Rachel Pray’s Equine Services Provides a Place to Learn from Horses in Los Angeles

The power of the human-animal bond is palpable. Just ask any proud puppy or cat or cockatoo owner how important that connection is. While 2,000 pound horses don’t necessarily make the best house pets, they are other creatures with whom we can connect and communicate if we get the chance to spend time with these incredibly special, attuned animals.

Rachel of Rachel Pray’s Equine Services has over 35 years experience with horses, riding, jumping and interacting with them. She facilitates sessions of Equine Assisted Learning (EAL) in Los Angeles for adolescents, individuals or couples who want to get in the corral to commune with a horse and see what happens.

EAL has elements of Project Adventure or teambuilding. You get to deal with your feelings while doing something action-oriented. It’s definitely experiential and an experience you won’t forget.

As a city girl with no equine experience to speak of, I was incredibly nervous about my and my husband’s first EAL session with Rachel and a horse named Sir Lancelot, or Lance for short.  But there was really nothing to be nervous about. Rachel describes her process as “never pushing the agenda, but letting it unfold” and that’s what she did. She introduced us to Lance and then asked us, gently, to try a series of exercises with him—attaching a harness, getting him to leave or come to us, even attempting a ground-tie where Lance was supposed to stay in one place, as if by magic. Whether or not we could complete the challenges in the way we’d hoped or expected, we worked through them, answering Rachel’s insightful questions and flexing our communication muscles with each other and keying into how the horse responded to our attempts—which ranged from timid to bizarre to, sometimes, just right.

I walked away feeling empowered and like it had been a success, even if the way we got there wasn’t always perfect. It’s not really about success at all, except as defined by you. It’s much more about process than outcome.

Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP) is an option for people who have a therapist, but for whom traditional therapy needs a little real world push, but EAL is there for anyone, no therapist required. Rachel has worked, for example, with a stream of women on issues of self-confidence, assertiveness, and what she calls congruency or authenticity, “where your affect and body language match what’s going on internally and emotionally, which is often not the case for many of us.”  Horses “reflect back to us information about [ourselves] by the ways they react to us.” Part of what makes horses so sensitive is that they are historically prey animals. And as such, they had to be incredibly tuned into whether a predator was going to attack or not and able to communicate that information to the herd. So they can sense what’s going on with us from those gifts—whether we’re a potential predator, subordinate or leader, if we’re angry, tense, or confused.

According to Rachel, “Long before we tried to domesticate, ride or control horses, we observed and learned from their behavior in a natural environment.  We can still learn a lot from letting the horse be a horse, and by allowing its sensitive, reflective nature to show us our true selves.”

Rachel’s website is: http://www.prayequineservices.com/index.html and she can be reached at prayequineservices@earthlink.net.

You can find a provider in another area or learn more about EAP or EAL through EAGALA or OK Corral.

Images via Rachel Pray and Laura Weinstock