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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to craft the foundations of a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, host and fellow traveller on this journey into possibility. And yes, I do still have the tail end of Covid and yes, I do have a new puppy and therefore not very much sleep recently. But our guest this week negotiated both with enormous grace and generosity of spirit, and I am hugely grateful. Because I've been looking forward to this conversation for roughly six months, which is the lead time at the moment. And I read Kelly's book back then, and I read it again this week. And she addresses head on one of the key questions of this podcast and of everything that we do in Accidental Gods, which is how do we heal ourselves from the lostness that afflicts us? How do we move on from the strange and totally untrue belief our culture holds that we are separate from the natural world, from the web of life. That our cycles of exploitation, extraction, destruction, pollution are just the way the world works, that this is the natural order and there's nothing we can do to change it individually or collectively. And here on the podcast, we know this isn't true. But knowing it in our heads is one thing; genuinely feeling it deep in the marrow of our bones is quite another. And this is where Kelly comes in. Kelly Wendorf is an executive and personal coach, a spiritual mentor, disrupter, and socially responsible entrepreneur.
Manda: And as you'll hear her book, Flying Lead Change; 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Living and Leading, opens up doors to exactly these questions. Because along with all the other things we've just mentioned, Kelly is the founder and CEO of Equus. And there the central question is: what are you yearning for? And the central offer is: we create conditions for your transformation. And as the name suggests, Kelly and her team do this by engaging the generous spirits of a herd of horses, who offer themselves as mirrors to the people who come to Equus for coaching. And although this is often not why they think they're coming, they come for healing. Kelly's childhood experiences with a whole hearted man in Ethiopia, and later as an adult with one of the First Nations people in Australia, taught her a way of listening, of being fully present, which is to say, fully in her heartmind and bodymind in the present moment. And this is what she helps others to find, with the help of the horses, who often just don't engage if we're not congruent, not present, not fully embodied. Or if we come with an agenda. They reflect that agenda back to us in all its rigid boundaries and often false premises underlying. So Kelly has been called a corporate Shaman and a CEO whisperer, which I think is hilarious. But as we collectively crash through the boundaries of the great transformation, it seems to me that Kelly's work opens doors for us all. We may not have access to a herd of free living, rewilding horses, but even reading about the experiences of her clients can melt some of the concrete around our hearts.
Manda: And with this, with this opening, with the cracks where the light gets in, we can always step outside and stand still and let the living world teach us. Even in cities there is life that is not human and not created by people. So I loved this book, obviously, and I love the conversation with Kelly. And at the end of it she offered our community, that is the Accidental Gods community, coupons for two of her forthcoming online courses. The first, Breaking the Loop Transforming Habits That Hold You Back, is on Saturday the 1st of November at 10 to 11.30 in the morning mountain time. So it should be possible for people around quite a lot of the world. And she's offering us 50% off that one. And the second is nearly a year from now. It's called How to Lead a Transformative Life. And it takes places over two Saturdays for two hours each, ten in the morning till 12 noon mountain time. And this one has a base cost of $457 but Kelly is offering it to our Accidental Gods community for free. So please listen to the end for the details of these, and then go and check out the show notes for the links and the coupon codes. And with that ringing in your ears and as a reason to go all the way to the end, people of the podcast please do welcome Kelly Wendorf, author of Flying Lead Change and founder and CEO of Equus.
Manda: Kelly Wendorf, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this lovely autumnal day?
Kelly: Hi Manda, I am so happy to be here with your community. And I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I live on a little ranch just outside of Santa Fe, on the unceded lands of the traditional carers known as the Tewa people.
Manda: Right, okay. Now we're already going off what I was expecting to ask, but are there any lands that were ceded in the US? Because every time I hear someone saying this, we live on the unceded lands of (name of one or more tribes), were there any lands that were actually ceded?
Kelly: No, it was all stolen. It was all stolen from the original peoples that lived here. Not that long ago, right?
Manda: No, because in the UK, that theft happened with the Romans. But it's 2000 years, so it's hard to look back. But it's alive. It's so alive with you. We talked to Hilary Giovale recently, and she's doing a lot of reparation work. And yeah, it feels as if we're going to get to this, that of all the things that are bubbling up, the rawness of a nation founded on that, feels like it's coming very much closer to the surface now.
Kelly: Absolutely. And, you know, just because we're there, so our little ranch has joined what's called the land back movement here. And it's happening in other countries, Australia. And even though we're a little property, we're only 11 acres, I don't know how many hectares that is; we have bequeathed half of that property back to the Tewa people. And even though it's a small little parcel of land, it is a patchwork that is significant in that this piece of land connects to a larger pathway to their ceremonial lands. So I always love to say it doesn't matter if you have one acre or two acres, if you have a little pathway or a little patch, you can very easily give it back without a whole lot of expense and Pallava. Yeah.
Manda: Right. Beautiful. Brilliant. That's so interesting. We were just talking to someone before I came up to record about creating wildlife corridors from our hill to the river. Which is like giving the land back to the rest of life and just planting a lot of trees. And yes, that land will not be productive; it may not be feeding people, but it will be feeding so much more life and connecting them to the river, which, you know, is kind of essential.
Kelly: Yeah, I love that.
