Program Cost: $3,200
A retreat at Bitterroot Ranch with Paula Josa-Jones CLMA, MSMET, SEP, TTEAM
Overview
Connecting in an embodied way with horses opens us to discovering our authentic selves and finding new ways of settling and grounding body and mind. Horses can help us become more comfortable in our own skin, more trustworthy to ourselves and others. With their help, we can find a more reliable sense of physical and emotional balance, resilience, and ease. Horses, as vigilant prey animals, read not only our movement behaviors but their underlying emotional tone. Often our movement behavior and emotional expression unconsciously reflect an unsettled or incongruent state of mind -for example, acting calm while feeling agitated inside.
Paula’s experience is that horses (and other equines) can help us with whatever needs helping. They can illuminate issues or give us insights into the places that we are stuck – places of resistance or habits of body and mind that have become obstacles to our opening fully to our desires. Often that information is stored in the body. It can show up as pain or stiffness or a lack of feeling and joy.
They can help bring us into alignment, which is not about posture or putting the parts of our bodies into a correct position. Alignment is about relationship and connection – between oneself and another, with ourselves and within the body – it is dynamic, flexible, and improvisational.
Co-Regulation, Connection & the Body
When we meet others – including other species – our systems begin to synchronize. We begin to mirror each other’s rhythms, movement, respiration, heart rate and emotional tone. This is a bodily, emotional sensing of each other – an empathetic, embodied experience of reciprocal resonance. This co-regulating, co-embodying experience of connection helps to nurture an intuitive, improvisational, feeling response to what is arising in the moment rather than being caught in habitual or automatic ways of responding. With horses, this means finding a shared settled state with the horse, where we are listening more than telling, creating opportunities for responsiveness and resonance rather than tension and reactivity. All of this happens through our bodies: breath, the movement of fluids, skin, muscle, bones, and organs – the shared anatomy of our moving bodies.
What is Somatic Experiencing®?
Somatic Experiencing® is a body-oriented therapeutic model applied for healing trauma and other stress disorders. It is based on a multidisciplinary intersection of physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics and has been clinically applied for more than four decades. It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine. The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. It offers a framework to assess where a person is stuck in the fight, flight or freeze responses and offers ways of resolving these physiological states.
The SE approach can be helpful with the following:
- Feeling as if you need to be alert and vigilant all the time.
- Never feeling safe or able to fully relax.
- Difficulty in expressing feelings.
- Chronic anxiety, panic, or shut down.
- Hyper-reactivity or sensitivity to even the smallest trigger.
- Difficulty in being alone or being with others.
- The same patterns of behavior appearing again and again, despite your best efforts to change them.
- Feeling unable to notice your bodily sensations or feeling uncomfortable about being in your body.
- Self-soothing with addictive patterns, including substances, food, shopping, media consumption.
Meet your Instructor
Paula is an author, horsewoman, choreographer, dancer, and movement artist who brings an improvisational perspective to all her work. She teaches an intuitive, embodied approach to the human-horse bond with movement and touch, integrating the principles of Somatic Experiencing©, the trauma-informed work developed by Dr. Peter Levine. She believes that our most reliable and authentic teacher is the body, and that learning to listen to what the body is expressing can help to unravel many of the patterns and beliefs that limit our pleasure, ease, and creativity.
Paula is a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner (SEP), a Certified Laban Movement Analyst (CLMA), and a Master Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (MSMET) accredited by ISMETA, the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. She is a Guild-certified Tellington TTEAM , and a member of the United States Association of Body Psychotherapy (USABP). Her book, Our Horses, Ourselves: Discovering the Common Body, is published by Trafalgar Square Books .
Schedule
SUNDAY: Arrive in the afternoon and settle into your cozy log cabin. Meet your fellow clinic participants over cocktails and dinner.
MONDAY:
- Breakfast between 7:30-9am each morning.
- 9:30am: Retreat welcome and orientation
- 10:30am: Retreat programming – Fundamentals of Somatic Experiencing© and trauma-informed work with horses. Somatic orienting and embodied listening practice.
- As you bring awareness to your body, what is moving? And how?
- Can you feel movement in a particular place or body system?
- Can you feel an absence of movement? Somewhere that feels a little stuck or lost?
- Is there somewhere in your body that feels like you? Somewhere that gives you a sense of safety?
- How can you invite movement to step forward in your awareness?
- Can you feel a little movement in a lot of places?
- 12:20pm: Lunch
- 2:30pm: Retreat programming with horses – Learning to witness from the body; understanding the language of movement that we share with horses.
- How do we understand the idea of “inter-being” with horses?
- How can we cultivate a practice of improvisational co-embodiment?
- How can movement and touch be a part of that co-regulation and listening?
- Appetizers and wine at 6:30pm and dinner at 7pm each evening
TUESDAY:
- Retreat programming in the studio and then with horses between 9:30am-12:30pm. This day focuses on touch – waking up our own tactile consciousness and then bringing that awareness and touch-listening to the horses.
- Integrative, improvisational grounding movement practice at 2:30pm before an optional trail ride.
WEDNESDAY:
- Retreat programming in studio and outdoors in the morning. We will be focusing on safety, belonging and social engagement with self and others, as well as noticing our habits, and learning ways of unraveling our unconscious patterns and reactions.
- Retreat programming with horses in the afternoon – exploring practices of leading, following, groundwork movement cues, and how we experience dominance personally and with horses. What is the difference between a top down and a bottom-up approach with our horses and ourselves?
- At 8pm join for an optional sunset hike to the horse herd in turnout.
THURSDAY:
- Retreat programming with horses between 9:30am-12:30pm. We explore the elements of finding connection through the body, the emotions, and the mind. As you begin to explore this way of “conversing” with your horse in the language of movement, what changes do you notice in yourself? In your horse?
- What is the quality of bodily communication and feeling between you? How are you sharing each other’s rhythms?
- Can you let go of any sense of doing and let this become a way of simply being?
- How can this movement conversation help you to be together without demands, expectations or agenda?
- How does the horse show you that he or she is listening? Saying yes? Saying no?
- Integrative, improvisational, grounding movement practice at 2:30pm before an optional trail ride.
FRIDAY:
- Walk up to visit the herd in turnout before breakfast with the group if desired.
- Movement practice with horses in the morning. Dancing releases dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins that combine and influence one another to create the cycle of positive feelings in the body and mind.
- The dancing relationship with the horse that I am curious about is not about doing steps, planned or memorized movement. It is about allowing impulses for movement (or stillness) to arise from the body itself, from conscious listening, and from the moving conversation with your horse. How is “waiting to be moved” different from moving with intention? How can you recognize an impulse from the body rather than a directive from the mind? And finally, how can we use this more spontaneous way of movement speaking to deepen our relationship with ourselves, the horses, and the moment?
- Integration practices in the afternoon, including a meditative practice of learning to let the heart rest as part of finding a deeper settling in the body.
SATURDAY:
- Orienting and integrative movement practice at 9am before optional trail ride or personal practice.
- Your afternoon is spent as free time on the ranch or in the town of visit. After dinner, closing practice.
SUNDAY: Departure after breakfast.
