How Horse Therapy Made Me A Better Entrepreneur

I recently visited a horse ranch in Iceland, and it reminded me of a very powerful story that I never shared with you… until now!

(Side note – if you haven’t been to Iceland yet, it’s a must. And, if you’re a horse lover, the Icelandic horses are 2 of the oldest breeds in the world and very special creatures.)

This was my first lesson on energy management.

It was 2017 and I was in Costa Rica as a speaker for a retreat for startups.

Little did I know that this retreat center included a very special offer that I’d never heard of before:

Equine (horse) therapy.

Little did I know, horses are actually incredible therapy animals for their ability to mirror the feelings of the handler or rider.

They have huge hearts, which means big electromagnetic fields that can pick up on subtle information from meters away.

Having been around as her and prey animals for 50+ million years, they have a HIGHLY developed emotional sense and sensitivity for energy that they use a survival tool to feel when a predator is coming from kilometers away.

That’s why humans can’t lie to horses. They respond to the feeling state we show.

If you’re angry and you pretend like you’re happy, they get uncomfortable. They shy away or become stubborn because they can feel your incongruence and it registers as “not safe.”

They actually prefer that you are honest about being angry as it creates coherence in the energetic field — you are what you say you are. It’s safe.

In other words, they are big, big mirrors for your current emotional state of being.

That’s also why some people have exceptionally uncomfortable experiences when horseback riding. Assuming that the horse is healthy — meaning it had a healthy development cycle, wasn’t traumatized, or ill-treated —  people think they got a “bad” horse when actually, the horse just doesn’t vibe with that person’s energy. There’s something about how the person is feeling and how they’re acting that feels inconsistent to them, and they can pick up on it and don’t like it.

(Horses are seriously incredible creatures. Study them when you change a chance!)

I decided to give this horse therapy a go. At the time, I was experiencing a lot of turbulence in my relationship with my mother and wanted support.

There’s an exercise where the therapist “matches” you with a horse (mine was a mare that had recently given birth to a female foal) and put you in a large pen with them. You have a whip in your hand, but you never use it on the horse… you whip it against the ground.

The whip represents a physical extension of your energy. When you whip hard, for example, it’s a strong assertion of energy. When you whip it softly, it’s a gentler expression of energy.

The exercise was the following:

Using your energy and the whip as a tool, the goal is to instruct the horse on where to go, and how quickly, around the pen.

The more clear and commanding you are with your energy, the faster the horse will trot or run in circles around you.

The less conviction you have in your energy, the slower the horse will walk (if it follows your instructions at all).

Through this, the horse will mirror back to you the emotions (= energy in motion) that you’re feeling, even if you’re unaware of them.

Ideally, if you are properly managing your energy, you should be able to “control” how fast the horse runs around you without a problem, and without any verbal commands.

That’s where the therapy piece comes in — what happens when you energetically tell the horse to run or slow down, and it doesn’t listen to you?

I was feeling quite cocky going into this session.

I got this, I thought, I’ll get this horse running according to my instructions in no time.

I was floored when I experienced that the horse hardly listened to me when I cracked the whip.

“Bring your commanding energy up to a 10,” the therapist would say. “You’re at a 5 right now. You don’t mean it.”

I would try, and try again. But all that it brought up was anger:

That the horse wasn’t listening to me.

That I didn’t “get” the exercise.

That I was doing it wrong and failing.

The angrier I got, the more the horse seemed to intentionally rebel against my requests.

I would whip softly and it would go faster. Then I would whip fast and it would stop altogether and wander off.

It felt like the horse was taunting me. I was so frustrated.

“You need to manage your energy,” the therapist would say. “Notice your anger. You don’t need to be more angry to make her change her pace. You just need to energetically command your desire.”

Still, I wasn’t getting it.

At one point, when the horse was running laps around me despite me begging it to slow down, I screamed: “STOP IT!”

The horse paused.

“STOP.” I screamed again in despair, my throat choking up.

“You’re not listening to me.” I whimpered. I started to cry.

“That’s it,” the therapist said. “Allow yourself to feel this. The rage. The helplessness. The grief.”

I broke down. And as I did, the defensive walls around me started to crumble. I softened.

The horse took a step towards me, looking straight into my eyes.

“Tell her how you really feel.” the therapist said.

Of course she wasn’t referring to the horse. The horse was just playing the role of my mother.

The tears started flooding and my heart opening as I began to express myself fully and completely to the horse, who patiently stood still and held space for me.

I told her how I didn’t feel heard. I didn’t feel seen. I felt suffocated and unable to be my true self.

As the truth poured from my lips, the horse took a few steps closer to me.

As I broke down and spoke my truth, my energetic field came into coherence. My internal emotional landscape and my external presentation got into alignment. I was vulnerable and real and the horse could feel it, and because of that, she trusted me.

She moved even closer to me,  just a few centimeters from my face. I reached out to touch her muzzle. She stayed still and steady.

We stayed there for a while, as I cried and kept telling the horse everything that I was bottling up inside of me. Sharing my deepest insecurities and my fears. Confiding fully in this creature.

Once I was complete and we got back to the exercise, the most incredible thing happened:

The horse started listening to me. She sped up when I dialed up my energy, and slowed down with me. Sometimes there was inconsistency and she stopped listening, but she’d stand patiently waiting for me to recompose myself. She wasn’t taunting me anymore. We were working together in harmony, and I felt that she had my back as I exercised my energetic muscle.

There was no fooling this animal, and this allowed me to really observe my energy and spot the subtle ways in which I was confusing being in my power with anger or arrogance, and my softness with meekness.

It was one of the most powerful lessons of my life.

To this day, I carry that experience with me because of how much it taught me about energetic management, being honest with myself and how I’m feeling, and how deeply our emotional state (whether we are conscious of it or not) affects us and those around us.

As I went on to become a practitioner of subconscious reprogramming, and later on energy work, I repeatedly witnessed the ways in which our repressed thoughts and emotions have a direct impact on our reality.

Although horses have very attuned intuition by nature, we humans have this ability, as well.

When you show up and share your story with your audience, for example — regardless of how nice your words sound, if they’re underpinned by unprocessed and repressed emotions, people will be able to unconsciously FEEL this.

If you put on a mask when you’re dealing with your clients, your team, your loved ones, your colleagues… they will be able to feel your incongruence, even if they don’t logically understand what feels so off.

So, whenever I am making a major decision in my life or business, creating a course or masterclass, or about to share a big story with my audience… I check in with myself and ask:

“Is this coming from an authentic, aligned space, or are there repressed emotions that need to be processed and released first?”

If the answer is the latter, I go ahead and process those emotions… through the somatic embodiment tools that I practice and teach, such as breathwork, sound, and movement.

When my energy is clear and focused, I know that I’ll be able to create whatever I desire with it. That’s the practice, though — keeping it clear and focused.

If you’re looking to get into the driver’s seat of your life and shift from the victim into the creator paradigm… energy management is a non-negotiable.

As that beautiful horse showed me, and life continues to show me, your inner world and your outer world need to be in total coherence and alignment in order to not only manifest the results you desire, but create genuine well-being and connection with yourself and others.

It’s worth asking…

In which areas of your life is there still a mismatch between how you feel, and the results you desire?

That’s where you can start to explore where you may not be properly managing your energy or processing your emotions.

If you need help with this…

We can unpack this in a Story Clarity Intensive, which is a deep-dive session with me where we untangle where you’re still subconsciously getting stuck, get you crystal clear on your next steps to reach your biggest goal, and create a blueprint for you to have the right processes and practices in place to quantum leap into your desired results.

I only offer 1-2 sessions a month You can book for yours here.