Grant Williams (00:00:00):
Before we get going, here’s the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully, entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now on with the show.
Welcome everybody to another edition of the Grant Williams podcast, a very special edition of the Grant Williams podcast because joining me today is a good friend of mine, Lynne Bryan Phipps. Lynne qualified as an architect before taking a very different path in life, as you are about to hear. She’s an ordained minister, has founded the Compass School, one of the leading charter schools in Rhode Island and is a former equestrian. However, she also founded Beachwood Integrative Equine Therapy, an extraordinary facility which spans the eastern seaboard of the United States from Rhode Island all the way down to Wellington in Florida and also, across in California.
And I first met Lynne a couple of years ago when I visited Beachwood in Florida and did some work with her. Work, which had a profound effect on me and which has genuinely changed my life for the better. Now, as regular listeners will know, this year has taken me on a journey of sorts into some areas which are less rooted in finance and business and deal far more with abstract matters of things like trust and morality, principles, ethics, but also, more and more I found spirituality as I continue to try and understand the world around me a little bit better.
As you’re about to hear, Lynne’s journey to Beachwood was a fascinating one, and the work she does helping people with a wide range of issues both big and small, using horses, will open your eyes and your heart, I guarantee it. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Lynne Bryan Phipps.
Lynne, welcome to the podcast. I’m so pleased to see you. It’s been a little while since we’ve seen each other, but I’m really excited about the conversation we’re going to have today, which is going to catch a few of my listeners off guard, I suspect. But if they’ve been listening carefully to some of my conversations in the early part of this year, it won’t be such a surprise. So welcome.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:02:21):
Thank you. And thank you for having me.
Grant Williams (00:02:23):
My great, great pleasure. So, you and I have known each other for a couple of years now, and we did some work together, which we’ll get onto a bit later on because I found it equal parts fascinating and incredibly helpful. But before we get to that and what you’re doing, let’s give the listeners a sense of your background, where you grew up and the path you’ve taken in life to get to where you are today.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:02:43):
I have probably an unusual background. My dad was an academician for a very long time, so we traveled to the universities that he worked in. So I have an international background. My family’s originally from North Carolina. We moved to Baltimore where my dad was at Johns Hopkins and then to Miami, then to London, then back to Florida. And the most of my life has been spent either in Miami or just north of Vero Beach where my family resides now.
Grant Williams (00:03:18):
So schooling and what were your interests at school and what academic path did you take?
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:03:22):
So, I actually studied architecture. I went to Rhode Island School of Design. Oh, I have to say this for Ben’s benefit, I went to Auburn first.
Grant Williams (00:03:31):
Okay, roll tide.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:03:33):
War Eagle. So I went to Auburn and my father said if I still wanted to transfer to RISD, which is an art school, in his mind, it was strictly an art school, that I was allowed to transfer my junior year, and I did. So I graduated from RISD in architecture and then I did my master’s in theology 10 years later. And that was actually a result of a couple of major grief incidents. I lost a few babies in the process between my oldest daughter and my youngest daughter. And my architecture, I did sustainable design for 30 years and I kept thinking people were not putting their energy and their money into the values that they said they wanted. And I was just very disillusioned and I thought, oh, I want to go design sacred spaces for churches. So I went to seminary and ended up falling in love with the work of working with people. So people would ask, how’d you go from architecture to working with people? And I say, “Well, it’s like you design spaces for people and then you help people design their inside spaces.”
Grant Williams (00:04:41):
It’s funny because as you say, that move from the physical world, very physical world, the design and building of structures, to the theological world and the world of the inside and the intangible, that’s quite a switch.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:04:53):
Yes. From my perspective, it’s all rooted in the same thing, which is, I’ve always been interested in psychology. I’ve always been interested in the way people perceive their world, why we perceive our world the way we perceive our world, and helping them to feel safe and supported in their world. So, whether I did that in the context of building progressively safe spaces, I did the first green building in Rhode Island. I did the first lead building in Rhode Island. I did the first corporate headquarters that was green in Rhode Island. I still reside part-time in Rhode Island.
So, all the work that I’ve done related to spaces has to do with how people use space, how they perceive space, how they understand space and how it can be good for the environment too. It’s not just about us. And then moving into the world of theology, for me, that’s the core of it. Who are we? Why are we who we are? And how do we become the best us we can be?
