My 4 Legged Therapist

I am volunteering at a breast cancer resource organization, Living Beyond Breast Cancer, and wrote a blog about my experience with equine therapy. The blog and a link to LBBC is below. Here are a few thoughts that I didn’t turn in for the LBBC blog. During my sessions I was wearing neon pink and with neon green accents, to be precise, shoe coverings. Imagine a snow boot made out of rain jacket material with a zipper all the was up in the back with boot tread on the bottom and even a tiny little pocket. It was reasonable to wear them, as the corral had mud and a bit of poop. I didn’t want my shoes to end up the same, so I figured it was a perfect time to break out the “boots” that are so neon you must squint a little when you look directly at them. I am almost positive the horses were either blinded by them, or were extremely disappointed in my fashion sense.

The horses offered me little morsels of love, a side-eye here, a mane shake there—all giving me fluttery jitters. I decided not to give the horses food—that is pure bribery, and I wasn’t going to give myself that false sense of flattery. I want them to like me, for me… At my third visit some of the horses met me at the gate. Either they remembered me and were excited or they were like “I really don’t want to stand in the same spot for an hour just to put this bitch in her place” and they were choosing me over mind-numbing boredom. In all seriousness, the experience was a part of a tremendous turning point for me. I loved getting uncomfortable—in all senses, it was fucking freezing! But I loved the little attention, to the full attention I was getting. I had to stop because the weather got too cold and my bad leg, with limited circulation, was getting too cold. I get to start back up in the Spring, this time I may have to bribe the troop to get them to love me and my neon pink shoes. I could figure out how to make the link connect so you will have to use a few key strokes and copy/paste the link... You can find my full blog post at: https://www.lbbc.org/blog/healing-with-horses