It all began with a horse named Conan. Or more pointedly, it began with a whisper. Dr. Allison Feduccia was mourning the loss of her dog of 15 years and the residual wounds of the pandemic during her second night of a challenging ayahuasca retreat. “I felt like I was in the middle of the desert with nothing and that I’d been abandoned there. It was just this wall of grief that I was immersed in.” But then, Feduccia heard a gentle voice saying to her, “You need to go reconnect with horses.” As a child, Feduccia had cleaned out her neighbors’ horse stalls for the chance to ride. “I was just enamored by their size and their gentle nature.” But she had lost touch with that side of herself long ago. The next week, she found a local horse rescue near her home in Santa Cruz, California, and, fatefully, met Conan. 

Conan was a 12-year-old palomino paint who was processing his own trauma, having recently been chased and bitten by a dog. “He was on the fritz, just very afraid of everything. Nobody could really ride him because he was spooking so much.” Conan and Feduccia developed a close, healing bond that continues to benefit them both. “I started to tap into this really calm feeling and it lifted a lot of the grief and pain and sadness that I’d been feeling. And in the relationship that we developed, he became really trusting of me, and he stopped being so afraid of everything. It felt like, together, we’re going through a healing journey.” 

Shaped by her journey with Conan, Dr. Feduccia drew on her neuropharmacology background and years of experience as a psychedelics educator to develop a groundbreaking online course with a team of experts called Psychedelic Support: Harnessing the Healing Power of Horses and Psychedelics. It’s a program that introduces professionals, practitioners, and the curious to the possibilities of combining two long-standing therapeutic disciplines: equine therapy and psychedelic healing. 

It begins with our history with these animals, as well as the unique characteristics that make them well-suited as therapeutic assistants. Horses are herd animals, Dr. Feduccia reminds us, and “they’ve adapted to survive by working together in a unit. They don’t communicate by barking like dogs, because they don’t want to alert predators to where they are, so they’re able to sense if another horse’s heart rate goes up, or the movement of another horse that would indicate, ‘hey, it’s time to flee.’ They are more intuitive.” This unique intuition has been used for decades as an alternative to traditional talk therapy, wherein the horse acts as “the second therapist in the room.” In building a relationship with the horse, the patient is able to process feelings and experiences that they might struggle to verbalize. 

Psychedelics occupy a similar space in alternative therapies, offering patients a method of mediation beyond words. These two intuitive therapies seem like such a natural fit for integration, you’d expect to be bombarded by resources as soon as you type them into your search bar. Yet, the internet — and the world of psychology — remain curiously empty on the subject. Dr. Feduccia is hoping to get the conversation started with this new course, however. “I see this as another era for the horse, where we might discover some other unique gifts that they have to offer us.”

To learn more about the potential for this burgeoning therapeutic integration, be sure to check out Dr. Feduccia’s Harnessing the Healing Power of Horses and Psychedelics.

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