ABOUT ELP

ELP MISSION

The Embodied Leadership Project makes it possible to work therapeutically with horses by providing free and low-cost programs held remotely from the farm. Our online and in-person sessions utilize video, storytelling, and meditation, allowing us to serve those who otherwise wouldn't have access by ensuring participants do not need to own a horse or be physically present with them.

ELP VISION

Healing with horses, beyond stables and fences - available to anyone, anywhere.

Our story

The Embodied Leadership Project (ELP) began with a simple belief: leadership lives in the body. In a world that rewards disconnection—pushing through exhaustion, ignoring intuition, numbing emotions—ELP offers a different path. Founded by Jamila in 2016, the project uses movement and stillness to help people to explore leadership as an embodied practice, rooted in self-awareness, resilience, and compassion.

Shortly after launching, in 2016 Jamila (a dancer, trauma-informed yoga teacher, and somatic practitioner) received grant funding to study Equine-Assisted Learning, working with horses to deepen understanding of embodiment, boundaries, relationships, and mindfulness. In 2020, a grant allowed ELP to welcome Angus, ELP’s equine partner, expanding access to horse wisdom through both in-person and virtual sessions.

Today, ELP focuses on rest as the foundation for embodiment. Through workshops, groups, and classes, participants learn how to pause, connect with their bodies, navigate overwhelming sensations with care. ELP believes embodied leadership creates more compassionate, creative, and empowered communities.

Who we are

JAMILA JACKSON

Director, Equine-Assisted Learning Facilitator

Jamila is an artist, dancer, 500hr trauma-informed yoga teacher, Equine-Assisted Learning facilitator, and an IFS-inspired Coach. Horses are a central component of her creativity and teaching.

She works specifically to support conversations about rest, trauma-informed embodied and community practice, collaborating with the horses to offer an approach that makes a sense of belonging tangible, possible to understand, and accessible. Her vision for the world is that we are successfully able to work with trauma, and with power, and also that we are lovingly connected to nature.

Jamila has studied Equine-Assisted Learning and healing with horses with her mentors Lori Halliday, Farah DeJohnette, Ellen Morrison, and Jini Patel Thompson.

Tess o'day

Administrative Consultant & Founding Member of ELP

Angus

Primary Equine-Collaborator

The Embodied Leadership Project received funding from the Kaleidoscope Institute Semester of Justice Grant to deepen our ability to bring the healing and trauma-sensitive wisdom of horses to the community. Through the grant Jamila was able to buy Angus and launch our Equine- Assisted Learning (EAL) Program.

More information

Hi there! Jamila speaking, and I’m here to introduce you to some foundational aspects of Equine-Assisted Learning:

WHAT IS EQUINE-Assisted Learning (EAL)?

The way I approach Equine-Assisted Learning (EAL) at the Embodied Leadership Project exists within a field of equine practice that is aimed less at what we can teach the horse and more on what we can learn from the horse as a leader and wisdom keeper in their own right.

"Rather than their ability to be ridden or their athleticism being the focus, [we instead focus on] horses’ ways of being, seeing, and processing, and engaging with the world" - Diedre West

This way of working with horses is referred to by several different names depending on who the equine specialist is and where they trained such as: Equine Assisted Practice/Learning (EAP/L), Equine Facilitated Learning (EFL), or Equine Assisted Growth and Development (EAGD).

PROGRAMMING

The Embodied Leadership Project’s (ELP) Equine-Assisted Learning curriculum provides the opportunity to experience the demonstrated therapeutic effect of relating to horses.

ELP’s programming is created in collaboration with the horses I actively work with in person and is designed to be offered via meditation, storytelling, and video to participants from a distance (not in the physical presence of the horses).

In addition to being all about horses, it integrates the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model and trauma-informed yoga to support the process of meditative states, embodiment and psychological integration. Using stories about the horses, videos of the horses, imagery and guided meditations, I invite participants to connect and journey with these horses through their inner world: somatic experience, emotions, intellect, and imagination.

