Course overview
The aim of the course is to provide a safe, calm and welcoming place where individuals can come to develop new skill sets and begin to focus on emotional and mental insecurities.
This is achieved by a combination of working through an industry recognised basic stable management syllabus and using horses and ponies with histories of physical and mental neglect/abuse to focus on how to process emotional and mental issues insecurities within their own lives.
In our experience we have found that course participants arrive to us with a variety of mental and emotional issues that range from lack of confidence, low self-esteem and feelings of low self-worth to complex cases of PTSD, drug and alcohol dependency and depression. Our process of development remains similar but fluid for all but with specific focus on:
- Building trust and developing empathy with others.
- Recognising mental trauma in horses and understanding how to rehabilitate them and reintroduce them into a calm environment (this is then discussed and related to human behavior).
- Building confidence to learn new skills.
- Developing the ability to read equine body language and then to relate it to human body language.
- Developing feelings of self-worth and improve self-esteem.
- Empower participants to look out of their own lives into the community to see how they can support and educate others.
These objectives are achieved through the close work between highly experienced staff and volunteers and that of a group of horses who they themselves have been both mentally and physically rehabilitated.