The sound bath companion at this L.A. ‘healing’ ranch? A horse, of course

After telling me to close my eyes, the voice instructs me to notice the sounds around me. I hear the drone of Tibetan bowls mixing with an insect chorus, scattered yawns and what sounds like a flowing brook. Upon opening my eyes, I discover the ‘brook’ is, in actuality, a horse releasing a powerful stream of urine.

The, uh, water feature is thanks to August, a stallion. He’s one of five horses who have joined a group of about 16 attendees for Horses and Healing: Finding Strength After The Fires, a day-long workshop located on a ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains. The guests and I are seated on blanketed chairs, in-the-round inside a horse paddock. It’s part of a semi-regular session that the ranch’s owner Kiki Ebsen runs free of charge exclusively to those who lost their homes in the January fires.

That little restroom break is August’s first contribution to the only sound bath I’ve ever had to sign a waiver for (I read and understood that horses could seriously injure me). The white-and-brown animal stands fish-eyed and proud beside Ebsen, who wears a subtly glamorous ensemble of bell-bottom jeans, dark V-neck tee, and tortoiseshell Prada sunglasses.

Meanwhile, Alison Ungaro, founder of the wellness non-profit UThrive Wellness, conducts the sound bath, gently circling the bowls with a mallet and intermittently hitting a small gong, while Ebsen guides her horses into the enclosure. As the animals churn the earth with their large hooves, nudge the participants and try to chew the blankets, numerous guests, including our photographer, begin to cry.

“Everything here is done with heart and soul,” one of the participants, who has been to several of these sound baths, later tells me, tears in her eyes, “nothing has been as healing for me as the horse community here.”

In the past few months, right after the January fires, families who have lost everything in the widespread devastation have gathered here, at The Healing Equine Ranch, a horse-healing retreat nestled in the Santa Monica mountains and run by Ebsen. The daughter of legendary actor Buddy Ebsen, as well as a musician on the side, Ebsen has been teaching thousands to rein in the healing powers of the horse through experiential learning with her ten-strong herd. Workshops and retreats here typically range anywhere from $70 to $2,000, and encompass new-age activities like the sound bath I experienced and horse grooming through a neuro-somatic lens. Though one-off events may come later in the year, Ebsen is focusing solely on serving fire victims until at least June, with monthly Horses and Healing sessions like this one. She is, however, one of many practitioners who hold sound baths with horses in the SoCal area. Others include Rose Anzarouth’s $71 ‘Sound Healing And Mindfulness With Horses’ in Rancho Santa Fe and Mountain View Ranch’s $60 ‘Horses Yoga & Sound’ workshop in Joshua Tree.

Ebsen’s offerings combine yoga-informed mindfulness, breathwork, somatic meditation and something she refers to as “natural horsemanship,” a term that originated in the US in the mid-80s to refer to a broad range of non-abusive horse handling techniques. She refers to this blend as ‘NEIGH’ (Natural Equine Interactive Growth and Healing). Through co-regulating with the horses, the client should end the session in what Ebsen calls a rest-digest state.

“There’s ‘flight and flight’, which is anxiety, and ‘rest and digest’, which is feeling, you know, pretty good,” she told me on my first visit to the ranch, a few weeks before the sound bath. The hills and trees were almost neon green after several days of heavy rainfall, the horses especially sluggish.

Healing with horses is a time-honored tradition. Inmate horse programs help incarcerated populations process their trauma. Riding schools specifically designed for children with special needs aim to improve motor skills and coordination. Laying with horses was even featured as a bonding activity during more than one date on The Bachelor. For those seeking alternative therapies, numerous studies have found that the warm and sociable nature of horses has successfully facilitated psychological and physical repair, allowing humans to co-regulate alongside them and move past trauma responses.

Ebsen’s model, however, deviates from your usual equine-assisted physical and psychotherapy. Instead, she draws upon indigenous wisdom and yogic philosophies to focus on how horses can aid with nervous system regulation. According to Ebsen, the advantages of horse healing are supposedly amplified when paired with sound therapy, a practice that uses targeted sound frequencies, like those in singing bowls, to encourage relaxation.

