“ Tell me. what is that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life”. -Mary Oliver

As humans, we tend to harbor emotional energy in our bodies, which disrupts the natural energetic flow of our internal systems. We suppress emotions because we’re worried—worried about being judged, shamed, or misunderstood. But the energy we hold back doesn’t just disappear. It has to be released in some way, shape, or form. This may be why we get sick. Why we feel fatigued for no clear reason.

We’ve often lost our natural ability to reflect energy. Instead, we absorb it—with the intention of “processing” it—but it lingers too long inside us and starts to manifest physically.

Horses, on the other hand, reflect. Their outer self is congruent with their inner state. They do not absorb negative energy unless forced to—like when they’re isolated in single paddocks, stalled, over-trained, or disconnected from the herd. When horses are presented with incoherent energy—energy that pulls them out of their calm, default rhythm—they respond. They reflect.

We, by contrast, tend to internalize. We overthink. We hide how we feel. We absorb rather than release. We rarely give ourselves the space to process emotions as they arise. And so, they become trapped—lodged in our bodies, eventually manifesting as stress, tension, or illness.

I imagine this is why we feel tightness in our chest, neck, head, shoulders, and throats, when we’re emotionally overwhelmed. Horses only seem to experience this if their natural option for flight is blocked. When they can’t move freely, that energy either becomes stored as muscular tension or released in defensive, explosive behavior.

There’s something here for us to remember. Something ancient.
A truth that lives not in words, but in the body.

This is why the somatic reprogramming we do at A Horse’s Heart is powerful and transformational.

We are out in nature, side by side with the horses. There’s no pressure to talk, no need to explain. Instead, we drop into presence. And in that quiet, something profound happens—clarity emerges. Patterns we've lived in for years begin to loosen. Fears we didn’t know we were carrying rise to the surface, and—gently—we begin to release them.

The horses show us what it feels like to be fully in our bodies, fully in the moment. They reflect us with honesty and kindness. And in that reflection, we begin to remember who we truly are.

“ Tell me. what is that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life”. -Mary Oliver