This is a book that details a therapeutic journey as well as personal journey of a woman who has a special touch with horses. The author runs a horse-therapy ranch where she not only has pioneered the only program to gentle stallions and get them to behave with manners to people and other horses (including stallions) but she has also pioneered an effort to incorporate a human being's need to be loved by a huge horse-heart as well as a horse that needs to be understood and loved by a human being. She is a very intelligent person and uses a great deal of classic psychology woven into her explanations, so I felt this to be a rich work that is not simply "New Age". That is the personal journey.

The therapeutic journey is the reason that I put the 18+ rating on the book. It is not graphic except for the explanations of examples of broken women (and a few males) who come to her ranch in search of a riding lesson and instead find themselves, find real reconciliation and get real with life, with trauma, with joy and learn to be human again...to live instead of merely survive.

Although this is a work that strongly stresses the woman-horse connection, anyone with a connection to horses can find themselves in this book and learn something every time they read.

Horse people. Animal-assisted therapy people. People interested in different types of growth and development of the self.

Reading about the horses and reading about real human women overcoming the worst life had to offer and turning real tragedy and sorrow into grace and triumph. It did a lot for my heart, it kept my mind busy and I have had to read it two times because it is so dense and rich in wisdom that it is simply too much to take in all at once. For me that is really neat, to have a book that I like that I need to re-read and still learn something from it.

This is a thick book and you have to give it your attention, this is not a light read.

I didn't just want to, I did buy a horse and I'm learning to put some of the principles she has in this book to work. I am also using my graduate research opportunities to gather information to open my own horse-assisted therapy ranch for children and veterans with PTSD.

Awestruck

Although one person does not have all the answers, this is a piece of the puzzle put in a way that reads like a text book you can reference over and over. It is science based as well as based on fieldwork, so it provides a solid base from which you can start thinking and puzzling things out on your own.

I love this book, it is awesome and I truly enjoy reading it about once a year.

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Created Jan 28, 2009 at 9:40pm • Submit your own review...