Centre for Equine Experiential Learning

01/09/2026

This training is for practitioners who feel like something is missing or want to work differently.

Your work may be talk or coaching-based, somatic-based, parts and systems-based, or through the body, in education, with allied health, or equine-based modalities.

You may see some improvement but feel like something is stuck.
You may feel some frustration hearing the same stories — not because you don't care, but because the client still seems caught in them. You learn another method. Try another approach.

Regulation practices help, but again, it feels like there should be more.

The Biological Completion Model™ (BCM) is a departure from most trauma therapies because it focuses on what the nervous system is trying to do. It goes beneath the story, the symptoms and the ongoing anguish.

The nervous system is motoric. When threatened, it organises movement for defensive action, and it requires feedback – evidence that the action was successful. When the system receives that evidence, its prediction can update to:
It worked.
The threat is gone.
It's over.
I can protect myself.
And the nervous system reorganises.

When that response fails, it remains active. The prediction does not update. Hypervigilance, avoidance, anxiety, fear, shutdown and other symptoms are expressions of a nervous system still organised around threat.

From the perspective of the nervous system, trauma involves a defensive response that did not complete. The response has purpose. It is not random. There is logic to it. BCM works with this logic.

BCM provides practitioners with a framework to identify the unfinished response — even when there is no coherent story – and work collaboratively with the client to support completion.
Prior to completion, the nervous system is organised around threat and survival.

After completion, the nervous system becomes organised around agency.

The change is often visible and unmistakable. And it can happen quickly – sometimes in the first session.

WHAT DOES THAT CHANGE FOR THE PRACTITIONER?

•You recognise the same nervous system logic across very different presentations

•You don't have to have all the answers.

•You don't even have to know “where to go next.” The client's nervous system will show you.

•You don’t need to keep learning and integrating multiple models and tools for different presentations.

•You don’t carry the client.

•You feel energised.

THIS MODEL EVOLVED FROM MY WORK AS A SOMATIC EXPERIENCING PRACTITIONER

Over time, I began to notice consistent patterns. I noticed how the nervous system organised in response to different threats and constraints. I realised that the concept of ‘fight/flight/freeze’ was not enough to explain how the nervous system organises around threat. And after years of clinical observations, documenting cases, research, and testing theories, BCM emerged.

BCM identifies a defense hierarchy where the nervous system selects a response depending on the type of threat. Environmental threats and relational threats present different biological problems so the nervous system selects different strategies for defensive action.

Sometimes the nervous system changes strategies mid-action. One response is abandoned when another takes priority. This matters because a person can successfully escape, remain physically unharmed – and still develop trauma because another defensive response never completed.

BCM looks for what was left unfinished.

Many of the clinical cases I have shared previously appear remarkably simple once the response becomes visible. That simplicity is not accidental. It comes from having a framework.

I explore many more real clinical cases, across very different trauma presentations and defensive strategies, in my forthcoming book, "The Unfinished Response."

SO WHY IS THE TRAINING ONLY 12 DAYS?

Because practitioners are not learning a different intervention for every presentation. They are learning the logic of the nervous system.

BCM gives you a framework for interpreting what the client’s nervous system is doing, and a map for what to notice, what to ask, where to guide the client, how to recognise completion and how to support what follows.

The destination is not simply fewer symptoms, better regulation or greater understanding of the past.

The destination is agency — the capacity to feel able to act, protect, choose and move through an uncertain world.

The training is highly experiential and includes demonstrations, observation, discussion, case analysis and extensive practice with one another, as well as theory.

While training takes place in the presence of horses, BCM is not an equine therapy modality and does not require horses in practice.

However, the horses contribute to both safety and containment within the training environment. Because they are free to move, approach and disengage, their responses provide immediate feedback about congruence, boundaries and nervous-system state.

Training cohorts are small, with a high ratio of training assistants to participants.

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN?

