A Woman’s Journey of Healing & Transformation through the Way of the Horse
In The Tao of Equus, author Linda Kohanov intertwines the story of how she awakened to the spiritual presence of horses with compelling mythology, neurological research, and per-sonal anecdotes. The result is an extraordinary story of healing and communication that turns conventional understandings of these amazing creatures upside down.
A horse trainer and equine-facilitated therapy practitioner, Kohanov first began exploring the horse-human connection in the early 1990s. When her black mare, Rasa, became lame, Kohanov was plagued by a series of sinister dreams and premonitions. Finally, prompted by her dreams, she canceled a chancy surgery to save Rasa’s potential career in competitive rid-ing. To relate to the injured horse outside conventional equestrian pursuits, Kohanov im-mersed herself in the day-to-day activities of the herd.
In the process, she discovered that horses are intensely emotional, intuitive, intelligent be-ings. They are true reflections of our deepest souls. Over time, she discovered their extraor-dinary ability to awaken intuition in humans, while mirroring the authentic feelings people try to hide, makes these animals powerful therapeutic teachers. Kohanov describes the sub-tle emotional and even clairsentient cues she tapped into after time spent interacting with her herd. And she details the techniques she developed to help students strengthen mind-body awareness and access their own extrasensory abilities through the way of the horse.
For Kohanov, it’s no mistake that many who feel alienated from modern society — women in particular — find themselves mysteriously drawn to these magnificent animals. She delves into the spiritual processes behind the magical connections riders sometimes stumble onto inadvertently and skillfully explores the subtle behavioral nuances horses detect and reflect. She reveals a potent feminine perspective in horses and shows how this equine-based wisdom can help people heal and empower themselves.
Blending her provocative story of prescient dreams and ancestral communication with a wide-ranging exploration of equine-facilitated therapy practices, Kohanov delivers an ex-traordinary work sure to interest both longtime riders and readers interested in exploring the deepest reaches of the bonds between species.
-
Quotes from The Tao of Equus:
The piece that really stood out is the piece about the horse’s eye…the Secret Spring by The Black Horse Speaks:
Secret Springs
There is a pool in the heart of the desert. The surface is as quiet as glass, though its waters are nour-ished by a mountain stream rushing endlessly underground. When the sun speaks in tongues and chases the clouds away for months, rivers turn to dust, dry grasses hiss tributes to the wind, eagles perch wings outstretched on columns of rising air, and the pond reflects it all in a luminous reverie that has never known stagnation. This is the spring that lives behind the black horse’s eyes.
I am content to sit at the edge and toss thoughts like pebbles into its depths, watching the ripples ex-pand in all directions. To the black horse, the human mind looks jagged, as if the roundness of experi-ence has been cut up by ruthless lasers and most of it discarded in a great heap underground. Still, she embraces my saw-toothed ways, for in the mirror of her lake, they are no less beautiful than flowers blooming or vultures preening after a good meal.
— from The Black Horse Speaks
“Think of the region just behind your eyes as a crystal-clear pool capable of reflecting everything around you,” I said as we headed toward a corral containing four of Epona’s therapy horses. “This spring is fed by an underground river that allows all your subcon-scious emotions, intuitions, and bodily sensations to bubble up and rise to the surface of your mind. Don’t reject anything that comes up. Try not to judge anything as good or bad; just let it tell you why it’s there, what it means. And don’t worry about being ‘wrong’ about anything. The wrong interpretation will still give you useful information — it will reveal a thought pattern or preconceived notion you hold that distorts reality. In order to change those patterns, you first have to be aware they exist.”
-
Quotes from the Introduction:
Websites:
Epona Equestrian Services: http://eponaquest.com/
Horse Conscious – Linda Kohanov: http://www.horseconscious.com/teachers/linda-kohanov
You must be logged in to post a comment.