Equine-Assisted Therapy

Explore our Equine-Assisted Therapy services offering a unique healing and personal growth approach. Our sessions are tailored to individual needs, providing a safe and supportive environment for self-exploration and development. At Mosaic Counseling we use the Eagala Model, a distinctive experiential framework designed to provide clients the latitude to discover, learn, and grow from the horse-human relationship.

Beyond Words

Many people find the idea of talking about their struggles challenging, but unspoken pain, anxiety, fear, stress, and trauma often seep through us in unintended, subconscious ways. How can we begin to share what we're going through when we can't even find the words?

Horses never speak, but they're always communicating. Albert Mehrabian, a researcher of body language, found that communication is 55% nonverbal, 38% vocal, and 7% words only. If actions speak louder than words, horses make great translators - They interpret body language quite fluently!

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Horse Sense

The sheer size and strength of a horse can make it easy to forget they’re prey animals. Their very survival depends on an almost unfathomable level of data analysis and reflexive decision-making. Much of the information we’re either oblivious to or subconsciously dismiss as extraneous is valued as a matter of life or death to the horse. In the wild their lives depend on them recognizing inconsistencies in their environment.

Equines use their innate ability to notice subtle nuances in humans too! The way we shift our weight, tilt our head, bend our knee, hold our breath…our gait, our gaze, our cadence, none of it escapes them.

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Fully Seen & “Herd”

Horses can sense our stress, often before we do. They not only look for subtle signs, they can smell it! Equines have approximately 300 million olfactory receptors (humans have five to six million). In horses, human fear and happiness chemosignals induced sympathetic and parasympathetic changes indicating emotional activation (Lanata et al., 2018). The nose knows!

Horses keen sense of hearing allows them to monitor your pulse from several feet away.

You can’t lie to a horse: they can see what we hide, even from ourselves.

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Restoring Balance

When stress signals are perceived, the horses evaluate the environment. If no looming threat is recognized the horses usually offer comfort by gathering around the stressed herd mate.

They often prompt a release of tension with deep sighs or "contagious" yawns which activate the vagus nerve. That signals the nervous system to switch from sympathetic (fight, flight or freeze) mode and jumpstarts the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). Then the magic happens - the horses leverage their large electromagnetic field to synchronize your heart beats with theirs.

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Release, Find Peace

And just like that, you release tension you didn’t even realize you were holding in your shoulders, neck, glutes... The air reserved in your lungs, just in case, evaporates with theirs. In a moment the worries and fears you held so tightly are gone with the wind.

Suddenly you see what the horse sees - the possibility of a purer, truer, lighter version of yourself. And you just want to stay found in that moment forever.

That's the art and science of connection. That's the power of the herd at play. And once you're in that space, the true healing can begin!

Harnessing Horsepower

For thousands of years, horses have helped people carry heavy loads faster and farther than humanly possible. Now we’re harnessing horsepower to help us lay our burdens down.

You can read all about it but nothing comes close to discovering the power of equine-assisted therapy for yourself. It's truly an experience that's beyond words.

Who is Equine-Assisted Therapy for?

Although equine-assisted therapy initially began as a treatment for physical disabilities in 1969, recently there has been a growing use of equine-assisted therapies as an adjunctive integrative health modality in treating individuals who are experiencing a wide variety of mental health needs such as fear, depression, anger, anxiety, and autism (Burton et al., 2019; Masini, 2010). Equine-assisted therapy has emerged as a treatment for PTSD as it allows participants to practice mindfulness, emotional regulation, and self-mastery or self-esteem building skills (Sylvia et al., 2020).

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What happens in sessions?

- Mindfulness/Grounding

-Grooming a horse

-Leading a horse

-Navigating obstacles

-Lunging a horse

-Observing the horses interactions, noticing connections, projecting and processing emotions.

Recognizing patterns in the herd members' non-verbal communication can be extremely enlightening, often eliciting revelations about the participant's interactions with members of their own "herd".

Participants learn how modulating the intensity of their own energy influences the behavior of the horse. This knowledge can then be generalized and applied to interactions with other people as well.

Review the Research

Horses respond to an individual's energy, emotions and behavior offering biofeedback by mirroring reflections of the subtle nonverbal behaviors of the people they interact with (Maros et al., 2008). Through interactions with the horse participants gained powerful insight into their own emotions and reactions (Masini, 2010).

When the horse and human subjects were together, with the horse free to explore the stationary human (S2), significant synchronization of their heartbeat dynamics occurred. Essentially we found that the ANS of horses affects the response of human autonomic nervous system (and vice versa) (Callara et al., 2024).

Equine-Assisted Therapy was found to increase feelings of acceptance, improvement in daily functioning, and increased awareness and connection with emotions (Masini, 2010; Shelef et al., 2019)).

Equine Assisted Therapy effectively reduces depression and trauma-related symptoms. Numerous participants who had met threshold for depression and PTSD prior to the beginning of the program no longer met criteria following their participation in the program. (Nelson et al., 2024).

Evidence suggests that equine-assisted therapies may reduce symptoms of PTSD in Veterans (Earles et al., 2015; Romaniuk et al., 2018; Shelef et al., 2019; Sylvia et al., 2020).