Grant Williams (00:05:54):
That’s something that as the world moves on, and we’ll come on to talk about religion’s place in the world a little later on because it’s something that… It keeps coming back there where it hasn’t, until the last year or so, it just hasn’t cropped up the way it’s cropping up now. But when you were young, did religion play a meaningful part in your life or was your family religious?
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:06:13):
So in a liberal sense, I would say they were religious. My parents became confirmed in the Episcopal church when I was baptized. So I’m their oldest child, their oldest daughter, and they saw it as important to bringing up children, making sure that there was a moral framework, so to speak. The thing that happened for me was because we moved so many times to so many places as a young child, the thing about the Episcopal church is there’s a liturgy and there’s a consistency. Not all denominations or all faiths are that way, but in the Episcopal church, it’s consistent. And for me, the church really became my safe place. And so, that was very relevant.
Well, I’ll tell you one other thing. My mom was very concerned when I went to seminary because she said, “People say when you go to seminary you lose religion, you lose your faith because you dig into the mythology and you understand the purpose.” And I understand my mom’s perspective from her perspective, but what I will say is it deepened my faith and my understanding in a completely non-religious way.
Grant Williams (00:07:38):
Did you recognize that at the time, your mom’s perspective or was that something that you came to after going through seminary?
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:07:44):
I think it’s a little bit of both. I think I knew what she was getting at because there’s a dogma and a way of perceiving that I think is actually not healthy in religious communities. And I think that the deepening of my faith and the things that happened when I was in seminary and the things that have caused me to become who I am and to do the work that I do, I couldn’t have done it any other way.
Grant Williams (00:08:16):
It’s such an interesting journey because at the time you were going through that, I would’ve been in the UK at the same time and it very much felt to me, although I didn’t have a religious upbringing at all, but it felt like that period coincided with a steady decline in religion’s place in society. Again, I found when I moved to the United States back in the early to mid ‘90s, I found the United States to be a much more religious enclave than the UK was. But still, I don’t know, you just got this sense that, maybe it was over the 10 years I was there, I felt that religious core very much in decline.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:08:50):
Yes. I think that it has been in decline for quite some time, and I think depending on where you live in the U.S., you find pockets of more religious or less religious communities. I think that the difficulty with religion is that as we became a global world, as everything about the world became more globally aware, the religion became an isolating and a segmenting, not a healthy thing. Isolating is the word that comes to me the most. We’re going to be asked, you’re going to be you. We’re not going to blend, we’re not going to… It’s very much an us-against-them mindset in many situations. There are churches and synagogues and temples that are much more open and affirming or universally accepting, but many, many are not.
Grant Williams (00:09:50):
My adult life has all been spent in the world of finance essentially. And along with that decline in religion, not that I necessarily felt it at the time, but as I sit and think about it, it very clearly to me anyway, the decline in religion went hand in hand with the escalation of the importance of money in people’s lives, materialism and all the things that the financial community, I won’t even say bestowed, has enabled, I think is a better word. The financialization of everything has enabled people to have access to more money than they would ordinarily have had.
And all those principles that you learn when you study the Bible about the sanctity of money and caring for it and all this, being a product of work and toil and all this stuff, it just seemed to fall by the wayside. And along with that prioritization of material things, you could see that there was a much lesser need for anything spiritual when you could hold something in your hand that was heavy and blingy and you could show off to your friends. As someone coming from the other way, what did that look like to you? Because to me, I recognized it, but it didn’t conflict with anything that I held dear inside of me. It just was. And I watched it happen and I can see that, but it wasn’t happening in conflict. For you, that must’ve been slightly different I would imagine.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:11:10):
So what do you mean wasn’t in conflict?
