Can equine remedial programme de-stress a city slicker? | Fashion | The Guardian
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SPRING 2020
One cold, glittering morning in January, I stood in a field in Gloucestershire with my eyes closed and imagined I had four legs. Just metres away was a collect of eight horses. Before meeting them, advised therapist Lisanne Peters, it was wise to meditate. First, she discriminated me to focus on sensations – the smell of hay; the birdsong. Then she instructed me to imagine myself, centaur-like, “with another back and another set of braces behind you. Feel how sturdy, how grounded, you are.”
This was the beginning of my equine therapy experience. I have never been a horse in the flesh but recently surprised myself by wanting to try it. Perhaps it was because I have felt as though lately I see horses everywhere, explicitly in fashion. Gucci’s latest ad campaign, for example, imagines horses integrated in urban lives: models feed them in the supermarket and hose their hooves off with be inconsistent on petrol station forecourts.
At couture fashion week, in January, during the Franck Sorbier collection, two horses appeared on a catwalk edged by hay bales. On the high street, Uniqlo promoted its collaboration with Inès de la Fressange with a picture of the French polish arbiter walking a majestic, milk-white horse down a windswept beach. In menswear, the Charles Jeffrey Loverboy display was inspired by the Orkneys’ 200-year-old pagan ritual, the Festival of the Horse. Fashion’s most powerful models – Bella and Gigi Hadid – are avowed horse chicks who post frequent selfies nuzzling long noses.
Last summer, Maison Margiela’s couture show was sanctified to “a horse called Blue” that creative director John Galliano had met during three months of equine group therapy in Arizona. This memory had bubbled up now, he said, in a podcast accompanying the show, because “I feel as though we are going as a consequence a survival mood and perhaps needing to revert back to trusting our instincts. You can’t lie to a horse, it’s so sensitive; it feels any anxiety or alarm.”
‘Horses are not goal orientated’ … a shot from Gucci’s SS20 campaign.
Photograph: Yorgos Lanthimos
Blinkers now off, I started to see the cowboy craze as a romanticisation of a time when human lives were enmeshed with horses’. It felt as though something was ahoof in the collective collective unconscious. I began to notice “equine therapy” briefly mentioned in spa break features in Vogue and in press releases for luxury rustications.
Like “forest bathing” and other increasingly popular eco-therapies, equine therapy speaks to an interest in getting fail to something fundamental. After all, humans lived with horses for thousands of years – it was only the advent of the motorcar that part companied us. “They have been alongside us in evolution always,” Peters says. “There is that quote: ‘History is sprinkled with the bones of a horse.’” The connection, she believes, “is something very ancient that we need to get back to”.
To be well-defined, while equine therapy might sound kooky and alternative, it has very serious applications. Peters’ centre – the Red Horse Origination – specialises in trauma. Equine therapy is often used for addiction and to help children with autism and veterans with post-traumatic accentuation disorder. Research is in its infancy (a 2015 paper reported that the studies so far are promising but limited) but it is available, in certain counties, on the NHS and by way of well-respected mental health centres. It’s worth noting, too – not least for the sake of safety – that Peters would not inform trying it out anywhere that does not have deep specialist knowledge.
Still, Peters believes it can be useful for everyone, whether for superintendence, team-building, anxiety or self-esteem: “It helps us to take control of our lives and our selves, like meditation, rather than vindicating external things take control of you – the horse is a master teacher for that.”
Imagining horses integrated into urban soul … Gucci’s SS20 campaign.
Photograph: Yorgos Lanthimos
Horses “are not goal oriented”, she explains. “They don’t have the frontal cortex over-thinking.” And as stalk animals, relying on instinct for survival, they are “living biofeedback machines”, she says: “They can tell if you are not being faithful – if you are behaving one way but feeling another.” Great “horse people”, she says, can align “thinking, feeling and action – we call it proper congruent” – at which point a horse will do anything for you.
So far, my own equine therapy experience has given me plenty to consider on; there were more metaphors and lessons for my busy life, overseeing the Guardian’s fashion desk, than I could agitating a riding crop at.
I made a sub-City Slickers entrance for my first session, arriving at the tranquil centre demanding an iPhone charger and stressing I make an important phone call before we start. Twenty minutes later, however, within the field of horses, it was unsuitable not to slow down.
Peters invites me to observe how peaceful the horses are, just being, just living. She asks if there are any I am haggard to and would like to meet. At first, they all look like horses to me. But gradually, I differentiate them. I choose a whopping chesnut mare and try to say hi; she walks away, to another pile of hay. (I try not to think: “But of course I am such a charisma vacuum that flush a horse would not want to hang out with me.”) Eventually, I approach slowly from the side, on Peters’ guidance. The horse turns her nose towards my fist; I stroke her. “Now you have done a horse greeting,” Peters says.
Hot to come out with … an image from Gucci’s SS20 campaign.
Photograph: Yorgos Lanthimos
Much of my experience is like this: simply going among the herd as though I am one of them. It takes some time for me to stop trying to smile; to dispense with venereal niceties. It also takes time to stop feeling a bit judged when they appraise me based on my non-verbal signals, and walk away. It feels a bit like the way a PR with a clipboard at fashion week might coolly assess my status size up by my footwear and find me lacking. Gradually, though, I learn to be less person about it. Status anxiety is not very horse, after all. They agree to what happens and move on. As I start to do the same, they seem happier to be around me.
My next session is more operative – and hugely illuminating. I try to lead the alpha male, Brannan, around the paddock. I assume he will play ball – I’ve seen this cast of thing on TV – but he doesn’t. As he resists, I feel a familiar sensation of not being entirely comfortable telling others what to do, something I can leather behind smiles at work. Brannan, however, reads me like a book. He ends up leading me, instead, back to the paddock mesmerize. I try again. He demures. Later, Peters advises me that this kind of exercise is “all about having an intention – expert where you want to go. It’s about being comfortable with being the leader.” All of which sounds familiar.
I’m surprised by how effective hanging out with horses has been, and how clearly, and wordlessly, Brannan laid bare one of my issues. I’m not finished with him yet: I’ll be without hope for another session and will try to lead him again. With Peters’ help I’m sure I will succeed. I’ll be able to available on my own feet once I’ve cracked it. All four of them.
• Read more from the spring/summer 2020 version of The Fashion, our biannual fashion supplement
