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Equine-Facilitated Wellness, also known as Equine-Facilitated Psychotherapy (EFP), is an experiential based therapy that embodies a dynamic interplay between horse and human therapist, creating opportunities for awareness, healing and growth in the client. The horses are honoured for their innate wisdom and respected as true co-facilitators.
Horses have an incredible awareness of the emotions present in others. This enables them to survive as a species and thrive in a herd. They are very adept at being present in the moment, instantly becoming aware of emotion arising within themselves or a herd mate. By taking appropriate action the emotion is released and the horses are able to return to grazing. Rather than viewing particular emotions as good or bad, horses honour them as the means by which vital information is communicated by the body. During the EFW process clients will learn to become more aware of their own bodies and the wisdom they hold as well as how to use emotion as information in daily life.
Horses are also very sensitive to incongruence between a person's behaviour and her underlying emotional state. If she is wearing a mask of well being, but underneath is fearful, angry or frustrated the horse will react by becoming agitated or actually mirroring the emotion that is being consciously or unconsciously suppressed. The emotion need only be acknowledged, not resolved, for the horse to settle. This non-judgemental feedback is invaluable in helping clients become more aware of and able to integrate their authentic emotions.
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
Henry Beston ~ "The Outermost House"
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