Grant Williams (00:11:12):
If you’ve grown up against the backdrop of religion, there is, in my bitterly rudimentary understanding of the finer details of it, but there is a sense that’s taught that money is the root of all evil and Mammon and all these, there’s a very clear delineation between good and money and you can do good things with money, but the pursuit of money is not necessarily the right direction to take. So I just feel like if that’s your background And I’m sure you grew up, you must watch this with a much stronger sense of unease or separation than I would’ve done.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:11:44):
I think it’s so much more nuanced than that for me. I don’t believe that money’s the root of all evil. What I believe is that we can do with what we have for good or for evil. And it’s not even that polarized. It’s a whole spectrum. And for me, church as an organizing principle for good is super healthy and helpful, but church can certainly tell you or organized religion or Joe Schmo on the television can tell you, send me your money and I’m going to save you. All of that stuff, that would be what Jesus would say is the root of all evil. I think we have to remember, from my perspective, Jesus came, or the understanding in the Christian faith that Jesus came to teach us how to live is really I think, the piece that both religion and all of us or many of us have gotten away from.
And that is, he overturned the tables in the temples because he was saying the church or the synagogue, the organization should not be taking all the money. And what he was saying was, we have the ability to be directly related to God. We actually have the responsibility to be directly related, to live our values, what we believe that we are to do in this world. I would call it a purpose-driven life. For me, I’ve, throughout my life, I saw my dad who was a surgeon, live his life to help people, to save people, save people’s lives. I would hear him do things. He was not a religious man and he didn’t really believe God listened or that there was anything out there that listened. But he would, if one of his patients was really, really sick, he would ask my mom to pray. Believed my mom could do something.
And so, that’s where I grew up. And then what did change for me when I went to seminary was this idea that prayer is how you get what you want or don’t get what you want. That to me is not the purpose at all. Prayer is the way you stay in community. It’s the way you stay connected. It’s the way you listen, not as much as ask. And some people can call it prayer. Some people can call it meditation, some people can call it walking in the woods. Doesn’t matter to me. But I think that the most important thing is that we are each and every one of us, and I say that with absolutely no holds barred, we are each and every one of us, a divine spirit in a human body. We use our humanness to act in the world. We use our divinity or our divine spirit to know how to act if we are listening. If we are not listening, we are not guided, we’re not led, and we’re looking at things that are going to fill us.
And I think that’s the really crucial thing coming back to the financial world or back to money, is that we taught people the only way to feel fulfilled is to have what you want and have the things and have the house and have the pool and for your kids to be able to have. And I think that we have gotten away from that sense of purpose. Because our purpose is not to get what we want. The purpose is to create because we are, we’re made in God’s image. That’s also what we’ve been taught. I don’t care what religion you’re a part of and what I believe that to be is that means you get to create, but you also have to be responsible for what you create. And that’s where we are right now. A lot of people with a lot of stuff have created, but are they happy? I don’t know. I can tell you that’s my goal. My goal is to be purpose driven and fulfilled by that purpose.
Grant Williams (00:16:04):
We’ll come into what you’re doing to fill up because the work you’re doing is truly extraordinary, and I want to talk about that, but I just want to stay on this for a little bit longer because it’s fascinating what you said there about your dad. This idea that I’m not a religious man, but when push comes to shove, we all want to believe in something. And if you do it secondhand, that’s okay. But we come back to that something, that feeling of helplessness that leads you to someone or something that can help you. And along with that decline in religion, certainly over the last 15, 20 years, we’ve seen this rise in spirituality. It’s almost as if that void that was created with the absence of religion, needed to be filled, not individually, but collectively with something. And thousands and thousands of yoga studios have opened up and mindfulness retreats and meditation and all these things that have filled that void.
And when I asked these five friends of mine to write these essays back in February, I had a fairly strong sense of which direction each one of them would come at it from. And one of my good friends, Roger Mitchell, who I do a sports podcast with, who is a religious man, he’s a Catholic and a religious man, or perhaps I should call a man of religion, he would probably argue the semantics with me because that’s just the kind of guy he is. But I was fairly confident that Roger would come at this from the perspective of religion. And it was fascinating when I got the essays through because I gave these guys a very broad brief. I didn’t pigeonhole them in any way because if I’d gotten five essays back that were identical, there was a lot of information in that.
And five very different essays, very different in nature. But the one that seems to have resonated with the most people, certainly the one that most people have felt compelled to comment on was Roger’s. And the thrust of Roger’s essay was ultimately, “When all the world is going to hell, we come back to religion.” And in Roger’s case, that is the Lord, as worshiped by the Catholic faith. But it’s this sense that we have to come back somewhere. And I was really not surprised because it was a beautifully written essay, but the fact that it moved so many people to write and say something about it, either how surprised they’d been or how interesting it was, or… I don’t think anyone said this has changed my life. But amongst five very interesting essays that were of the world that brought them into my orbit, it was the one that was really out of their orbit that compelled them to actually write something, which I found very, very interesting.
