Approach 

Through the Embodied Leadership Project, we 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/