In the heart of Arizona’s enchanting Sedona Verde Valley, a transformative healing experience awaits those seeking profound personal growth and trauma recovery. Belle Shook, the visionary founder of Equine Guidance®, stands at the forefront of Somatic Equine Therapy and Coaching. With a unique blend of intuitive therapy, board-certified coaching, and licensed counseling, Belle has pioneered a powerful method that fine-tunes the neurobiology of her clients, helping them unlock their true potential. Working alongside her three horses, Belle has been guiding individuals on transformative journeys since 2004, offering a therapeutic partnership that transcends traditional methods. Through her innovative approach, Belle and her equine companions facilitate deep, inside-out transformations, leading clients to new levels of self-awareness, leadership, and healing. Join Mystic Mag and read more.
You’ve pioneered Equine Guidance®, combining your background in outdoor experiential learning with equine-assisted therapy. What inspired you to integrate horses into your therapeutic practice, and how have they enriched the healing process for your clients?
I earned a bachelor’s degree in outdoor experiential learning and found it incredibly beneficial for helping people access the more spiritual aspects of themselves. It allows participants to connect with their curiosity and imagination in ways that might not be possible in more traditional settings. The outdoors is a beautiful tool for guiding people to a calmer, quieter place within themselves.
About halfway through my studies, I was introduced to equine therapy, which involved working with horses in ways that went beyond traditional therapeutic riding or other conventional forms of interaction with horses. That’s when I remembered my deepest desire, and my greatest love is horses.
I created a program working with horses that combines my love of nature and working with the elements of the natural world. I also hold the perspective of working with horses as sentient beings, creating meaningful experiences beyond what is available through talk therapy or coaching.
Equine Guidance® uses a somatic approach I developed from decades of experience and education. Talk Therapy accesses the prefrontal cortex of the brain, facilitating insight. Somatic Equine Guidance® supports the nervous system in dissolving stress and trauma from the body.
Being present to the elements of nature, the horses’ deep capacity as prey animals to attune to and co-regulate the nervous system of the herd and participants, this experience dissolves trauma, stuck emotional states, and stress from our neurobiology.
Your work emphasizes clarity after trauma. How do the Bashkir Curly horses—Salsa, Penny, and Mimi—play a role in helping clients navigate and heal from traumatic experiences?
Any horse can technically do this work, but only some want to. The breed of horses I work with are American Bashkir Curlies. While this work isn’t unique to the Curlies, they are unique as a breed.
Only about 5,000 of this horse breed are in the world, and not much is known about them. What is known is that the Lakota Native Americans call them “the horse before the horse” because, while the Spaniards brought over every other horse in North America, it’s believed that the American Bashkir Curlies came through Russia, Alaska, into Canada, and down into North America. They are incredibly hardy horses, much like Mustangs.
Our work isn’t specific to a horse breed; it’s more about the horse’s desire to engage in this type of work. In the early years, a fourth horse lived at the property where Equine Guidance® was initially based. The owner of that horse said I could utilize her horse if I wanted and to let her know how it went. However, that horse did not want anything to do with Equine Guidance®.
Whenever a participant would come for an Experience, this horse would stand in the back corner of her space, clearly signaling, “Don’t look at me. I don’t want anything to do with this.” But as soon as her owner walked onto the property, she would light up and trot over to her. It was clear that this horse just wanted to be a one-person horse.
Horses permitted to be themselves often excel at this work. For example, Salsa, came to us with the original plan for him to be a team buggy horse. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, that plan changed. We sent him to a 30-day trainer, who told us, “You better sell this horse. He’s unpredictable, dangerous, and not suitable for trail riding. He can’t learn.”
However, we discovered that Salsa was naturally engaging in Equine Guidance®. Salsa wasn’t misbehaving; he was trying to help clear emotional blocks, past trauma, or stressful events from the Trainer’s life. Unfortunately, the Trainer viewed his actions solely through the lens of traditional horse training and interpreted Salsa’s actions as misbehavior when, in fact, Salsa was desperately trying to help.
When we got Salsa back from the Trainer, we were puzzled by the Trainer’s assessment because we had already lived with him for a while. Not only did he turn out to be excellent at this work, but he is also one of the most gifted horses I’ve ever met in my decades of working with my herd and at other facilities worldwide.
What type of services do you offer?