So let’s shift and talk a little bit about your move from the seminary and the world of theology into the world of medicine and working with people, which you do now with Beachwood. How did that course start for you? What took you down that road?
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:18:41):
So I served four or five different churches, and I was the university chaplain, for a school outside of Boston, which was an interfaith chaplaincy, not just specifically one religion, but interfaith chaplain. And when I finished that position, I had spent a lot of time with young people because obviously, I’m in a university, and I had done a lot of my own work as well, realizing how the experiences that we have when we’re young, impact the way that we behave as we grow older and the choices that we make and the things that we’re drawn to and the things that we’re not drawn to. I had also, at that point, started a school, a school called the Compass School, which is in Rhode Island. It’s a charter school and its focus is environmental sustainability and social responsibility at the ages, K-8, taught in a project-based learning environment.
And the idea being that people who are sending their kids to school and who weren’t necessarily finding religious homes, church homes, or because religion had declined, were finding that their values weren’t being taught. And so, what I was trying to do was find a way, or what I believed was necessary, was to find a way that we could have a values-based education that met all children’s needs. Because the other thing that’s going on in America is that our education system teaches to the mill, not you can be a little bit ahead of yourself or you can struggle with different things and you get either left behind or you don’t get challenged. So that was a very successful project. It’s 25 years old almost right now, and still one of the top schools. And so, a lot of what people will describe Beachwood as or Beachwood and Inspirited Living my online and my in-person work, is Compass School for big people.
I think I found through the work, I think I’m an experiential learner basically, and I have hypotheses and then I build models. It started in architecture. I was always designing things that hadn’t been designed yet. It’s scary. One of the things that’s interesting about architecture is that when you build it, it either works or it doesn’t, and you’re either successful or it’s a disaster because you can’t undo it. And the really cool thing about working in the spaces that I work in now is that we can design it and build it, and when it works, it’s great. And when it’s not working or if it’s not working, then we tweak it or we change it or we figure out who it’s working for? How it’s working for? And then we can change it.
But the really cool thing about getting to Beachwood and doing the work that we do to help people heal is that I did develop an approach that works consistently. No matter if you come to us because you have heart disease and you think there’s an emotional component to your heart condition, or you have fibromyalgia or chronic pain, or you’ve got anxiety or you’re picking up on all the things that are going on in the world and you’re feeling insecure and uncomfortable, the same approach works for everybody.
Grant Williams (00:22:23):
So, let’s talk a little bit about Beachwood because there’s no clues for anybody here so far in what it is you do there. So, before we actually talk about the work you do there, let’s talk about the journey that led you to actually establishing Beachwood as a physical entity and what it was that you wanted to achieve with that specifically.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:22:40):
So, I’m an equestrian. That’s an avocation. I haven’t talked at all about that. I work with horses to enjoy them. And I was looking for a dressage horse, and I found a horse that I credit with teaching me this work. And the really beautiful thing is that we looked all over the country with a trainer and a veterinarian, we do this, and nobody thought that I needed to look at this horse. We had vetted four different horses that were “suitable” and none of them passed the vetting. And my trainer finally said, “Okay, you can go look at that gray horse in North Carolina with Jennifer,” who’s one of the U.S. equestrian team members. And he was five years old. He was not what I was looking for, supposedly. I needed a school master who was going to teach me more than I taught him. He did do that. He just didn’t do it the way we thought.
Grant Williams (00:23:36):
Explain what you mean by that because there will be people that don’t quite understand what you mean by getting the horse to teach you, because that’s an unusual way to think of it.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:23:43):
Okay. In the equestrian world, whether you’re jumping or you’re riding dressage or you’re barrel racing, doesn’t really matter. Horses that have a lot of training already on them, they’ve been trained to do a job, can teach the person who doesn’t know the job as well. Or the person who knows the job well, may want a horse that doesn’t have a lot of training so that they can teach the horse their way of doing. So, in this particular case, I was transitioning from jumping, I’d been a jumper for a very long time, to riding dressage. And dressage, it’s like for people who are double type A personalities because it’s so very, very specific. Every movement matters. And so I needed to learn. And the way horses can communicate with people is through their bodies and through their minds. So the human’s body and the horse’s body and the human’s mind and the horse’s mind need to work together on a very, very, very high level.