You will understand the logic of the nervous system and learn to:

•support the client to increase self-awareness and the capacity to stay present without overwhelm

•recognise nervous-system organisation beneath very different symptoms and presentations

•identify the defensive strategy that was interrupted, inhibited or overridden

•recognise when one defensive strategy has overridden another and identify the response that remains unfinished

•identify and suspend survival-based inhibitors

•distinguish how the nervous system organises around different types of threat

•recognise when the client is ready to move toward completion

•use interventions that support the nervous system to continue the unfinished defensive response

•create the conditions required for the unfinished response to complete

•understand how prediction sustains the response and what biological evidence is required for prediction to update

•recognise the physiological markers that indicate the system has reorganised

•support what follows completion — including integration and the restoration of agency

WHO IS THE TRAINING FOR?

Anyone whose work brings them into contact with stress, trauma, and protective patterns, such as:

•counsellors and psychotherapists
•coaches
•somatic and body-based practitioners
•allied health practitioners, including physiotherapists and osteopaths
•educators and other practitioners working with human behaviour
•equine practitioners

The longer-term goal is to develop a community of BCM practitioners who integrate the model into their existing work, contribute clinical observations, and help take the model further.

TO REGISTER
Send an email to [email protected] or contact Cindy on 0411 593 369

01/09/2026

https://www.facebook.com/freereinaustralia

20/08/2026

Outside Conventional Equine Therapy

We have come a long way.

Twenty-two years ago, we started our equine therapy practice (generic term) using a cognitive-based, problem-solving model. Some know of this as EAGALA. It was useful but soon became limited.

We moved into a somatic space, tracking emotions and somatic /body responses. This had more depth, and combined, it became more useful.

Somewhere along the way, we introduced ‘horse reiki.’ People would lay on a table in the round yard, and horses would come in – by choice – and ‘work’ on clients. What the horses did, and what clients reported was phenomenal.

And then it stopped.

The horses refused to continue. They ‘said,’ “we can clear energy blocks, but as long as people don’t make the changes in their lives that caused the blocks they will just come back. We will continue to work with clients – but they have to be active participants in their own healing.”

So we deepened into the somatic work – primarily based on Somatic Experiencing.

Something else emerged from this work. I began to see specific gestures and movements that didn’t make sense but seemed to resolve a person’s trauma.

After years of working with clients, I now see that trauma is not psychological, pathological, or physiological – with trapped survival energy, but biological – at the level of the nervous system expressing in gestures, movements, symptoms, etc. that finally make sense.

I encoded this work into a model called the Biological Completion Model ™, which is explained in my book, The Unfinished Response which will be released later this year.

There is a kind of elegance working at this level because it is logical, predictable, precise and efficient. Understanding the logic of the nervous system is the pathway to resolving trauma.

In the training that I offer, I condense this 24 years of working daily with clients and a large herd of horses into 4 powerful 3-day intensive modules. In a way, graduates start their work at the point where I have finally arrived.

How the Horses’ Role Has Changed

Initially, they were learning partners. Then they were healers. Then they responded to what was expressing in the clients’ bodies.

Today my focus is on agency – for both the client and the horses.

Agency for clients returns when resources previously committed to protection are released – making movement toward life and the future possible.

Healthy horses embody agency. Their presence makes what previously held clients back, visible. They are an organised living system, and they create an environment of safety and freedom.

Importantly, the burden of performance, healing, participating, and responding is removed when the client becomes their own authority.

And surprise, not surprise, with this evolution of how we work, the horses are more engaged than ever.

20/08/2026

There is a plethora of equine therapy training organisations, and consequently a plethora of practitioners in the industry. In addition, there are places popping up everywhere – offering a horse experience, horse healing, or spiritual expansion. None of these are wrong, they are just different. If you are just getting started, you might find all of this overwhelming. Here is a summary of the various equine therapy offerings: https://www.freereinaustralia.com/a-living-system-for-real-change/bcm/bcm-practitioner-training/equine-therapy-approaches-explained/

Learning a form of equine therapy is not a discipline on its own. It is a modality – in the same way that CBT or EMDR or IFS are modalities. Certification comes from your discipline: e.g. counselling, psychotherapy, coaching, teaching... Equine therapy is a modality that falls under your discipline. It is another ‘tool.’

