Overview: Soul Connection with Horses: Healing the Mind and Awakening the Spirit through Equine Assisted Practices by author Suzanne Court, is a book that reveals that horses can teach humans healthier ways of being, deepening innate wisdom and enabling soul-to-soul connections.

Verdict: Working with horses as equal partners in the equine-assisted space while respecting their intuitive wisdom leads to life-changing psycho-spiritual understandings, learning and healing, is what author Suzanne Court has not only done, but has brought forth her findings on here within this incredible new book.

Soul Connection with Horses: Healing the Mind and Awakening the Spirit through Equine Assisted Practice introduces concepts of awakening and spaciousness as understood in many spiritual traditions and demonstrates that horses effectively model awakening for humans. Through this approach horses help re-establish natural bonds and intuitive ways of knowing that have become obscured by conditioned thought and ineffective individual narratives.

Horses show us that we can trust our intuition and learn how to live from the soul while making meaningful connection with ourselves, other people, animals and the natural environment. By considering how horses experience the world through their senses, how they process emotion and how they express their needs, we see that they live through the same social, psychological and spiritual paradigms as humans.

Following equine assisted therapy and learning practices through to their logical conclusions, horses naturally lead us to questions of “who am I?” and “what is life?” They help us transcend non-functioning personal stories as we step out of ineffective ways of thinking and being and discover connection and wholeness.

Given my family grew up with horses, I have always know that equine-assisted services (EAS) - a term used to refer to various services in which professionals incorporate horses and other equines to benefit people - have been made readily available for time immemorial.

But this service goes a lot further than just being some terminology used for animal-assisted services or interventions, for when undertaken, it’s primary focus can also be of equine-assisted therapy (EAT) - which is about addressing mental health challenges and emotional well-being - while equine-assisted learning (EAL) primarily focuses on educational and personal development goals.

Author Suzanne Court, PhD, is a qualified equine assisted therapist and mental health practitioner with over 30 years’ horse experience and ten years’ experience working professionally with horses in the mental healing and spiritual space, and so who better to bring forth such an in-depth and highly informative prose on the subject to hand.

But for all those interested, the book also covers other animal-related therapy, albeit briefly, and thus makes the whole subject matter seem more generously rounded to me. Sure, horses are the main focus here, but the book is really good at being easy to read, easy to pick back up (the chapters are not long and far from arduous to get through), and therefore provides an easy-to-follow guide for anyone looking to either get into this profession, or benefit from it.

In closing, this book invites equestrians, equine assisted practitioners and seekers of spiritual connection, to walk in the hooves of the horse, to experience the horses’ worldview and to access your own soulful wisdom.

About the Author - Suzanne Court, PhD, is a qualified equine assisted therapist and mental health practitioner with over 30 years’ horse experience and ten years’ experience working professionally with horses in the mental healing and spiritual space. She teaches group and individual courses and gives lectures on Equine Assisted Therapy. She comes from a musical and academic background, having been a performing classical guitarist and a professor of music. She has published widely in historical musicology, and this book is her first regarding horses. She lives in Waikato, New Zealand.

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