trueCOWBOYmagazine Sept/Oct 2014 | Page 50

It is our relationship with others who experience us in our wholeness, our unique and sometimes messy brilliance, who inspire us to want to live a life and be alive in our authenticity that changes not only our own lives, but the lives of others. Horses are not unlike humans, we manifest positive and negative behavioral patterns based on our life experiences. The horses I adopted, Montana, Homer and April, were no exception and they challenged everything I thought I knew about horses and myself. I had to learn to love myself, really love myself, before I could understand how to be healthy in any relationships with others. The horses started me on an unexpected mind-body-spirit life awakening. As my awareness expanded, my perception of myself and how I related to everything in my life began to shift. I believe that our lives and the quality of our relationships are a reflection of our relationship with our selves. My horses kept calling me to step into my authenticity, the wild Montana spirit of a girl, with a soul connection to nature and a passion for supporting humans, horses and horse owners. I am a warrior voice for mutuality and for the horse to be understood as a horse; a powerful, cooperative, social-bond oriented, sentient being who has so much to teach us about those qualities in ourselves. Very few of the horses, or humans for that matter, who come into our lives are free of the consequences of conforming to a human world. A world where most people don’t stop to consider and understand horses, or each other, as sentient, conscious, cognitive, social bond oriented mammals. Humans are that kind of mammal too. Every horse who has found their way to our ranch has needed only to be seen for who they are: a social being and an individual with a past that can play out in the present until they have healed what was hurt in their relational journey. The remarkable thing about helping horses reconnect with their authentic self-expression is how much we learn about reconnecting with our own in the process. go to page 52