What is Equine Experiential Learning?
Equine Experiential Learning is a format that uses horses as active participants that help to facilitate the learning experience for the human participants. By examining horse behavior, and how the horses relate to us, we can better understand what may be more effective in our own human relationships.
EEL uses a team approach, bringing together a horse specialist, a trained facilitator and the horse, to assist individuals and groups. Through a collaborative learning process, people use experience and reflection to facilitate learning. The equine-assisted model helps individuals learn about themselves and others by participating in activities with the horses and then processing feelings, behaviors, and patterns, recognizing how these may relate to the workplace or at home. While EEL is related to other experiential programs, equine assisted programs have the added element of horses with as many different personalities and attitudes as the humans they are working with.
Why Horses?
Domesticated horses retain the thought and behavior patterns of their nomadic ancestors. Interacting with these animals on their own terms encourages a fluidity of human thought, emotion, and behavior that sedentary twenty-first-century life makes difficult. Horses also model the strengths of what are often referred to as feminine values: cooperation over competition, relationship over territory, responsiveness over strategy, emotion and intuition over logic, process over goal, and the creative approach to life that these qualities engender.
Typical outcomes through a Challenge U EEL program:
- An experience of consensual leadership and how to create mutually respectful relationships.
- Uncover unconscious limitations and become empowered to change old dysfunctional patterns of behavior.
- Expand nonverbal awareness.
- Develop listening to the two other brains, the heart and the gut, and the information they hold.
- Connect with your authentic self.
- Hear the messages behind your emotions.
- Identify patterns inhibiting movement into the personal satisfaction you seek.
- Create authentic relationships and community.
- Reduce stress and increase mind-body awareness.
- Learn effective and congruent communication skills
- Redefine power and leadership.
- Identify barriers to effective communication.
- Increase teamwork.
- Develop responsibility, team and leadership skills.
- Learn to identify and set healthy boundaries.
Arbonne International
