Equine meditation: Horsing around with chakras, energy, truth and cockamamie hullabaloo

Constance Rizzo was busy meditating when Maribel the miniature horse found herself in need of a snuggle. As Rizzo sat in a yellow plastic chair with her eyes closed, hands on her thighs, Maribel walked over and placed her soft pink nose in Rizzo’s palm.

Rizzo jumped. Her eyes popped open. She smiled, reached out, and petted the horse on the head. Maribel liked this so much she spun in a half circle, backed up, and rubbed her wide gray bottom back and forth against Rizzo’s shoulder.

It seemed the horse had an itch she was trying to scratch. Anna Gassib, executive director of the Bergen Equestrian Center, assured the group of 14 women meditating inside the barn that this was not the case.

“What Maribel is doing there is aligning her root chakra with yours,” said Gassib, 50. “That means you’re questioning your belief system. She picked up on it! They know. You can lie to yourself. We do it all the time. But you can’t lie to horses. They speak the language of energy.”

A different kind of stable

Some stables provide homes for horses. Others train people how to ride.

The Bergen Equestrian Center has performed these roles for years, attracting generations of riders from Northern Jersey and New York City. The center, located in Overpeck Park in Leonia, is owned by Bergen County’s government, which closed the 22-acre facility for a five-month, $4.5-million renovation in 2009.

Gassib leased the facility six years ago, she said, maintaining it as a traditional stable.

She also added programs that turned the center into perhaps the only stable in the New York area that uses horses to heal human trauma.

“When someone experiences trauma, they have a physical reaction. Trauma lives in our body,” Gassib said. “Our muscles get tense. And horses read that.”

In this view, a full-grown horse operates like a 1,000-pound nerve ending, perpetually probing its surroundings for possible threats. Its evolution into one of the largest animals of prey on earth makes the horse a uniquely sensitive animal, Gassib said, attuned to nearby animals and their subtle changes of mood, hunger and intent.

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“Horses rely on reading the energy of those around them,” Gassib said. “We can walk into the subway and know when someone’s staring at us. We can feel it. We have these senses too, but we just don’t use them as much, so they’re not as evolved as a horse.”

Gassib mates her belief in the sensory powers of horses to a belief in chakras – networks of invisible energy nodes embedded throughout the body. Starting in eastern India in the 8th century, the notion of chakras grew in popularity and complexity among various Buddhist, Hindu and Qigong sects, which eventually identified anything from four and seven to 88,000 chakras.

The chakra at the top of our heads is believed to serve as the seat of spirituality. The one in our groin focuses on survival. Despite their different anatomies, Gassib said, horses have chakras with roughly equivalent locations and jobs.

And because horses are nice, Gassib believes, they like to rub their chakras against ours when they see we’re in pain.

“She aligned you! You’re healed!” Gassib said to Cristina Lopez, a Jersey City resident who participated in a recent meditation event at the center, when a blind miniature horse named Hank bonked Lopez’s shoulder. “This is what horses do. And if it gets too intrusive, just push her off!”

In this view, then, a speckled gray horse rubbing her bottom against a woman’s leg represents something more complex than itchy hindquarters. It’s a sign that Maribel sensed Rizzo's deep-down disquiet.

Rizzo finds this narrative persuasive.

“I’m a woman in long-term recovery from drugs and alcohol, so there is a lot of guilt, shame, loss, lack of love when you live a lifestyle like that,” said Rizzo, a Garfield resident who works as an addiction counselor. Maribel’s vigorous rub, Rizzo said, “is speaking to my root, my strength, my foundation. I’m building a stronger foundation in my life.”

A bunch of cockamamie hullabaloo

Six years ago, Gassib attended an equine therapy training at a ranch in Colorado. She was 44 and had never grieved her mother, who died when Gassib was 12.

As she stood inside a horse training ring, Gassib started to cry. A horse walked over and pressed its body against her.

“It was the first time I had cried about that in 30 years,” she said.

The experience confirmed Gassib’s hunch that horses can heal.

“I always kind of believed,” she said, “and that was the moment when I said, ‘Yup. I was right all along.’”

The experience happened right as Gassib finalized plans to lease the Bergen Equestrian Center. The facility sits quite literally in the shadow of the Palisades, two miles from the George Washington Bridge. Horses as healers may represent a growing business in the West, but here in Bergen County we pride ourselves as a skeptical bunch. Our culture takes a dim view of New Age mysticism, favoring instead Old Age values like cars, land, and stuff we can see.

Gassib knows this. On a regular basis, people in New Jersey find opportunities to state their opinion that this horse therapy stuff is a bunch of cockamamie hullabaloo. .

“I have people who say it all the time, [that] they don’t really buy it,” she said.

And that’s OK,  because plenty of other people are buying it. Gassib offers private sessions in which people pay up to $250 to spend an hour and 15 minutes getting their chakras into alignment with horses. Nonprofit groups including Covenant House, a national program for homeless youth, and Spring House, Bergen County’s halfway house for women recovering from addiction, send participants to the horse center for trauma treatment.

Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute are partnering with Gassib on the Man O’ War Project, a research study to determine whether horse therapy can address post-traumatic stress disorder and reduce suicide rates among veterans.

“Equine-Assisted Therapy is believed to benefit those with mental health disorders, but evidence is anecdotal,” according to the project’s website, which describes it as “the first university-led research trial aimed specifically at veterans diagnosed with PTSD to determine the effectiveness” of horse therapy.

In all, the healing work provides about 30 percent of the center’s revenue, Gassib said. The meditation sessions serve as a kind of hors d’oeuvre, introducing first-timers (and certain skeptical but open-minded newspaper columnists) to the whole idea.

“Meditation is like an introduction,” Gassib said. “Not everybody’s ready to face the dragon of trauma. But aren’t they entitled to a little bit of peace?”

The end of peace

During a recent meditation session, it was clear that horses occasionally find peace boring. After Maribel rubbed her bottom against Constance Rizzo, a little brown horse named Teddy did the same to Rizzo’s daughter, Francesca Bautista. From there Teddy wandered over to Rizzo and stuck his snout into her hand.

“SLUUURRRRRP!” came the noise of Teddy’s tongue against Rizzo’s palm.

“That sucking noise?” Gassib said. “That’s how they show they’ve reached a truth.”

From there Maribel left the circle, found an empty chair, and commenced rubbing her bottom against it. Gassib walked over, grabbed the chair and moved it away.

A few minutes later Maribel stopped in the dirt, raised her white mane into the air, and blew air through her cheeks, making a noise like “ThhhhBBBBTT!!”

Gassib looked up and smiled.

“Yeah,” she said. “She’s done.”

Email: maag@northjersey.com

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