Parallel Effects Equine

I want to tell you about something I have watched happen more than once.

The session finds its pace and something starts to move in the client’s body. Not dramatically. Just a shift or a softening somewhere. A breath that goes a little deeper than the ones before it.

One of the horses walks over. Then another. Sometimes all four find their way into the space around this one person, each of them attending to something different, each of them certain about where they need to be.

Not to the client’s hand, extended in greeting. Not to the space in front of them where most human interaction happens. To the place in their body where the thing is held. A shoulder carrying years of tension it has never been able to put down. A chest that has been braced so long the person stopped noticing. A place in the back that has been quietly aching through every session they have ever sat in with anyone.

They just stand there. Touching those places.

Breathing.

The client usually goes very still. Sometimes they cry. Not the effortful kind of crying that comes from being asked to access something. The other kind. The kind that arrives on its own because something has finally been met that has been waiting a long time to be met.

I have also watched a horse refuse to engage with clients who are performing or hiding behind a mask. They also refuse to disengage when a client’s mind was ready to move on before the body was ready. The horse stayed exactly where it was, at that place, with a patience and a certainty that I can only describe as knowing.

The body’s process was not finished. The horse knew before any of us did.

I cannot fully explain this. I just know to trust it completely.

The horses know where the work is.

They always find it.

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Surviving looks like this.

You get through the day. You do what needs to be done. You are functional, mostly. You show up for the people who need you. You hold it together in public and decompress in private and wake up the next morning and do it again.

From the outside it looks fine. From the inside it feels like you are always slightly bracing. Always half-waiting for the next hard thing. Always running a quiet background calculation of how much you have left and whether it will be enough to get through what is still coming.

There is no room for joy in survival mode. Not real joy. Not the kind that comes up unexpectedly and takes you by surprise. What passes for good is really just the absence of bad. A day where nothing went wrong. A moment where you weren’t needed by anyone. A night where your mind finally, briefly, went quiet.

You have forgotten what it feels like to actually land somewhere.

Living is different. Not easier necessarily — life does not stop being hard. But different in the way you are inside it. You check in with yourself before the catastrophising has finished. You notice a moment of pleasure and you actually feel it instead of watching it pass from a slight distance. You move through difficulty without being consumed by it. There is ground under your feet. There is something in you that is not just holding on.

You know the difference. You have known it for a long time.
You also know which one you have been living in.
That knowing — that quiet, persistent awareness that something is missing — is not a problem. It is your body telling you the truth. It has been telling you the truth for longer than you have been able to listen.

I want to help you listen.

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A glimpse into a 1-on-1 sessions with me.

You cannot perform your way through something you have no script for. There is no
right answer, no correct response, no way to do this wrong. There is only you, showing
up as you actually are. For many people that is the first time that has happened in a very
long time.

What follows is a three-way conversation between you, the horse, and me. It is not a
session you observe. It is something you are inside of. The horse tracks what is
happening in your body with precision.

⭐️

Come join us! Me — Michelle and my intuitive herd (Swayze, Jimmy, Two Socks and Whip) 🐴🐴🐴🐴 for The Equine Effect Fall Experience October 17th, 2026! Deepening into understanding the inner workings of your mind

Untangling your mind: Where thought becomes choice.

More info at www.paralleleffects.net

I have four horses.

When a client arrives, I do not decide which horse works with them. The horses do.

They scan. They assess. They determine what this particular person needs on this particular day, in this particular moment. Sometimes one horse comes forward. Sometimes more than one. Sometimes the dynamic shifts mid-session as the work moves and changes and the horses respond to what is actually happening in the client's body in real time.

Next session it will be different. The client will be different. What they are carrying will be different. The horses are not following a protocol. They are responding to a living human nervous system that is never exactly the same twice.

I did not design this. I cannot replicate it. I cannot manufacture it on a day when the horses have decided something else is needed. It is not a feature of my methodology.

It is the centre of it.

People ask me how I explain it. The honest answer is that I don't, not fully. What I can say is that I have watched it happen enough times, with enough different people, that I have stopped being surprised by the precision of it. A horse moving to the exact place in a client's body where something is held. A horse refusing to disengage when the client's mind is ready to wrap up but the body's process is not finished.

They know things. Not the way humans know things, through language and analysis and the stories we build around our experience. They know the way a body knows. Through sensation. Through presence. Through something that does not have a clean name but that every person who has stood in that space has felt.

You will feel it too.🤍

Two years ago my body stopped being something I could manage from the neck up.

Four major episodes in fourteen months. The kind that take you out completely: hemiplegia, the world tilting, the ground disappearing. Strong medication was the only available answer. Something in me knew that was not the path I was willing to take.
So I went looking for something else.

What I found, I did not expect. A practitioner working with somatic body-based process. From my very first session something happened that I had not experienced in any of the many things I had already tried: the meditation, the yoga, the breathing, the self-help practices that I had approached with the same determined willingness I brought to everything.

My body had a say.

It wasn't being overridden or managed or asked to perform a particular kind of healing. It was being listened to. Gradually, not dramatically, not overnight, something began to shift. A little more energy. Less fog. The tingling in my face slowly settling. The constant low hum of fear beginning to loosen its grip.

I have not had a major episode since. I know there are no guarantees what life will bring but having a foundation and living again is everything.
I tell you this not because it is a remarkable story. I tell you this because it is the only reason I do this work. I have been on both sides of this process. I know from the inside what it feels like when the mind has been overriding the body for so long that the body finally breaks through with force. I know what it feels like when the body is finally given permission to lead.

That is not a credential.

It is a conversion. The thing underneath everything I now offer.

Any horse person will tell you that their horses have made them a better person. Working with horses builds your patience and your out of box thinking skills to name a few. Mine have taught me the gift of pausing life for a second or two. Whether it is pausing to capture of picture of a moment you enjoy, or pausing and taking in what is happening in the moment and living in it. Taking the time to slow down and enjoy the life you are living is a skill we can all keep working on. And I will. 🫶🏼

www.paralleleffects.net