Here are some practical questions to help you clarify which organisation you choose to train with.

1. Ask yourself why you want to learn equine therapy? To be around horses, to share the experience of being with horses with others, to help people overcome adversity, or deal with disability…. This is perhaps the most important question because it will influence your training organisation choice the most.

2. Ask yourself who would be your ideal clients? It’s recommended that you start with a demographic you know and are comfortable with. For example, choosing to work with children when you have no experience with children will be a double learning curve. It’s important to understand the needs and behaviours of your ideal client so that you can more easily absorb the training.

3. Ask yourself what kind of outcomes you would like for your clients? That leads to what skills and resources do you need.

4. When considering a training organisation, ask what is their methodology. What is possible for the client? What is the practitioner’s role in a client session? How would their modality work for your ideal client?

5. When considering a training organisation, ask what their philosophy is about horses. Do they need to be trained, are they constrained or at liberty, are they ridden, how do they live, what is their schedule like, and what is their role in equine therapy? How does their philosophy compare to yours?

6. Ask the training organisation explicitly, what will you need and what will you learn to get you from where you are now, and where you need to be. And specifically, what skills and what processes will you learn?

7. If the training organisation offers certification, ask who (what governing body) recognises it, and how is it useful? Saying they are certified does not guarantee effective, or quality training.

8. Ask the training organisation what is involved in learning practical skills. How much practice will you get working with a ‘client,’ and will you be ready to start offering your services at the end of the training?

20/08/2026

A therapist’s beliefs about trauma are not neutral.

They are not casual.

They are causal.

They shape how the therapist responds:
What they see.
What they look for.
What they believe is possible.
What they tell the client about themselves.
What they consider progress.
And what they accept as an outcome.

Years ago, I worked with a woman who had accumulated almost every mental health label imaginable.

By the time she came to me, she believed she was profoundly damaged. So damaged that giving up felt like the only option left.

I listened to her history. I listened to the diagnoses she had been given. And then I asked her: “has anyone ever told you that you’re normal?”

She was shocked.

I explained that given what she had experienced, it made sense that her nervous system was responding the way it was. Her responses were not evidence that she was defective. They were evidence that her nervous system had been trying to survive what had happened to her.

The idea was almost too much for her to absorb.

When she returned for her second session, I asked: “what is it like to be normal?”

She lit up. She smiled broadly. “Yes! I am normal!”

Same history. Same symptoms. Same nervous system.

A completely different assumption about what they meant. And that matters because a therapist’s beliefs do not stay inside the therapist.

If the therapist sees pathology, the client may eventually see themselves as pathological.

If the therapist believes trauma healing is necessarily long and difficult, the client learns to expect a long and difficult journey.

If the therapist believes regulation is the goal, becoming better at regulating becomes success.

If symptom reduction is the measure, fewer symptoms become the destination.

If the therapist believes some effects of trauma simply have to be lived with, the client may learn to organise their future around managing them.

These assumptions are so common that most people entering trauma therapy never think to question them.
They are just hoping to feel better.
Less anxious.
Less reactive.
Less overwhelmed.
Better able to cope.

They may never have been given reason to ask: “can my trauma actually resolve?”

My assumptions are very different.

I do not begin with the belief that a person is damaged.

I believe the nervous system is responding for a reason. That trauma lives in the biology — not in the story we tell about it. That talking about it, analysing it, reliving it or reframing it may change our understanding of what happened.

But understanding is not the same as resolution.

I believe trauma is the body attempting to finish a defensive response that could not be completed when the threat occurred.

And when the conditions are right, resolving trauma does not inherently take a long time.

Sometimes it happens in one session. Sometimes it takes a few.
The destination is not better symptom management.
Not calmer.
Not better regulated.
Not better at living with what happened.

The destination is restored agency.