Manda: So brilliant. Thank you. All right, so you have written Flying Lead Change, which is one of those books that made my heart sing and open doors for me and is changing my relationship with the ponies with which we share the land here. And early on in the introduction, you say: 'I wrote Flying Lead Change to help take us back to where we were before the lostness started, before we were taken from our collective knowing of connection. Our very humanity. From there, it puts us on the right footing for transformation, for that leap into a change of lead'. And that seemed to me to encapsulate the book beautifully. There's so much in just that statement. The awareness that the lostness is a thing, and that it separates us from our humanity. And I know you spent a lot of the early bits of the time that this book discusses speaking to an Aboriginal elder in Australia.
Kelly: Mhm. Yes.
Manda: And so I'd like to unpick your journey towards understanding the lostness and towards finding the healing. And then obviously that leads to the book. So over to you.
Kelly: Thank you. I love that you opened with that. I forgot that I wrote that. You know, I think I was privy to recognising that I was lost when I was really small. So my father was an archaeologist. In fact, his collection and his work is in the British Museum.
Manda: Oh, really? What was his speciality?
Kelly: Prehistory; Nubia, the Nile valley, places in northern Africa. So, you know, these were the places I got to go as a kid, both to Egypt and the Sudan and Ethiopia. And also he worked a lot in in northern New Mexico, where we have a lot of digs for the ancient peoples who were here; original peoples. So as a kid, rather than being on playgrounds, I'm hanging out on archaeological digs and picking up pottery and looking for arrowheads and kind of being in these experiences where clearly there there was another culture, another way of being. And a lot of it was nonverbal. I think there was a kind of transmission from these places and these digs, and there was a lot of information that was going into my body and being without realising it.
Kelly: But I was also exposed to relationships with traditional peoples and in the book is a story about my relationship to Kibata, who was a Oromo Ethiopian native man who was hired to take care of me while my father was out on digs in Ethiopia. And here is a person who is joyful and free. Not wild as in unhinged, but wild as in free and grounded and peaceful and kind. Profoundly kind. Now that collection of qualities in a strong, fierce warrior, because he kind of came with his tall spear and his earring dangling from his ear and just his length and his mass. It just was so remarkable to me. And I couldn't articulate of course, I was seven, I was too small. But this was a different kind of human being, this was someone who really knew what love was and lived it by his actions and his care for me. And he was a man, also. Men in America did not embody these things on the whole. So this was a disruption in my psyche. And biologists talk about the adaptive cycle and how in order to evolve, we need these disruptions in order to swing into a new evolutionary cycle. And this was a very key disrupter in my psyche and positioned me to contrast the contemporary culture in which I was raised, and this that was embodied in Kibata. And I remember going back to school in America and this experience made me an outlier.
Manda: Okay. Yeah. Which is hard when you're young and at school.
Kelly: Absolutely. It set me up. I was bullied in elementary and middle and high school, and not for anything that anyone could really pick up on or say, but they knew I was different. They knew I felt something different. They knew that I could see through them. But again, I was too small to articulate. Nobody was telling me about this. So I was pretty alone in it.
Manda: Nobody in your world had experienced it, I think, either. There's a very moving bit in the book on the day that you were leaving. And he's just sitting there, looking. And he obviously had really bonded with you. He wasn't just there being a protector, he had actually really, genuinely cared for you. And then the nature of our trauma culture is we're going to rip this child away from you, because you were just there as a kind of... You could have been a robot, it doesn't matter that you were a person.
Kelly: Mhm. Exactly. We know about attachment theory that these significant bonds matter. And even though my time with him was mere weeks, maybe eight weeks. The bond was extremely significant and true. If I close my eyes, I still feel His warmth against my skin, when I jumped on his lap that last morning when we left, when we departed for America. And I still feel his breathing and I still smell his skin. And that's the impact he had. So, you know, I took refuge in my animals, my dogs, my horses, being out in nature. This is where I ended up spending most of my time, because this was what was most resonant with what had awakened in me in being with Kibata. And there were kind of periods of time like when I went to college, where I a little bit became even more lost. When you've woken up into a possibility of connection and love, one of the By-Products, and people don't talk about this, but I heard about this from somebody who facilitates outward bound experiences. Is that people wake up and then you would imagine that they would go, oh, this is it, this is how I want to live forever and this is the way forward. But what happens is that through our trauma and everyone has trauma, and we've all been traumatised by the way we've been separated from nature and each other.
Kelly: It snaps us back with a kind of grief, existential grief, of all that we lost. Of all that we didn't connect to throughout our lives. Or even historically what our parents lost and our parents parents. And again, this isn't Conscious. And so that grief will come in and provoke people to snap back into the lostness, into the forgetting. Because they don't have a tolerance for this grief, and again, no one holds them and tells them this is why you feel this way. And it doesn't necessarily come across as a linear, oh, I woke up, I experienced the truth of how life is really meant to be. Now I'm sad about that and now I'm falling back asleep because it's easier to fall back asleep. I'm reminded of that scene in The Matrix, where the man, I forgot his name, but he ended up betraying all his people on the craft because he said, I want to forget. You know, if I give you the keys to this ship, and he's talking to the AI people, I want you to put me so far gone asleep that I never, ever know that I used to be awake, right? So it's not linear, we just snap back asleep. So, you know, college, it was boys and stuff.
Manda: The occasional bit of learning somewhere in there.
