About Us

I think I had the perfect childhood, in the rural country of central California, where we (my sisters and I) spent our spare time during the school year on horseback and then spent our entire summers out of the heat of the San Joanquin Valley and in the remote parts of the cool Sierra Nevadas. My family had a few retired horses which we went trail riding on or goofing off and teaching ourselves how to ride. It was an easy recipe: get on, ride, fall off, figure out how to get back on again because we were in the middle of nowhere and then ride again. It wasn't until I was 10 that I had my first ‘formal’ riding lessons thru 4H and by that time I could get on and stay on.

What I lacked in formal training I gained in later years when my daughter decided she wanted to learn how to ride and we took up dressage and jumping lessons together. I had always loved jumping logs on the old logging roads we explored in the mountains even though I was forbidden to, so, I was enjoying these new riding adventures. After a few years my daughter went on to play lacrosse and I continued with riding lessons and started introducing myself to ground work with an eye on liberty work and alternative approaches to old training methods. But what was missing at the core of all this was developing a deep bond with horses. This is difficult to do in the culture of taking lessons or leasing a horse because the bottom line is that you have little say or access to the horses. No control over how they are trained, treated or taken care of including their diet and health. I could deeply love horses as well as anyone else, but the kind of bond I was longing for was not just about loving them.

Finally, in my 60’s some unusual doors opened for me to achieve the possibility of a much deeper bond. Through the experience of a horse communicator, I started to see horses as beings more like ourselves than the narrow view I had for years: horses are to be ridden or to work for us. I began to hear what horses had to say and what they understood, and like us, I found that horses have emotions, intelligence, opinions, awareness and wisdom. But honestly, I saw they were way ahead of us in their wisdom, even our superiors on some levels. Through experiencing and learning equine guided work I saw their ability to see, read and understand humans better than we understand ourselves. And through working with a herd of horses that focuses on healing, I saw endless possibilities for humans and horses. When I started doing equine guided work with Murdock and Sierra with clients I saw that they instinctually did the same kind of work that the equine guided and healing horses did and yet they were never trained or never intereacted with those herds.