Helka Lehtinen - animal communicator
You Can Leave your Hat Off
Get back to nature, learn to talk Horse
The Equilibre Gaia natural horsemanship school nestles deep in the Ancosa-Montagut mountains surrounded by sweet-scented pine trees and rosemary. It is a joint venture run by Finnish anthropologist Helka Lehtinen and her partner, animal behaviour therapist Victor Ros Pueo. “I came to write about horses, but they ended up becoming my life” Helka laughs.
Their property extends across 400 acres from mountain top to valley spring, and is home to ten Arabian stallions and mares, a herd of frisky goats, a gaggle of geese, four dogs, a supremely relaxed cat and the couple’s three-year old son, Vito. A huge, fluffy, brown and white Saint Bernard stretches out in the sunshine in front of the door to the house, letting out deep snuffling sighs of contentment as he sleeps. Four years ago their pinky-ginger farmhouse was so dilapidated it didn’t even have windows. It’s a testament to hard work that the building is now a comfortable family home, complete with solar-generated electricity, clean water from the well, and a garden full of broccoli, potatoes & alfalfa.
Victor and Helka teach much more than basic riding skills, they teach people how to communicate with their animals. “You can call it horse whispering if you like, but this is not something magical or mystical” Helka assures me, “what we do is all based on the latest scientific theory and practice”.
Helka grew up in the north of Finland, and has really good memories of riding out there: “One winter the sea froze and there was this huge expansion of white space - we galloped for hours over the ice.” She became a riding instructor whilst studying anthropology at Edinburgh, and came to Spain to research how people who worked with horses communicated with them. After travelling over 500km with some “pretty rough” Spanish cowboys, she met Lucy Rees, a Welsh horse trainer and writer based in Spain. Lucy knew all the local trainers and introduced Helka to Victor, who was at that time running a small farm 40km south of Barcelona.
For his part, Victor had just given up a successful career as a naval surveyor: “I found I kept asking myself, ‘what am I doing with my life?’” One day he costed out his retirement dream of running a little farm in the countryside, and realized he did not have to wait. He left his company and bought the largest farm he could afford. The property came complete with stables, and an old, troubled horse that couldn’t be moved. “I wasn’t very close to horses when I first arrived. I’d had a nasty fall when I was 14 or 15, and still kind of blamed the horse. But this animal was scarred, and more scared than I was, so I took it as a challenge, to try and find out what was wrong and put it right.”
Nothing Victor did seemed to make any difference until he read the, ‘The Horses Mind’ by Lucy Rees. Over the next few months he used Lucy’s techniques and gradually began to win the horse’s trust. “Other trainers and riders used to pop by to see how we were doing, and everyone could see the results were extraordinary.” His own fear had disappeared during the process, and he began to work with Rees, teaching others how to avoid problems with their animals based on a greater understanding of horse-behaviour in the wild.
“When you examine horses in nature, you see they graze for 16 to 17 hours a day, so they need a lot of space to move around and keep healthy. Horses have no teeth or claws to defend themselves from predators; their only protection is to run. So horses are social animals - they have to be for survival. A horse on its own would naturally be too frightened to stoop its head down to eat – but if another horse is there to keep watch, the horse can feed. If you come to a horse in a calm, quiet, peaceful way, and offer it the choice between being on its own and being with you, it is most likely to choose to be with you,” Victor explains. “The result is the creation of a completely different kind of relationship to the usual one based on dominance, where the horse is forced to submit.”
When people come to work with the horses at the farm there are no ropes, reins or saddles. Just you and the horse. Helka continues: “People come here with lots of mental noise, we all think so much about the past and in the future and we often don’t concentrate on the present moment enough. Part of being here at the farm is breathing in the clear mountain air, and tuning into the peaceful nature of the horse. We want people to experience a little bit of peace when they come, to experience being present in a very beautiful moment with an animal that isn’t thinking about yesterday or tomorrow.”
BECOME A HORSE WHISPERER
Equilibre Gaia is open throughout the summer for individual or group classes and workshops. See http://equilibregaia.wordpress.com/ for more details. Natural Horsemanship classes cost E.25 per class and last between one-two hours. To visit the farm, book lessons or get more information call Helka on 977.266.021 or email her at equilibregaia@gmail.com.
Helka and Victor were talking to Alison Micklem alisonmicklem.blogspot.com
July 09
