Horse Boy Method, Movement Method & ATHENA

What will our webinar be about?

Three neuroscience based approaches to building neuroplasticity in neurodiverse children and adults working with horses, nature and above all joy.

One concept, 3 programs and a worldwide movement.  What started as a personal dilemma for Rupert, when his 3 year old son Rowan was diagnosed with severe autism, turned into first a quest for mentorship, and then a discovery of a way of soothing the nervous system, turning off the fight, flight, freeze response in the brain, switching on the learning receptors in the brain and achieving radical positive change through neuro-plasticity. 

The key word here is mentorship: Rupert first went to Dr. Temple Grandin to say “how does my son become you?”  The simple yet effective advice Dr. Gradin gave him will be revealed in this talk. What resulted from following this advice led Rupert into “stumbling into a way to switch off the cell danger response in the brain”. This was what Dr. Robert Naviaux a neuro-scientist at University of California San Diego told Rupert he had done after, amazed at the results with his own son Rowan and by then scores of other children and young adults. Rupert went on his second quest for mentorship – talking to various neuro-scientist to find out why Horse Boy Method and Movement Method, as the way of working that Rupert had discovered were now called, were working.  The explanations that the various neuroscientists gave Rupert, he then distilled into a simple brain equation which he will share in the talk. 

The original approach Horse Boy Method not only gains extraordinary communication in autistic and other neuro diverse populations, it also results in actual academic learning, live skills and self-advocacy. It is also very simple to do once you know the brain secrets – provide you train and maintain the horse in a way that produces collected rhythms that rock the hips of the  rider in a way that produces a particular hormone which again we will talk about in the webinar.  Rupert then found, because he had to homeschool his son that the same rhythms applied with play equipment produced very similar results and today Movement Method, as the second program is called, has been brought into schools in the USA, UK, Ireland and Germany.

A key component here is movement and nature – however even in the classroom these ways of moving and bringing in of nature to calm the sensory system is more than possible.  After many years of developing the methods Rupert then found that the way of training the horses to go in the collected rhythms necessary to produce the brain effect in Horse Boy Method were therapeutic in their own right and a 3rd Program was born – ATHENA Horse Training for Development & Growth – which maintains and rehabs therapy horses and which neuro diverse adults, at risk youth, adults with trauma and veterans and first responders have all found massively therapeutic.  Today the three Methods are in more than 30 countries and serve in excess of an estimated 300,000 service users per week and they continue to grow.

We hope that the story of how Horse Boy Method, Movement Method and Athena were discovered and developed will be of interest to HETI’s Membership and we will give information about where and how people can learn the methods both live and online if they want to.  We look forward to sharing the journey with you. 

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