After telling me to close my eyes, my voice asks me to notice the sounds around me. I hear the tibetan bowl drone mix with an insect choir, dispersed yawning and what looks like a fluid stream. By opening my eyes, I discover that the “stream” is, in reality, a horse releasing a powerful stream of urine.
Kiki Ebsen is the owner of the Ranch Healing Equine in the mountains of Santa Monica.
(Jennifer McCord / For Times)
The characteristic of water, uh is thanks to August, a stallion. He is one of the five horses who joined a group of around 16 participants for horses and healing: finding strength after fires, a day workshop located in a ranch in the mountains of Santa Monica. The guests and I sit on covered chairs, in the round inside a paddock on horseback. This is part of a semi-regulatory session that the owner of the Ranch, Kiki Ebsen, manages for free exclusively to those who have lost their house in the fires of January.
This small toilet break is the first contribution of August to the only sound bath that I had never to sign a derogation (I read and understood that horses could seriously injure me). The white and brown animal stands in the eyes of fish and proud next to Ebsen, which carries a subtly glamorous set of jeans with bell background, V-shirt in V Dark in V and Prada sunglasses.
Meanwhile, Alison Ungaro, founder of non-profit well-being Uthrive Wellness, leads the sound bath, gently surrounding the bowls with a mallet and intermittently striking a small gong, while Ebsen guides his horses in the enclosure. While animals hide the earth with their large hooves, push the participants and try to chew the covers, many guests, including our photographer, are starting to cry.
“Everything here is done with the heart and the soul,” said one of the participants later, who was in several of these sound baths, “nothing was as cured as the Horses community here.”
Two participants are successfully asleep to sleep while horses are walking in the sound circle of sound.
(Jennifer McCord / For Times)
In recent months, just after the fires in January, families who have lost everything in generalized devastation have met here, The equine healing ranchA retirement of healing horses nestled in the mountains of Santa Monica and led by Ebsen. Daughter of the legendary actor Buddy Ebsen, as well as a musician next to it, Ebsen taught thousands of people to brake the healing powers of the horse by experiential learning with his herd for ten people. Workshops and pensions here generally vary from $ 70 to $ 2,000, and encompass new activities such as the bath of sound that I lived and the grooming of horses through a neuro-saomatic lens. Although punctual events can arrive later in the year, Ebsen focuses only on fire victims until at least June, with monthly horses and healing sessions Like this one. However, it is one of the many practitioners who hold sound baths with horses in the Socal area. Others include the $ 71 of Rose Anzarouth 'Healthy and mindfulness healing with horses“ Rancho Santa Fe and Mountain View Ranch's 60 ''Horses Yoga & Sound“Workshop in Joshua Tree.
Ebsen's offers combine mindfulness, breathing, somatic meditation and something it calls “natural horse riding”, a term that comes from the United States in the mid-1980s to designate a wide range of non-abusive horses handling techniques. It refers to this mixture as a “neighbor” (interactive natural equine interactive healing). By co-regulating with horses, the customer should end the session in what Ebsen calls a most wirers.
“There is” theft and theft “, which is anxiety, and” Rest and Digest “, who feels, you know, quite well,” she told me during my first visit to the Ranch, a few weeks before the sound bath. The hills and trees were almost green neon after several days of high precipitation, the particularly slow horses.
The fenced horses derive towards the sound of the song bowls of Alison Ungaro.
(Jennifer McCord / For Times)
Healing with horses is a secular tradition. Detainee horse programs help the people who are imprisoned to deal with their trauma. Driving schools specially designed for children with special needs aim to improve motor skills and coordination. The installation with horses was even presented as a link activity for more than one date on The baccalaureate. For those looking for alternative therapies, many studies have revealed that the warm and sociable nature of horses has managed to facilitate psychological And physical Repair, allowing humans to co-regulate alongside them and go beyond the responses of trauma.
The Ebsen model, however, deviates from your physique and your psychotherapy assisted by usual equine. Instead, it is based on native wisdom and yogic philosophies to focus on how horses can help regulate the nervous system. According to Ebsen, the advantages of horses healing are supposed to be amplified when associated with sound therapy, a practice that uses targeted sound frequencies, such as those of singing bowls, to encourage relaxation.
