What is Equine Gestalt Coaching?

Equine Gestalt Coaching is a life coaching method that applies Gestalt Therapy principles in client coaching sessions while in a horse’s presence. The equine gestalt coaching blends a coaching and equine session, often creating an extraordinary and profoundly life-changing moment for the client. The equine gestalt coaching method uses a holistic non-diagnostic approach in partnership with a horse, forging an integrative process of helping clients identify and achieve personal goals through developing skills and attitudes that lead to self-empowerment.

What Is Gestalt Therapy?

Gestalt therapy is a holistic approach to human experience developed in the 1940s and 1950s that helps clients focus on the present and understand what is happening in their world at this exact moment, rather than what they may perceive to be happening based on past experience. A form of psychotherapy emphasizes personal responsibility, and the self-regulating adjustments people make due to their overall situation. Through the gestalt process, clients discover how to utilize their newfound realization of how their personal negative thought patterns and behaviors block true self-awareness and make them unhappy. Gestalt techniques are often used in combination with bodywork, dance, art, drama, equine and other therapies.

Gain Perception Clarity With Equine Gestalt Coaching

The equine gestalt coaching method utilizes Gestalt therapy’s core concepts, including that the equine session’s most helpful focal point is the present moment’s experience. The equine gestalt coaching session is a guided exploration of experience, fully engaging with a coach and an equine partner. These coaching engagements go well beyond a simple talk therapy session, as the coach, client, and horse interacts on so many different levels of communication, yielding insights, understanding, and self-discovery in unique and rewarding ways.

Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone With Equine Gestalt Coaching

With the support of a certified equine gestalt coach and horse partner, you’ll discover your inherent wisdom to:

• Penetrate the buzz and noise that clouds your mind and keeps you off balance.
• Learn to align your perspective to your authentic self-values quickly.
• Better understand previous unconscious behavior patterns and how you can quickly move beyond them.
• Integrate and form new behaviors that move you forward in life.
• Improve emotional responses to become less reactionary and more reflective.
• Increase self-confidence.
• Move toward their goals with more clarity and integrity.
• Identify and move past self-imposed limitations.
• Enjoy a stronger mind-body connection to draw strength from whenever needed.

Areas of influence that equine gestalt coaching can improve include:

• Life transitions in health, careers, finances, and relationships.
• Past traumas such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, or body image issues.
• Relationship improvement with family, spouses, or significant others.
• Loss, grief, or depression.
• Better creating a work-life balance or defining career changes in the workplace.
• Self-discovery and uncovering a new you.

How Does Equine Gestalt Coaching Work?

The Equine Gestalt Coaching Method varies from session to session; the commonality is that the sessions incorporate horses into the therapeutic process. Clients may engage with grooming and leading a horse while being guided by a certified equine gestalt life coach. Throughout these experiential processes, clients connect to a deeper reality and awareness of their responses and reactions to the world around them. In the coaching session, the horse becomes an active partner and provides feedback and mirrors the client’s behavior and emotions. Horse’s sensitivity to the client’s movement and emotions provides insights for the coach to direct the session and generate self-awareness. While interacting with a horse helps clients gain a sense of safety, allowing self-discovery in a healthy, controlled environment.

What Are The Benefits of Equine Gestalt Coaching?

Horse assisted coaching offers many benefits in equine gestalt coaching. Certified life coaching with a horse can be used with various demographics, ages, even families or groups. The unique traits found in horses can provide calmness and a sense of peace for many clients. Without the threat of bias or judgment of their emotional state, clients are more apt to interact with the horse and try new things.

Engaging with a certified equine gestalt life coach helps many people identify and achieve personal goals. Incorporating gestalt coaching while partnering with a horse helps develop skills and attitudes that lead to self-empowerment. Equine-assisted therapy, like equine gestalt coaching, is growing in popularity due to its experiential approach, increasing clinical evidence to prove its effectiveness. When combined with traditional therapeutic treatments, life coaching in partnership with horse therapy is complementary with more standard methods. As a truly holistic and integrative approach, equine gestalt coaching might be just the thing you need to live your best life.