EquestriZen LLC

10/29/2026

Step in the right direction. Now what’s everyone’s definition of a true stretch though 🙄

10/28/2026

Louder

Progress- it’s important, fun, but it isn’t everything

What’s most important is training your eye, developing your feel, learning to guide the horse through problems. Keeping calm when things don’t go well, or the horse gets upset or doesn’t respond well. It’s learning to develop our own balance even when the horse is a mess.

True horsemanship: focus on developing ourselves and learning how to really guide the horse through real life stuff. Being a good partner for the horse. Learning to feel ourselves and accept ourselves, continually improving but without judging our mistakes.

Progress comes in time and branches easily off of all those developments. The horse coming together after all this is developed in us is only a matter of time-
It is a given.

10/27/2026

Yessss

Looking at whorls is a time honored method of judging a horse’s temperament.

Long held as superstition, there is science to back it up. Hair and brain are formed from the same fetal cell layer. Because they form at the same time it makes sense that as a fetus develops the hair growing over the brain, and body, can shows signs of what is going on underneath.

The placement of a whorl on a horse’s face can tell us a lot about their personality.

If it is up high, above eye level, the horse will be very smart, energetic, and outgoing. An extrovert.

To the right, our right as we face them that is, shows a right brained horse, reactive, emotional, nervous, defensive.

A whorl placed below eye level should be an introvert, sometimes considered lazy or stubborn they are smart, easily bored, and can be distrustful. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a mule that didn’t have a low whorl.

A whorl that sits on the left side of the face, again our left, means a left brain horse. One who is confident and willful. The farther a whorl is from center the more pronounced the effect will be.

A center whorl is the most common and doesn’t tell us a whole lot. With that type of whorl we need to look at the shape of the head, ear, eyes, all the other clues we are given.

When we get into two or more whorls it gets even more complicated. They can show tendencies from two very different brain types. Whorls that are stacked, one above the other, show a horse that is an introvert and an extrovert. Side by side whorls will be right-brain, reactive, and hot, as well as left-brain, unreactive, and confident.

The more whorls the more interesting the horse. The people I’ve talked to who have horses with three or four or more whorls have loved them.

Whorls can pop up in some unexpected places across the body of the horse too. All horses have whorls on the neck that will tell us where they prefer to flex or what direction they like to turn towards.

Whorls on the body can tell us if they will be sensitive to the cinch or girth, or possibly even to the saddle. Whorls on the legs and belly can tell us how the horse will move. There are many whorls that we don’t yet know the meaning of but all whorls have a message for us if we will listen.

All horses are individuals. With careful thought and effort, we can find the best ways to work with them no matter what whorls they have. A whorl is not a way to see if a horse is ‘bad’ instead, checking whorls is one way for us to gather clues. Those clues can help us figure out a horse’s temperament and suitability for both us and whatever discipline we are hoping to pursue.

10/23/2026

🥰

Studies show that a horse's heart can generate a magnetic field up to five times stronger than ours, and it actually synchronizes with a human's heart rate when we are calm and grounded nearby. But there’s much more to it than that. In 1999, Linda Kohanov began studying and mapping aspects of the horse’s electromagnetic field due to her work with a dangerous stallion who could not be touched. Over the years, she noticed that the energy field had a multi-layered effect and that humans could either dysregulate or coregulate a horse’s nervous system through predictable interactions at distances of 20 feet or more. Over time, she developed protocols that helped people gain the trust of fearful or aggressive horses through conscious interactions with the equine energy field.

During her workshops in Europe, Australia, Canada and North America, she used these same protocols with hundreds of horses and taught their owners to do the same. She also learned that the same protocols could be used with fearful or aggressive people, and with other animals.

“In the beginning, I taught these protocols only to advanced equestrian students,” she says. “But this form of sentient communication was so useful, even in purely human contexts, that I began to teach these skills during my introductory workshops and in my sessions with people who either work with trauma survivors or are trauma survivors themselves.”

Linda was particularly surprised to find that the engineers she worked with at Raytheon Missile Systems not only embraced the protocols, they were unusually comfortable with the idea of learning to communicate through interactions with the energy fields of living beings: “After all, they told me, not only do they have to calculate for the influence of the earth’s magnetic field to manage satellite functions in space, these rocket scientists have learned how use energy fields as nonviolent weapons to surround a sensitive military installation with an invisible force that literally makes trespassers feel nauseated, unable to function under its influence.”

Linda says she has written about the equine energy field in limited ways in her books, but because of the nonverbal nature of the protocols, she and the Eponaquest instructors she has trained must teach most of this knowledge in person, with the horses.

For more information about workshops with Linda, see the link in the comments below.

10/06/2026

There is no “re-starting” a horse.

I hear the term a lot.

A horse had a poor or traumatic start under saddle, so someone decides to turn them out for six months or a year, give them some time to decompress, and then “restart” them.

And to be clear, I often think that is an excellent idea.

I just think “restart” is the wrong word.

You only get one start.

No amount of time standing in a field can make a horse unknow what happened during their first rides. We can give them time. We can change their expectations. We can build new associations and teach them that the experience can be different now. Horses can heal tremendously from poor training and frightening experiences.

But we cannot go back in time and give them a different first experience.

I think that distinction matters because it speaks to the seriousness of starting young horses.

And seriousness does NOT mean perfection.

A horse’s first rides do not need to be some magical sequence where nothing goes wrong. Young horses are going to misunderstand things. Riders are going to make mistakes. There may be awkward moments, spooks, confusion, days when things don’t go according to plan…

A good start isn’t a perfect start.

It’s one that respects how formative those early experiences are.

We should be thoughtful about who gets on them, what we ask of them, how prepared they are before we climb aboard, and what they learn when they don’t understand the question.

Because if it goes badly, yes, someone can absolutely help that horse later.

We can train past bad experiences.

We can build new confidence.

We can layer hundreds of better experiences over frightening ones until the horse has an entirely different understanding of ridden work.

But I think calling that a “restart” accidentally minimizes both how important the original start was and how much work goes into repairing one that went wrong.

The goal of good training after trauma isn’t to erase the horse’s history.

It’s to give them enough good experiences that their history no longer has to dictate their future.

You can train a traumatized horse.

You can rehabilitate their confidence.

You can give them a completely different relationship with being ridden.

But you cannot restart them.

You only get one start.

Treat it like it matters.