Our culture has created a division between healing ourselves and healing the world. It makes sense to recognize that, before we can relate to horses or anyone at all in the best way possible, we need to get right with ourselves, to arrive at a truly healthy mind and as healthy a body as we can. When we suffer from illness and from typical anxieties and neurotic patterns, we can find it much harder to be fully present with others, including horses. The important dictum, “Physician, heal thyself!” applies to all of us who want to help horses, help those we love, and help the world.

Some people seek to offer healing to horses, perhaps in the form of Reiki, bodywork, acupuncture, or chiropractic adjustments. Others seek healing from horses, in forms such as equine assisted therapy, equine-based learning experiences, and all manner of workshops, retreats, and more.

Either way, we cannot maintain a division between our healing and the healing horses and the rest of the world need. Our best science recognizes what wisdom traditions around the world have taught for millennia: Everything is interconnected. If that is so, then if we focus on self-help or self-healing, our healing will pull at the interconnected web of life in ways that harm others. We can call this situation the self-help catastrophe: The self-help industry (including health and healing, broadly construed) has exploded in recent decades, and meanwhile things have not gotten better for wild horses and countless other animals and ecologies.

But we fall into this trap when we try to offer healing to horses as well, because we make the approach a matter of self-help for horses. Under the very best intentions, and often with lots of careful language and conceptual apparatus, we pull horses into our human notions. Many who offer healing to horses have little training in the wisdom traditions, and they may experience all manner of stress, anxiety, neuroses, and unconscious complexes. Offering healing to horses can in fact make them feel better during the application of the treatment, and it may also produce results in the horse that further ease the psyche. Nevertheless, the basic orientation still lacks rootedness in wisdom, compassion, and the clarity of mind taught by the spiritual and philosophical traditions of the world.

All of this can sound shocking, but it’s true: Our processes of self-healing and self-help tend to create harms, as do our processes of helping others—because there is no such thing as “self-help” or “self-healing” or even “healing a horse” in a truly interconnected world. Rather, true healing demands awakening an ecosensual awareness, getting in touch with the world in such a new and different way that our healing journey includes both self and world. Then, our healing becomes the world’s healing, as does the healing of our horses. Their healing, our healing, and the world’s haling come totally together. 

We have come to a point at which we cannot overstate the importance of this insight into healing. We can all sense that things have gotten rather extreme, with species going extinct, weather becoming increasingly erratic and damaging, water becoming scarce in many places and still polluted for huge numbers of people, soil degraded to the point at which we have less than 60 harvests left . . . the list goes on, and it can feel so daunting that we feel tense up stressed, even traumatized, and even refuse to look at the reality of our situation. If we don’t begin to bring together our healing and the healing of the world, all of these things will only get worse. 

Many people have written about the healing power of horses, but this tends to remain trapped in the self-help catastrophe: Humans claim to feel better, but horses overall still struggle. Moreover, the predominant approaches tend to put yet another human burden on horses. Humans want healing, so they make the horse carry the burden of their healing process. This often happens with very good intentions, and much of the language and the results seem lovely at first glance. But when we think carefully, we begin to ask if there might be a better way. 

By working with the teachings of the wisdom traditions that pertain to health and healing, and by taking up some of the core healing practices—so effective they have thrived for centuries or even millennia—we can get beyond the self-help catastrophe and enter into a path of mutual healing of ourselves, our horses, and our world. 

Over the course of 6 weekly zoom sessions, each 1.5-2 hours long, you will out the essence of holistic healing and how you can bring your healing together with the healing of all horses, the society and culture at large, and the world we share. 

We recommend you enjoy this experience in a group. If you have interest in this program, let us know, and we can either place you in a group when available, or we can discuss the possibility of one-on-one sessions.

A note from Nikos:

I decided to offer this course after seeing the profound effect the practices it teaches can have on humans and horses together. Perhaps the horses most responsible for allowing me to see these shifts are Yunmen, pictured above, and Rio, Aragon, Siobolla, and the other horses pictured below.

Philosophy has long been therapy for the soul, a practice of healing self and world by treating the only true illness: Ignorance. But philosophers in various traditions also served as healers, just as the healers in various traditions—if they achieved significant spiritual realization—served as philosophers. In the Tibetan medical tradition, for instance, the physician is expected to achieve a high level of spiritual development.

As true as all of that is, and as powerful as the teachings of philosophy have been in my own life (including my own experiences of healing), seeing the effects on horses and on other humans became inspiring, and I felt called by them to formally offer some essential teachings. These teachings will help you, too, to experience this inspiration.