After telling me to close my eyes, the voice instructs me to notice the sounds around me. I listen to the drone of the Tibetan bowls mixing with a choir of insects, scattered yaws and what sounds like a fluid stream. When I open my eyes, I discover that the 'stream' is, in reality, a horse that releases a powerful urine current.
Kiki Ebsen is the owner of the Healing Equino Rancho in the mountains of Santa Monica.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
The water feature, UH, is thanks to August, a stallion. It is one of the five horses that have joined a group of about 16 horsepower and healing attendees: finding strength after the fires, a one -day workshop located in a ranch in the Mountains of Santa Monica. The guests and I are sitting in covered chairs, inside a horse padd. It is part of a semi-regular session that the owner of the ranch, Kiki Ebsen, runs free exclusively to those who lost their homes in the January fires.
That little rest of the bath is the first August contribution to the only sound bath that I had to sign an exemption (I read and understood that the horses could seriously hurt me). The white and brown animal meets the fish of fish and proud next to Ebsen, which wears a subtly glamorous set of jeans with bottom, dark shirt and TortoShell Prada sunglasses.
Meanwhile, Alison Ungaro, founder of the non -profit welfare of well -being, conducts the sound bath, gently surrounds the bowls with a mallet and intermittently hits a small gong, while Ebsen guides his horses in the enclosure. As animals stir the earth with their large hooves, push the participants and try to chew the blankets, numerous guests, including our photographer, begin to cry.
“Everything here is done with the heart and soul”, one of the participants, who has been in several of these sound baths, later tells me, tears in his eyes, “nothing has been as curative for me as the horsepower community here.”
Two participants are successful to sleep while the horses walk around the sound bath circle.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
In recent months, just after the fires of January, families who have lost everything in the general devastation have gathered here, in the Healing Equino Rancho, a horse healing withdrawal located in the mountains of Santa Monica and directed by EBSEN. The daughter of the legendary actor Buddy Ebsen, as well as a musician on the side, Ebsen has been teaching thousands to control the healing powers of the horse through experimental learning with her flock of ten force. The workshops and retreats here vary from $ 70 to $ 2,000, and cover activities of the new age such as the sound bath that I experienced and prepared through a neuro-somatic lens. Although unique events can arrive later in the year, Ebsen is focusing only on serving the victims of fire up to at least June, with monthly horses and healing sessions like this. However, it is one of the many practitioners who hold sound baths with horses in the socal area. Others include the workshop of $ 71 'Sound Heening Fulness and Mindfulness of Rose Anzarouth in Rancho Santa Fe and Mountain View Ranch in the workshop of $ 60' Horses Yoga & Sound 'in Joshua Tree.
EBSEN offers combine full attention, breathing, somatic meditation and something to “natural riding”, a term that originated in the United States in the mid -80s to refer to a wide range of non -abusive horsepower management techniques. She refers to this mixture as 'neighbor' (interactive growth natural and healing). Through the regulation of the horses, the client must finish the session in what Ebsen calls a rest state of rest.
“There are 'Flight and Flight', which is anxiety, and 'Rest and Digest', who feels, you know, quite well,” he told me on my first visit to the ranch, a few weeks before the sound bath. The hills and trees were almost neon green after several days of heavy rains, especially slow horses.
The fenced horses are directed towards the sound of the Canto de Alison counts of Ungaro.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Cure with horses is a traditional tradition. Inmate horsepower programs help imprisoned populations to process their trauma. Assembly schools specifically designed for children with special needs are aimed at improving motor skills and coordination. Lying with horses even appeared as a union activity for more than one date in The Bachelor. For those looking for alternative therapies, numerous studies have found that the warm and sociable nature of horses has successfully facilitated psychological and physical Repair, allowing humans to regulate with them and go beyond trauma responses.
The Ebsen model, however, deviates from its usual psychotherapy and psychotherapy assisted by horses. Instead, it is based on indigenous wisdom and yogic philosophies to focus on how horses can help with the regulation of the nervous system. According to Ebsen, the advantages of horse healing are supposedly amplified when combined with sound therapy, a practice that uses specific sound frequencies, such as songs bowl, to encourage relaxation.
