The Shaman is Gone

Winter came back last night and I went out this morning to wet, heavy snow.  Faraona and Diva were waiting for their breakfast but I had to look around for Ella.  I found her laid out flat in the shelter and knew immediately that she would not be getting back up.  She had been laying down for a long time and I could see that she had tried to get up but no longer had the strength to do so.  The day that I knew was coming was finally here.  I had to end her suffering.  She has now gone home to the horse ancestors.

Ella has had a far-away look in her eyes for some time now.  She has been fussy about eating her ration, although last night she ate it all up.  At 26, and with an international-level dressage career behind her, she had arthritis in her knees and was finding it more and more difficult to get up if she laid down to sleep.  I had already decided that I would not make her go through another winter, but I was hoping that she could enjoy one last summer outside, munching on grass.  That was not to be. 

So, who was this horse, and why do I feel such a deep loss?  My dressage coach found Ella for me, 11 years ago.  We had been looking for a dressage ‘schoolmaster’ – a highly trained dressage horse who had been there, done that and who could teach me the fine art of dressage, the art of dancing with a horse.  Ella was 15 years old and living in Colorado.  But my coach knew of this horse – Ella had been bred in Alberta, and my coach had ridden both her mother and father.  Ella was the high-selling horse at the Olds Warmblood sale when she was a three-year-old and went to Florida for training and showing.  From there, she was sold to a teenage girl in Colorado.  Ella took this girl all the way to the North American Young Riders Competition.  When the girl went off to Europe for university, Ella became available for sale.

My coach said we had to have this horse.  Ella was worth more money than I ever thought I could spend on anything for myself, but my coach said that if I got one year out of her, I would learn more than a lifetime on the kind of horses I had been riding.  So, Ella came back home to Alberta, to the stable where her mom and dad had both lived for a while.  And I rode Ella for six years before her knees said enough.

Ella at 15 years old

Ella last week, shedding out winter hair

I brought her home to my acreage to retire, and that is when her real career started.  I had just finished my training as an Eponaquest Instructor and Ella became a part of the ‘team’.  She was so big that I thought people would be frightened of her size and wouldn’t want to work with her.  But the opposite was true.  Many people told me that they sensed she would take care of them.  Her calm presence made them feel safe.   Well, at least until Ella figured out what the person needed to learn.  Sometimes she pushed them a bit to dig deep.  I would like to share a few stories of what Ella was able to do.  These stories were written for a book that will hopefully soon be published.  I was asked to contribute a chapter titled Messengers Between the Worlds: Horse-Human Connection as a Sacred Path of Healing.  These clients have given me permission to share their highly personal stories.

A year into my equine-facilitated learning practice, I had a client who came with a horrific trauma background.  Betty, as I will call her, told me that she had done many decades of therapy and that she was just curious about connecting with horses.  This seemed in line with what I could offer in equine-facilitated learning.

Before going into the roundpen with a horse, I usually have the client scan down their body and notice any sensations, emotions, or memories that come up.  Their back is to the horse in the roundpen at this point.  As Betty began her body scan, her right arm kept twitching.  She unconsciously took her left hand and held the right arm still, but I suggested that perhaps her right arm had something to say and perhaps let it move however it wanted to.  Betty did that for a bit, but then she seemed to speak in another voice that said, “You don’t always have to be in charge”.  A surge of anger came up as she tried to hold her arm.  She said that she wanted to ‘check out’ but another ‘voice’ said “You are not checking out!”  Then it was “I can be compliant.” Then, “Don’t fuck with me!” I understood all these different voices emanating from one body to be ‘parts’ of the personality, to use the language of Internal Family Systems®, a psychotherapeutic modality that I had previously been introduced to in one of my coaching courses.

While this is going on, Ella, my huge warmblood mare, was in the round pen, rolling and rolling on the ground. I knew that something big was going on as this was not normal behavior for Ella.  Not knowing what to do, I asked Betty to ground herself by paying attention to her breath and feeling her feet on the ground.  This settled her.  She said she was ready to go into the roundpen.  When I asked Betty to breathe into her heart and see what came up, she said ‘support’.  I didn’t know what that meant – whether her heart was there to support her, or perhaps Ella was supposed to support her.  The message Betty got from Ella when I asked her to send the question out ‘Do you have any advice for me as we go into the roundpen today?’ was ‘show up.’

Both those messages proved to be totally right on for what then happened.  As soon as Betty went in, Ella was right there with her head at Betty’s heart, and Betty began crying and wailing.  Ella kept sniffing at Betty’s heart space as Betty let out huge wails and cries.  Betty stumbled, then put her hands on her hips as if to support herself.  Ella began stomping her foot, first her left foot a few times, then her right foot.  Was Ella trying to get Betty’s attention so that she would stop crying? And what was the sniffing at Betty’s heart about?

I had worked on a halter trauma with Ella earlier that year and had been shown by a very skilled horsewoman how trauma energy can work its way through a horse’s body once it is released and out the back end, either by a kick of the back leg or a swish of the tail.  I knew now that what I was seeing in Ella were trauma releases going through Ella’s body. As Ella breathed deeply into the area of Betty’s heart, I saw that she would swish her tail or kick her leg out. After every kick or swish, she would lick and chew (a sign of let-go in the horse), so I knew that there was energy being released. After a brief pause, she would stomp again, as if to say ‘There is more in there.  Come out!’  Ella gave some really weird licks and chews, with her tongue doing things I had never seen before.  Betty’s body began to tremble and there were several times that her whole body was engulfed in spasms.  Ella just stood there, mostly by Betty’s right arm – the arm that wanted to speak during the body scan.  At one point, I thought that Betty might fall over, but she reached out her hands to hold onto Ella’s cheeks, as if Ella could hold onto her and support her.  Was this the ‘support’ that Betty heard in her body scan?

