s sixth sense while the Celts had horse oracles and a female centaur, Epona, the goddess of horses who was skilled in healing. The little statue of a female centaur below was found in a small shop in China. The centaur is holding a snake, the symbol of transformation.
Some six thousand years with people have not changed the true nature of horses. Horses are taken care of perhaps better than ever before in the human history but the mental connection and true mutual understanding are often missing. Just as they seem to be missing between people, too. We rarely allow horses to live a natural life in herds on big fields grazing some 16 hours a day. However, horses have not lost their nomadic, nonpredatory, nonterritorial and wild nature. Horses still need the social structure of a herd and the companionship of their subherd or closest friend. Every foal born in the stable is in essence wild until the human handler manages to convince him people are okay. And every horse still carries the same secrets within and will teach those who want to listen. Cavesson’s workshops offer a chance at listening and learning.
In most of the EAL – workshops riding skills are not required and teaching them is not necessarily an objective. Horses’ sheer size combined with the sensitivity and the richness of nonverbal communication of a social pray animal make them impressive partners on the ground, too. The participants adventure in awareness and hone their emotional intelligence skills feet on the ground with the horse loose in fenced area. Consequently, people with little or no prior horse experience have an equal opportunity for personal learning experiences. When riding is an activity, as is in HorseTalk™ - clinics, the focus is on communication between the horse and the rider. Riding instruction follows the principles of classical riding, in the footsteps of the old masters who called riding ‘meditation with the horse’.
Cavesson’s EAL-workshops incorporate elements of adventure and drama pedagogy as the participants engage in experiential exercises with horses and each other. The exercises draw out compassion and validate the insight, intuition and wisdom inherent in all of us. EAL - workshops don’t include any activities or allow attitudes towards people or animals that would be considered disrespectful and inappropriate in other social encounters. Consequently, while our objective is to help build authentic communities, authenticity does not automatically equal intimacy and we strive to allow every participant a very personal experience with the right to share it or not with others. Actions and teachings must advocate the same principles and, hence, in EAL the horse is a co – facilitator, not a tool. His mental and physical safety is always our first priority.
Interspecies communication is not just about reading the horse’s ear position and communicating through subtle body language. Horses exchange information among themselves also invisibly. Although we don’t yet scientifically know how exactly it all happens, we know for certain that people do too. Also with horses. The three other nonverbal forms of communication are based on emotions, intuition and intent. Experiential knowledge and scientific research are currently taking each other seriously and resulting in some fascinating explanations and hypothesis about the different aspects of nonverbal communication, transpersonal experiences, non-local awareness etc. www.noetic.org Never before in human history have we been able to see what goes on in the brain of a meditating Buddhist monk or measure people’s energy fields or the electromagnetic field of the heart. www.heartmath.org Now we even know that heart transplant receivers have sometimes also received some emotional memories from their donors. We don’t understand everything, but many of the experiences previously regarded as old ladies’ waffling are now being taken seriously enough to warrant research. We do, however, already know better than to limit consciousness only to humans. Anyone who has attended an EAL-workshop will have a personal story to tell about that.
Horses have many roles. Over the second half of the 20 th century the horse became mostly a recreational amusement for city people whose lives aren’t bound to that of the horse in the same way as before. The close co-existence over thousands of years has resulted in a huge body of horse myths, poems, fairy tales, sagas, and symbolism that keep enticing people to explore further the wisdom behind the horse-human-connection. Today horses train corporate leaders and teams in leadership and teamwork. Horses teach social emotional skills to school children and at risk teens, and they help adults to find new sources of energy and joy within. Regardless of people’s agendas, horses in EAL - programs offer without failure life-changing experiences and reconnection to nature. Above all, horses lead even the most seasoned adventurers on challenging journeys to oneself and to the transforming sceneries of interspecies communication.
A major part of our mission is to help children and young adults develop personal reflective skills and expand awareness of their inner strengths and life's many gifts. Cavesson offers to riding instructors and commercial equestrian facilities training in specially designed HorseTalk™ - program to help teach riding and life skills to the children of the 21st century. As riding has become one of the most popular hobbies of children in the western world, its wider pedagogic implications should not be ignored. Riding schools are in essence teaching multiple lifeskills, emotional intelligence and a whole set of values. We can do a lot of good or completely teach the wrong things. The objective of riding schools is to train students soundly in the principles and basics to a level that supports further training, in the equestrian art of riding or in the different disciplines of contemporary competitive sport, under the tuition of a specialised trainer and a suitable horse. Hence, the whole foundation - ethical, emotional and technical training - rests on the shoulders of riding instructors. HorseTalk™ - pedagogy, developed in the late 90’s by Mari Louhi-Lehtiö, aims at providing instructors pedagogically sound curriculum and tools to incorporate in their teaching the principles of natural horsemanship and classical riding, emotional intelligence skills vital for successful riding, and a consistent ethical undertone essential for the future of the whole sport.
While EAL - activities are professionally run, a few restrictions are necessary for safety reasons. To join Cavesson’s EAL – workshops participants must be physically in reasonable health. We wish to be consulted beforehand in case of any health problems. The fast developing field of Equine Facilitated Mental Health is yet another extension of the same method and Cavesson will host a series of seminars on the topic in 2005. However, the workshops and clinics offered at Vidafält are not suitable for people with serious active mental health problems. We also restrict participation during pregnancy in exercises involving horses . All participants are expected to have a valid accident insurance and to sign our safety agreement and liability waver.
Mari Louhi-Lehtiö has been a student of riding and the healing powers of interspecies communication for close to 40 years. She became a certified riding instructor (England) in -83, M.Sci in 1990, a mother in -92, -94 and -96, professional teacher in 1999 (Finland) with a degree in special education and license to teach all school grades and adults in colleges. In 2004 Mari graduated Epona Instructor after a year-long apprenticeship with Epona founder Linda Kohanov, author of The Tao of Equus and the newly released Riding Between the Worlds , councelor Kathleen Barry Ingram, and their colleagues at the Epona Center in Tucson, Arizona.
Mari has a lifelong love also for adventure and experiential learning and has some 10 years of experience in using equine facilitated experiential learning as a tool for personal competence development and social emotional learning. Appart from teaching riders and their instructors, and a couple of years in scientific research, she has coached corporate personel and teachers in personal competence development, taught at-risk teens as well as university students. The past four years she and her family lived in China where she trained locals to become riding instructors and run a truly international ridingschool with clients representing over 20 different nationalities. She currently devides her time between working as a part time special ed. resource teacher in middle school and as a trainer in family company Oy Cavesson Ltd.
HorseTalk™ - everything towards true communication
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