Parelli & Equine Assisted Practice: 2011 Progress!

As October winds along it’s been fun to stop a moment and take stock of the year’s events. I can’t believe all we’ve done! Most of our work this year is about continuing to explore and develop the connection between Parelli Natural Horsemanship and Equine-Assisted practice.

In that vein, Brenda and I continue to make progress on the new Horse Sense book, which is all about integrating natural horsemanship concepts into the training of Equine Specialists & the care and support of therapeutic horses. The book includes results from a nationwide survey and dozens of interviews with top Equine-Assisted professionals, as well as my own musings, thoughts and ideas about our field, our profession, and the horses we love. There’s so much material, in fact, that we found our original timeline far too ambitious; we’ll spend the winter finishing the book for publication in 2012.

So far, one big highlight of the whole process was interviewing Linda Parelli for the book back in February. We already knew about her work as a teacher and master translator in the Parelli program; our discussion on how horses have motivated Linda to change and grow as a person was fascinating. She has hundreds of examples of how she’s seen horses change people through the Parelli curriculum. It was amazing to see how interconnected Parelli Natural Horsemanship really is to the Equine-Assisted world.

It was also a great honor to be asked by Pat & Linda to assist in writing the section “Exploring The Horses’ Role in the Counseling Dynamic” for Kay Trotter's upcoming book, Harnessing the Power of Equine Assisted Counseling: Adding Animal Assisted Therapy to Your Practice. We submitted our work to Kay back in March, and haven't heard any more about it since then. It looks like a wonderful book, and I'm excited to see the finished product. Well done, Kay!

Richard and I also continued to refine our Parelli-based Natural Horsemanship curriculum for the field this year, teaching workshops in late 2010 & in 2011, at the Horse Sense farm, at Prescott College in Arizona, and in England, showing practitioners how to better understand horse body language, psychology, and behavior while demonstrating how specific aspects of Parelli Natural Horsemanship can be utilized in Equine-Assisted work.

We also held our first annual Parelli & EA Practices symposium in April at the Horse Sense farm. We then spent the summer teaching clinics for both Equine-Assisted professionals (to introduce them to Parelli) and for Parelli folks learning about Equine-Assisted practice. We’ve found more and more people getting excited at the cross-over opportunities!

And we spread the word about Equine-Assisted work through various Parelli forums over the past 12 months as well. We participated in the Parelli Rendezvous in Jacksonville, Fl in October 2010, and had a feature article appear in the May issue of the Parelli Savvy Times. July found us at the Conyers, GA Parelli Jamboree, followed by the big Parelli Summit in September. In each case we manned an information booth and had dozens of enthusiastic conversations with Parelli students about Equine Assisted Practices.

Meanwhile, Richard is growing an active teaching schedule as a Parelli 2-star Junior Instructor, with regular clinics in Tennessee and at the Horse Sense farm in Western North Carolina. It’s exciting to see his practice grow!