Kelly: And, you know, getting my diploma, getting to work. But interestingly, I was very ambitious and I worked in the corporate sector. I worked in a marketing capacity for a lot of different companies in Texas, of all places. And ended up working for pretty much the devil himself at a radio station. He was so hostile, he enjoyed the suffering of others and working with that man really snapped me awake. So at that point, there was a hard left turn of, oh, I remember something. I remember another world, another paradigm. I need to head in that direction. Because this lostness paradigm, it is so toxic ultimately. And in an interesting way, that toxic environment of working in the radio station with this man, was such a wonderful kind of stopgap that headed me where I needed to go. So I'm always grateful for that terrible experience. And so I started to formalise a question, kind of a koan, which was thinking about this experience with Kibata; what conditions need to be in place to help people to thrive in that way? To help people to wake up to this paradigm that is a power with paradigm, not a power over paradigm.
Kelly: And, you know, that became the formative question to all of my work. I published a magazine based on that question in Australia. I lived in Australia for 20 years. And eventually it was the basis of my work now here at Equus, my leadership development organisation. And while in Australia I met uncle Bob, who was my other Kibata.
Kelly: Uncle Bob is the listed custodial elder of Uluru. Some know it as Ayers Rock, but the real name is Uluru and he's part of a 60 000 year old culture. It's the oldest human culture in the world. And I had the great privilege of uncle Bob selecting me to translate his teachings. And he received a bit of pushback about this, because some folks believe that this would be cultural appropriation on my part, that a white girl didn't deserve to listen to these teachings. But uncle Bob said that most of his people were too traumatised to carry on the teachings. And he said, now, as elders, our role is to find people that have an Aboriginal heart. And you have an Aboriginal heart and so I am going to deliver these to you, and you are to take them into the world. So I spent many, many days, hours, weeks, months parking a microphone in front of him, because his tradition is oral, while he just downloaded stuff.
Kelly: And then I would take those transcripts and then have to usher them back to him to make sure and sort of bridge these gaps of like, well, I don't understand what you mean exactly by Rainbow Serpent. And what is the meaning of this story? And things like that. So it was a real deep education on my part. And it was he who said, when you're lost, you have to go back to where the lostness started. And he said it to me personally because I had become mired in a lot of spiritual communities in Australia, and there was just a lot of, honestly, colonised crap inside spiritual dogma and the spiritual industry. I'm going to call it that deliberately, because it's still founded on the trance of disconnection. It's still colonised. And it had kind of disconnected me from my own spiritual path and I had become very kind of brittle and just wasn't connected anymore. And I told him how disconnected I felt from me, my soul, my life, my spiritual path, everything. And he took me on a kind of road trip. I didn't know where he was taking me. And we ended up six hours in silence, there's a whole story about that in the book.
Manda: Learning to be comfortable with the silence, that was really interesting.
Kelly: Learning to be comfortable with that silence and not perform, right? And he drives me to a billabong, which is like a watering hole. And we sit there in the bushes. We're sitting and we're sitting and what are we doing? What's going on? And after about an hour, I hear these thundering hooves and this mob, as they are called, a mob of horses, brumbies, wild horses or feral horses, they weren't originally wild, come thundering over the hill to come to the watering hole. And he looks at me at that moment and he says, when you're lost, you go back to where the lostness started. And for me, my horses were that focal point where I could either go left and continue in a power over paradigm, so prevalent in the horse world, or go right into this power with paradigm. But it was the horse that was the place of my return to become Unlost. So I say that, to share with everyone; where is your place of return? Is it the garden? Is it your childhood? Is it your true vocation as a poet that you didn't know that it was. You'll know it. You'll know that place at which if you return it will help you to be found again. To remember again. Yeah.
Manda: Gosh, Kelly, there are so many questions on this and there's so many bits in the book that this is bringing up. There was one point, I just want to hover on this briefly, where uncle Bob, I can't remember the exact words, but it was basically that if you are congruent, the horses will know. And if you're trying to be congruent, they're not going to come. And discovering the difference between actually being and telling ourselves that we're being, feels to me one of the really big internal shifts that we have to make. Because this is the distinction between the manufactured spiritual colonialism and actually connecting to the web of life. And horses are such amazing mirrors.
Kelly: Correct.
Manda: So I have loads of questions going back a little bit. So Bill Plotkin.
Kelly: Yes!
Manda: Has done some research and he says that, yes, a wonderful man, he's coming on the podcast in a few weeks time. That by the age of 12, the average indigenous child has made meaningful relationships with over 400 other species. And I think in our culture, we're really lucky by the age of 12 if we've made a meaningful relationship with our own species. And some of us may have the dogs and the cats and hamsters and the things that are actually our refuge, because our own species is fundamentally a dangerous thing. But we have certainly not made 400. And Bill is showing that we can learn, it's not a lost skill. And it is that thing that our hearts yearn for, is to feel that interbeing again. And I'm wondering, way back when you were a child in Ethiopia, were you also learning connectedness to other species, or were you just learning connectedness to Kibata?
Kelly: That's a great question. I have always sought out connection with other beings. I was always making ant farms and hanging out with beetles. And just any critter I could engage with. Snakes. You know, we had little garden snakes I wanted to connect with. But the deepest wounding of disconnection for me came between me and other humans. And this this continues to be my work. You know, it's interesting that I didn't become a zoologist or whatever, or a biologist. I am in the business of deeply connecting with other human beings to help liberate them. That's my job. And so this is my deep spiritual curriculum, is to keep forging ways to reconnect with my own species, which is very difficult because this species became very disconnected around 6000 years ago.