So when you’re the person learning all of those different tools to communicate, it’s helpful if one of you, either the horse or the human, knows the tools. If you’re learning them, you’d like a horse that already knows them. If you’ve got them and you want them to learn your tools, then you want the less trained one. I was in the position where I wanted the school master. We call them a school master. We want the one that has all the training on them, and you’re going to learn it from them. They’re going to give it to you when you do it right, and they’re not going to give it to you when you don’t ask them correctly. So we were at a point where the school masters didn’t pass the vetting that we’d identified. And there was a very young, a five-year-old, which is very young. We only back these horses. We only start riding them at four.
So very newly trained gray horse that kept showing up in our searches. And the vet actually kept saying, “You should go look at the gray horse.” And my trainer kept saying, “You don’t want the gray horse. It’s not what you’re looking for.” So finally, the trainer agreed that I could go look at the gray horse if I had three other horses I could look at down there. So I called the person who was selling them, Jennifer, and I said, “Do you have a few more horses I can see?” She said, “Yes.” I came down, she said, “Don’t you want to look at the gray horse?” I said, “Yes, I want to look at the gray horse.” So we narrowed it to two horses. There was a chestnut and a gray, and I didn’t know what to do because I’m paying for another vetting.
Both of them seem perfectly suitable. And I called a friend and she said, “Well, have you asked them?” I was like, “Of course, I should have thought of that. Of course, I need to ask them.” So it was in North Carolina. Every horse had a two acre field, beautiful layout, individual. So I walked to the gate of the chestnut and I walk through the gate and he’s at the far end of the field, and we hang out for a few minutes, a little while, and I’m like, “Yeah, this feels good. Everybody’s happy. It’s fine.” I go to the other gate of the gray horse, I get to the gate, he’s at the other end of the field. I open the gate, he looks up, I walk through the gate, he starts walking towards me. We met in the middle of the field. He put his head on my heart, and I burst into tears.
And this is no exaggeration, it was the craziest thing on the face of the planet because I was like, “Oh my God, he’s choosing me.” There was this moment where it was so clear, it really had nothing to do with me. I was being chosen. We vetted the horse. I bought the horse. It’s been an amazing partnership. But I credit him with founding Beachwood because through the work that I started doing with him, he was so physically demonstrative about how he helped people that I realized my job was to figure out how to make the healing power of horses accessible to people who didn’t have access to horses, which is most of people.
So it’s not dressage. Nobody’s riding in the world of Beachwood, but the horses who do this work, we have five centers across the country. We have horses across the country. We have trained, integrated equine therapists across the country, and we’re continuing to grow. But the work that’s happening is happening on the ground where people are able to be in a safe enough place that they can access the emotional, the stuff that’s stuck, the stuff that they need to get to, the stuff that they can’t face, and bring it up and look at it and move it around and let it go.
Grant Williams (00:28:37):
I need to interject because there are going to be people listening to this, I’m sure, going, “Wait a minute, hang on a second. What are you talking about there?” Because this idea of the horse choosing you, this idea of horses and the healing properties of horses and working with human beings is something that, and I know this from experience, because I’ve done work with you and I’ve seen how this extraordinary thing happened. So I want to relate my own experience in this because I think through that, people may get a better understanding. And I should preface this by saying, I would say I hate horses. I don’t hate horses, but they make me very nervous. I’m very skittish around horses. I’d been on a couple of horses when I was a little kid, and I just found them too big and too powerful and just couldn’t control them. It wasn’t I was afraid. I just didn’t like horses. I didn’t feel any compulsion to go on a horse.
And I came to see you a couple of years ago now, to do some work, and I was introduced to you by someone I love deeply, and we went down to see you and was a little skeptical, but open-minded. And you explained to me how this whole thing works because I literally went in pretty blind and hearing the theory behind equine therapy is interesting. I’m a curious person, so I’m curious about how all this stuff works and curious about what it’s designed to do and what the goals are. But I still have this, I’m sure this comes from the world of finance, but I have this show me mentality. It’s like, yeah, well that sounds great, but show me.
