Animal Therapy – White Witch Chronicle

What a special pleasure it was this week to work with friends Joan Ranquet and Ellie Laks to help Danara, a sweet mare living her best life at The Gentle Barn in Santa Clarita, California.

I met Danara during a class field trip with students. Besides being stunned by her beauty, I was drawn to her proud and lively energy. Despite the telltale signs of progressive weakening in her legs due to DSLD and a twisted front leg from a previous injury, Danara exudes the spirit of her Arabian heritage and the light that shines from her large black eyes is magnetic. I knew instantly that I could offer her some help. Thanks to lessons I have learned from Jade and Greystoke and Raffi, former residents at our retirement farm who also required management for progressive DSLD, I had a trick or two up my sleeve. (https://thehorse.com/1124890/updates-on-dsld-in-horses/)

Ellie Laks is founder and the powerhouse behind The Gentle Barn, a network of sanctuaries that offer a safe sanctuary for animals of all kinds. They create the opportunity for people to come and commune with cows, pigs, sheep, horses and others through their Cow Hug Therapy programs and interactive tours. Ellie’s connection to the animals in her care is palpable and Danara was no exception. So when I suggested I could come out to show her a kinesiology taping pattern that I developed to help my own horses with DSLD, she lit up like a neon sign.

Joan Ranquet, founder of the Communication With All Life University and animal communicator extraordinaire, hosted our Foundation Level Massage course at her farm that same week. Joan’s friendship and mentorship has been influential to me personally for over 20 years and particularly in recent years, where her professional mentorship has helped to elevate my school and practice to new heights. I am so grateful for her gentle encouragement in the direction of all things right for the planet and her enduring curiosity and readiness to explore anything and everything that makes animal’s lives better. She pulled all the threads together, including securing tape (I had not travelled with any of my usual tools), arranging schedules and singing my praises to make sure that doors opened to bring all the right people together. So here we are, three influential founders within the animal healthcare industry on a Saturday morning, in jeans and tshirts doing what we love most, kneeling in the dirt, sharing our thoughts and concerns and skills to try our best to care for this beautiful little gray mare, cast off by others once they had broken her down and she could no longer live up to their expectations.

Danara stood patiently as our team of 5 taped all four legs. Joan had invited her student Audrey, who was kind enough to drive from an hour away to bring the needed tape and her enthusiasm. Ellie had included Alfredo, who is responsible for the rehabilitation efforts at The Gentle Barn and who Danara clearly was enamored of. I walked them through the proper tape handling and measuring skills and designed a taping protocol that they could use for her regularly. I coached Alfredo as he practiced the taping on a few legs. With each relaxing breath, blink of her eye and lowering of her head, Danara shared her appreciation and relief.

I count myself among the most fortunate people I know. I spend my days doing work I love, sharing my passion with students and graduates and horselovers and pet owners. I get to learn from the most amazing people within my chosen industry…my first mentor and coach Jack Meagher, Equi-Tape founder Dr. Beverly Gordon and my instructor and co-teachers Lumi Michelle Rolley and James Ruder, and countless others who have shaped the way I work and teach. To bring that collective knowledge together, to kneel on a Saturday afternoon at the feet of this creature, so deserving and so accepting of our help, with these kindred spirits who live their life in the service of animals…I simply cannot imagine anything more rewarding. To be able to offer support, touch and knowledge and to receive in turn warm breath across my cheek, a soft kind eye turned thankfully in my direction, to see the visible softening in the muscles and tendons that work all day to hold her up.

Such a simple thing. From our childhood desire to pet horses, each of us had carved out a life that included doing just that day in and day out. One horse, one story of so many stories. We were just a few people, sitting in the dirt, playing with tape. We weren’t inventing anything new or solving world problems or changing the world…or were we?

Animals are like wet cement…everything that touches them leaves an impression.

This was not a name or a path that I gave myself. Like so many people find, your true self reveals itself to you over time, over trials and over all else. Many of us spend a great many years standing alongside our truth rather than in it, an observer of our actions, a cautious participant in our own amazing unfolding. Stepping in to your truth is not often an easy task but a necessary one to truly experience your life at its richest. Sometimes you step into that truth and sometimes you fall and sometimes, you are pushed.

The White Witch is one who strives to do no harm and to choose her actions out of a desire to be one with nature. She gets much help from the natural world around her in this endeavor. And she is often completely and peaceably unawares of her own spellcasting. But cast a spell she does. Her small actions often create ripples and her reach is far beyond her sight. She is a manifestor, but her best work is done close to her home and almost without her conscious participation. Others tend to draw her best work out of her as she loves to be of service. But this can be her kryptonite as she will share her power easily with both friends and foes. But nature and its creatures never betray her.

My personal calling was always to be of service to the animals in some way. Following the traditional paths proved too disciplined for a distractible and restless mind like mine. Though my heart longed to be a doctor to my furred friends and my body bent itself easily to the task, my mind was too often drawn to the remote corners of that world, where natural healing methods and wives tales and whisperers gathered and practiced their craft in the shadows.

But it wasn’t a natural place for me to reside. I came with no magical gift or special sense. I adhere steadfastly to the predictability of science and the reliability of experience. It was years before the animals themselves would reveal to me that all I needed I arrived with and everything that came after only sharpened my vision.

I have been blessed with teachers of every kind and the universe gave me at least the curiosity to hang on their every word. From my mentors and my teachers came my knowledge, but my knowing came from the horses, the dogs, the birds and the fantastic creatures I found beneath my hands.

It was actually a woman raised entirely on the back of a horse who first gave me the nickname White Witch. Until that time, I only knew the white witch as the villian from The Chronicles of Narnia, favorite books of my childhood passed on to me by my sister. But a White Witch is anyone who strives to do the right thing in the name of nature, to do no harm, to exercise the will of nature and bring about the health and well-being of her creatures, be they animals or children. Some are born, some are fashioned, but all are drawn by the magic of nature and seek the outdoors.

Perhaps you too, are a White Witch? Were you drawn by the idea of magic and tales of animals? Were you searching for the connection to nature and her ethereal powers? Perhaps the stories here will reveal to you the White Witch within, just as they did for me.

Category: Animal Therapy

Cohesive

Storytelling from the White Witch