It was very hot that day in May, and I was sitting under some mesquite trees in Tucson, Arizona. I was attending a one week workshop in Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning, by Linda Kohanov, author of Riding Between the Worlds and The Tao of Equus. A breeze was caressing my hair, and behind me there was a round pen, with a horse named Cali inside.
At Epona Equine Services, this is the name of the school, they sometimes rescue a horse and allow this four legged being to find his character and spirit again. But this horse was somehow struggling to decide what he wanted to do, and got into a transition phase where he sometimes would not eat, and be depressed. As I was fully present in my body, just listening and observing what was around me, I started to receive some messages.
At first I did not understand whether my mind was busy creating them, or whether someone else was sending them to me, but no two legged was around . At first I heard: “What are you doing here? You have nothing to look for here, go back home”. This was a very weird message to receive, considering that it was the very first time I was at that place, and that I had been travelling for more than 36 hours to get there from Cape Town, South Africa! And then I suddenly started to cry, and the tears were not of sadness or grief, it was a different sensation. I did not understand it, so I decided to ask the horse, what that could have meant. He very gently comforted me and replied: ”I am attuning you to the universal song of the horses”.
During the workshop, I got very interested in exploring the potential of horse/human relationships, and started the Epona apprenticeship program lead by Linda Kohanov and Kathleen Barry Ingram. Since that day my life has completely changed, although not on the outside. What I mean is that I started to reclaim my own character and spirit which had been taken away from me when I was a child. My parents, from catholic Italian families, did not know better. As it often happens in western cultures, very little importance is given to the spiritual side, and I am not talking here about religion. I had never been taught to live in the present moment and that having altered states of consciousness was something good.
Cali was right saying that he was attuning me, because since that day a lot of horses have been telling me parts of their life stories, and asked me for help as their humans (e.g. owners) were either unable or unwilling to understand them.
I started studying shamanism which helped me to get connected to different realms, with the majority of my teachers being spirits themselves.
Sometimes I have visions during journeys, while in altered states of consciousness, which I would then find in the prophecies of Native American Indians. Synchronicity started to be an important factor in my life. All this different information and experiences have brought me to reflect on the connection of all things about which already a lot of people have been talking.
Carl G. Jung talks about the “collective unconscious”, and has been working often in altered states of consciousness where he would get a lot of information he would then put on paper and publish to the world. Einstein, Stanislav Grov, and other well known scientists have been working with the spiritual world in the last centuries. The fact is that all these people, as well as me, have not found anything new.
Many tribes, all around the world, used to have a very strong connection with nature which helped them to survive for millennia, and in some cases up to the present time. If I look now at the period after the Industrial Revolution, I notice that something is going in the wrong direction. We are destroying the world at such a speed that disaster is looking inevitable.
The point is that I do belong to the people who cannot go on sitting in the comfort of their house and watch movies, while the nature outside my window is dying.
Eckhard Tolle talks in his books The Power of Now and A New Earth about the insanity where the people are not able to learn from the mistakes done in the past, and where they go on repeating the same mistakes, in an attempt to gain more control, more power and more money.
A couple of nights ago I had a dream. I was busy defending my small holding boundaries from people breaking in, when suddenly a grey horse with a little Khosa girl passed through a cut in the fence and went through our garden and into the Noordhoek wet land. They were both in peace with themselves, there were no constrictions, no halter, no ropes, nothing, just love, peace and harmony. They did not see me and my husband, they were happy walking through a nice garden. Then I started to talk to my husband about closing up the fence, and not letting them enter into our garden any longer. As I turned around, instead of the green pastures and garden that are normally there, I could see a desert. There was a bright light, and a breeze moving around the sand. I felt sadness inside, I could not see any life left, and it looked like an atomic bomb had just exploded.
I went into my house, I was speechless. My husband’s parents were there, and were not aware of what had happened outside. Their only concern was to prepare their breakfast. Then I saw a small vase with a pink geranium plant inside, it reminded me of the old garden, where the plants used to stretch their roots freely into the earth.
On the next day I woke up and I decided to take a shower and suddenly the dream came into my consciousness. I started to recap it and analyse it, and suddenly I felt my life energy increasing into my body: it is now the time to do something, I thought! In the dream I could see the edge where humanity is now, and that we can still make a decision in which direction we want to go.
One direction is heading to peace, love, relationship, and the other side is heading to a complete destruction of life on the planet. On the one side there was a horse at the side of a human being (right brained), on the other side there were people that are very mental and are not able to really see and listen any longer (left brained).
In the last two years, during my studies, I have been observing the commitment of the horses in being at the side of the human being and helping them to recognise the right direction to go toward. Far too often I have been confronted with the fear of the people to make a jump into the unknown and walk toward sanity.
Come out of the head and get into the present time, make a shift in consciousness and use more the right side of our brain, instead of the left. These are all lessons that the horses can teach to the humans, if we would only listen to them.
Every human being has the power of choice, as Caroline Myss says, the point is which choice can the mind make, is it based upon creativity and intuition? I have the feeling that the people in South Africa can be a catalyst of the process of awakening. In the American Indian prophecy tradition they talk about the rainbow people, that are going to bring fertility onto the world.