About Us

Video Transcription

I'm Niki Jones, and this is Indian Springs Farm in Spring Grove, PA. And here we have heart sing horses. We do equine facilitated learning here. That is really relationship work with yourself through the mirror up. Of course, they just show up for people in ways that people don't usually get in their lives. You know, like when they learn to be present in their bodies and they open themselves, they get nothing but positive feedback from these horses. It's really, really cool to see.

So this is Merlin. He is 19, and he came up from Kentucky. His name was Hobo, and he had been passed around to a lot of different homes. He is a medicine horse. They all carry medicine, but his is really, really potent. We do something called a medicine journey when Dawn is here from England. The horses stand, and the people sit on their backs, and they turn in three different positions. It's sort of like a meditation. Also, it's just healing and a connection with themselves. And Merlin has volunteered for more than any other medicine journey. He shows up for medicine journeys. So he's really, really, really a cool guy.

We use horses instead of dogs and cats because they're prey animals and not predators. We're the predator; they're the prey. They are emotionally congruent, which means that they have to know when you have to run from the tiger, you don't get a second chance. So they have to read what's really happening in our bodies. And what happens with us is that we're programmed from the time we're very young to not acknowledge our emotions and feelings. The thing about horses is that they show us exactly where we are and don't have to change anything. We just have to acknowledge where we are, and then they will accept us. If I'm in a bad mood and I go to the barn and pretend that I'm happy. They might pin an ear or turn and walk away. But if I acknowledge, I'm really nervous right now, Traveler will say, it's okay. You're okay. You can be nervous as long as you're with yourself, congruent with your emotions.

This is Journey. When Journey and Secret got here in July of 2019, one of the girls in the barnes said that Journey did a great job of keeping Secret a secret. Secrect was fine, but Journey was not fine. She was a shell of a horse. She didn't trust people. She would bite someone when you went into her stall, she would kick, um, we could barely do her feet. She was very protective of her baby. And so first of all, we just started by giving her time and space. Now she has really come into herself. This year I've been working with her a lot – taking the time to build a relationship – and we just started riding her. And she's just coming out of her shell. She's not even the same horse that stepped off of that trailer. She trusts, she's curious, she's funny. Um, she's not afraid any longer. And that means so much. That means so, so much. So, you know, being in a place where she wasn't cared for well, and she was just another horse. She wasn't an individual. She wasn't honored for her spirit. And here she is, and it changes everything.

We do exercises in boundaries, in connection. We focus on being present, and the horses are really good at that because if you're not present, they don't feel safe. When working with the horse, we work with the limbic brain. What we do is establish a connection. And by actually doing something different with the horse, we have something called limbic revision occur. And in doing that, we're able to establish new neuropathways in the brain. So in our ordinary lives, we have all of these neuropathways in their sort of like superhighways. And what we want to do is create a deer path. So when you do something with a horse, and it does something new for you, you're able to revise your brain and create a new neural network. That's what we consider equine-assisted therapy work.