The Handbook of Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning through the lens of Adventures In Awareness offers the theory, principles and practice of equine inner-active exercises for wellness work with horses.
Outlined in detail is AIA’s 5 DAY Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning Curriculum™, an enrichment and prevention program for at risk youth, and those with severe emotional and behavioral disturbances; it features the AIA™ process. AIA promotes working with horses as a reflective and reflection experience, mirroring personal and interpersonal relationships. The specially designed interactive and inner-active exercises develop communication (including interspecies) skills, promote team building, promote self developed insights and contribute to the ability to be responsible for self. The basic AIA principle is that awake aware responsible individuals living the Adventures In Awareness safety agreement make healthy behavior choices.
In 1974, a cofounder of TROT (Therapeutic Riding of Tucson, Inc.), Barbara utilized her skills as a Pony Club Instructor to teach – TROT. While acting as resource developer, director of instruction, and executive director, she taught 45 weekly volunteers safe helping and handling techniques, schooled and trained 12 horses and ponies, supervised and developed assistant instructors, while teaching 4 – 6 half day sessions of TROT classes for approximately 80 students a week.
In 1989-90, at The College of the Holy Names in Oakland, CA, she obtained a Master of Arts degree with an emphasis in Spiritual Psychology. While at the Institute of Culture and Creation Centered Spirituality, she worked as an intake counselor and group facilitator for near death youth, and women with homebound disabilities, at the Center for Attitudinal Healing in Tiburon, CA. As she completed her thesis, she worked as the manager for NCEFT (National Center for Equine Facilitated Therapy) in Woodside, CA. She is a 1965 graduate of the University of Arizona with a BA in Philosophy and English.
In the early 90s, Barbara developed the therapeutic riding program at Sierra Tucson and co-founded FETE, Medicine Horse, in Flagstaff, AZ. At Sierra Tucson, a private psychiatric hospital, she developed and coordinated Sierra Tucson’s Integrated Riding Resource Program for adolescents, family week treatment, the eating disorders, and trauma resolution units, while training the hospital medical staff in her model for equine facilitated experiential learning process work – now trademarked as ADVENTURES IN AWARENESS (AIA)™.
In 1995 Barbara developed the AIA/EEL (Equine Experiential Learning) Institute featuring ADVENTURES IN AWARENESS (AIA) - an equine facilitated experiential learning process for the teaching of equine facilitated experiential learning (EFEL), and/or the practice of equine facilitated psychotherapy (EFP). The purpose of the AIA/EEL Institute is to provide educators, health, horse, and other animal professionals with an experiential “learning through doing” opportunity to develop competency in the principles, theory, and practice of EFEL and EFP utilizing the structure of AIA, while simultaneously engaging in a personal development process.
AIA’s 5 DAY Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning Curriculum is an enrichment and prevention program for at risk youth, and those with severe emotional and behavioral disturbances; it features the AIA™ process. AIA promotes working with horses as a reflective and reflection experience, mirroring personal and interpersonal relationships. The specially designed interactive and inner-active exercises develop communication (including interspecies) skills, promote team building, promote self developed insights and contribute to the ability to be responsible for self. The basic AIA principle is that awake aware responsible individuals living the Adventures In Awareness safety agreement make healthy behavior choices.
In 2004 the Adventures In Awareness Internship Program™ grew out of the AIA/EEL Institute into a comprehensive 14 day curriculum of 3 short courses -3 days - (TASTE of AIA, Energy of Relationships, Equine Perspective) and the longer 4 day professional facilitation skills workshop aka HAT RANCH ADVENTURE.
Students seeking a completion certificate or AIA Certificate of Merit may study the AIA website for further details. www.adventuresinawareness.net
Barbara has served on the NARHA (North American Riding for the Handicapped) Board of Directors – the NARHA Ways and Means, Health Education and Standards Committees. She co-founded EFMHA (Equine Facilitated Mental Health Association), a section of NARHA, and serves as liason to NARHA Standards Committee. A past EFMHA President she remains active on the EFMHA Curriculum Development and Standards Committees.
She is a founding board member for Animal Therapy Association (ATA) [which recently merged with People, Animals & Nature (PAN)], an organization developing animal assisted therapy as a profession, linking existing ‘model’ practices, and generating educational degree programs.
The Adventures In Awareness Internship Program is an active
member of the Equine Guided Education Association,
A National Heritage Foundation, www.equineguidededucation.org
Barbara lives in Tucson, AZ with her dog CIDAR and cat
Buttercup. The Handbook of Equine Facilitated Experiential Learning
is her first book. Book #2, AIA’s JOURNEY RIDE, is a work in process.
