What is Equus Coaching?

Equus Coaching is an experiential, ground-based approach to life coaching where you interact with a horse in a safe, structured environment. Horses are highly sensitive to body language, energy, and emotional state and they respond honestly and in real time, offering immediate, non-judgmental feedback about how you're showing up.

Do clients need to have horse experience?

Nope. Clients do not need to have any prior horse experience. All of the Equus Coaching work happens on the ground. There is no mounted work of any kind. Clients only need to bring their curiosity.

What happens in a session?

While every session is shaped around what you need, most follow a similar arc:

• A grounding check-in to arrive and settle before any horse interaction

• Time observing the horse(s), which builds rapport and lowers activation

• Hands-on interaction with the horse: simple, non-task-oriented exercises such as leading, sharing space, or navigating together

• Coaching, questions, and reflection are woven throughout, and a closing conversation helps you connect the interactions with the horse to what you are working on in your own life

Where do sessions take place?

Individual sessions take place in the San Francisco Bay Area at a small, private ranch in Moss Beach, CA located 25 minutes South of San Francisco just off Highway 1. To arrange individual coaching, private workshops or retreats for groups in other locations, please reach out to me. rachelbensoncoaching@gmail.com

Why horses?

As prey animals, horses instinctively live in connection with one another for survival and are deeply social beings that have developed finely tuned receptors to read body language, energy, and energetic shifts in the beings around them.

This high attunement is why horses are so adept at responding to and mirroring human energy, emotions, and intentions. And this intuitive responsiveness, gives us the opportunity in an Equus Coaching session to gain meaningful insights and connections around what is taking place with the client in relation to the issues they’ve brought up.

Why does it work?

Experiential Learning is what Equus Coaching is all about. Sure, it involves talking about the issues and topics that the client wants to discuss, but it’s also about experiencing the physical and emotional shifts as those topics are explored.

Immediate, intuitive feedback from the horses can reveal subtle cues about a person’s emotional state, how truthful they are being with themselves, and their beliefs as well as patterns of behavior.

Self-awareness and transformation can take place when clients observe their behavior and emotions reflected back to them in the sessions and see their own patterns from a new perspective.