In a way this post will act as the foreword of the subsequent entries, as well as to help readers understand that the stories ahead are ladden with emotion. They are, in themselves, a form of healing.
I have experienced innumeral traumas in the past few years managing a boarding farm. I went into the role knowing that the road ahead would be rough, miserable, sometimes impassable, but the bits of beauty scattered throughout would be worth the struggle. I didn't know how much I would change as a person. As the world locked down due to a pandemic, I sometimes spent entire months completely alone on the farm. I faced disasters alone, and sat with horses as they passed to the next world, without anyone else around. This job is incredibly lonely, but it helped me see that when immersed in the uproar of humanity, there is a subtle language we have learned to overlook. The gentle whispers when you share silent space. The soft, glimmering warmth when we see something sigh with relief. The almost imperceptible buzz of electricity when your fingertips touch the skin of another.
I made several attempts of writing a foreword, and each one didn’t quite offer the right touch to what I was hoping to express by writing these stories. I wanted to write about my method, my skills, about the knowledge that I wished to pass to others. But every time I tried to write a “how to” manual, it never sounded right. It never felt right. A client of mine would ask me during every ride, "What is my horse thinking?" And I always had an answer. That's how I discovered the missing element that served as the foundation of my work; the horse’s perspective.
A big part of creating this compilation was to make space for a part of me that I kept hidden, that I felt was too “tender” to honor and embody. I am an energy worker, I am a healer, I am an animal communicator. These are all titles that I worried would diminish the reputation I had worked so hard to build in the horse community as a trainer. But in the karmic way of the universe, I was jettisoned down my path of self-acceptance by having to witness my “Trainer” self get set ablaze, and the ashes of it slowly drift away in the wind.
So I embarked on a strange, miserable, joyful, painful, loving, exciting journey of asking the horses that made marks on my life what it looked like through their eyes. Some offered their whole stories, some only offered glimpses and flutters of emotion to accompany them. Many of these horses came to me as a last-chance or a lost-cause. But each one altered the course of my journey as a healer and horsewoman.
I wanted to find a way to release the trauma, both experienced through my horses and experienced in order to protect or heal them. I wanted a way to organize my thoughts on melding the worlds of training and healing, because the struggle of balancing them is often like juggling chainsaws and kittens.
Almost every story brought tears to my eyes as I wrote them. Tears of overwhelming joy, of bottomless despair, or even rage. These stories will act as the skeleton of the book I will write, I hope that I can do each story justice. The path to healing often requires pain; an unraveling of tension, fear, sadness, loss. To heal is to be reborn with the burden of memories.
Helping horses unravel isn't an easy journey, or some mystical experience. Some fight with all their might to hold onto their trauma, some choose to leave their bodies and ask for our aid. I often had to unravel with them.
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