Book Review - Riding Between the Worlds - Expanding our Potential Through the Way of the Horse

It's only been the last eight of my 61 years that I've been with horse. I had a few cowboy moments in years gone by, but not the ownership experience with all it entails - ever heard of mucking? My first horse was better educated than I, so I got to enjoy the illusion that I knew what I was doing. Except for those moments when "Lady" would choose to suddenly gallop down the road, whether I was riding in the saddle, or driving behind in her cart, for no apparent reason. It took me awhile to catch on to the fact that she was doing it on cue, that is, in response to my unacknowledged thrill at the speed of it all.

With the new baby horse, "Sparkles," my true ignorance was exposed. We both started from scratch and learned together how to interact. For the most part, she's a willing student, but she too can suddenly bolt, not into a gallop, but straight up into the air, at the sight of - what? I didn't see anything. Was she responding to some high-flying notion passing through my head? I've had to seek expert opinions.

I'm back in school now, with Sparkles as a classmate, learning about human-animal communication. Being a recovering intellectual, I've tried to learn from books on horse whispering and pet psychics, but reading books on horses isn't the same as horsing around with the fillies themselves. Then I read5B4 Riding Between the Worlds: Expanding our Potential Through the Way of the Horse (New World Library), by Linda Kohanov. The author runs a place where people can get psychological help by interacting with her therapist horses. She calls it "Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy." Now I'm back into familiar territory, yet where I encounter a surprise.

The message of her work with horses is that they are emotional (no surprise) and respond to emotion as information. They do have the surprising tendency to act out the emotion that the human is holding back or not consciously experiencing. It is as if the horse, acting as therapist, confronts the person with their unacknowledged feelings. From these interactions and their consequences, the author reaffirms the long-standing idea of the distinction between the false self and the authentic self. She proposes that horses always interact with the person's authentic self, whether that person does or not, such that interacting with a horse forces the person to get into relationship with that authentic self.

Kohanov stresses not only the importance of the authentic self, but that we need to learn to treat our emotions as information. She offers an analysis of anger, which many of her clients have stuffed somewhere, and which causes no shortage of exciting moments with the horse therapists. She offers an alternative to either expressing anger or repressing it, an alternative that surprises me5B4 because it is one I've long worked with myself, but one others find very uncomfortable to use. She asks that we meditate on our anger to learn what it has to tell us about our boundary violations. If we take responsibility for our boundaries, then there's no need to express anger, but simply to assert the need for space. Cayce advocates, "get angry, but sin not," yet we rarely hear how to make the "getting" constructive. I practice allowing my anger to impress itself upon me, alerting me to the urgent and important information coming from within my body. To me, anger is like an angel of self-affirmation, arising because it requires me to affirm my space. Rather than ask, "why am I angry?" when the answer to that question is often dismissed as trivial, as in "no reason to get angry about that!" Instead I find it better to ask, "what is the purpose of the anger? what is its motivation? what does it want?"

Anger prompts actions, promotes fantasies of revenge, which are scary. Yet I find that, holding my thoughts within a protective boundary of my own inner explorations so that they will not touch another soul, if I explore my revenge fantasy, I find that its motivation is to create in that other person the same feeling that I am left with as a result of that person's actions toward me.

In other words, revenge seeks empathy. Blindly maybe, unconstructively for sure, but nevertheless, revenge seeks something positive. If the "pe1C84rp" could actually feel how I feel at the insult, maybe that empathy would create respect for me. Anger and the reflex toward revenge, properly understood, give important information for better consciousness of our needs, so that we can communicate our boundaries more effectively.

As Kohanov suggests, we can learn from horses what we need to improve our relations with others, including ourselves. Sparkles demands of me that I calmly, but assertively, let her know my boundaries, and her boundaries, if we are to remain safe. It is imperative. There's little room for anger to build, but it must be used - quickly, consciously, and intelligently - to rein in the power of nature, to harness it for good.

Henry Reed, Ph.D., is on staff at Atlantic University He has been the prime designer of A.R.E.'s psychic development program, in its various aspects, for the past twenty some years. He is one of the trainers of A.R.E.'s most successful, and long running, psychic training conference, "The Edgar Cayce Legacy: Be Your Own Psychic." He developed A.R.E.'s program of evaluating psychics. He has published scientific articles on his research into intuition and psychic functioning. He is the author of Edgar Cayce on Awakening Your Psychic Powers, Edgar Cayce on Channeling Your Higher Self, and Your Intuitive Heart.