So perhaps before asking a therapist what modality they use, ask something more fundamental:
“What do you believe trauma is?”
“What do you believe needs to happen for it to resolve?”
“How will you know when it has resolved?”
“What do you believe is possible for me?”

Because the answers to those questions shape far more than the treatment plan.

They can shape how you come to understand yourself. Be very careful whose beliefs you place yourself inside when you are vulnerable enough to ask for help.

Because those beliefs don't stay with the therapist.

They can become yours.

P.S. After 10 sessions, that client was going out on her own again, driving a car, got a job, and repaired relationships with her children.

13/07/2026

Over years of working with clients, I noticed a recurring phenomenon that I initially had no explanation for.

It eventually led me to understand why trauma persists, even after one escapes or avoids harm altogether.

I call this the preventative response – which occurs earlier than the fight, flight, and freeze responses.

That led me to study the mechanics of the defense system – what I call the defense hierarchy. Essentially when something happens, the defense hierarchy initiates an early response – in an attempt to stop the threat from escalating.

However, if the defense hierarchy determines that that strategy – the preventative response, is not going to be successful, it switches to a different strategy – such as escape or fight, while leaving the preventative response still active.

Once the nervous system commits resources to a protective strategy, that response must complete before the prediction can be updated to "it's over." Prediction essentially determines how we perceive our environment.

But when the preventative response remains active – even years later, the prediction doesn’t update, so the nervous system remains organised around the threat.

Therefore anxiety, fear, chronic tension, avoidance, hypervigilance and other behaviours persist.

The preventative response is often hidden from both practitioner and client and consequently remains active indefinitely.

Trauma persists and there is a biological mechanism that explains why.
And once we know, we have a map.

Learn more here:

The Biological Completion Model™ (BCM) is a biological framework for understanding how the nervous system organises when safety is threate

12/07/2026

For more than 20 years I've had the privilege of working alongside people as they navigate stress, trauma, change and growth.

Over those years, something kept capturing my attention.

Regardless of the story people brought, I found myself observing the same underlying patterns. Different experiences. Different symptoms. The same organising principles.

At the same time, I was spending every day immersed in a healthy social system—a herd of horses living together with freedom to move, choose, connect and respond naturally.

They weren't teaching me about therapy.

They were teaching me about living systems.

Gradually, those two worlds came together.

That journey has changed not only how I work, but how I understand trauma, recovery, leadership, learning, organisations and wellbeing.

Today I'm excited to share the next chapter of Free Rein Australia.

The updated website introduces ideas that have been quietly taking shape over many years: Living Systems, the Biological Completion Model™ (BCM), BCM Practitioner Training, and my forthcoming book, The Unfinished Response.

It's not the end of the journey. In many ways, it's the beginning.

I'd love you to take a look.

A Living System for Real Change At Free Rein Australia, we don’t see trauma, leadership, horses and organisations as separate. We see living systems. And living systems are organised. Everything we do is grounded in an understanding of how conditions influence the way living systems organise and r...

16/02/2026

ANNOUNCING OUR UPCOMING TRAINING:

WORKING WITH GROUPS!

Advanced group facilitation requires more than a collection of activities — it requires nervous-system literacy, strong containment and ethical herd integration.

Our 5-day Working With Groups certificate training in April is designed for practitioners ready to lead with confidence in complex environments.

No prerequisite training required.

http://centreforeel.com/working-with-groups/

08/12/2025

22/09/2025

TRIPLE R RETREAT Saturday October 4

When we are feeling constantly exhausted, and no amount of rest, self-care or even having a holiday seems to be effective for long. This is because our nervous systems need to reset - a natural, organic process that refreshes the nervous system and brings it back 'online.'

A nervous system reset cannot be done on our own - we need other nervous systems to feel safe and held, so we can fully surrender.

Come to our Triple R mini retreat and be supported by the Free Rein herd, who create a coherent energy field, and profound feeling of acceptance and safety.

You will be guided to listen to your body and as it expresses its exhaustion and overwhelm, to fully release and surrender - to a sustainable feeling of being refreshed and ready.

Spaces are limited. Please contact us to register.