The Power of the Compassionate Heart: Horses as Spiritual Teachers and Healers

The Power of the Compassionate Heart
Horses as Teachers and Spiritual Healers

By Alicia Nation, M.S. copyright 2009

Since there was earth experience for humanity, horses have befriended us, helping to expand our horizons, discover our creative power and ensure our survival. In North American history, as recently as 150 years ago, horses offered us their power and collaboration, pulling wagons across desolate prairies to the New Frontier, toiling in fields to grow our crops, hauling carriages and heavily loaded wagons to market.

Horses made development of this nation possible. It was their willing and sacrificial partnership with humanity that enabled America to tap the wealth of resources in this great land and become a world power.

When teachers engage the students in learning opportunities, the wisdom of the lesson is often fully revealed in enlightened retrospect. Therefore, our culture might consider what it has gained and lost, through our embrace of fossil fuel driven transportation and marginalization of horses.

Since automobiles displaced horses from the mainstream of society, in just one hundred years without horses plowing the family garden and keeping us localized in strong communities, we have epidemic chronic illnesses, unprecedented levels of obesity, diabetes, immune diseases, mental illness and poverty, shattered social structures and environmental disaster that threatens planetary existence.

When riding horses was our means of transportation, people rarely thought about health benefits of our equine-human interactivity. While riding, the horses’ movement cleanses the lymphatic system, pumps cerebrospinal fluid and strengthens the muscular-skeletal system.

Like dolphins and whales, horses emanate energetic frequencies that reduce stress and restore the human energy field: stress levels, elevated blood pressure and elevate blood sugar all tend to normalize. Stress is implicated in 95% of all diseases and horses reduce our stress levels. Could the dramatic rise in diabetes, obesity, and chronic illness since the automobile has replaced horses be a result of the loss of our healing connection with horses?

Few species have served humanity more graciously, more consistently, and more selflessly than horses. Presently, through equine assisted therapies, including therapeutic riding (www.narha.org), hippo therapy(www.americanequestrian.com/hippotherpay.htm),
equine-assisted psychotherapy, and many versions of equine assisted healing modalities, horses remind us of their willingness, trustworthiness, compassion and kindness to the most frail of the human population.

As powerful as they are, horses are compassionate, considerate of our smallness, aware of a human body’s relative weakness. The beneficial influence of their heart-centered collaboration with people with disabilities is healing far beyond our most advanced medical technologies.

Our investment in the idea of human superiority, or the belief that a human can control an elephant with a chain or a horse with a rope is absurd. We do these things because we have not yet learned to lead with the heart, wherein no ropes or chains are needed to bind: where fears that our giant companions will do us harm dissolve. It is the power of the compassionate heart that horses, now, are calling us to remember. Horses ask now, that we as a culture, as a society, live in new levels of compassion, understanding and equanimity.

The astounding announcement by the BLM in 2008, that 33,000 horses in captivity stand to be euthanized, is a collective call awakening us to live in compassionate coexistence with other life forms on the planet. We must abandon our collective pattern of irresponsibility for our government policies toward species and cultures that differ from our own. We must see how present management of wild horses is remarkably similar to policies that stole land from indigenous humans, destroyed their culture, murdered millions and drove remaining few onto inhospitable reservations.


We must see and act or it will happen again. And again.

Standing in a corral with hundreds of horses at a BLM facility, which holds 2,000 horses, is a life changing experience. The horses are eager to connect. Sniffing, nibbling at a hat or sleeve and ever so gently nuzzling a cheek, they dissolve fears of wild horses as dangerous or violent. While they suffer within ill-managed wildlife programs, these masters find peace in the midst of everything, even chaos, neglect and brutality.

They call us to ask and to answer:
If there is pain what will you do to alleviate it?
If the is fear, what will you do to reassure us?
If there is joy, what will you do to share it?
Will you look at us truly, and
See who we really are?”

They choose, even in painful confinement, to anchor peace and balance even in their own suffering. These intelligent, kind and willing beings ask that release our deep held fears and beliefs that other life species wish us violence and harm and again engage with them peaceful collaboration, goodwill, and respect so that we may all survive.

A highly evolved soul, who incarnates to bring enlightenment to humanity in a time of great need, is called an Avatar. What do we call a horse who leads or shifts humanity to a new level of consciousness? Are we to believe that a horse, or horses collectively, act in the capacity of a spiritual teacher and healer influencing the collective consciousness of humanity? History proves this to be so.

Barbaro’s tragic injury and death called us to reconsider our responsibility and treatment of horses in the racing industry, to look at he pain, the demands the expectations we place upon them for our entertainment and greed. He called us to heart –compassion, as did Eight Belles, who, saddled with the burden of political agendas between leading male and female presidential candidates, finished second in the Kentucky derby at the cost of breaking her two front legs.

Dramatically, indelibly and unalterably our culture was changed during the mid 70’s by a single event at Belmont Park, when the undefeated filly named Ruffian raced against the dominant colt, a young stallion, named Foolish Pleasure. It was a highly publicized match race at which the racetrack offered campaign buttons: one had a picture of her, -- Ruffian and the other, him -- Foolish Pleasure.

This was not about speed: the two horses, in this match race, were saddled with our cultural and social struggle for redefined gender roles, in search of an equality that has to some degree, continued to evade us.

The contentious mood in the world and grandstand shifted to awesome silence in the traditional post parade, as Ruffian majestically and serenely walked slowly by us, by the cameras. Looking deeply into our souls, she embodied the presence of a Master Teacher giving Darshan, the blessing of his/her presence, to devotees.

Moments later, she broke the rigid stalemate between genders, bringing us instantly into collective one-ness through heart filled compassion. We, millions of us, watched her struggled and persist in running on a three legs and shattered, dangling foreleg and we were changed. Her sacrifice -- as did Barbaro’s and Eight Belles’ -- transformed our collective anger, greed, selfishness, hatred, and judgment and instantly silenced and the world in a unified, heart-centered compassion.


What new awareness, what new dimension of consciousness are horses bringing to us now? What lessons do we need to learn so that we may all survive? Equanimity is not always equality. It is mutual respect and honor, despite our differences. It is the compassionate path to lasting peace. Accepting and neutralizing these differences, in is a lesson horses embody and which we must learn for the peaceful survival of the planet.

Horses invite us to restructure our ways because our ways do not work for the good of the whole. They are calling us to be called to be responsible for our government and it’s behavior, to stop turning away from decimation of the innocent whether it be people in Iraq or horses, wolves, or indigenous people in our country.

We are asked to align in collaboration rather than competition, in peace, acceptance, harmony; to unmask our fears, and to look at all life in a new way, through eyes of respect and compassion. They invite us to allow them to befriend us once again so that we may all survive and co-exist in peace. They call us to join them in an enlightened partnership in which we open wide our hearts and move forward to the brink of a New Civilization, born of compassion.





Alicia Nation, MS
Is a holistic healer, classical singer, writer, visionary artist, and spiritual counselor. For over 25 years she has attuned to the wisdom of the ages, counseling and facilitating healing with her operatic voice. Recently, called to speak for the horses, she has established Shaking Wind Ranch in Santa Fe where horses, domestic and wild, engage people in heart centered experience in profound new ways. She is president of the New Mexico Mustang and Burro Association, which offers education about wild horses issues and promotes compassionate solutions for horses trapped in the present BLM system. You can learn more about her healing and creative work at www.alicianation.com and www.equineartsgalleries.com. To learn about horses and equine programs, go to www.shakingwindranch.com and www.nmmba.org.

Horses, Art and Healing