So you and I, we go into this field and there’s a couple of horses and you say, well, let’s see which of these horses you’re going to work with. I’m like, “Okay, well is this going to work then?” And you stood be in front of one paddock with one horse, and you asked me to close my eyes and stand there, and I still remember the sensation of leaning backwards or falling away, not uncontrollably. So I stumbled, but I felt my body move backwards and I can still viscerally feel what that felt like, which caught me completely by surprise. I didn’t know what it meant, but it caught me completely by surprise. And you didn’t say anything. You just said, “Okay, right. Well, let’s go.” We went to horse number two and same routine, same thing happened, and it felt like I was losing my balance, and I didn’t really associate the fact that I was falling backwards. I just felt like I was off balance. It was the strangest feeling. And then we go to Bugatti, bugs in the third paddock, and I stand there, same thing.
And now, I realize that I’m toppling forward, which is again, that was the point where I realized something strange was happening because I then was aware that I’d fallen backwards both times and now I was falling forward. That was how you said, “Right, well, this is your horse.” And again, at that point, now, my curiosity is still peaked, but now, there’s something going on that I can’t explain and the way that my right brain says right, we need to explain everything here. Everything’s got to make sense and be identifiable and have an explanation to it. And so, we went in and we stood in the paddock and you said to me, “Look, you just stand here. Ignore the horse. The horse is going to be over there. He is going to be over here. He’ll come to you if he needs to come to you, and he’ll be away if he needs to be away.”
And what happened in that next hour is truly extraordinary for me to feel that and to have… To your point, and when you told me that story when you first met the gray, I’ve experienced that. I’ve experienced the horse come up and put his head on your heart when you’re talking about something emotional or difficult. And to this day, I can’t explain it, but I know it’s real. And this is why it brings me back to this whole thing of religion and this whole idea that there can be things out there that you can’t explain. And as much as you like order and you like to be able to understand everything around you, sometimes you just have to let go. And sometimes, you have to accept that there are things that go on in the world, in your life and things that bring you to certain places and certain people, and in this case, certain animals, that there’s no point in trying to analyze it. There’s no point.
So when you talk about the horse choosing you, I just wanted to relate that story to the people listening to give them a sense of what this feels like for someone who, I say, wasn’t skeptical, but was like, “I’ll give this a go. What could go wrong?” And walked away profoundly moved and profoundly changed forever through the thing. So with that story said, and give people a little bit of sense, let’s talk through the actual what happens and what it is you’re trying to do.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:33:08):
Just like you, I didn’t want to be that crazy horse lady that thought something was…
Grant Williams (00:33:10):
Right.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:33:13):
Honestly, when I developed this process, I was like, “Oh my God, people are going to think…” So first of all, I developed it, and then second of all, people started asking if we could help and my kid can’t get out of bed to go to school, she’s going to fail, can you help? My husband or my spouse or my whatever? Can you help? Can you… We can try. We can try. And I had a consistent process and the truth of it, and what I think is the most significant thing about the work that we do at Beachwood is that Brown University collects data on what we do and has been since 2017 because I didn’t want to be that crazy horse lady who said something was happening and nobody could really see what it was.
So, do we know what is happening? We have hypotheses. Do we know something is happening? Absolutely. Do we have evidence and data that shows that it helps people heal? Yes. Do we know how and why? We think we do. It takes more and more and more studies, but I think that that’s an important thing to say and that is because I think the truth is, getting to a safe place, getting what we call grounded and connected. So, back to your question, what is it that we do? The first thing we do is we help people to get their head, their heart, and their gut connected again, because our culture teaches us to dissociate. It teaches us to live in our head and think we can figure everything out and do everything up here. And the truth is, you know a lot in your body and it’s valuable information.
And when you don’t listen to it, you get yourself into trouble. And when you have experiences as a young person where it hurts too much either in your heart or your stomach, you try not to listen to it because you don’t want it to hurt anymore. So, the work that we do is critical to helping people stay human and stay connected, but also, to be able to be safely connected to each other. And sometimes, the problem is that we’ve had difficulty connecting with humans and we need something else to be connected to, to feel safe or to trust. So that’s where the horse comes in.
