Well, so far we've talked a bit about family constellations in general, eh, their origin, albeit quite succinctly, because the goal isn't to delve deep into the practice of family constellations, eh, but to bring the foundations of how this happens with horses. And we also did some experiential exercises to start feeling the magic of looking at your own family system from a new perspective. If you were already familiar with the systemic laws I presented here in the last class , right, belonging, balance, and hierarchy, eh, you probably heard about this in a different way.
Because I believe this study, eh, of the systemic field, of phenomenology, eh, and especially the role of horses in all of this, it has to be a very practical study and it aligns with our personal journey. So, that was how I learned. I am not someone who keeps studying the origin a lot, the history of how everything happened, eh, or what such a person said, rather I go deep into the essence of it and bring it into my life .
And then I bring my own reflections on this. It has worked for me and it is in this way that I have contributed to other people's lives as well. So, if you haven't watched those classes, I recommend you watch them.
Eh, even if you are already a therapist, even if you already work with the systemic view , with the forces of love, because I brought it in a very light way. By the way, as you can see, this entire course is being recorded in the flow. The horses are here by my side, I'll show them to you.
So, it's just me, the camera, and the herd, because that is also how I facilitate the therapeutic practices here. I am looking to enter the most meditative state possible, as focused as possible, to truly bring only the essence of this work, which is a very big work, it is a very spiritual work, and I feel it is a great message to be heard, right? So now we are going to talk a bit more about the horses ' performance in this systemic field.
Eh, and I want to say first of all that I feel we are crawling in this perception as humanity. I feel that we still have a lot to learn eh about the performance of horses. Biotechnology is coming with more and more force to prove these things that were previously taken only by empiricism.
Eh, artificial intelligence itself is managing to decode sonic communications eh between species. So, we’re going to have another great wave of learning about animal intelligence as a whole, right? I feel that this work is still in its infancy, and I don't want to exhaust every meaning horses can bring to human consciousness here.
My idea here is to humbly and briefly share my 5 years of experience working with a herd of horses, and hopefully, promote a transformation in your perspective. As I said at the beginning, this isn't a professional training course, but rather a course of information and transformation. Information, because I’m compiling everything I feel is essential and fundamental to this work; and transformation, because with this organized information, you can start to change how you view horses and, perhaps , allow them to make you a better human being, just as I’ve been doing for a few years.
As that little sign over there says, life doesn't come with an instruction manual, but it does have horses. I feel that these animals have a great capacity to make us better people. And well, when I was about to start this class, Ternura appeared here , this beautiful Arabian mare, a great constellation horse.
I think she came to give me a hand so we could talk a little bit more about this. When we talk about horse-assisted family constellation, we’re citing a term coined by Paulo Neumer, who is at least the main reference we have to this day as the pioneer of the constellation process with horses in Brazil and the world. Other systemic therapeutic practices were already being carried out, such as Rud Knappen's systemic coaching with horses and other methods of training people through equine awareness, mainly because we know that horses have a unique sensitivity regarding our emotional processes.
So even people who trained horses were already using them to train people themselves, since they are very reliable in their biofeedback. So, I will briefly tell you what my path was within this movement. In 2019, some people already know, but in December 2019 I left my whole life behind and went in search of my dream, which at the time I didn't know what it was, but I knew it wasn't the life I was living.
So, uh, I ended a 4-year relationship, and at the moment I was ending it, my horse, who was in the backyard, came over and put his head between me and my then-partner. This was perhaps the first clear interference of horses in my life. Of course, before that, I lost my first horse, who was hit by a car.
I feel that this also reverberated very deeply in my life. But a clear and evident action from a horse of mine was him putting his head through the house window between me and my then-partner the moment we were breaking up. And that really left a mark on me, but I took it as a coincidence.
My path in search of horses continued. At the moment I didn't know it, but later I came to realize it was in search of them. And after a motorcycle trip through Latin America, I ended up in Argentina, where I took a Doma India course with the Escarpate tribe.
There I had other great moments of connection with horses, above all. I always tell this story. On a day I went in, maybe it was the fourth or fifth day of the course with Cristóbal, I stepped into the round pen and he said: "Now, Guto, I want you to enter, but I don't want the Guto who has been here with me for I don't know how long to enter, or the Guto who already worked with horses, or who already had horses back in Brazil, or the Guto who wants to impress everyone here as the best Escarpate student.
""I want the Guto who, in the dead of night, picks up the guitar and sings a song to himself to enter the round pen. ""I want the Guto who writes a poem. ""I want the Guto closest to his essence to enter here.
" When he told me that—this was in 2020, in January or February of 2020—it touched me very deeply; it's as if I had stripped away everything I thought I had to be to enter that round pen more vulnerably before that horse. And that changed everything. I had much more connection, the horse approached me much faster, and I mounted him and worked with him for the first time, and it was beautiful—everyone was kind of amazed at what happened, and I felt something very different that I had never felt until then.
Uh, I called it connection, right? But other people call it a state of flow. it's when the movement happens without you having to think about it and you feel it much more deeply.
That was perhaps the second time I was able to prove, in a sensory and perceptible way, what I had intuited existed when I was a child. I always imagined that horses had something more. I always imagined they were beings that interacted with us in a different way, not just as high-performance machines, not just pulling carts, not just as beasts of burden, but that they touched a very deep aspect of our soul.
So that was the second time I could perceive this through that state of flow inside the round pen there with the horses. When I returned to Brazil, I received a message from someone I had met in Peru during that motorcycle trip and she said: "Look what's near my city. " Then she sent me a video about Paulo Neuman's horse constellation.