Since horses are prey animals, they have evolved to respond to the subtlest of aural stimuli. When placed within the context of a sound bath, as I experienced firsthand, the horses are physically drawn toward the ringing vibrations, becoming visibly soothed, and seem to invite the same feeling of calm and deep attunement in humans.

Ebsen also conducts breathwork and yoga workshops throughout the year. ‘Horse-Connections Breath’ invites guests to participate in mindful breathing exercises with the horses and is offered at $100. The ‘Yoga, Hiking, Horses’ package, priced at $75, includes a mindful hike through Ebsen’s expansive meadows, culminating in a guided meditation and yoga session in the presence of the horses.

Ebsen says her practice is very effective for people with PTSD, which is something I’ve carried with me since my sexual assault as a teenager. I’m also generally quite spiritually reserved (in other words, British), so I wasn’t sure the horses would help much. I was skeptical even. Still, as a L.A. resident for the past two years, I’ve already had my fair share of sound baths. Why not throw a horse or two in there? I was willing to try anything.

As the bowls rang through the paddock, it felt as though the trees, horses and guests were breathing as one. During the hour-long process, wherein Ebsen gradually filtered more and more horses in, most of the guests committed to having their eyes shut the entire time, seemingly undisturbed by the increasing number of horses who were trying to nibble at the cymbal in the center of the ring. I couldn’t help but laugh as August — the jokester of the herd — almost managed to knock over the instrument, filling the calm air with a jarring crash.

The energy shifted when Rose, the lead mare, entered the ring. She trailed in slowly, solemnly, heading straight for a visually impaired guest. Rose lingered there for almost the entirety of the session, nudging her guest’s outstretched hand.

“That’s how they greet,” Ebsen told me a few weeks before, “their whiskers send signals straight up to their brain which tells them all about your smell, your hormones, everything.”

On the ranch, horses often become metaphors for our complicated human emotions. “Horses think through energy and pictures,” said Ebsen, meaning they communicate through pure expression, one unfiltered by the neocortex. “So, if you’re not acting in congruence with your emotions, our horses will call you out on it, and encourage you to simply be yourself.” Seeing Rose interact with the guest in this way, calmly trading energy with her, it became clear that the mare has met her match: a human who possesses total integrity of feeling.

Each client typically bonds with a particular horse. I am personally drawn to the most anxious among the herd — Cowboy — a crossbreed who holds his head in rigid panic, hair long and straight as a Long Beach girl’s.

Cowboy fortified our bond during my first visit to the ranch by chewing at my arm with his great teeth. I experienced my own panic followed by rest and digest. Inhale: please, please don’t eat me alive. Exhale: I’m safe with you. I love you, Cowboy. He rubbed into me like a needy kitten with the force of a lion. “Oh, yeah, that’s the release,” said Ebsen, “he’s saying, thank god I’m not getting eaten today.” I thought: I know the feeling.

Cowboy is, she said, a great example of rest and digest. Ebsen told me that he has a “huge heart.” It took a beat for me to realize that she didn’t just mean this metaphorically. Horses’ hearts and electromagnetic fields are five times larger than our own. When their pulse is arrhythmic, as Cowboy’s was when we first met, it jolts everyone around him into a sense of unease.

Luckily, Cowboy seems to be at peace during the sound bath. Although he isn’t invited into the ring itself, he seems physically drawn to the sound. He descends a nearby hill, rests his neck on the nearest fence and chews at the air as though the singing vibrations were made of hay. I notice two guests, both with their eyes closed, yawning as Cowboy rubs his muzzle along the fence. Ebsen appears absolutely delighted.

Rose and her person of choice then exchange yawns while drones fill the air, their vibrations sending a slight tingling sensation to my shoulders. Everything is totally serene, at peace. I’m not sure why but I’m crying happy tears. Almost everyone here is.

“That was breathtaking, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Ebsen said after the session came to a close. I was in disbelief too. The horses may have healed me.

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