I’ve yet to experience a horse that doesn’t have some sort of “baggage” from a previous unfavorable experience in their life. There’s usually something that went array in their training or life that left some sort of emotional attachment. It’s no different in people. We all have some baggage.
The healing work I do with horses is at an intuitive level where I am able to isolate and determine which age the root of the problem we’re working on occurred. In doing this healing or horse counseling I sometimes call it, I’ve found several common events in a horse’s life that can shape who they are in the future. It can also shape their health. That’s where I come in when we’re doing the healing to bring back this health. I work backward to heal the past events that are affecting their current state of health. It’s their emotional baggage from the past that’s catching up to them.
There are many things that can happen in a horses life, but here are some of the most common experiences a horse can find traumatic in their lifetime. I want to emphasize “can” as not all horses will interpret the same experience the same way, so what was traumatic to one might not be traumatic to another.
Weaning
Many horses who deal with anxiety and abandonment (being left alone) have unhealed wounds from the loss and heartache they experienced at weaning time. I’ll write another time what I think we can do to avoid this, but to summarize I feel that making it as natural of a process as possible is our best bet. Not all horses are affected by weaning, but those rushed through the process before they were starting to wean naturally are more likely to be carrying some baggage because of it.
Breaking
Many horses carry fear, resentment, and anger from the experience they had from first being started. How well our horses are properly prepared going into training situation is huge. How the trainer reads the horse and the horses level of understanding are important. Imagine going to a foreign country and you don’t know how to speak the language but you get thrown into a job and expected to perform. This would be a stressful situation where you might be afraid or frustrated. Learning the language before you go to the job will help. Teaching our horse proper manners and ground work can really help their success and understanding in training. Teach your horse “English” before breaking him.
Being Sold
I see two things come up when a horse is sold. One is that they love their current owner and home and don’t want to leave. They don’t understand what they’ve done and why they have to leave somewhere they’re happy. Second, we as humans seem to do emotional damage when we “break up” with the horse. It’s like a teenage break up when the kids look for all the bad things in their girlfriend or boyfriend and pick fights so it’s easier to break up. It seems like people do this to make it easier to sell their horses. I’ve seen it a lot. It’s not a conscious thing we do, it’s just something that can happen by default to make it easier to let the horses go.
Another Horse is Sold or Dies
Horses do make friends with one and other and horses do care when their friends “disappear”. I have found they feel equal sadness and sorrow for a friend that has been sold and left the farm vs. a horse that has died and disappeared. It is a loss and they will grieve in both cases.
2 Year Old Competitions
Racing, Cutting, Pleasure, any event that takes a 2 year old into competition, has the potential to put on more pressure than the horse can handle at that age and understanding. Horses that have been on the track or been in training for other competitions at such a young age, will often have a pile of emotional baggage. In any event, if they don’t have a compassionate trainer who has trained and properly prepared the horse, they are apt to carry low-energy emotions like terror, horror, panic, fear and shock from their experiences. Horses who were trained for their job and understand it rather than being scared into their job (like racing) have much less emotional trauma.
Heavy Training
Going into heavy training without proper preparation (no matter the discipline) leads to many horses picking up emotional baggage. This seems to show up a lot when a horse is 3 or 4. The horse is “of age” and can start discipline specific training, however, their age doesn’t always mean they are mentally (or physically) prepared to do the work. If they have to work through pain or confusion under the stress of their new “job”, you can expect frustration, defensiveness, panic, worthless and confusion to show up in their future baggage. It is important that a horse’s understanding and level of education dictates the expectations we have of them not their age or days of training.
Other less common, but important events that can lead to future emotional baggage are trailering accidents, entrapment, major injuries, sickness, and surgeries.
Each one of these traumatic events has the potential to manifest itself energetically in the body. It is known that anger, for example, hangs out in the liver, sadness, grief and sorrow affect the lungs. Different emotions have a tendency to affect different organs and areas of the body. By offering healing to these horses we are able to help them let go of these emotions that weren’t properly processed when they were first felt. We help them release those and restore the natural flow of energy wherever those emotions were lodged. Once released, the horse will heal and work its way back to optimum health.
