Being Outside of the Box

I have a confession to make – I am venturing further and further outside the box.  Manjiri Latey came to my attention as a guest on Warwick Schiller’s Journey On podcast, where she was described as having a Masters of Outdoor Education, having studied neuro-linguistic programming and now working in outdoor education and experiential learning.   But what intrigued me was that she is also a telepathic interspecies communicator.  This I wanted to know more about.

Warwick Schiller is an Australian born, internationally recognized horseman who now lives in the USA.  I first learned about him from Sarah Schlote, psychotherapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, founder of Equusoma, and an important consult therapist for me during my SEP training.  It turns out that Sarah Schlote and Warwick Schiller took a course together and quickly bonded. Sarah taught Warwick about Poly-Vagal Theory and the workings of the Autonomic Nervous System.  This has greatly influenced Schiller’s horse training methods. Schiller interviewed Sarah Schlote early on for his Journey On podcast.

But Schlote is not the only person who has been interviewed for the Journey On podcast.  Schiller has also interviewed Linda Kohanov, the originator of Eponaquest and my teacher for equine-facilitated learning, as well as Dr. Rebecca Bailey, a psychologist who deals with complex trauma and who taught Connection-Focused Therapy with Linda.  That course was my introduction to trauma recovery and working with horses.  The other person who has been a part of my healing-with-horses journey to be interviewed by Warwick Schiller is Carmen Theobold, Advanced Eponaquest Instructor and creator of Horse Sense North, an equine-facilitated learning program in Ontario.  Carmen was our Group Leader for my Eponaquest training.

To have all of the people who have been instrumental in my horses-as-healers journey interviewed by Warwick Schiller indicates how small this world really is and how fortunate I have been to have been taught by some of the best in the field.

But, back to the box.  I would venture to say that one cannot live ‘in the box’ and do equine-facilitated work.  There is so much that appears, at first glance, to be mystical about the horse-human connection.  When Linda wrote about this in her seminal book The Tao of Equus, she was ridiculed by many people involved in the horse business.  But advances in neuroscience have now been able to explain a lot of what happens in the mammalian nervous system, and how two nervous systems can interact – even interspecies!  It is no coincidence that a second edition of The Tao of Equus has just been published, updated with new stories and new neuroscience to explain this seemingly mystical connection between horses and humans.

So, ‘telepathic interspecies communicator’ may sound really far out of the box but quantum physics and neuroscience may soon explain how that can possibly be.  In the meantime, I sit with the question of – Why?  Why do horses choose to heal humans? That is still the great mystery to me.