When the Session Ends: Staying Regulated Between Appointments
What Horses Teach Us About Embodied Coherence in the Space Between
Author: Kerry Hayes, Equine-Assisted Leadership Coach
Author’s Note:
This essay was originally written for Kelly Kennedy’s August 2025 newsletter of The True Wellness Center, a leader in energy medicine. While it’s addressed to her community of energy practitioners and wellness seekers, the themes of coherence, regulation, and relational healing through the herd apply to anyone navigating a healing path, especially those looking to stay grounded between moments of guidance. I feel it also speaks to the space between sessions, and to the power of presence in the field.
When the session ends, the real work begins.
Many clients leave their Energy FLOW session, lymphatic therapy, or PEMF treatment feeling incredible; clear, grounded, lighter, even radiant. Then a few days later, the coherence starts to fade. The pressure creeps back in. Screens. Traffic. Dysregulated people. Self-doubt. It's not that the treatment didn’t work. It did.
The thing is energy medicine, like any medicine, is most powerful when it becomes a practice.
That’s the space I work in, the space between sessions. The time when clients are left to integrate, stabilize, and embody what was awakened in the treatment room. And surprisingly, my co-facilitators in that process are not machines or protocols, but horses.
Yes, horses.
Let me explain.
The Trouble with “Holding the Frequency”
As energy medicine grows in popularity and power, more of us are learning to tune in to the signals of the body and the field. We’re using sophisticated technologies to map the frequencies of inflammation, emotional blocks, trauma patterns, and energetic flow. But what happens after those amazing sessions?
How do we learn to stay coherent when life gets incoherent?
This is where many practitioners and clients struggle, because having the tools isn’t always enough. When there is a lack of relational, embodied support between sessions true transformation starts to derail. Devices can show you the pattern, even help correct it; and only through presence, moment by moment, can we retrain the nervous system to inhabit coherence as a baseline.
That’s where the horses come in.
Horses as Living Biofeedback
Horses are wired for coherence. As prey animals, their survival depends on staying attuned to energetic shifts in their environment. They notice incongruence instantly. When someone’s outward calm masks internal chaos, they respond. Not with judgment, but with data that is usually quite clear to understand, even for a client with zero horse experience.
In my work, horses act as sensitive barometers for human nervous systems. They “read and respond” to our internal states, noticing our breath, heart rhythm, tone, posture, and even our subtle waves of intention. What they offer is not performance or pet therapy; it’s real-time, relational feedback that reveals the energy beneath the words.
And unlike a printout, you can feel it. In your body. At the moment. In the field. As their enormous nervous system entrains the human’s.
Building Coherence as a Practice
When clients enter the field with the herd, their nervous system begins to downshift. Breath slows. Muscles soften. Thoughts scatter or settle. Something ancient is remembered: I can be safe and connected. I can belong to this moment. I don’t have to perform my wellness, I can live it.
We don’t just talk about boundaries, we feel what happens when we hold one, or collapse it. We don’t just visualize grounding, we practice it with 1,200 pounds of intuitive awareness beside us. It’s visceral. It’s immediate. It’s real.
And it’s exactly the kind of embodied, relational practice that helps energy medicine stick.
The Field Between Sessions
The more I work with energy medicine practitioners, the more I hear this theme: “My clients feel amazing after our session, and yet they can’t hold it.” What if it’s not about doing more and instead about being supported in a different way?
Horses can’t follow your clients home, though what we cultivate in the field; through attention, embodiment, and somatic awareness, does go home with them. It becomes a felt sense they can return to. A blueprint their body remembers. A new baseline.
As frequency medicine continues to evolve, my invitation is this: Let’s not rely solely on tools to deliver healing. Let’s include the body. Let’s include the breath. Let’s include the field. Let’s teach coherence as a herd practice. Something we build in relationship, through 4-legged masters with grace.
From the Field to the Everyday
The next time you find yourself “losing the frequency of connection,” try this:
Stand or sit with your feet flat on the earth.
Inhale slowly through your nose.
Exhale even slower through your mouth.
Place your right hand on your heart and left hand on your lower abdomen.
Ask: What’s present in me right now?
And: Can I stay with it, without fixing it?
That’s where the real healing happens, in the moment, in the noticing, in the return to Self and the quiet coherence always available underneath the noise.
Just like in the herd.