Manda: At least. I think it's closer to 12, but yes.
Kelly: Yeah, it could be 12. You know, whatever it is, it's relatively new on our collective history as a species. And there are some, and it's really interesting, I'm reading a book called Saharasia. And I looked in the back in the footnotes and the bibliography and there's my father, like a hundred times, which is really interesting. But there is evidence that shows that we didn't just make that turn towards disconnection because we're a screwed up species and we're innately evil and terrible. It's a historic trauma, and there's evidence that says that some time between 12 and 6000 years ago, there were many, many cataclysmic events that happened on Earth. Volcanoes, tsunamis, climate change. Just nature became very hostile from humanity's point of view. And so, of course, we said, hey, we've been worshipping you forever... What the heck? You're now turning against us. We need to control you. We need a God that stands aside from you and will protect us against you. So all that we've become from that point onward is an echo of that trauma.
Manda: But not all of us did. That's the interesting thing. So I read Christopher Ryan's Civilised to Death, which has a similar narrative structure, and I now want to read Saharasia. But we in the West, whatever we call the Western educated industrial, rich, democratic, WEIRD culture chose to separate off, or were separated off, or somehow created the narrative of separability. And yet the native Aboriginals didn't. And I read somewhere, I think, a paper in Nature a couple of weeks ago, that actually we all thought that the dawn of humanity was in Africa but actually it was in North America, interestingly. And there were thriving cultures all around the world that continued to be connected.
Kelly: Yes, that is true.
Manda: And our culture ended up in this power over paradigm.
Kelly: Yes, that is true.
Manda: I guess we will never know what the difference was, but my question, my abiding question now is how do we become an initiation culture again? This is Frances Weller; trauma culture is what we are, initiation culture is what we were and what we could be. And it seems to me that your work with horses is a potential key to this. Because what really strikes me through all of the examples in your book is that the experience of being with something that weighs 300 to 500 kilos and quite plainly could kill you if it chose to, and and it chooses not to. And you can't hide from the reactions that they give. You have to get out of your head and into your body and into your heart. And this is where the healing arises. So I really want to explore this with you, but we probably ought to give people a bit more context of: you met uncle Bob, uncle Bob reconnected you with horses. Somewhere along the line, it seems to me your your dad was gone, and you had a stepdad who had a 2000 acre ranch. Because you mentioned at one point that you discover your horses above all when you're trying to go out and catch it on 2000 acres, because it doesn't want to be caught and you're not in the right frame of mind, you're not going to make it. So you had the horses, 2000 acre ranch; tell us a little bit about what brought you to Equus and the way of working that you're doing just now.
Kelly: Thank you. So horses were always a part of my daily life from the time I was four years old.
Manda: Because of your mum or your dad?
Kelly: My mother is from the UK, and she always loved horses. She was raised in boarding school, so it was never really a full part of her life. But she had a strong resonance with them and strongly supported my absolute passion for them and with them. So great for her, thank you mom. But I was taught in the conventional approach, which is very power over. And, you know, we say we love our horses, but I make a distinction between the felt sense of affection, this is what I learned from Kibata, but I'm still learning about it because of my own colonisation, internalised colonisation. The felt sense of affection, and the absolute fidelity to another's freedom. To me, that's love. So I define domestication along with a woman named Ren Hurst who wrote a book, The Wisdom of Wildness; that domestication is the use of power over another so that we can use them, whether that be a person, a child, a dog, a cat, a horse. So there was a point when I, around the time that I met uncle Bob, and I saw these wild brumbies, that I had a sort of inkling there was another way to be with these animals. That wasn't the way I had been taught and it meant a whole lot of unlearning and continues to this day. I feel like I'm just scratching the surface of what rewilding really means and domesticating really means, for me as a human and for my animals, to whom I am responsible for their well-being. And my daughter, in all her wisdom, when she was a small child and she had her first pony, said to me, mom, I want to learn to be a good rider and to be a good horse girl, but I don't want to do it the way you do it.
Manda: Oh, that's so savage.
Kelly: Oh, yeah. I mean, she's always been that way and continues to be that way. She's my greatest teacher. She's always calling me out on stuff. So I found someone for her who was sort of known as a horse whisperer. Her name is Louise Kropach, she lives in Australia. And I was very sceptical, you know, natural horsemanship. What baloney. We're anthropomorphising our horses, this is crap.
Manda: And a lot of natural horsemanship, frankly, is exactly what you just said.
Kelly: So I watched her engage with my daughter and this pony, and I went, oh! She asked my daughter this one thing, she said, so, Mackenzie, if you wanted your pony to do something, if you wanted Pippa to do something, what would you do? And Mackenzie was like, you know, sort of beard stroking in all her five year old wisdom, she goes "a carrot". And Louise said, ah, bribery and corruption. I mean, she's saying this to a five year old child over a Welsh pony.
Manda: I have Welsh ponies. They're pretty smart.