And then, it was over.  Ella walked a few steps away, hung her head low, and I sensed that she needed to process what had happened in her own body, as well as give Betty space to process.   Betty came to the gate because she knew she was done.  As I let her out, Betty turned to Ella and said to me, “What is that?”  indicating Ella.  I replied, “I think she’s a shaman.”  I didn’t know how else to understand how Ella could know what needed to happen and could orchestrate and stay with the whole process. 

That experience was so profound and healing for Betty that I knew I needed to learn more about how the body processes trauma.  In this session, there were aspects of Internal Family Systems in how the client spoke in different ‘parts’ during the body scan.  The trauma releases that I witnessed in both Ella and Betty seemed to me to resemble the work of Somatic Experiencing®, a body-based trauma recovery method.  Needless to say, I have now been trained in both these modalities and employ them in my sessions with clients.

The big question, though, is – How did Ella know how to do what she did?  Also - How did she sense the trauma that was held in Betty’s body?  What did it mean when she stomped her feet at the start of each round of energy release?  Was she getting Betty’s attention?  Did she actually take on the client’s trauma energy and move it through her own body and out?  And, most profoundly - why would she choose to do that?  In that moment, ‘shaman’ seemed like as good as an answer as anything. 

Horses have an uncanny ability to sense where stress is stored in our bodies.  I have seen many times how they zero in on certain parts of our body, as Ella did with Betty’s heart. A couple of summers ago, I had a woman named Sarah come for an equine-facilitated learning session, wanting to learn about Sentient Communication, or how we communicate without words.  There was no expectation that we would be doing any trauma work.  However, what started as a typical workshop-type session turned into a very deep trauma recovery, Somatic Experiencing session.  After teaching Sarah how to recognize her boundaries, we did the body scan with Sarah’s back to Ella.  What came up for Sarah was that her hearing was more acute than normal and the message from Ella was ‘pay attention’.  There also was some ‘fluttering’ in her belly that was non-descript and she couldn’t really get a message from it.  She said she was familiar with this sensation in her belly. I asked more questions, wanting to know if there was fear or performance anxiety around going in the round pen with Ella.  It ended up that she wanted to go in the round pen, but with me beside her. 

Once in with Ella, Ella came right up to Sarah, and the session quickly became about something more than boundary setting.  Ella nosed me away as if to tell me that she didn’t want me involved in this.  As Sarah and Ella connected, Ella repeatedly nudged Sarah in the solar plexus with her nose, quite vigorously in fact.  I even separated them a couple of times because I was thinking that Ella was getting quite aggressive, but every time I did that, Ella came back to Sarah and did the same thing.  Finally, I had Sarah go stand about 10 feet away from Ella.  Ella didn’t approach her immediately but instead started nipping at her own belly, quite vigorously and on both sides.  Ella seemed to be giving Sarah a very graphic demonstration of paying attention to the belly.

Sarah got this, and when Ella approached her again, Ella didn’t nudge her but stood a couple of feet away from her.  As Sarah started to connect into her own solar plexus, she started burping and burping.  This indicated to me that trauma energy was working its way through.  Then, in an a-ha moment, Sarah realized what it was about, and verbalized what had long been held in her belly.  As she said it, Ella turned and walked away, and the session was effectively over.  Ella sensed the energy shift in Sarah as her truth came to consciousness. 

One final story, from someone who became almost as close to Ella as I was.  When Ella was still living at the stable where I took lessons, Dana, one of the stable hands, was having a very bad day because of personal stress. When she was putting Ella’s blanket on her for turnout, Ella reached out with her nose and wrapped her head and neck around Dana, in effect giving her a hug.  Dana asked me later if I thought Ella could sense her need for comfort and connection and I of course said ‘yes’.  When I asked Dana for permission to use her story, she replied, “I am honored that you want to use that day with Ella . . . That day helps me to keep trying to move forward.  I hope when someone reads it, they will feel like they can also.”  When I reached out to Betty for permission to use her story, she replied that her experience that day with Ella is “still visceral!”  It seems like these felt experiences with horses stay with us and can be a resource later – truly transformational experiences.

So, Ella became the Shaman in my herd.  Every experience a client had with her was profound. She was also the leader, the one whose quiet but strong energy assured the other horses that they were safe.  She could move the other horses around just by pointing an ear at them.  I have a wonderful video of Ella herding my pony Holly around in the pasture just by directing her with her nose, but never actually touching her.  Even Faraona, the most dominant horse I have ever owned, knew better than to try and push Ella around.  Only in the past year, as Ella really started to age, did she begin to defer to Faraona.  It is as if she was ready to give up the responsibility of being the leader and matriarch of the herd.

Ella is the horse that showed me how it is possible to heal.  Everything I have learned and now use to help people is because of what she showed me.  And now I get to practice the lesson in grieving all over again.  If Ella were here, she would nudge my heart, her way of telling me that I must feel the loss, the hurt.  Otherwise, the grief gets locked up inside the body and comes out sideways in physical pain, depression, or seemingly unprovoked emotional outbursts.  It hurts to grieve but it means that we have loved.  And I loved this horse beyond measure.