This article is part of our Mental Health Awareness Month. Brought to you by Touched by a Horse.
Horses are clairsentient animals, meaning that they can perceive emotional energy through feeling. As intuitive beings, they feel the energy around them, perceiving when and how to react.
[READ MORE: LEARN HOW YOUR HORSE CAN HELP YOUR MENTAL HEALTH]
How Horses Use Their Intuition
Humans, like horses, have a strong intuition. Where humans start to fall short on following intuition is when we run into limiting beliefs. Humans, unlike horses, also have limiting beliefs that block us from fully following our intuition. For example, when an authority figure tells you something about yourself, such as “you’re lazy” or “you’re clumsy,” you may take it in as part of your identity, forming a limiting belief that you’re lazy or clumsy. Similarly, as children, we are taught that we have five senses. This sets us up an internal belief that we are limited to only five senses, when we have many more—including intuition.
We have more intuitive capacity than we give ourselves credit for and we need to listen to it. Horses do listen to it and they’re listening to ours and theirs when they’re around us. They don’t have limiting beliefs that prevent them from listening to their intuition. In this way, horses can become our perfect teachers—they’re the connection we need to ourselves to learn to trust our own intuition.
How You Use Intuition
When you’re around horses often, intuition begins to develop. As you become a better horseman, your intuition grows. As you develop the sense, you’ll notice that you’ll feel things are going to happen before they do. You’ll begin to feel when a young horse is about to spook and will be prepared for it, whereas a beginner wouldn’t have the situational awareness that allows them to use their intuition. As the sense grows, it’s key to trust the feelings. As a seasoned horse owner, you’ve experienced or will at some point experience the intuition of knowing when your horse has had enough riding for the day, when to move on to a more advanced maneuver, or when everyone tells you that your horse is OK, but you know that there’s something that isn’t quite right.
While sometimes it’s easier to trust your intuition around horses than it is in other areas of life, using our intuition beyond the barn can give us an advantage in situations where the answer to what needs to be done is not obvious.
