SAY YOU’RE INVITED to a retreat at a horse ranch. You’re thinking you’ll ride them around, pet them, feed them a little hay, and you’re good to go. Or not. At A Chance of a Lifetime, a nonprofit therapeutic center for horses – and people – the experience is pretty much the opposite. Just off the Turquoise Trail, a couple with deep experience in horse training has discovered something profound. They weren’t teaching the horses, the horses were teaching them.
What is A Chance of a Lifetime?
J: It’s a sanctuary that we started in 2013. A lot of our horses are at the end of the rope. They’ve been damaged, neglected, abused.
E: These are the ones that there was no hope for. These are the horses people gave up on. There was nothing left for them.
J: We both knew how to train, and we thought that’s what we’d do here. But slowly, it transformed from a training facility into something different. It turns out these horse that had been traumatized, that had been through the worst, well, they had something to offer to people.
E: So we do workshops where the horses become our guides, teachers, and healers.
What are your workshops like?
J: People just come into the corral and we sit and watch the horses. We meditate. We don’t ride the horses, we watch. It’s about that meditative frame of mind, about being observant.
Then what?
E: That’s it. We stay for about three hours. We try not to do anything. It’s being, not doing. So we sit. And pretty soon they come and say hi. And we invite people to go say hi to a horse.
What we see, especially with people who have mental health challenges, nine out of ten times they go to the horse with similar problems. They just gravitate toward them.
More than anything, we try to give people a sense of reverence. When they approach a horse, to have reverence. That’s when the horses show up. That’s when the relationship starts.
J: And horses are really good at sensing. They can tell if someone is true or false. They can tell if someone doesn’t want to be there.
We had one woman who showed up in a big black pickup with tinted windows, shades, arms crossed, scowl on her face.
E: She had this aura of Don’t touch me! She gets out of the truck and says, I don’t know why I’m here, I don’t even like animals. After her first session, she broke down and cried for an hour. She came back and back and back. She’s a volunteer here now, and we’re going to hire her on.
We have a gorgeous, white-spotted horse named Emma, who is very shy. She was bred over and over and over from the time she was two, and her babies were all taken away. And without us saying anything to anyone, the women in workshops that gravitate towards her are always the ones with sexual trauma. They’re the ones who know exactly how to touch her. They instinctively know. By the end of their time together, Emma follows them everywhere.
You’ve mentioned trauma. Who comes to the workshops?
E: Recently, it’s kind of exploded. We do about one or two a week now. We work with a lot of the mental health departments from the state of New Mexico. On the other hand, we also work with corporations. Everyone, really.
How do you explain what happens here?
J: I don’t. I don’t know how to describe the transformation. I can’t put words to it. The Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe says that language is the thing that separates us from the natural world.
Seems like we got the Genesis story wrong. Maybe we don’t have dominion over these animals…
J: The Genesis story, yeah. And what’s it start with? In the beginning was the Word. Language. They’re God’s creatures, and we separated from them with language and dominion over them.
It’s the opposite here. They’re the teachers, we’re the ones learning.
Learn more at achanceofalifetime.org
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