MONROE — A 2005 Monroe High School graduate is placing her career’s future and her clients’ well-being on the strong backs of horses, metaphorically at least.
Mason LeStarge, of Monroe, a long-time horse-riding instructor and life coach, has decided to combine her two passions into a new career, having recently earned the designation of a certified equine assistant coach.
Such coaches are not riding coaches in the traditional sense, or even volunteer ranch hands. They are not even psychologists. Far from it.
During the therapy sessions there is no riding at all, just guided interaction with LeStarge, her clients and the horses.
“Horses are non-judgmental, and they have an uncanny ability to know what’s wrong” with a human, she said. “You let the horse do its thing and it opens people up to what they are really feeling.”
Rather than ride the horse — which is itself a type of therapy — clients engage in more routine tasks such as feeding, grooming and leading the horse on walks, where they can talk and bond with the animal.
Equine assisted therapy is described by experts as “a holistic, experiential and highly specialized form of therapy” that involves working in one or more horses, a certified therapist and/or an expert horse handler. And it can be done in combination with or without a mental health therapist.
In recent years, such equine-assisted therapies have proliferated, in a manner not unlike the emergence of therapy dogs long used to assist people in dealing with trauma. Horses too have long worked with veterans returning from war and even those people who find themselves on the autism spectrum.
LeStarge said she has seen enough to make her a believer in the healing power of these large animals. It’s a mystical power that’s hard to quantify but one that the 36-year-old former x-ray imaging technologist has experienced first-hand. Among the traumas she has endured in her life include them the loss of relatives to cancer, job loss and a 2017 divorce.
“Horses have kept me alive, basically,” she said. “For many, the world as we know it seems like it’s ending more and more every day; just getting sadder and sadder. I want to help them overcome that.”
The single mom has long served as a riding coach at Country View Equestrian Center and later worked as a life-coach for a group of local people suffering from stresses great and small. But she just signed-up her first equine assisted therapy client and is eager to work with anyone who needs help with a new type of therapy to this region.
“This is something you have to try but your mind has to be open or the horse will actually know you are not being open,” she said. “I like to say it is like magic because people don’t get it until they see it happen.”
She currently works out of Country View at N2192 Clarno Road, Monroe, and encourages anyone who wants to give her therapy a try to make an initial appointment.
“I do specialize in women who are working on trauma,” she said. “Or those who are grieving — really anyone who wants to work in a way that you can’t put into a medical field type of box.”
For more information, or to make an appointment, call LeStarge at 608-558-3107.
