In-person equine-assisted therapy intensives in Western New York. Coming summer 2027.
Where the work you've done finally becomes something you can feel.
You can name it. You can trace where it came from. You've explained it so many times you could do it in your sleep. This is where it stops being something you understand and starts being something you feel.
Photo credit: Bare Mountain Photography
Dr. Emily, circa early 90s. Still just as horse obsessed.
Equine-assisted Therapy Intensives: coming soon
But the best things aren’t rushed.
Developing this in a way that honors the horses and holds you matters more to me than getting it out fast.
This has been nine years in the making, and in some ways more than three decades. It's close now.
Why horses? Why Equine-Assisted Therapy?
They're prey animals. Cool… Why does that matter? They're always attuned; they've had to be. Think of a wild horse and a mountain lion out west. That horse has to know: is the lion walking to the pond to drink, or pretending to walk to the pond so it can eat me? The movements look the same. What the horse reads is the intention underneath.
The intention, that energy, that doesn’t always match what’s being shown on the surface.
Sound familiar?
Seen but never judged.
That's the gift. To be seen past the performance, and not judged for it.
For someone who's spent a whole life being competent and composed, that can undo you. In the best way.
Some people feel it before they ever touch a horse. Just imagining it. The wisdom in the eye. The sense that this animal could hold what's there and not flinch.
A horse doesn't buy the surface story.
And that's the exact thing we're so good at talking our way past. We intellectualize, we explain, and somewhere in the explaining we lose track of what's actually moving through us. We'll narrate our calm while the body's bracing.
A horse just responds to what's real, and by responding, it shows you what's real in you. Usually it's something you didn't know was there. So we slow down, and we notice, and now the work has something true to work with.
The same work as in the office, just made way more visible.
Where are the edges? What feels safe? Can we breathe here, or can we go deeper? It's a relationship, and the relationship is the information. What's it like to just be here, not performing, not on guard?
A horse asks all of that without a single word. That’s the power of it.
Photo Credit: Jamie Pankow Photography