Approach

Through the Embodied Leadership Project, I work to bring awareness to the process of healing with horses, a lesser-known field within the arena of personal growth and healing.

Horses are incredibly therapeutic and spiritual beings who are known for their power, their grace, and their healing presence. Horses help us to become present in our bodies and develop leadership in the way we relate to our own minds. They support us to feel and release emotions and sensations connected to trauma and grief and they open pathways for us to align more deeply to our purpose and aliveness.

While many people feel a draw toward horses, there are some very real barriers to finding and sustaining a long-term empowered relationship with these animals. Not only is there a lack of awareness that healing and personal growth with horses is an actual field of practice (and that it can be beneficial to most people), there are the additional challenges of getting access to a horse, finding the right facilitator, and of course, cost!

I believe that engaging in healing and personal growth with horses should be accessible to any person who feels called. I am passionate about bringing awareness to the benefits of this work and creating free and low-cost ways for people across racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds to work with me and the horses.

The incredible thing about my method is that it can be used in a potent and powerful way at a distance. This means I can offer it in a way that participants do not need to have a horse or be in the physical presence of a horse. I bring the horses - invoking their energy through video, story, breath-work, and guided meditations - and I bring the personal growth and healing frameworks that allow you to create a deep and lasting connection with horses and your own Self. This framework invokes an expanded relationship with one’s own psyche that is strengthened by the healing consciousness of the horse and herd.

I recognize racial, economic, ecological and other social injustices to be rooted in the trauma that naturally results when the sacredness of our relationships to our bodies, to one other and to the earth is disrupted due to the misuse of power, colonialism and domination-based paradigms. My leadership approach is about cultivating a sacred relationship to love through developing embodied, empowered and trauma-informed communication by learning directly from horses, Black women, and nature.

More about Equine-Assisted LEarning (EAL) and Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Diedre West, owner of Healing with Horse Collective, speaks beautifully about working with horses as a pathway of healing and growth:

“There is a distinction to be made here: equine specialists working in the realms of EAP/L see horses as the guides or sources of wisdom rather than as the learners in client interactions. Rather than their ability to be ridden or their athleticism being the focus, horses’ ways of being, seeing, and processing, and engaging with the world opens sources of wisdom and enlightenment about our inner selves, our relational dynamics, and all those forces that make us yearn, change, transform, and do things we would not otherwise do (whether creative, destructive, or genius) if we were truly logical, exclusively conscious beings.

That focus on horse as a sentient being full of wisdoms we do not have, distinguishes the goals for working with horses in this field from most every other equine field out there, including natural horsemanship and most liberty training. This is a profound shift about which practitioners find there is an onion-peeling sort of learning to get to the heart of, not just for our clients but for ourselves and our practice/facilitation.”

- Diedre West, Owner of Healing with Horse Collective, from her article, "And So We Begin: Our Role as Practitioner & Facilitator" (http://www.healingwithhorse.org/and-so-we-begin/)

Developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a model and a method of working with the psyche and soma that views each person’s body and mind being a system of many parts. This principle of multiplicity allows us to develop our Self - our central core & inner compassionate witness, and from this place, develop relationships with the tender parts of us that hold trauma and pain, as well as the parts of us that shield us from this pain and manage our lives to keep the entire system safe.

Internal Family Systems honors and respects each aspect of who we are and invites the wholeness of ourselves to be seen, heard and understood. IFS and Equine-Assisted Learning partner together incredibly well because the model of a system of many parts organized around a witnessing presence mirrors the way horses exist in herds and rest in witnessing awareness. Horses are incredibly therapeutic and help us to not only develop our Self-energy, but model a way of welcoming all aspects of ourselves into the herd where they can be truly heard.

You can learn more about IFS here: https://ifs-institute.com/

We believe in the possibility of diverse communities

where all being’s voices are heard and valued. It is when we have meaningful and connected relationships to others that we think most clearly and creatively and act with innovation, empathy, care and understanding.

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