Since horses are prey animals, they have evolved to respond to the most subtle of auditory stimuli. When it is placed within the context of a sound bath, as I experienced first -hand, horses are physically attracted to sound vibrations, becoming visibly calm and seem to invite the same sense of quiet and deep tuning in humans.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Ebsen also performs breath and yoga workshops throughout the year. 'Horse-Connections Breath' invites guests to participate in breathing exercises aware with the horses and offers at $ 100. The 'yoga, hiking, horses' package, with a price of $ 75, includes a conscious walk through the EBsen expansive meadows, which culminate in a guided meditation and yoga session in the presence of horses.
Ebsen says that his practice is very effective for people with PTSD, which is something that I have taken with me since my sexual assault when I was a teenager. In general, I am also quite spiritually reserved (in other words, British), so I was not sure that horses help a lot. It was even skeptical. Even so, as a resident during the last two years, I have already had my fair part of sound baths. Why not throw a horse or two there? I was willing to try anything.
As the bowls sounded through the paddock, it felt as if the trees, horses and guests breathe like one. During the one -hour process, in which Ebsen gradually leaked more and more horses, most guests pledged to close all the time, apparently intact by the growing number of horses that were trying to stain on the dish in the center of the ring. I could not help laughing like August, the Jokester of La Manada, almost managed to tear down the instrument, filling the quiet air with a discordant accident.
A woman opens her palms for Rose, the main mare.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
The energy changed when Rose, the lead mare, entered the ring. He was slowly, solemnly, directly addressing a guest with visual disabilities. Rose remained there for almost the entire session, pushing the extended hand of her guest.
“This is how they greet,” Ebsen told me a few weeks before, “their mustaches send signals directly to their brain that tells them everything about their smell, their hormones, everything.”
In the ranch, horses often become metaphors for our complicated human emotions. “The horses think of energy and images,” said Ebsen, which means that they communicate through pure expression, one without filtering for neocortex. “Then, if you are not acting in congruence with your emotions, our horses will call you and encourage you to be yourself.” Seeing Rose interact with the guest in this way, calmly exchanging the energy with her, it was clear that the mare met her partner: a human who has a total integrity of feelings.
Kiki Ebsen dog moon during the sound bath.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Each client usually joins a particular horse. I feel personally attracted by the most anxious between the flock, a cowboy, a crusade that holds a rigid panic, long and straight hair like a long beach girl.
The cowboy fortified our link during my first visit to the ranch chewing my arm with its big teeth. I experienced my own panic followed with rest and summary. Inhale: Please, please don't eat me alive. Exhale: I'm safe with you. I love you, cowboy. He rubbed like a kitten in need with the strength of a lion. “Oh, yes, that is the launch,” said Ebsen, “he is saying, thank God they will not eat me today.” I thought: I know the feeling.
The cowboy is, he said, a great example of rest and summary. Ebsen told me he has a “huge heart.” It took me a rhythm to realize that I was not referring to this metaphorically. The hearts of horses and electromagnetic fields are five times larger than ours. When his pulse is arrhythmic, as was the cowboy when we met, he takes everyone around him in a sense of restlessness.
Fortunately, Cowboy seems to be at peace during the sound bath. Although he is not invited to ring, he seems physically attracted to sound. A nearby hill descends, supports its neck in the closest fence and chews the air as if singing vibrations were made of hay. I notice two guests, both with their eyes closed, yawning while the cowboy rubs his snout along the fence. Ebsen seems absolutely delighted.
Rose and his person of choice then exchange yawns while drones fill the air, their vibrations sending a slight sensation of tingling to my shoulders. Everything is totally serene, in peace. I'm not sure why, but I'm crying happy tears. Almost everyone here are.
“That was impressive, I couldn't believe what I was seeing,” Ebsen said after the session came to an end. I was also incredulous. The horses may have cured me.
One of Kiki Ebsen's assistants gently encourages a horse to move to the paddock.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
