Horses

I offer help with:

starting and bringing on young horses and ponies;
problem-solving;
developing confidence in nervous horses and humans;
improving communication between horses and humans;
equine-assisted personal development coaching.

A BHSAI with 45 years' experience with horses, I use the principles of natural horsemanship, emphasising a warm-hearted, friendly approach and positive methods including clicker-training. As an NLP Trainer (INLPTA), I coach humans using methods drawn from Neuro Linguistic Programming, which makes for fast and enjoyable learning. I believe in the importance of reciprocal benefits, and I offer my understandings and skills to help horses and humans alike to bring out the best in themselves and each other. I particularly enjoy working with ponies (especially Exmoors - Britain's own truly wild horses!), Arabs, and cobs.

As well as private coaching at clients' premises, I also offer workshops for groups.

NLP FOR HORSES AND RIDERS

NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is a kind of practical psychology based on the study of human excellence in terms of how people think, communicate, and act.  Founded in the 1970s in California by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, it has since evolved greatly and is today widely used in many fields of endeavour eg business, education, psychotherapy, sports and personal development coaching.  Anthony Robbins, Derren Brown and Paul McKenna are all well-known NLP experts.

NLP offers innovative and entertaining methods to help you make rapid and positive changes in your attitudes and behaviour so you can bring out the best in yourself.  It's self-empowering, about learning how to be more effective in whatever you're doing.  It's particularly useful for changing unwanted habits. NLP works by promoting your own lateral thinking, creativity, and flexibility, within an attitude of warm heartedness and humour that encourages enquiry, experiment and learning.  An NLP coach will help you develop confidence in yourself and in your ability to learn how to do things better.

NLP coaching can help riders to become aware of their own blocks and resolve them, whether emotional eg anxiety, or self-fulfilling prophesies ('I'll never be good enough to succeed at dressage / jumping / riding out by myself'), or physical habits eg toes turned out, or poor empathy and communication with their horses. 

NLP can help enormously in working with horses.  Much traditional horse-training has been based on correction.  Imagine what it would be like to have someone command you in a language you don't understand; then, as you hesitate, not knowing what to do, they start punishing you!  As you get more confused and upset, so they punish you more – until, by accident, you do what they want, so they stop punishing you.  Terrifying, isn't it?  NLP brings in a radically different perspective: drawing out the best in someone, whether human or horse, within a kind, warm approach that encourages experiment and learning, and promotes confidence and enjoyment.  The emphasis is on effective communication, which means enabling horses and humans to understand each other.

CONFIDENCE COACHING FOR HORSES AND RIDERS

Would you like to feel more confident around your horse?

Would your horse like to feel more confident around you?

What would it be like to be able to be with your horse on the ground or ride him or her with mutual trust, the two of you enjoying each other's company?

Are you interested in hacking, schooling or competing; improving your ground-handling such as in catching, grooming or loading; dealing with challenges such as spooking, napping, or traffic nerves; or bringing on a youngster?

Perhaps you're aware of something missing – you'd like to bring back the enjoyment in your riding.  Or maybe you've had a fright, or just found yourself feeling a bit anxious.  Riding isn't meant to be an ordeal; you shouldn't need Dutch courage to get on your horse!

I emphasise safety and enjoyment and reciprocal benefits for all concerned. A BHSAI with 45 years experience with horses, I bring in a range of methods including positive natural horsemanship and clicker training, with love, respect and the commitment to trying to understand the horse's point of view.  An experienced personal development coach and NLP Trainer (INLPTA), I can help you find the confidence you need so your horse can be confident in you. 

Individual sessions cost £25.00, plus travel costs if you're more than 10 miles from Timberscombe, near Minehead.  I also offer workshops for groups.

HORSE ASSISTED TRANSFORMATIONAL COACHING

Why get wet swimming with a dolphin when you can walk in the field with the horse next door?

Many people have found swimming with dolphins to be a profoundly spiritual, transformative experience. In fact, we can do something similar on dry land, closer to home! Horse-assisted transformational (HAT) coaching enables us to step into a deeper level of being as we learn how to find the inner qualities that allow for true connection with the horse: awareness, trustworthiness, empathy, goodwill, humour, creativity, patience, confidence, respect and flexibility. 

The benefits are actually reciprocal, for it's only when we stop seeing the horse as 'other', and start genuinely connecting with a deeper, shared state of being, that the magic happens.  Horses love to be with humans who are willing to meet them in the open space of mutual understanding, connection and communication!

There's no need to be a rider to enjoy HAT coaching.  It can be helpful for anyone wanting to learn more about themselves and find ways to bring out their positive potentials, whether regarding a particular issue or as part of general personal development. For many people it can be a spiritually liberating experience.  For horse-people, it can help you improve your relationship with your own horse.

I've trained with Paul Hunting, developer of the HAT system; I'm an experienced coach and NLP Trainer (INLPTA) with a background of 30 years of Buddhist meditation practice; and a BHSAI with 45 years experience with horses; all of this comes together in facilitating a HAT session. However the senior facilitator is Brigit, a beautiful, friendly palomino mare, 10 years old.  Rowan has recently joined us as an assistant: he's a lively chestnut mostly-Arab gelding, 7 years old.

