11 minute read
Emily Rose Anderson: How to Be Wild
By Sydney Munteanu
Images by Paula Bartosiewicz & Nicole Wild
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Emily Anderson ended up in Montana because of the horses.
Okay, that’s an extremely simplified story. But the truth of it is, without the horses, there is no story. A story that has its twists and turns like all of ours, but with an underlying theme, you’ll come to see, of following your intuition and trusting your deep inner self.
This is a story of a woman, her horses, and the quest to discover her own wild side— her wild self— and to daringly bring others on that journey too.
Emily Anderson lives in Bozeman, Montana… sometimes. As often as she can, she and her husband live and spend time on a family ranch in Tom Miner Basin just north of Yellowstone National Park. It’s as magical and picturesque as you can imagine, so it’s no wonder Emily prefers her days spent in the pasture with the horses, studying their behavior as a means of research in her journey to understand what it takes to reclaim the wild self.
image by Paula Bartosiewicz
As an Equine Guided Empowerment® coach, a spiritual psychologist, and the creator of the “Embodying Wild” course, Emily provides soulguided resources to help women reconnect to their wild feminine, which she describes as “the inner yin energy, the seat of the soul and the place where intuition and creativity reside in all of us.” For wildness, I’ve learned, is as innate to the feminine spirit as a young horse getting up to run for the first time.
Sounds a little metaphysical? I thought so too as I found myself signing up for Emily’s exploratory course last fall, trying to wrap my head around what I was actually going to uncover and learn through it. But here I am 8 months later, diving into Human Design charts, quoting lines from her favorite book, The Heroine’s Journey, and giddily packing my bags for this summer’s retreat at the Tom Miner ranch in order to experience for myself the deep therapeutic healing Emily claims horses can provide. And hopefully, I’ll enjoy a further discovery of the pieces that make up my own innate wildness.
“Wildness, to me, is less about the unruly and chaotic associations we have with the word and more about being in touch with the cycles of life,” Emily explains. “Being wild is being totally in tune with our own instincts. Which puts us in our natural rhythm— and in the rhythm of life.”
Emily works with women on exploring wildness as an innate quality of our femininity. She does this primarily through her one-on-one coaching and leading groups of women through the Embodying Wild course, a 3-month program that she holds twice per year and times with the equinoxes of fall and spring. “I mostly try to show women how to trust in their deep inner self,” Emily explains.
But first, an origin story.
image by Paula Bartosiewicz
How did this New-England born, scholarly film student (who, by the way, just a few years ago ditched her budding career as an LA screenwriter) end up spending most of her time hanging out in a pasture with horses and leading women on their wild way?
“I’ve always been someone who’s thrived in a more rural setting,” Emily explains. “The first time I visited Montana, I remember it very vividly, even stepping off the plane. I met my husband Geoff in high school, and he invited a group of us to visit his family’s ranch over summer break. I was 14, and I remember feeling like there was so much space here. And that was a feeling I never had found anywhere else.”
Emily and Geoff got together after college and moved to Hollywood so Emily could pursue her dream of becoming a screenwriter and filmmaker. They got married in 2018 at the family ranch. And as for the horses? Emily grew up riding English and jumping, but it was always more about being around horses and their calmness that she enjoyed. “I continued riding just for fun and found my way to Equine Guided Empowerment® after listening to a podcast. I was looking for a way to connect with horses while we were living in LA beyond just our short visits to Montana.”
image by Paula Bartosiewicz
The podcast guest was Cassandra Ogier, an Equine Guided Educator and the creator of ‘The Reflective Horse,’ a program that has pioneered conscious equine therapeutic programs around the world. The first thing Emily got after finishing the podcast was an intuitive hit. She explains just feeling, “I have to meet this woman!” Emily immediately signed up for a 2-day excursion in Northern California to meet Cassandra at a horse rescue sanctuary. It was 2018, and at the time, Emily had been pursuing a career as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, developing a habit of reading psychology books to use for character development and even exploring the study of dreams through a Jungian psychoanalyst she found in LA. “He was this rather odd man tucked away in a dark wood-paneled office full of ancient artifacts, and I was totally fascinated by his ability to demystify my inner life,” Emily laughs. And it was also through character development research that she discovered Women Who Run with the Wolves and The Heroine’s Journey— books that would later become cornerstones for the framework of the Embodying Wild course.
Emily’s experience with Cassandra was her first time feeling guided into just being with horses in a quiet, reflective space. (As opposed to riding them for sport or utility of some kind.) “I had some powerful moments of interaction with this herd of rescue horses, and I just knew this was going to be part of my work going forward,” she explains.
image by Paula Bartosiewicz
Emily ended up taking The Reflective Horse 10-month mastery program to eventually provide Equine Guided Empowerment® on her own. Her Northern California experience with the rescue horses, it turns out, would become one of the reasons Emily now creates opportunities for her coaching groups to connect with horses in Montana every summer. This year, Emily has even added a second retreat at their ranch and will host an Equine Guided experience at the Dare to Detour event.
But at the time, Emily didn’t know what the “work” she felt called to do was actually going to look like. She did know, however, that she was feeling completely burnt out and creatively drained with Hollywood and screenwriting as a result of the largely formulaic writing program she had attended at the American Film Institute.
