Horse Sensations

What Horses can Teach us about Introspection

Introspection is an important human sense that enables awareness of internal body sensations such as hunger, thirst, temperature, heart rate, breathing, bladder pressure, itch and nausea. Introspection also includes difficulty accurately differentiating body sensations, for example, interpreting most bodily cues as pain or failing to notice bodily signals of pain. Introspection is a prerequisite skill for self‐management and self‐regulation. It provides the tools to know when we are developing emotional reactions and the skills to be in control of these reactions. Introspection in relation to emotional regulation enables you to be aware that you are becoming angry or upset and being able to manage your emotions proactively.

Children and young people will struggle with their own emotions and social interactions if they have not developed introspection skills. Even just being around others may be difficult for them to manage. An introspection activity focuses on creating and noticing a change in some aspect of one's internal self, such as muscular system, breathing, temperature, pulse or touch.

Benefits of teaching introspection with horses

• Horse teach introspection by reacting to clients emotions and behaviour - Enabling adults, children and young people to understand how their body sensations and emotions impact on their behaviour

• Horses are nonverbal and enable clients to focus on the horses behaviour; movement, breathing, touch - Helping adults, children and young people to understand how horses behaviour is related to what is happening in the moment

A client is in the arena with the pony, the pony talks away from the client (7 years old), the client says she is excited and is asked to describe how this feels, the client says she is tingling inside her body and wants to move. Client is asked to focus on breathing like a horse, the client breathes like a horse. The client is asked how her body is now and she says the tingling has gone. The pony allows the client to walk up to him. The client, 7 yrs old, now understands how what is happening in her body and the accompanying emotion affects her behaviour and impacts on the relationship with the pony.

Once a child or young person can recognise and understand their internal body signals for distress, they can begin to work out what distresses them and then how to respond to these stressors.

There is compelling evidence demonstrating links between poor or disrupted awareness of sensory information, or interoceptive awareness, and difficulties with emotion regulation. Self-awareness on the interoceptive level is a pre-requisite for accurate self-awareness of self in terms of strengths, abilities and support needs in the long term.