Kelly: Right. They're so cute. And it suddenly awakened, that seed that Kibata had planted. And my whole life unravelled from that point on as I knew it. And I began reforming my relationship to my horses, not knowing what to do or how to do it. Because this is very pioneering work. It's still pioneering work. There are only a small handful of people exploring approaching horses with liberty. But this was working alongside of my developing career as a coach, so I started to knit together wow, the person that I am having to become through this journey of rewilding my horses, rewilding myself and undomesticating my horses and myself, waking up from colonisation, waking up from power over constructs, that we all are in and under the influence of. Even uncle Bob, even uncle Bob. So I just want to drop that in there.
Manda: Yes. I mean, presumably there are some uncontacted tribes in the Amazon who are not, except that they're drinking rainwater full of PFAs and their atmosphere is collapsing. But yes, the rest of us have to be inside.
Kelly: We can't underestimate the power and the pervasive, ubiquitous nature of the soup called colonisation. It's the water we all swim in unless you have not ever been in contact with the modern world. So I thought, well, if if this embodied, experiential journey is doing this to me, how can I pair that with my clients? How can I immerse my clients experience in some of these processes? And this is why I decided to pair horses with people. Not because I thought, oh, equine assisted learning. That's such a great thing. It was because I was immersed in the medicine and the shamanic process of rewilding with my horses, and I knew that there was something to that for other people. Because when we are colonised, we are dismembered, of course. We are dismembered, we are cut off from our bodies. And it's both actual in that when we conquered societies, we were cutting people's heads off, cutting people's heads and arms and legs off and disembowelling them. But it's also metaphorical and energetic. And so part of waking up is returning to our bodies. And you talked earlier about congruence. We have to live from the neck down and start to become incredibly somatically literate with the energy that we're bringing, the places in ourselves where we are somatically split apart, or shaming ourselves or disconnecting from ourselves and where we are somatically unable to feel the co-mingling of our beingness with other beings. That is a real felt sense.
Manda: And you describe this in the book. You've got a description of somebody where you you kind of talk them through coming into their body and them sitting there. And you ask them, can they predict what the horses are going to do before the horses actually do it? And in the book, there's this sense of this person, of a light bulb going on and I used to feel this when I was a kid. And I don't think they actually say it was domesticated out of me, but that's what they mean; colonised out of me. And now you've given me permission to do this again. And I'm guessing, you see this time after time, because you can't get an interactive, a live congruent flow with the horses unless you are here. Can you talk about that a bit more?
Kelly: That's right. So we have a few things happening with the horses. One is from an indigenous point of view, the whole reason for their being is to serve as a wisdom companion for this awakening period. Not to win ribbons and take us over the countryside. But they are so gracious, if what we say to them is you know what? I just want to ride you, I don't want to listen to you. They'll do that. That's how gracious they are. I mean, that's just so beautiful and compassionate. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you're dealing with very large nervous systems that because they're so large, they positively impact and shape our nervous system. So you can be with a horse and without even really realising it, your nervous system is being influenced positively towards a more whole way of being. Third, they're one of the most successful mammals on the planet, second only to the platypus. At 150 million is the platypus, 56 is the horse. 56 million years these creatures have been on Earth, making them highly successful. Why are they successful? Why have they made it 56 million years through tectonic shifts and climate spikes and volcanic mega explosions, and they're still here, as opposed to other mammals also with four legs also who graze, who did not make it.
Kelly: And it has to do, I believe, with their culture. And their culture, and they have a culture, is focussed on five core values or premises and that's: safety, connection, peace, freedom, joy. Just like Kibata: safety, connection, peace, freedom, joy. And the leadership is not those stallions. All that stuff that Hollywood gives the stallions is just breeding. That's breeding happening, that's not leadership. Leadership is through care and presence. So when people immerse themselves with the horses, with the context and attitude of I am going to learn from you. I am going to listen. I am going to avail myself to the 56 million years of wisdom. Then all of that cultural overlay, kind of just like my experience with Kibata, goes into people's nervous systems, whether they want it or not. So my favourite work is going deep into the belly of the beast of the corporate sector, where I get to Trojan Horse.
Manda: Pun intended.
Kelly: This amazing molecule of freedom. I don't know what it will do, it's not my business. They say we're going to hire you to do leadership development or strategic planning, and we want to do it in a different kind of way. And I say, great, come on to the ranch. We're going to work with your team for a day. Immerse them in some stuff with the horses, who, by the way, only know how to tell the truth. And they leave here different, whether they want to or not. If they're here, they're meant to get that molecule. So that's my subversive act.
Manda: Yes. Yes. And there are so many stories of that throughout the book and you obviously picked the ones that are really transformative, of people finding their own space or business people understanding what leadership really is. And there's a wonderful one, is it Brio? Am I saying that right? The stallion that comes in and thinks he's going to be leader and and your lead mare is like, no, I don't think so, mate. But she just does it quietly and she doesn't face up to him because he's huge and can take her apart if he really needed to. But just quietly, quietly, over time, she just asserts. It's like just putting the roots down and going, no, actually, this is our space and you don't get to push us around. And it's such a glorious way of offering resistance in the face of force, which I feel was quite useful to the world at the moment.
Kelly: It really is. Well, you look at our wonderful No Kings protests that are going on in America, the largest protest movement in America's history. And I don't know if you've seen the pictures, but people are showing up in animal costumes.
Manda: Yes. The frogs. Yes!