A two-hour HAT session here in Timberscombe costs £49.  For you to get the most benefit from HAT coaching, I recommend a series of sessions spaced in such a way that you can assimilate and stabilise the learnings.  With this in mind, I offer a series of four sessions for £160 (instead of £196).

ARTICLE: THE SPIRIT OF HORSES

Experiencing deeper levels of being, glimpsing that elusive state that lies beyond the usual ups and downs of ego, is traditionally the province of the spiritual seeker.  But the opportunity can also pop up in other places: the arts, for instance; sports; or extreme experiences such as mountaineering; and, of course, if we can just prise our attention away from our habitual distraction long enough to notice it, we'll find that the doorway is really always open.

Over the past 10 years or so, with the happy coincidence of the rise of natural horsemanship – 'horse whispering' – combined with the development of personal and corporate performance coaching, another field of opportunity has appeared with the recognition of horses as guides and doorkeepers.

Stepping through the doorway into our 'true nature' requires us to dare to go beyond the limits of our habitual ego-identifications; beyond the conventional barter systems of trying to please and wanting to be liked; beyond the learned hypocrisy that prevents our truly honouring ourselves or another person.  Horses are extremely sensitive to human incongruence or hypocrisy; they can pick up, and are afraid of, our fear and aggression.  They have an extraordinary ability to respond accurately to others' intentions.  Maybe this comes from their evolution as flight animals whose survival depends on their being able to correctly read and react to the intentions of predators.  And, as social animals, they are skilled communicators with a natural inclination to form harmonious relationships, and they value the qualities of herd-leaders who can help them to stay safe in a dangerous environment.

The world of personal and corporate coaching has begun to recognise the significance to humans of the equine response to human intentions and leadership qualities, and a number of horse-assisted coaching systems have appeared.  One such system is overtly venturing into the spiritual realms, despite being largely aimed at business managers wanting to develop leadership skills!  Cotswold-based leadership coach Paul Hunting has combined his horsemanship skills with his coaching training and his personal spiritual practice to come up with what he's calling Horse-Assisted Transformation (HAT) coaching: he calls it transformational because it's not about learning to do better at what we're already doing, it's about finding a radically different way of being. 

My own background includes a lifetime of being around horses – working with them, riding them, just being friends with them – combined with over 30 years of Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice, plus professional training in counselling and NLP coaching.  Meeting Paul and training with him has given me the key I was looking for to bring all three together.  Bring in a beautiful palomino mare called Brigit as the senior partner, and we're ready to go!

Imagine yourself in a small space with a very large, fast-moving animal with hair-trigger reactions.  You can't be anything but fully present!  Mental chatter stops right there!  You're highly motivated to find whatever it takes to stay safe – and that means finding the qualities or state of being within you that will enable the horse to relax and be confident in your ability to direct her properly.  It's fast, it's effective, and it's exhilarating.  It's also egalitarian: Brigit doesn't care about your income, your beauty, your achievements, your cleverness, or your ancestry; all she is interested in is your trustworthiness right here now.

As with any interaction, there are inner and outer aspects.  On the outside, you're learning how to handle a horse in such a way that you can both enjoy each other's company.  On the inside, you're learning how to connect with Brigit at that deeper, shared level of being that is always there, waiting for us, if we dare step through the door.

Brigit has been working her magic with a range of people over the past few months.  She brings to each encounter exactly what each person needs to help them make that shift.  Epiphanies are taking place in a muddy field on Exmoor!  Some of the seekers are meditators: for them, it's a way to find the deeper level of experience they're seeking; later they can take it into their meditation practice and learn to stabilise in it.  Others are hoping to find some solution to a problem: what they learn is that the answer lies less in doing and more in being and in connecting with another person at a different way from the usual titanic clash of egos.  Brigit's sensitivity and flexibility are extraordinary.  I recently experimented by working with two people at the same time.  We were working at liberty, with Brigit free to express herself unconstrained by halter or rope.  One moment she was standing quietly, absolutely immobile, allowing a woman who was afraid – afraid of horses and afraid to be herself – to find the trust and courage to duck right under Brigit's belly, inches from her hooves.  The next moment she was racing madly round the field, bucking and kicking, slide-stopping and rearing – for the benefit of the other woman, a dancer who wanted to overcome the inhibitions holding her back; standing in the middle of Brigit's wild display, this woman was both weeping and laughing as she said, 'She's dancing for me – she's showing me how I could dance!'  And with another seeker, someone with no knowledge of horses but a loving, nurturing person with a strong spiritual practice, Brigit simply walked over and lay down in front of her – perhaps the greatest way a flight animal can demonstrate that they find you trustworthy.

As the Sufi mystic Rumi said: 'Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field.  I'll meet you there.'   Brigit and her fellows want us to meet them in that field.  Horses will forgive us again and again as we come at them from our ego-based, exploitative agendas; they will invite us again and again to join them in the field of authentic being, authentic connection.  When we respond to their invitation and the transformation happens we experience it as a moment of shattering truth and a shifting to another state of being, free of fear, free of aggression. That's true 'horse-whispering': it's not about our talking to horses; it's about our having the humility to listen to horses.  If we listen to them, they can guide us through that door. 

November 2007 © Caitlin Collins 

Published in New Vision magazine, January/February 2008 www.thehamblintrust.org