interview
Reflect yourself in a horse What benefits come from interaction with horses? Maria Bielak: Horses teach us humility, consequence, perseverance, and relentless development on multiple levels. Anna Łaszcz: For me, contact with a horse is a lesson of being here and now, focusing on yourself, and seeking peace and relaxation in your body. Benefits are as many as people, and everybody can take whatever they need in this particular moment. Horses are excellent teachers and companions if you want to listen to them. People say that horses are a mirror to your soul. How is that possible? Why can they be beneficial in selfdevelopment? MB: They are communication masters and perfectly can feel all emotions. It is hard to fool a horse, they demand authenticity, and in a way, they force constant development.
8 - VOICES
AŁ: It can be said that they look straight into our hearts. It is not about our social status or life role we’d like to play. They see us sauté: our fears, dreams, self-confidence, or insecurities. When we reflect on our relationship with a horse, we can see our schemes, needs, or behaviors, which in our daily life are unconscious. This kind of knowledge is very releasing. How these kinds of workshops look like in practice? Is it similar to coaching or therapy? AŁ: In practice, tempo and deepness of work depend on participants. There are groups and people when workshops look more like coaching sessions. A lot of exercises are connected with the goals of participants. We continuously evaluate the current situation and check what we would like to change. At the same time, we are working with emotions, values, thinking patterns, and beliefs. In this way, it can be therapeutical. Development workshops are a time for yourself. Horses are here to help us open up and listen to what’s inside us.
There are no coincidences in life. Two women who fell in love with horses – Maria Bielak, an owner of Zadora stable, and Anna Łaszcz, psychologist, met at the right time and decided to organize equine-assisted development workshops for youngsters and adults. Can horses help us to grow? In reference to the workshop’s title – how can horses help us discover our way? AŁ: Depending on what we want to work on, experience with horses can be a universal tool to work with our inside software. In the case of the workshop’s Own Way, horses’ main task is to draw each participant from the perpetuated behavioral scheme. Motivate to focus on here and now, on relations and our inside world. A considerable part of what is happening to us in brain processes is unconscious. And here, the presence of a horse, which forces us to be 100% aware, is the first step to verify if we are on OUR Own way. The horse sees if we want to do something in the kindness of our hearts, or we want to do it because it is appropriate. They can show when we have too much or not enough strength. And this is your own way– living in harmony with yourself, your heart, values, and what is ‘alive’ inside us. I read that one of the basic exercises is just observing horses. How can we refer that to development?