The ADVENTRUES IN AWARENESS (AIA) process promotes working with horses as an experiential(learn by doing) learning opportunity. Horses behaviorally mirror our interpersonal relationship dynamic. Acute observation, mindfulness practice, of these inner-active gestalts by facilitator(s), group members, and safety support staff produces remarkably accurate pictures of psyche’s inner process. The word, gestalt, as defined by Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary is: “a structure, configuration, or pattern of physical phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable from its parts in summation”.
As in the practice of dream work, this noticing of expressed observations with attention and intention through the feedback process (discussed in the round pen reasoning chapter) and linked to current life situation produces self-directed insights. “When the student is ready, the teacher (teaching) appears.”
Participants explore what horses can teach humans about life skills. AIA’s specifically designed interactive exercises focus on the development of relationship skills, while providing opportunities to practice interpersonal communication, including interspecies communication.
The intention of AIA is to develop personal reflective skills grounded in self responsibility, while expanding awareness to become more fully conscious of internal thoughts that contribute to one’s experience of reality. Expanded consciousness is associated with developing empowerment. Authentically empowered individuals make healthy behavior choices, living comfortably in peace and support of one another and our planet.
The purpose of this handbook is to set forth the basic principles of equine facilitated experiential learning (EFEL), as developed, practiced, and taught by myself, the originator of ADVENTURES IN AWARENESS (AIA). The AIA process is a template, giving structure and form, for the teaching and practice of equine facilitated experiential learning process work, the term coined to describe equine facilitated experiential learning – EFEL. It is generally the professional educator (professional horse person) who actually teaches EFEL. Often, AIA is the treatment approach utilized by the licensed/credentialed mental health professional in the practice of equine facilitated psychotherapy (EFP).
Frequently people ask me how I came to this work. Where did I get the notion that animals communicate with humans? How can I believe that certain animals, like certain human beings, and particular places in Nature, are highly evolved spiritual guides offering wisdom and counsel in creating increasingly peaceful, mutually supportive, interdependent relationships nurturing harmony and balance (mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually) with a reality of inclusive abundance?
The truth is I have always lived in a world where animals and nature communicate. This reality went underground as I matured in the environment of collective culture, media managed child care practices, and limitations of group mind school curriculums. Phrases such as “you are such an imaginative child, learn to live in the real world, live up to your potential, stop daydreaming and get with the program”, peppered my youth and young adult life. And I continued to sit on rocks and become rock, lean into a tree to be tree.
In May of 1973, a near death experience (NDE) provided the impetus to co-found Therapeutic Riding of Tucson,
Inc. (TROT), with my best friend, Nancy McGibbon and the mentoring support help of our friend, Bazy Tankersley. The integration of this NDE is something I am still living. Then, in the activity of being a corporate wife, mother of two bright, precocious children, and an active junior leaguer establishing a beneficial community health and educational service (TROT), this intense experience burrowed deep within my psyche.
In Tucson, Arizona, in 1973, there was no context or conceptual reality available to support the experience of dying, time traveling to visit then husband and children during their day, while simultaneously enduring a life review process, and being with a VOICE FEEL – EMBRYONIC LIGHT urging me to go back. “Now is not your time my child, you must go back”. A massive shift in my reality base continues to unfold thirty years later. The more I tell my truth to myself, the more information becomes available. How to synthesize, translate and share is my creative purpose and process. ADVENTURES IN AWARENESS (AIA) is the result.
Experiences teaching the in-service sessions for Sierra Tucson hospital staff during the early 90’s became the seeds of AIA. Educating others in the methodology and processes of the STIRRUP barn ( Sierra Tucson’s Integrated Riding Resource Program ) provided valuable equine experiential learning for myself and staff. Abundant opportunities to ‘train’ referent guest professionals from around the world served to hone and polish AIA. A bibliography of the significant authors and teachers who contributed ideas, theories, and concepts which I have generalized to working with horses and people is listed at the end of this handbook.
The evolution of this work and its theory base is liberally illustrated with personal stories of the horses whose identities have not been disguised. In the case of the people involved, their names have been changed in order to preserve the privacy pledged to each person in an AIA session.
People often ask about the significance or importance of consciousness? How does awareness contribute to knowledge of personal beliefs? And what is the effect on an individual’s quality of life? The following story from the early days of STIRRUP illustrates possibilities. For me the story offers a description of both the AIA process and life lived in relationship.