So it is at this moment, we have a turning point in the story.
image by Paula Bartosiewicz
For Emily, it came in the form of writer’s block. “I started to feel very much like the training I was receiving wanted me to conform to a certain formula of writing. My creativity was feeling so boxed in and bound up that I just couldn’t write anymore. I was working on one particular deadline for a script, and it felt like pulling teeth,” she explains. “So instead, I procrastinated by doing more research. Diving into my psychology books, particularly those of Freud and Jung, to try and work on the characters. My manager kept asking for the script, and I lied, saying it was coming, but eventually, he called me out. I remember him asking if something was wrong? What came out of my mouth was ‘no’ when really I knew the answer was ‘yes’— something wasn’t right anymore. And it was at that moment I committed to the journey of coming home to myself. Of rediscovering my creative voice.”
Emily quit screenwriting and began further exploring the topics of spirituality and psychology. She discovered Ayurveda as a new form of self-care, dove into learning about Astrology and Human Design, and eventually, enrolled in a masters program at the University of Santa Monica for a two-year study in Spiritual Psychology. It was during that time Emily first started offering one-on-one coaching sessions. “I wasn’t yet doing Astrology readings, but I would always have people’s charts up during a session,” Emily recalls. “I remember feeling so at home practicing Astrology. Even though I was still learning, it felt natural to me. And I was joyous to have finally found a structure for something that I felt like I had been doing my whole life.”
Emily launched her coaching business a year into her masters program, and her client list grew. She and her husband made the decision to return to Montana in 2019 (something Emily had always been an advocate for), and she began to feel the call to do something more comprehensive for her one-on-one coaching clients. “Eventually, you keep getting asked some of the same questions, and I wanted to put it all in one format that was easier for everyone to have access to. And I wanted to provide a community for the people who are doing this type of work,” Emily said.
“I realized that my clients, all of them women, were facing some form of burnout.” Emily explains, “In our society, we’ve had to learn to go against our nature as women in order to fit in— and going against our nature is going against our wildness. So many of us are trying to prove ourselves. And there are so many rules about who you need to be in order to be successful. On top of that, we [women] hold ourselves to such high standards of achieving those roles. I know I was certainly doing this and, as a result, it had cut me off from my instinctual nature, which for me is one and the same as my creativity.”
image by Paula Bartosiewicz
I ask Emily what her definition is, now, of wildness.
“For me, the wild self is the uninhibited essence of who we are. Before any conditioning, before we are told who to be. It’s the part of ourselves that feels free to express who we are at the core.”
Emily continues, “Embodying Wild came out of a quest to embody my own wild self. That and my own experience of healing and exploring all kinds of therapy. And now that I am in the role of the practitioner, I realize the beautiful thing about this work is that I am still being healed through it. It’s beautifully reciprocal in this way.”
At this point in our conversation, I remembered to ask Emily how she came up with the name ‘Embodying Wild’ for her business? “The name came to me before I had the inspiration to center my work around helping women to reclaim their inner feminine energy, but I always knew the theme was going to be about guiding people back to their wild self.”
In addition to leading an intimate group of women through the Embodying Wild course twice per year and working regularly as a spiritual coach, Emily continues to be inspired by the horses. “In my experience, you feel held in the presence of horses. So in terms of bringing that into a therapeutic context, there’s a lot we’re able to allow ourselves to feel and bring up when in the presence of an animal that is holding such clear, neutral space for us. Horses are instinctual beings; they have no shame or judgement.”
What Emily is curious about and exploring right now is an approach called Freedom Based Training™, developed by a visionary horse trainer named Elsa Sinclair. “Elsa’s work has inspired me to deeply explore the questions: if horses had the space to say no, would they still want to partner with us? What happens when we take away all of the force and dominance? And naturally, these questions are profoundly impacting my understanding of the wild self and how we can preserve this spark of instinct-driven uniqueness that lives within each of us while also finding harmony in relationships.”
image by Nicole Wild
Before we hang up, I look down at my notes to the quickly jotted-down question: Tips for women to embrace their wildness this summer? Emily laughs (she has one of those delightfully infectious laughs, by the way). She says, “For me, summer is such a beautiful opportunity to be outside, so I would prioritize that as much as you can. Especially in Montana! I just want to have lots of time to walk my dog in the creek. I’m trying to leave a lot of space to be spontaneous.”
Scheduling in time to do nothing. Got it. That is where all the good, wild ideas come in anyways.
IMAGES BY PAULA BARTOSIEWICZ | @PAULABPHOTO NICOLE WILD | @NICOLEWILDCOLLECTIVE
SYDNEY MUNTEANU is a communications and branding strategist with a passion for storytelling. She grew up in Colorado and received her B.S. from the University of Colorado, Boulder and left in 2012 to pursue a marketing career in Los Angeles. After 5 years of city life, the call back to the mountains was too great and she found (and fell in love with) her new home in Whitefish, Montana. Sydney has a marketing consulting business working with food & beverage, wellness, and women’s brands. Connect and find her work at backlabelbranding.com
