Equineflow - Horse Guided Human Development

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Equineflow - Horse Guided Human Development Transformative experiences, science-backed methods, and thinking big has been our flow since 2009. Join us. The world needs more of you.

Horses make wonderful projection screens.A horse stands quietly and we see trust. A horse walks away and we see rejectio...
10/14/2026

Horses make wonderful projection screens.

A horse stands quietly and we see trust. A horse walks away and we see rejection. A horse follows and we see leadership. A horse refuses and we see boundaries. Another person might watch exactly the same horse and construct an entirely different story.

That does not make the story useless. What we project can tell us a great deal about how we organize experience.

But the projection belongs to us.

The ethical problem begins when the practitioner gives the projection authority by saying, “The horse is showing you…”

Perhaps the more interesting question is not what the horse has revealed about the client, but why this particular human made this particular meaning from this particular moment.

That keeps the horse out of the therapist’s chair and puts inquiry back where it belongs.

We talk a great deal about client autonomy in coaching. The more difficult question is what we do when autonomy produces...
10/12/2026

We talk a great deal about client autonomy in coaching. The more difficult question is what we do when autonomy produces an answer we do not particularly like.

A client may reject our interpretation, decide not to change, choose the option we consider less healthy or simply refuse to go where our beautiful question was supposed to take them.

That is where autonomy stops being an attractive principle and becomes a practitioner discipline.

If the client is genuinely the owner of their process, then our task cannot be to lead them toward the conclusion we have already decided would be best. We can challenge, inquire, offer information and make patterns visible. But the meaning and the decision remain theirs.

EquineFlow takes that distinction seriously because without it, coaching can become persuasion with very good manners.

What if the person is not the problem?Much of coaching and personal development starts by locating the difficulty inside...
10/09/2026

What if the person is not the problem?

Much of coaching and personal development starts by locating the difficulty inside the individual. She needs stronger boundaries. He needs confidence. She avoids conflict. He is too controlling.

Sometimes that is useful. But behavior is also produced in relationship with an environment. A person who appears indecisive in one system may make decisions perfectly well in another. Someone who “has poor boundaries” may actually be responding quite intelligently to a setting where saying no carries a real cost.

EquineFlow asks us to look at the person without losing sight of the field around them. What is being rewarded? What is punished? Who has power? What choices genuinely exist?

Sometimes changing the person is exactly the wrong intervention.

How much of what we call observation is actually interpretation that happened very quickly?“The horse moved away” is an ...
10/07/2026

How much of what we call observation is actually interpretation that happened very quickly?

“The horse moved away” is an observation. “The horse sensed her anxiety” is already a theory.

“The client stopped talking” is an observation. “She shut down” is a theory.

There is nothing wrong with developing hypotheses. Human beings could hardly function without them. The problem begins when we forget that we made the leap and start treating our interpretation as something we witnessed.

For a practitioner, that distinction is not academic. Once I decide what the horse’s behavior means, I can very easily begin telling the client what their experience means too.

Learning to keep observation and interpretation separate for a little longer is one of the simplest—and hardest—disciplines in EquineFlow.

At first, people came because they believed they had a horse problem. The horse would not load, would not stand still, w...
10/06/2026

At first, people came because they believed they had a horse problem. The horse would not load, would not stand still, would not cooperate, was anxious, pushy, reactive, or had simply stopped doing what the person wanted.

Over time I began to question the phrase ‘horse problem’ itself.

The horse might certainly have a problem. The horse could be in pain, frightened, confused, socially isolated, physically unable to do what was being asked, or responding to something it had learned from earlier experiences. But that did not mean the horse was the problem.

That sounds like a small difference in language, but it changes how you look at the whole situation.

If you decide the horse is the problem, it becomes very easy to moralize the behavior. The horse is spoiled. Disobedient. Stubborn. A brat. Lazy. Dangerous. The horse needs more miles, more pressure, more wet saddle pads, or somebody who will finally make it behave.

If instead you recognize that the horse has a problem, you start asking different questions.

What is happening to this horse? What is the horse responding to?
Is there pain? Is the horse afraid? Does the horse understand what is being asked?
Are the conditions in which the horse lives meeting its physical and social needs?
What has the horse learned from previous experiences? What is the human doing that may be influencing what happens next?

The horse was not failing at being the horse we wanted. The horse was being a horse.

Once I began looking at it that way, I became much less interested in how to make the horse comply and much more interested in understanding what was happening in the whole system around the horse. It changed everything.

Excerpt from the EquineFlow - Horse Guided Human Development book.

What if the most important thing a horse brings into human development work is not sensitivity, intuition or “mirroring,...
10/05/2026

What if the most important thing a horse brings into human development work is not sensitivity, intuition or “mirroring,” but the fact that the horse is another subject in the system?

That distinction is important. A subject has its own experience, history, preferences and interests. An object exists for our purposes. The moment we treat the horse primarily as a tool for producing insight in a client, it becomes remarkably easy to interpret whatever the horse does in whatever way serves the session.

EquineFlow starts from a different premise. The horse does not have to mean anything. The horse gets to be a horse. What becomes interesting is the interaction that develops when several autonomous beings share the same space and none of them has complete control over what happens next. 🦋

Happy World Animal Day! 🦋
10/05/2026

Happy World Animal Day! 🦋

08/24/2026

At Return to Self- Equine Assisted Women's Wellness Retreat we cover the survivor vs thriver modes in depth....both are good and necessary to a happy, healthy life. If you've been in survivor mode for long enough and are ready to step into thriving more often....join us this September for a long weekend of nervous system education, reset and equine assisted coaching to get you on track to honoring your priorities successfully.
www.HRDretreats.com

Fabulous day at REIN Rescue with Summit Animal Health, EnjoyEquine LLC, and fellow EquineFlow practitioner Allison Ragan...
08/21/2026

Fabulous day at REIN Rescue with Summit Animal Health, EnjoyEquine LLC, and fellow EquineFlow practitioner Allison Ragan.

Summit sponsors REIN’s mustang mission and was there today filming a documentary about their work, so we spent the day talking horses, hanging out with the mustangs, swapping ideas about training and behavior, and generally getting happily sidetracked by very cool little horses.

And my EquineFlow brain was definitely firing: Joy Baker’s sanctuary is incredible, and mustangs have a lot to say about pressure, trust, autonomy, and leadership. The whole team is amazing, including Lindsey Duchaine, who has a true gift for starting mustangs the right way. There may be something interesting brewing there for EquineFlow. Stay tuned!

Alisa Farmer from Summit sent me home with Summit supplements for the aging EquineFlow herd. Pretty fabulous Friday. 🦋

How was your summer? ☀️ We spent another lovely summer in the Netherlands. One of the horsey highlights was a visit to a...
08/13/2026

How was your summer? ☀️ We spent another lovely summer in the Netherlands. One of the horsey highlights was a visit to a Warmblood stallion facility in Nederwetten, where young stallions with impossibly shiny coats spent the afternoon playing, rolling, snoozing and pestering their buddies beneath the centuries-old Oude Toren.

A long summer away from it all gives you a lot of space to reflect on what was, what matters, and what could be next.

The young stallions reminded me that life goes on even when old horses like Cielito pass.

Cielito’s tracks around the house have already overgrown. His grave has passion flowers criss crossings it. His spirit, like those young stallions, seems to dart and frolic all around the farm. He is here, even though he is not.

Somewhere between that old tower, those young stallions, the losses, and all that time to think, some new ideas started taking shape.

A little hint of what’s ahead: there will be new EquineFlow programming this fall. 🦋

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