And that was when I first came into contact with this therapeutic practice. I participated in a workshop with Paulo Neuman. Later on, we became friends many times over.
I went there to visit him at Ecos, which was the training space for people and horses that he had . And I met other people who also worked with horse constellation. That was when I joined the Caruna Saberes school.
I graduated in the first class of the Caruna school. Later, I became a teacher at the school and today I work there teaching people how to perform horse constellation. But every time I enter a field to work with a person, I am more impressed by the capacity horses have to point us toward solutions for personal dilemmas.
You will find in various sources, in various schools, the reasons why this happens. I honestly feel that the role of both a constellation teacher and a facilitator is not to explain the reasons why. In fact, Bert Hellinger has a story he tells in one of his books, which says that in the city of Cologne, a shoemaker lived in poverty because he couldn't sell his shoes.
And one day he left the cut leather on the table and, at night, magical dwarfs appeared, hidden from him, and stitched the shoes with a superhuman delicacy and perfection using the leather he had left there. He sold those shoes and sold them for a very high price. With the money, he bought new leather, left it cut on the table, and the next day the shoes were stitched again with great delicacy and finesse.
And he kept doing this many times, selling shoes for higher prices, and he began to grow rich. Once he told his wife that it wasn't him sewing those shoes, and that during the night someone else was doing it, because he would leave the leather cut and the shoe would appear finished. So he and his wife decided to hide inside a closet; they left the leather cut and saw that magical dwarves arrived there at night, sewed the shoes , and left them ready the next morning.
So they decided to, uh, thank these dwarves and sewed clothes for them. The wife made clothes, the shoemaker himself made footwear for these dwarves , and they left the leather cut, and next to it, they left the clothes and footwear. And then the dwarves came, sewed the shoes, took the clothes, took the footwear, and said: "Yay, we no longer need to sew shoes to have clothes and footwear.
" And they went away and never came back. This little story has to do with how sometimes we want to reveal the magic, but revealing the magic can weaken the magic. I prefer to focus on what the horses have to offer me than to try to put what they have to offer me into the little boxes of my cognition, which is so tiny compared to the therapeutic, spiritual, uh, transcendental capacity these animals have, so to speak.
I do see this work as spiritual work, a spirituality manifested in practice. There is a method, there is a way of doing things, there are laws that govern, uh, the conduct of a facilitator; however, we cannot invalidate that horses, uh, act far beyond what we can encode as systemic laws or something like that, because everything acts beyond our cognition, right? I said that and a piece of fruit just fell next to the phone, it couldn't be seen on camera, but, uh, these are those "aha" moments, right, that we are immersed in a greater whole of which horses are also a part.
The point is that they weigh 500 kg, that they have a very powerful muscle mass, nerves, bones, and a will of their own. And they are at the service of this morphic field, of phenomenology, of the systemic view. I don't know, they are at the service of themselves, and we can take advantage of that to become better human beings.
Whether there is or isn't a spiritual aspect in this work, my question is the following: is there anything that doesn't have a spiritual aspect involved? If we are alive, it is proof that there is something spiritual animating, giving spirit, giving soul to our existence. If there is anything around us, if there is a universe around us, it is proof that spirituality has manifested itself in matter, right?
So, whether or not there is a spiritual aspect to this work, I would say that you certainly don't need to be a medium, a clairvoyant, a priestess, a drummer, or a spiritist to do this work. No, you certainly don't have to, because it's just about looking and bringing it in, looking at the horses and bringing it in, putting our heart, the qualities of our heart, the absence of judgment, the absence of a sense of self and other, and the perception that everything is, that everything is part of it. That, from this moment on, we can see the horses' actions as something that brings us clarity, right?
So that is a small insight I wanted to share. If there is something spiritual in this work, I ask, is there anything that doesn't have something spiritual, right ? A footnote is worth adding here.
Bert Hellinger himself designated his family constellation therapy as constellations of the spirit and brought the love of the spirit as a love that has no conditions to be love, a love that happens in relation to all that is. So, talking about horse-assisted family constellations and citing it as a work devoid of any spirituality, I feel like that invalidates all the greatness that this work can have. It's just that we are very conditioned not to be able to talk about spirituality, not to be able to talk about God, about love, about presence, about divine presence, about the spirit itself.
Talking about this, because of the paths already paved by religions, leads us to some dead ends, right? And aspects very disconnected from the religious essence, which is to reconnect, which is to reconnect us to a spiritual plane, right? Today, when we talk about religion, we think of specific doctrines, but religion, in its essence, actually has to do with reconnecting earthly consciousness to a spiritual consciousness.
So I think the horses, because they have no religion, because they don't care if you're Catholic, Evangelical, Spiritist, Candomblé, Buddhist, or whatever religion or doctrine, they will work with you because you are a human being, and that changes everything. So, yes, there is something spiritual in this work, but there is also something very practical, very grounded, very, uh, palpable. So, 100%of this work is perceptible with your own eyes.
This work of constellations with horses, it breaks the skeptic. Because when a constellation is with dolls, or when the constellation is with people, it's very easy for you to say: "Oh, they're faking it" or "Oh, this means nothing to me. " Now, when a being, as I said, of 500 kg, with its own free will, at liberty, in a herd, expressing its natural behavior, reacts to your internal aspects, then it becomes very, very palpable, it becomes very visible and it is undeniable that something is happening there.
So that's why I like to say, family constellation with horses, it breaks the skeptic, right? I was broken by it. I was very skeptical.
Let's go to the next class.
