The Life Adventure Center and Woodford County is hosting the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association Fundamentals Training, or E Gala Training for Mental health professionals, life coaches and educators looking to incorporate horses and their treatment options.

The program is focused on emotional growth and learning and it is also used for team building.

We have invited people from across the country to come to our facility for five days where they're going to get to learn about the Agoglia model and practice with our horses and see our beautiful property.

The Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association is we teach a modality of incorporating horses into the therapy mental health field and also using it for equine assisted growth and learning.

So if you do corporate development or team building, we can incorporate the horses into that as well.

And with our model, we always have an F1 specialist and a mental health professional involved.

We teach them how to incorporate horses and be a team to to work with their clients.

So riding the horses can be very therapeutic.

But in this model it's 100% on the ground.

There's no riding the horse because I believe there's a different relationship when you're on the horse versus off of the horse.

And so in this model, when we're not on the horse and we're in a large space like in our arenas, the horses have the opportunity to make choices so they can they can choose to be with the clients or away from the clients and move around and take care of themselves and so it's all about relationship and communication with the horses and moving forward with that process and relating those to life experiences and how they are very similar and how you can help.

Or actually the horses can help your clients move forward in their everyday life through experiences in the arena.

This training and model is really cool because unless you are coming in trying to be an equine specialist, you don't have to have any basic knowledge about horses, which also really aligns well with what we do here.

Because some participants that we serve have never seen a horse, are very nervous around horses or are like hard, no when they walk through the doors.

But this is a cool program that enables them to choose.

So from the moment they walk in, they get the choice.

Like you can enter the arena or stay on the outside and observe for a while.

So we use horses because they're they're very adaptable.

They're very forgiving.

They are herd animals much like people in their personalities.

They all have different personalities, which is very like people because we are animals as well.

And so just the connectivity there with with that aspect, but also a lot of times it's being able to get £1,000 animal to be able to either connect to you or get it to do something that you're wanting it to do can really empower people in that aspect as well.

The people that come to these trainings really have a heart and a passion to help people and just being able to use the horses in that aspect I think is really exciting because you're you're building two passions that most people are passionate about horses and people in your being able to bring those two together and help other people in your community.

The gala method is recognized around the world, but it's the first time the Life Adventure Center has hosted the full training.

24 professionals are participating in the five day program.