Our story

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted a life devoted to helping people. Early on, that desire took the shape of medicine. I imagined becoming a doctor, then a veterinarian, sensing even as a child that my interest in healing was inseparable from my love of animals and horses.

By junior high, I discovered emergency medicine and felt its pull immediately. I was drawn to its clarity, its usefulness, and the way it demanded presence rather than perfection. I also knew instinctively that I could not spend my life confined indoors. Becoming an EMT felt like a way to meet people in real moments of need, with my whole body engaged.

By high school, that calling expanded to include firefighting — a role that blended physical challenge, teamwork, and service in a way that felt deeply practical and real. I wanted work that mattered in the moment, work that asked me to move toward difficulty rather than away from it.

Just before college, I took a part-time job teaching riding lessons, believing it would be unwise to mix career and passion. Horses, I thought, should remain something personal — a counterbalance, not a profession. Teaching was meant to be temporary.

It wasn’t.

I completed my degree in emergency response, graduating with an emphasis in fire science and earning my EMT license, but something kept me tethered to the barn. I loved teaching riders and watching their skills, confidence, and connection with their horses grow. What began as a part-time instructor role gradually became my own program — one I built and sustained for more than a decade.

During those years, I felt a growing pull to incorporate more into how I taught. I was drawn to natural horsemanship, to quieter communication, to relationship over force — even as I worked within the traditional hunter/jumper world and struggled to fully honor those instincts. I sensed there was something essential happening beneath the surface of skill-building, something relational and regulatory that I didn’t yet have language for.

At the same time, my work in emergency services deepened. I spent several years working full time on an ambulance and serving with a local volunteer fire department. I saw firsthand the brilliance of modern medicine — its life-saving interventions, its speed, its technical mastery. And I also witnessed its limits.

Too often, I felt like a last-ditch distributor of bandaids, arriving at the end of a long chain where the root of the problem had been missed, medicated, or masked many steps earlier. I watched people cycle through the system again and again, surviving — but not healing.

That tension stayed with me.

Personal challenges and growth outside of work further widened my perspective. I began to question long-held assumptions about strength, productivity, and what true healing actually requires. I became more open, more curious, and more willing to listen — to the body, to intuition, to what was being communicated beneath symptoms and behavior.

Over time, it became clear that emergency medicine, horsemanship, and personal transformation were not separate paths. They were threads of the same story — each teaching me about regulation, presence, and the cost of disconnection.

Heart and Home Equine grew from the decision to stop trying to fit relational, intuitive knowing into systems that weren’t built for it — and instead create a space where coherence, honesty, and choice could lead.

Today, I offer equine- and land-based healing experiences rooted in presence, heart-centered coherence, somatic and energetic awareness, and ceremonial relationship with horses who participate as partners rather than tools. My work is especially shaped by — and offered to — those who carry chronic responsibility: veterans, first responders, military families, caregivers, and others who know how to function under pressure but are ready for something deeper than endurance.

Heart and Home Equine exists because I believe healing does not come from fixing symptoms or pushing harder. It comes from listening — to the body, to the heart, to the land, and to the living beings who meet us with honesty every time.