About me
Horizon Equine- Equine Facilitated Wellness/Learning, partnering with horses to gain personal insight and improve our social-emotional skills. We offer leadership and core skill personal development through groundwork interactions and cooperative games/activities with horses. These experiences help to provide confidence, self-efficiency, open and clear communication, trust, new perspectives, impulse control, and learn appropriate boundaries with the importance of body language. These activities have shown to lower blood pressure, heart rate, alleviate stress and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. Horses teach us several skills better than a person; patience, problem solving, conflict management, clear communication and being consistent in our behaviours. EFW sessions have proven to reduce negative emotions among participants, such as anger, and horses provide a distraction from thoughts of substance abuse, cravings, mindfulness, focussing on goals, and empathy for another living being. With trauma and ADHD clients, horses respond to both spoken and non-verbal communication through the use of ground work skills introduced with a halter and lead rope. With depression and anxiety, clients have identified helpful coping skills, cognitive patterns and regained belief of self. These horse interactions open up discussion of feelings, behaviours and patterns that are more helpful to improve our state of mind. Horses observe and read emotions of herd mates and people for their survival as prey animals, so clients can practice new skills to replace ingrained habits with more positive responses. Recent Canadian studies have found overall positive outcomes for participants involved in Equine Facilitated Wellness and Learning activities and Mental Health programs over the past 25 years.
