On Writing Soul Connection with Horses

By Suzanne Court 

I have no memory of deciding to write the book Soul Connection with Horses: Healing the Mind and Awakening the Spirit through Equine Assisted Practices (O-Books, 2024), or even of starting it. To say it wrote itself would be an exaggeration—and it certainly wasn’t channelled—but it’s true to say it started as an organic process. It arose seemingly naturally from my practice of the previous twelve years as an equine assisted therapist. One professional responsibility as a therapist is to make full clinical notes of each session, hence hundreds of reports had accumulated over the years. As the Covid epidemic struck, like millions of others, I could no longer work face to face, so as a personal revision exercise I set about copying and organising the reports under specific themes. After a few months I realised I had what looked like a collection of headings that could conceivably be chapters of a book. When that idea arose, I thought, “Why not?” 

As writing started proper, it ceased to be a series of reports on client sessions, although those personal stories remained the catalyst and inspiration for the writing. One of the reasons I wanted to record my experience and ideas around equine assisted therapy (with its unattractive acronym EAT) was to explain what it is. When people hear the term “equine assisted therapy” or “equine assisted counselling” (or one of a considerable variety of names) for the first time, many respond with “you do what to horses?” or “you do what with horses?” The first question infers that we psychoanalyse horses, while the second expresses surprise that a horse could be an integral part in talk-therapy processes. Explaining what it is and how it works, being one of the aims, I included enough client experience to show this while disguising names and details and sometimes conflating sessions to protect client confidentiality. However, I didn’t want the book to consist entirely of personal experiences—either mine or my clients’—so I researched the existing literature to put it into perspective.

My other aim was more complex. I’d discovered while doing this work that while clients came to me for seemingly resolvable issues or problems, increasing numbers of them were searching for meaning in existence, both personal and universal. Some would complain of feeling soul dead, rudderless or lost. Then my responsibility became one of helping clients re-discover the spiritual basis of their life. Fortunately, as contributors to the therapy process I had the assistance of the most spiritually connected beings—horses—who, compared with humans, are egoless, always honest in their connection with us, and who live in presence.

Tackling this question in my writing involved reviewing and researching existential meaning as understood by the world’s religions and philosophy, to demonstrate how spirituality can manifest in EAT work. I loved this exploration since I have been a student of philosophy and religion all my life and have called myself variously Christian, Baha’i, Buddhist and Taoist. Now in my 70s I no longer identify exclusively with a religion, and my own journey towards what it means to be human has mellowed into various meditative and mindful practices. Horses, I discovered, had become my principal teachers, a role they maintained  during the pandemic “lock down” writing period. A large part of the writing process took place under trees and next to a river on our horse farm in Aotearoa New Zealand. More than once a horse nose would investigate the laptop keyboard to have its say in the matter. The physical proximity of seven horses certainly helped maintain focus on the main subject, while the peace gifted by the absence of traffic noise and the subsequent cacophony of birdsong alongside a flowing river was inspirational.

Writing was a pleasure in every way, but was not an altogether foreign experience since I had previously spent 30 years as an academic, working in the field of musicology. My PhD and subsequent research was in Italian renaissance music in which I had published books and articles, as you do in university employment. (How I got from renaissance music and academia to mucking about with horses and training in EAT remains a story for another time). The writing for this book was quite different from anything I had done before—the subject matter, for one, but also the style of writing. Although I couldn’t break from the habit of researching the subject (evidenced by around 180 footnotes), the big challenge was to adapt my language from academic stuffiness to something a little more approachable and personal. Hopefully, I achieved that while maintaining my authenticity, that is, without losing myself in an imaginary other persona. 

Another challenge of the writing was my intention to address two distinct audiences, one being other equine assisted practitioners who wished to explore further the connection between horse and client within a spiritual paradigm. What I wished to convince these readers of was that the spiritual connection is already there in mental health work and it simply needs to be noticed, and in the end, amplified. The other readership I had in mind was people who had their own, or who loved, horses who wished to deepen their spiritual connection. My readers who beta tested the book for me said they found no conflict in this respect. I hope they were right. 

I loved every aspect of the writing process, even the endless revision and editing, and am very grateful for the vital support of an enthusiastic and professional publisher (O-Books). I loved the process so much that I am hooked and have opened up to ideas for another book.

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Soul Connection with Horses
Horses teaching humans healthier ways of being, deepening innate wisdom and enabling soul-to-soul connection. 

Working with horses as equal partners in the equine-assisted space while respecting their intuitive wisdom leads to life-changing psycho-spiritual understandings, learning and healing. Soul Connection with Horses: Healing the Mind and Awakening the Spirit through Equine Assisted Practice introduces concepts of awakening and spaciousness as understood in many spiritual traditions and demonstrates that horses effectively model awakening for humans. Through this approach horses help re-establish natural bonds and intuitive ways of knowing that have become obscured by conditioned thought and ineffective individual narratives. Horses show us that we can trust our intuition and learn how to live from the soul while making meaningful connection with ourselves, other people, animals and the natural environment.

By considering how horses experience the world through their senses, how they process emotion and how they express their needs, we see that they live through the same social, psychological and spiritual paradigms as humans. Following equine assisted therapy and learning practices through to their logical conclusions, horses naturally lead us to questions of “who am I?” and “what is life?” They help us transcend non-functioning personal stories as we step out of ineffective ways of thinking and being and discover connection and wholeness. This book invites equestrians, equine assisted practitioners and seekers of spiritual connection, to walk in the hooves of the horse, to experience the horses’ worldview and to access your own soulful wisdom.

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Category: On Writing