Kelly: Naked parades. And they're not going against, they're standing in the freedom. I've been in a lot of these protests and the joy that you feel. And so people are just being in, rooted in this sense of freedom and power with, not against. And even donning these fabulous costumes of stuffed animals and blow up frogs. That is such a great model of that. And my theory around why democracy is kind of struggling all over the world is because democracy at its best, is founded on the principles of safety, connection, peace, freedom and joy. Right?
Manda: Yeah.
Kelly: And power with. That's the principles. But it was stuck on top of a power over paradigm.
Manda: Yeah. A lostness.
Kelly: Right. The lostness. And until we work to remember, rewild undomesticate, unshame, emancipate ourselves and emancipate others, and that become a non-political biological movement, our democracies are going to fall over.
Manda: And with them our entire culture, frankly, because we haven't got time anymore to mess about, because there's actual biophysical hard limits.
Kelly: That's right.
Manda: So let's head down that route, because there's so many other stories in the book that I would like to come back to. So safety, connection, peace, freedom, joy. It seems to me that we're basically talking Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in a way. Every human being needs to feel safe. I was listening to another podcast, Tim Logan's podcast recently, with someone who brings peace into places like prisons and schools, and peace is one of those things in our trauma culture, we see it as something fluffy and probably unnecessary and certainly unattainable. And he goes into prisons and when he goes in and goes, okay, what would it be like if there was peace with, let's say, the warring factions inside the prison? And he says, these young men just fall off their chairs laughing. But then he describes them, peace is not having to watch your back every day. Not having to plan how you're going to take revenge for the assault that's going to come because there is no peace. And within a few hours they're like, okay, that sounds like a really good thing. And then and then it sounds like the energetic transformation that is possible, even in a place that is the epitome of power over, like a prison. If we can do it there, we can do it anywhere. I read The Tao of Horsemanship years and years ago, but you seem to give your horses much more agency. It seems to me that within the movement of horse assisted therapy, there are the ones where the horse is in a box and does not get a choice. And your horses get choice.
Kelly: Yeah.
Manda: And so there's something really vital in the them having agency, choosing to interact in the ways that they interact. And some of them are so moving. The old horse that licked the lady's face, it was just such a beautiful story. You can perhaps tell that and the ending of it, but I won't spoil it first. But I'm wondering how we scale this. This is where I'm getting to, is it feels to me that the work of our generation, anyone alive on the planet at the moment, is to do the healing, to heal the lostness, the individual, collective and ancestral. And however many thousand years it is, it's many thousand years for most of us. And it's not negotiable anymore. I was at a literary festival at the weekend and I said more or less that. And I was the youngest person in the room by a good 20 years and I'm not that young and that's fine. You know, who else comes out on a Sunday morning to listen to someone talk about their book? But that generation who have the time, who probably have the resources, were also the generation that was taught never to listen to their body.
Kelly: Yeah, yeah.
Manda: Cut off at the neck. If you have a pain, you talk about 'the leg'. I have a pain in the leg. Not my leg, the leg. Like it's somebody else's. It's not part of me, because if I did, the whole system would fall apart. How do we reach all of the generations? Are you sensing? What I'm really getting to is I am asking my horses this on a daily basis, but I don't probably have the depth of connection that you have. And I'm wondering if you have a sense of how we could scale this.
Kelly: I love that question. I am so hopeful because I get to see people waking up every day, and I just abhor that so-called wokism has been a term that's weaponized.
Manda: Waking up is now a bad thing.
Kelly: Give me a break. All woke means is that you care and that you see. Right?
Manda: You want not to be lost.
Kelly: Yeah. So the journey that we are invited to take isn't so much linear as it is sort of weblike.
Manda: Fractal.
Kelly: Right. In that my emancipation is intrinsically linked to the emancipation of my dogs, my cats, my children, my horses, my friends. And so if I start to learn non-coercive ways to be in partnership with my horse, that act of emancipating my horse from that coercion automatically also dismantles a certain amount of oppression in myself. So it's sort of tangential or parallel. But I say web because then it's like, well, what can I do with my team? You know, where did I use that smile to charm someone, to manipulate them, to like me so that I can use them better in my life? I mean, it requires enormous honesty, self honesty, and it requires an absolute fidelity to not shame oneself, because shame is a colonising construct. There is no room for shame in waking up and remembering and decolonising. So if I notice that I have these manipulative tendencies, then I don't go and shame myself about it. I just go about the work of dismantling it. Period. It's just like that. So I can't say it starts with an inside job. I would say inside and outside arise together and we just keep chipping away at it, you know, at those constructs. Does that make sense?
Manda: Yeah, it totally does. Yes. And it pings off a whole bunch of other questions. But what's arising most clearly and cleanly is I am imagining that horses are politically neutral. That you must get people from right across the very wide political spectrum. And yet my prejudice is that waking up, finding empathy, not shaming oneself is integrally more regenerative than the opposite. And I'm wondering what happens to people who might previously have identified with people who think woke is a bad thing, who come and really are touched at an embodied and heartful level, and then have to go back to a world where that's not necessarily accepted. And perhaps I am projecting onto them things that are not true. But you live with this. So I'm really interested in whether you are able to follow up and what the ripples are there. Because I kind of imagine it's a bit like seven year old you going back to school, and everybody knowing that you're different, but nobody being able to put a thumb on why you're different, but you're still going to get bullied.
Kelly: I love that question. So this is why I'm so hopeful, because the horses are non-denominational and apolitical and because they kind of fly past the radar of the critical neocortex.
