Stress
Equine Involvement Therapy - connecting with the natural instincts of the horse
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Stress
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Emotional exhaustion
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Sleeping problems
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Anxiety
Living with stress can be exhausting, it drains all your energy; normally pleasurable experiences lose their appeal and life becomes a constant stream of anxieties and tensions. The ability to relax becomes a thing of the past and your physical as well as mental health deteriorates rapidly. Thoughts become obsessive and switching them off an impossibility, even sleep patterns can be severely disrupted excacerbating your battle against tiredness. The body's reaction to stress is the same as that of an animal, every part of you, mind and body is on high alert, or hyper vigilence working at excessive levels to help you to excape from what it perceives as danger, but unlike a prey animal that is running away in fear from its predator, you have nowhere to run, so the strain you put yourself under becomes intolerable.
Horses know better than most how it feels to be under stress, they are prey animals, but in the animal world once the danger is over the animal quickly returns to its natural state, which is alert but relaxed; conserving energy yet always prepared. Being with horses has an incredibly calming affect, connecting with their natural thinking and way of life allows you to look at the events that are creating your stress, from a completely different perspective. The horse leaves the memory of a perceived danger behind once it has passed, they know how to deeply relax, how to let thoughts go, because they have no concept of holding on to them. Everything they see or experience they use as information, merely a survival technique, they attach no emotion to what they perceive. Whilst working with them so closely, communicating with them as they would with eachother, connecting with and absorbing their thoughts, it becomes clear, that their way of viewing life, is what we need to deal with stressful situations without the stress.
The tasks we do with the horses can be very very simple or quite challenging depending on your progress and how you feel. We want you to get better and that means succeeding, so we never ask you to do anything that you are not completely happy with.
Equine Involvement Therapy is a quiet, unthreatening, gentle and beautiful way to find an escape from emotional distress. Click here to find out more.
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