1. I offer one to three-day intensives in 3-hour increments with my horses. We primarily work with people who are ready to address:
• Spiritual & Life Enrichment
• Stress & Anxiety
• Resiliency & Emotional Growth
• Childhood trauma & C-PTSD
• Traumatic Plant Medicine Experiences
• Leadership Development
• Accidents & Shock Trauma
• Grief, Loss, & Depression
• Relationship Enhancement & Personal Growth
• Couples Comprehensive Intensive
• Separation, Divorce, & Infidelity
• Communication Difficulties
• Medical trauma & Near-Death Experiences
• Chronic Health Issues & Cancer
• Narcissistic Abuse
• Attachment Issues & Developmental Trauma
• Riding Accidents
2. I am known as the Therapist’s Therapist, and I assist other professionals with their own healing and personal growth.
3. I offer to Train the Trainer opportunities to professionals interested in learning the Equine Guidance® approach.
4. I also provide Telehealth as a Licensed Professional Counselor in Arizona and Connecticut.
The connection between humans and animals is often described as profound and transformative. Can you share a memorable moment where a client’s interaction with one of your horses led to a significant breakthrough in their healing journey?
Sure! A client of mine, an adult who, when she was born prematurely, was immediately placed in the NICU for life-saving interventions.
As a result, she missed the critical and healthy attachment experience that is now well-researched and understood as essential for creating healthy relationships, a regulated nervous system, and the ability to connect in healthy ways with oneself and others.
What’s interesting about survival energies, like fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, is that our first imprint often becomes our default response later in life when we’re under stress.
Her first imprint was to withdraw from everyone because, in the NICU, no one was coming to hold her. She missed critical right-brain communication, such as sensing her mother’s breath, the experience of healing touch by being held, making eye contact, and the presence of a calm and nurturing heartbeat.
When she came to Equine Guidance® to work with the horses, she intended to heal this early attachment wounding. Having insight into the ways this trauma had been playing out in her life for years.
Mimi often helps people with parent-child relationship issues. Mimi voluntarily stood with this client, intentionally engaging with her, standing so closely that their nervous systems and energy fields intertwined. The client could feel Mimi’s breath and the warmth of her body. Mimi provided the corrective emotional experience the client’s nervous system needed, restoring safety to her life’s first days.
This interaction helped the client’s nervous system stabilize and receive the soothing comfort of a nurturing, mothering presence—though not exactly how a human might hold a baby, as this client was now an adult standing beside a horse.
Nonetheless, Mimi enveloped the client in the care of the herd. Horses are intentional about where they stand, how close they stand, and if they touch someone’s body with their noses in specific areas to help dissipate energy and facilitate healing.
In this case, Mimi had positioned herself, so the client felt cradled as if she were a baby. It was indeed an amazing experience. There isn’t enough talk therapy in the world to create the kind of right-brain-to-right-brain healing and connection that horses can provide, helping people’s nervous systems find balance, regardless of the stage of life where the disruption occurred.
Spiritual interconnectedness is a core aspect of your practice. How do you guide your clients in exploring and deepening their spiritual connections with themselves and the natural world around them?
First, I create safety for my clients by orienting them to boundaries within the top-down and bottom-up approaches to safely facilitate transformation.
Equine Guidance® is both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. Top-down approaches involve our mind, like traditional talk therapy. In the bottom-up approach, I support my clients in tracking their nervous system and being present with sensations, feelings, emotions, and cues related to external and internal stimulation.
People still need to share their stories—but that doesn’t mean the nervous system will become regulated. However, it’s highly beneficial for the mind to have a space to express its perspective. I hold that space for my clients.
On the other hand, the horses—since they don’t speak English, French, Mandarin, or Spanish—communicate through the non-verbal dialog of the nervous system.
The horses become incredible guides in interspecies healing, helping the person’s nervous system work through stuck survival states like fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. They facilitate a corrective, co-regulatory experience from the felt sense or from the bottom-up itself.
While I also have extensive training in somatic healing, the horses do it a thousand times better than I or any other human could. Think about it—each animal is around 1,000 pounds, and their entire survival system is based on returning to harmony with themselves and the herd. When they’re permitted to behave that way with the humans who come to work with them at Equine Guidance®, worlds of top-down and bottom-up transformation unfold through a very gentle and natural process.
In other words, it’s not about making the horse do something. There is no riding or obstacle courses, and we’re not digging for metaphors or narratives. Simply put, the process is a spiritual experience clearing past stress, helping you feel more connected to your life force by dissolving the body’s scoreboard of wounds.