Manda: Yeah, straight into our limbic system.
Kelly: And go straight to the heart, right. I see some of the most hardened, protected personalities just break down and break open. And that is why I have hope. That is why I have hope. And I don't have to tell them what's happening. I think that would be a very unkind thing to do. It would just T-Bone with their psyche. I just let the work happen. I prepare them for going back to the world, and the rest is not my business. And I am finding that, for example, this Navy Seal wrote me an email two years after working with me saying I have unbridled my daughters and my wife. I have taken off the halter. You know, he's talking metaphorically, I hope.
Manda: Yeah, of course.
Kelly: Right. And so he gets to find that. And what I have to ensure, as an agent of change for people waking up, is that shame never enters the picture. So if I in some way said, yes, it's wonderful you finally saw or whatever. Or if I somehow nudged him towards not controlling his wife and daughters, then it wouldn't have been his to find. So this is a sacred place for my very far right wing, you know, fanatical Christian, whatever. It is a sacred place. I open the door. If their soul and spirit takes it, that is so worth honouring. So this is why I have hope because it's happening.
Manda: Yeah, totally. And near the top of the show, you talked about the kind of anxiety that's not necessarily grief that we're avoiding, but we're avoiding the anxiety that arises from the grief. That our capacity for avoidance is real and that the route to healing our lostness is not linear. And so I'm wondering a number of things. First is do your clients dream with the horses? I'm wondering how support happens. And I'm thinking that dreaming with horses is a way that support could easily happen. Because our world is not linear. We live in an energetic world. This is what gives me hope, is we have no idea. I occasionally have visions in which there is a grey mare that I have never met in life, and one of the really clear ones, I was totally not expecting it, I was lying on a treatment table, having a really lovely treatment, and she turned up and she said, the world is not what you think it is. And I tend to think I've got a really flexible view of what the world is anyway, but okay, to just abandon anything that I think to be true feels like a much better way to progress. And I'm reading in your book and hearing in your voice that people undergo profound change, and yet change is not linear. And where do you see or feel the support? From the energetic world? From the horses? From the web of life? For people who are on that cusp, on the threshold of feeling connected, of healing the lostness. Because you had uncle Bob and horses and a world and not everyone has an uncle Bob.
Kelly: Not everyone has an uncle Bob. But not everyone needs as heavy a touch as I did. I'll just say that. And horses do come to people in dreams and it is so nonlinear and therefore measurements don't really apply. So Kelly got uncle Bob and Kibata and this other person got ten minutes with the white horse. You know it doesn't matter. What matters is the input. And I love what you say about sort of the web and nonlinear, because I feel that the change that is going to happen, and I do believe it's going to happen, or all these events would not be happening. It's going to be quantum, right?
Manda: And fractal.
Kelly: Fractal, right, yes.
Manda: You hit the acupuncture points and you've got no idea the ripples throughout the system and Gurdjieff said a long time ago it only takes 80 fully enlightened human beings to completely change the world. The difference is he didn't tell us what fully enlightened meant. We can work towards it. Okay. Thank you. Sorry, I can't believe it. We're nearly at an hour. There's so much else in your book. Is there any one story that really stands out that you would like to tell us? I like the one of the old horse that licked the lady's face.
Kelly: Oh, sure, I'll tell that, of course, of course. So this was early days where I was really prototyping the Equus experience work, and I did not have my own herd of horses at the time, and I worked with a kind of ragtag team of trail horses that were used at a resort to just drag tourists up and down the hills. And some really sad stories in that herd. And there was an old, old horse named Camaro, who had been abandoned by someone who had once lived at the resort and brought his horse and then just decided to leave his horse there. And whenever I did work with these horses, and there were about 30 of them, I would take to kind of psychically connecting with them before I would drive to the ranch. And saying, you know, I'm going to do this group and I need like seven of you. Could seven of you just make yourselves known that you want to come and play with these people and work with these people. And sure enough, I get to the ranch and there'd be like 7 or 8 horses standing by the gate. Okay, then you're coming. And Camaro? Never. Camaro was always far in the corner. Camaro was so shut down and so sad and so traumatised. And then I had this group and asked the same question and there's Camaro right at the gate, pressing his chest against the gate. And I was like, Camaro, you never want to do this stuff, are you sure you want to do this?
Kelly: And he just kept insisting, he wouldn't let any other horse through the gate. He kept insisting. So I brought him in along with some others. And this was a sales team who actually worked for the resort. And I think in the beginning, the sales team was sort of on one end of the arena, and the horses had sort of clustered on the other side of the arena. And this is all done at liberty, meaning the horses are free to roam around and do what they want in the rather large arena. And at some point Camaro just marches very deliberately to this one woman, and he had to cross, you know, 100 yards to get to her. And he is like making a beeline to her. And he puts his forehead on her chest, and then he licks her face from her neck, jaw, upper cheek to her forehead. Which, you know, that kind of licking thing horses don't normally do. She bursts into tears. And later, as we unpacked some of the things, she shared that her intention of going into the arena was to really deal with what had become a kind of block of she hadn't been able to meet any sales goals. She'd really just been blocked, and she was kind of all over her self about not being able to meet her sales goals, and she wanted to unlock that. That was her intention for her time, her session.