Since horses are prey, they have evolved to respond to the most subtle of sound stimuli. When placed in the context of a sound bath, as I felt first, the horses are physically attracted by the vibrations of ringtone, visibly peaceful and seem to invite the same feeling of calm and deep harmonization in humans.
(Jennifer McCord / For Times)
Ebsen also leads breathing and yoga workshops throughout the year. “STERED BREATH-CONNECTION” invites guests to participate in conscious breathing exercises with horses and is offered at $ 100. The “Yoga, hiking, horses” set at a price of $ 75, includes an attentive hike through large meadows of Ebsen, leading to a guided meditation and yoga session in the presence of horses.
Ebsen says that his practice is very effective for people with SSPTs, which I have worn with me since my sexual assault in adolescence. I am also generally very spiritually reserved (in other words, British), so I was not sure that horses would help a lot. I was even skeptical. However, as a resident of the for two years, I have already had my fair share of sound baths. Why not throw a horse or two in there? I was ready to try anything.
While the bowls sounded through the paddock, he felt like the trees, horses and guests breathed as one. During the one hour process, in which Ebsen gradually filtered more and more horses, most guests have committed to close their eyes all the time, apparently not disturbed by the growing number of horses that were trying to snack the cymbal in the center of the ring. I could not help laughing in August – the joker of the herd – almost managed to overthrow the instrument, filling the calm air of a shocking accident.
A woman opens her palms for Rose, the main mare.
(Jennifer McCord / For Times)
The energy has moved when it increased, the lead mare, entered the ring. She dragged slowly, solemnly, heading directly to a visually impaired guest. Rose lingered there for almost the entire session, pushing the outstretched hand of her guest.
“This is how they salute,” Ebsen told me a few weeks ago, “their mustaches send signals directly to their brains that tell them about your smell, your hormones, everything.”
On the ranch, horses often become metaphors of our complicated human emotions. “Horses are thinking about energy and images,” said Ebsen, which means that they communicate through a pure expression, not filtered by the neocortex. “So, if you don't act in congruence with your emotions, our horses call you and encourage you to be simply yourself.” Seeing Pink Interacting with the guest in this way, calmly exchanging energy with her, it has become clear that the mare met his match: a human who has total integrity of feeling.
Kiki Ebsen Luna's dog during the sound bath.
(Jennifer McCord / For Times)
Each customer generally links with a particular horse. I am personally attracted by the most anxious among the herd – Cowboy – a crossing that holds my head in rigid panic, long and straight hair like a long girl from the beach.
Cowboy strengthened our link during my first visit to the Ranch by chewing my arm with his big teeth. I experienced my own panic followed by rest and digest. Inhale: Please, please don't eat me alive. Exhale: I'm safe with you. I love you, cowboy. He rubbed me like a kitten in need with the strength of a lion. “Oh, yes, it's release,” said Ebsen, “he says, thank God, I am not eaten today.” I thought: I know the feeling.
Cowboy is, she said, an excellent example of rest and digestion. Ebsen told me that he had a “huge heart”. It took me a beat to realize that she did not mean that metaphorically. The hearts of horses and electromagnetic fields are five times larger than ours. When their pulse is arrhythmic, as Cowboy was when we met for the first time, it makes everyone around him in a feeling of discomfort.
Fortunately, Cowboy seems to be at peace during the sound bath. Although he is not invited to the ring himself, he seems physically attracted to sound. He descends a neighboring hill, rests his neck on the closest fence and chewed in the air as if the vibrations of singing were hay. I notice two guests, both eyes closed, building while Cowboy rubs the muzzle along the fence. Ebsen seems absolutely delighted.
Rose and his person of choice then exchange the yawn while the drones fill the air, their vibrations sending a slight feeling of tingling to my shoulders. Everything is completely serene, in peace. I don't know why but I cry happy tears. Almost everyone here is.
“It was breathtaking, I couldn't believe what I saw,” said Ebsen after the end of the session. I was also incredulous. The horses may have healed me.
One of Kiki Ebsen's aid gently encourages a horse to move in the paddock.
(Jennifer McCord / For Times)
