Somatic Experiencing® with Horses: Equine-supported trauma recovery

A retreat at Bitterroot Ranch with Paula Josa-Jones CLMA, MSMET, SEP, TTEAM, who says:

Connecting in an embodied way with horses opens us to discovering our authentic selves and finding new ways of settling and grounding body and mind. Horses can help us become more comfortable in our own skin, more trustworthy to ourselves and others. With their help, we can find a more reliable sense of physical and emotional balance, resilience, and ease. Horses, as vigilant prey animals, read not only our movement behaviors but their underlying emotional tone. Often our movement behavior and emotional expression unconsciously reflect an unsettled or incongruent state of mind -for example, acting calm while feeling agitated inside.

My experience is that horses (and other equines) can help us with whatever needs helping. They can illuminate issues or give us insights into the places that we are stuck – places of resistance or habits of body and mind that have become obstacles to our opening fully to our desires. Often that information is stored in the body. It can show up as pain or stiffness or a lack of feeling and joy.

They can help bring us into alignment, which is not about posture or putting the parts of our bodies into a correct position. Alignment is about relationship and connection – between oneself and another, with ourselves and within the body – it is dynamic, flexible, and improvisational.

Co-Regulation, Connection & the Body

When we meet others – including other species – our systems begin to synchronize. We begin to mirror each other’s rhythms, movement, respiration, heart rate and emotional tone. This is a bodily, emotional sensing of each other – an empathetic, embodied experience of reciprocal resonance. This co-regulating, co-embodying experience of connection helps to nurture an intuitive, improvisational, feeling response to what is arising in the moment rather than being caught in habitual or automatic ways of responding. With horses, this means finding a shared settled state with the horse, where we are listening more than telling, creating opportunities for responsiveness and resonance rather than tension and reactivity. All of this happens through our bodies: breath, the movement of fluids, skin, muscle, bones, and organs – the shared anatomy of our moving bodies.

What is Somatic Experiencing®?

Somatic Experiencing® is a body-oriented therapeutic model applied for healing trauma and other stress disorders. It is based on a multidisciplinary intersection of physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics and has been clinically applied for more than four decades. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine. The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. It offers a framework to assess where a person is stuck in the fight, flight or freeze responses and offers ways of resolving these physiological states.

The SE approach can be helpful with the following:

• Feeling as if you need to be alert and vigilant all the time.
• Never feeling safe or able to fully relax.
• Difficulty in expressing feelings.
• Chronic anxiety, panic, or shut down.
• Hyper-reactivity or sensitivity to even the smallest trigger.
• Difficulty in being alone or being with others.
• The same patterns of behavior appearing again and again, despite your best efforts to change them.
• Feeling unable to notice your bodily sensations or feeling uncomfortable about being in your body.
• Self-soothing with addictive patterns, including substances, food, shopping, media consumption.

Paula Josa-Jones

Paula is an author, horsewoman, choreographer, dancer, and movement artist who brings an improvisational perspective to all her work. She teaches an intuitive, embodied approach to the human-horse bond with movement and touch, integrating the principles of Somatic Experiencing©, the trauma-informed work developed by Dr. Peter Levine. She believes that our most reliable and authentic teacher is the body, and that learning to listen to what the body is expressing can help to unravel many of the patterns and beliefs that limit our pleasure, ease, and creativity.

Paula is a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner (SEP), a Certified Laban Movement Analyst (CLMA), and a Master Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (MSMET) accredited by ISMETA, the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. She is a Guild-certified Tellington TTEAM , and a member of the United States Association of Body Psychotherapy (USABP). Her book, Our Horses, Ourselves: Discovering the Common Body, is published by Trafalgar Square Books .