Kelly: And she shared that when Camaro did this, that Camaro embodied the exact way that her dog would meet her every day at the end of work; beelining over to her, pressing his head against her chest and then licking up her face. And it broke open this terrible grief she was feeling because she had lost that dog four months or so before, and she had judged herself for having any grief about it. It was just a dog, so to speak. And because she wasn't allowing herself that grief to flow and because she's, you know, disconnected from her body and it's not okay to grieve, blah, blah, especially not over an animal, she'd shut that down. And consequently she had shut down her creative capacity to make sales. So, lo and behold, later her sales had improved. But the real touching part of this story is that Camaro, for the first time in his life, was seen as a healer. Was seen as the wisdom companion that he truly was for the first time in his life. And that night he died.
Manda: And that's the bit that's heartbreaking.
Kelly: But what's not heartbreaking is that he died knowing who he was.
Manda: Yeah.
Kelly: He died being seen, being heard, feeling felt and getting gotten. Which are really primary for any being. And I have his mane on a totem thing I made and it's in my bedroom. And so he knew. The intelligence of these beings. He knew he had work to do before he left this earth.
Manda: It's such a moving story. And you tell it really beautifully. You've got a real flair for telling stories, so thank you. That's really beautiful. Thank you so much for that. We have to stop very soon, but you offered two really generous offerings to people listening to the podcast. One is quite soon and one is next year. Do you want to tell us about both of those?
Kelly: Yeah. Thank you. I do a lot of online course work that is all inspired by everything we've spoken about, as it applies to practical application to daily life. So I have an online course coming up about kind of rewiring habits to serve us better. And that is called a spotlight and I'm giving a 50% off of that, to our class. It's coming up, I don't know, soon in November. And there'll be everything in the show notes and the discount code. And then around September of 2026, I really want to invite your listeners to join me in a course called How to Lead a Transformative Life. It's a nature based approach to the blueprint of human evolution. It's a four hour course on two consecutive Saturdays for two hours each Saturday, online at a good time that works for all sorts of time zones all over the world. And I'm giving 100% off that course.
Manda: You're so generous.
Kelly: Which is worth $450. So I just wholeheartedly invite our communities of Equus and your community Manda to commingle and learn and grow together.
Manda: Thank you so much. And people, the links will be in the show notes with the coupons to make the best of this offer. Kelly, we could have talked for hours. Thank you so much for everything that you are and do and for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Kelly: Thank you so much, Manda. And oh, I invite everyone to just read my book, Flying Lead Change; 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Leading and living. And Manda, thank you for the work that you're doing. It is so sacred and so important, and I'm delighted that life stuck us together at this time. Thank you.
Manda: Thank you to Kelsey, who is a wonder and put us together. Thank you.
Kelly: Yes. Wonderful.
Manda: Until the next time. I'm sure we'll get back together sometime soon. Thank you.
Kelly: Thank you.
Manda: And there we go. That's it for another week. Huge thanks to Kelly for all that she is and does. The work with Equus feels to me really transformative. There are a lot of people doing some kind of equine facilitated learning or therapy or healing. But doing it with the herd free, so that they have total agency. And in a herd that is being managed in a way that is as rewilded as possible, when we don't have access to thousands of acres of whatever we want to call it, Pampas Savannah Prairie, Feels to me as if it's stepping on the way towards rewilding us at the same time as rewilding the horses. Our world doesn't give agency to much. It doesn't give agency to our dogs or cats. It certainly gives no agency to a lot of our domestic, industrially farmed livestock. The lives they live are unmitigated hell. It's different when we begin to do regenerative agriculture, and we begin to head towards the kind of things we talked about in England with Charlie Bennet back in episode 297, or in Wales with Abel Pearson in 288, or particularly with Daniel Firth Griffith talking about Kincentric Rewilding back in 273 and the bonus that came after it. I put links to all those in the notes.
Manda: But the point is, we often see our horses as tools. We see them as slightly complicated motorbikes. And they're not. They're individuals with agency. And if we give them agency, they can teach us so much. And yes, this is completely contrary to what we're told, still, now, about domination and control and the need to gain respect by using force or whatever else. But that's the point. This is what Kelly's work and her book can teach us. The world is different if we let it be different. And that means us being different in ourselves, finding the ways to open our heart minds, to become fully embodied in the present moment, to begin to connect with the web of life so that it can become our teacher. And what better teacher than 500 kilos of something that could walk right across the top of you, but chooses not to? And yes, an oak tree can be a teacher, or a rock, or a river, or a red kite, or a mountain. All of these can be our teachers. Opening ourselves to hear the language of what's there, of what's being given to us is the work of this moment. And I genuinely believe that Kelly's book will help you to do that. It's full of really interesting, relatable, empathic case studies of people who have come to Kelly and her team for help, and have gone away having received that help.
Manda: So I put a link in the show notes. You can give yourself a present of that. And there are the links to Breaking the Loop, which we have 50% off. So it's costing $48.50. And that's on the 1st of November. Or How To Lead a Transformative Life in September and October of next year, for which we have no price at all. So you too can engage with Kelly and learn what she's teaching and begin to implement it in your life in whatever way is appropriate. So there we go.
Manda: That's it for this week. Huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for this week's production. To Lou Mayor for making the videos amazing, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the website, and for doing all the work behind the scenes, and for coping with the absolute chaos that a new puppy brings into our world. And as ever, a huge thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand some of the ways that we can be fully present in the moment, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.