I highly recommend Linda Kohanov’s book “The Tao of Equus: A Woman’s Journey of Healing & Transformation through the Way of the Horse.”
Kohanov, a leader in equine-assisted therapy, combines her personal experiences with emotional trauma, horse training insights, spirituality, and “horse whisperer” philosophy to help humans learn to be better humans — from horses.
Here are some of Kohanov’s best quotes on the power of intuition, a key theme in the book:
“Staring into the vast reflecting pools of the equine mind, I realized that healing was less about helping someone analyze her childhood, or work toward some preconceived goal, than reconnecting with the world from a position of empowerment and compassion, expanding her awareness to see things as they were, moment to moment. Only from the vantage point of fully experiencing and participating in the present did the past make sense and the future show potential.”
“We have a culture in which the nourishing, life-giving waters of emotion, empathy, sensory awareness, gut feelings, and other forms of nonverbal awareness have dried up in the heat of our obsessive reliance on all that is light and logical and conscious enough to be mapped, explained, and controlled.”
Instinct is: “a natural or inherent aptitude, impulse, or capacity; a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency by an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason and for the purpose of removing somatic tension; behavior mediated by reactions below the conscious level.”
“Our culture tends to value thought over emotion, logic over intuition, territory over relationship, goal over process and force over collaboration, competition over cooperation.”
“Children are taught to narrow their attention, cling to the past, and focus on the future, thus losing their ability to fully function in the present. They become dependent on authority figures who themselves only excel in highly specialized environments and situations.”
“Most people deny and sublimate their feelings, keeping them well below the conscious level until the somatic tension becomes so overpowering that the emotion overrides reason and finally expresses itself, often in violent and self-destructive ways.”