Coherence in Horse Guided Empowerment®

Achieving coherence of mind, body and soul is becoming more and more interesting for a lot of people these days. 

Many new programs and therapies around coherence are coming onto the market, and the offering is huge. 
What they all have in common:

They want to help us become more centered and less prone to sickness.

Sense of Coherence

The concept of a sense of coherence (SOC) originated from Aaron Antonovsky in 1979 to explain why some people become sick under stress while others stay healthy.

Sense of coherence or SOC is a mixture of optimism combined with a sense of control.

The SOC has three main components:

• Comprehensibility - understanding events in life.
• Manageability - being able to take care and have control over the event in my life.
• Meaningfulness - making sense of live, the joy of living, and seeing a purpose.

According to Antonovsky, the last component is the most important one.

What effect does the sense of coherence have in your life?

What Antonovsky wanted to find out when he came up with the SOC concept was the answer to the question:

The SOC measures how people view life, how they manage stressful situations and how they identify and use the resources available to them to maintain and develop their health.

These resources could be things like money, intelligence or education, self‐esteem, preventive health orientation, social support, etc.
Obviously some people may have more money than others, or come from a more stable family background, and thus might find life easier to deal with.

However, the theory is not about how much you have - it is what you make of what you have.

When you have a sense of coherence, you see the world as something
that is manageable, understandable, and meaningful.

Whilst Antonovsky over 30 years ago still believed that the sense of coherence is relatively stable over time, we now know that it can change through life, same as the resources available to us may change.

Much of this concept of coherence is built on the idea of salutogenesis, which is an approach to human health that examines the factors that may contribute to the promotion and maintenance of physical and mental well-being rather than disease. 

Focus on the positive and on empowerment

And this is exactly where Horse Guided Empowerment® comes in - in all our sessions, and very different from a usual therapy, we focus on the positive aspects. We look for strength and positive qualities in our clients instead of categorizing people according to their weakness.

Letting people see what they can achieve rather than what they lack, we raise their self-awareness, self-esteem and thus their ability to self-manage their life.

• We don't lecture clients, but let them explore.
• We help them get out of their comfort zone and expand, without pushing.
• We call it empowerment and not therapy.

With a flexible approach and a setting that is adapted to the clients capabilities and needs, we make sure that every session ends with a positive experience and an increase in empowerment. 

Coherence of mind, body and soul

How do we achieve a high sense of coherence and how can the horses in particular help with that?

Read more in detail about studies conducted by the Institute of Heartmath which showed how horses can help us in getting into a better state of coherence where mind, body and and thoughts are aligned, which again is important for emotional, mental, and physical healing.