At Turning Point, there’s a specific reason that we use the wisdom of horses to foster a new learning and wellness experience for everyone, regardless of your interest in horses as a sport or hobby.
We’re specifically using the term wisdom because while most people can acknowledge the intelligence of horses, their wisdom goes back further than you might think – as far back as some earliest human civilizations.
Horses have been on the planet for over 50,000,000 years. 5000 years ago they decided to partner with humans in a myriad of ways that changed the world. We are just in the first century when horses have not been crucially connected to mankind’s physical surrvival through warfare, farming, transportation, and food, but they still have the means to take us forward to a better life through their enhanced life and survival techniques.
Horses are highly attuned to body position, muscle tension, and breathing. They physically detect muscle tension, heart rate and respiration in others from upwards of forty feet away, enabling them to process the emotional changes that have triggered those shifts and respond accordingly.
Emotional recognition is horses’ greatest survival skill. It is present throughout the body of both horses and humans, especially in the heart and gut. With a heart four times the size of ours and over 80 feet of intestinal tract, horses have a true ability to receive “gut” information and to affect ours in return.
Highly evolved vision and hearing of all that is around them, horses have 340 degrees of vision and 170 degrees of ear movements. They can see, hear and process individually between both eyes and ears, and have the largest eyes of any land mammal and can see small movements from long distances and hear three times as well as dogs. This attuned sight and vision requires us to “see things through another’s eyes” and makes us more understanding of others’ perspectives in life.
Throughout thousands of years horses have passed down wisdom gained through their long, complex partnership with humans from ancient society to our modern era. While horses fulfill vastly different roles than they did in the days of Ancient Rome or the Colonial period, they still have a unique connection with people. All of this is why horses are an ideal partner for the Turning Point – and why they’re so important in all of our lives.