Grant Williams (00:35:30):
So let’s talk about the things that you can use the horses to help with and how the process works and what’s actually going on behind it. Because you explained it to me, and I’d much rather you explain it because it made so much sense when it came from you, and I’ve tried to explain it to people since, I’ve gone in all kinds of tangles and said, “You know what? I don’t know. You need to speak to Lynne about this.”
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:35:51):
I think the easiest thing or the most significant thing to say is we are talking a little bit about the vasovagal nervous system, the fight or flight part of our brain, which operates based on our heart and our gut. When you get scared, your heart rapidly beats. When you get frightened, you get a pit in your stomach. Just think about it, a lot of times if I’m scared, my brain is not really firing. It’s my heart or my gut. So the first thing that we have to do is we have to help people get that working again, be able to listen to it. Then what we have to help people do is well, trauma, and for us, our definition of trauma is not just abuse or neglect or natural disaster. It’s anything that happened to you that you had to get through when it was too big for you. It just was too much. And when you felt like you had to get through it alone.
So even if you were in the midst of a group of people, everybody was like every man for themselves because by the time you’re scared, it is, it’s every man for himself. So what happens when we are having an experience like that is the experience gets stored in the fight or flight part of your brain, not in the conscious part of your brain where short and long-term memory happens. And the neuron that fires to help you get through it is the instinctive one, the one that’s coming from the fight or flight part of your brain creates a neural pathway. The age and stage you were when it first happened. So for instance, you’re in kindergarten or you’re getting ready to go to kindergarten and your mom says, “Oh, we’re going to go to kindergarten and here’s your lunchbox, and we’re getting you all ready,” and you’re not ready for this. You’re just not. A lot of people are, some people aren’t.
And you’re like, “You’re going to what? You’re going to drop me off and you’re not going to be there? And I’m going to have to be with people I don’t know and I’m going to be doing things that I might not like?” And so, all these things are getting churned up in your brain. You develop a neural pathway right then and there from the fight or flight part of your brain to get through that experience. And what that means is you’re only as old as you are. So your brain is only as formed as it is. So let’s say you’re four or five years old, five or six years old, what can you do when you’re four or five or six years old to help yourself?
Grant Williams (00:38:26):
Very little.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:38:26):
Not a lot. So now comes high school. You’re going to new school. All these things are happening around you. How old is the part of you that shows up to help you get through that? Four or five years old. Because that’s who gets triggered and it’s all about hair triggers. We go through life and there’s a smell that makes you think of that thing that happened or a thought, a visual. There’s something that you bump into or a sound, and all of a sudden, you’re back there. That’s the way we’re designed and we’re designed to do that so we can survive.
So what we do is we help you to get in touch with that experience and build a bridge to the conscious part of your brain so that you can actually access all of the things that you can do and all of the coping strategies that you have now. So, if every time you’re in a very scary situation, like a social situation, you revert to the things that you could do when you were four. It’s way better to be able to access… You leave that social situation, you go, “Oh, I should have said this or I should have done that. Why couldn’t I?” Well, you couldn’t because you were in the fight or flight part of your brain. What we do is we help you build that bridge so then you don’t get triggered that way.
Grant Williams (00:39:46):
But if you’re in those situations, you understand that your instinctive reaction is to deal with it like a four or five-year-old kid. But the adult can come in and say, “We’re not going to handle this because we know that. We know what’s happening. And so let’s work through this as adults.”
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:40:01):
Yes, I’ll use a different example. If you’re a baby, very, very young child, you can’t move yet. You’re not a toddler. Maybe you’re even a toddler and what’s going on in your house is overwhelming. Your parents are fighting. Maybe there is abuse, maybe there’s something going on. What can you do as a baby?
Grant Williams (00:40:21):
Literally you’re completely helpless.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:40:23):
You go to sleep. This is way too much for me. I’m going to go to sleep. Light years ahead, things are overwhelming. How can you numb now? I can use weed, I can use alcohol, I can use substances, I can use whatever. Addictive behavior oftentimes is a result of very, very early childhood trauma. Might not have been anything more than something that felt overwhelming to you. Whatever it was that made you need to numb, you go back to numbing, you find new ways to numb, right? There’s a very easy solution. Well, it can be painful, but it’s not a difficult solution, which is build a new bridge and you don’t have to do that anymore. In fact, you’re not even interested in the substance or the behavior, whatever that is, that helps you numb.
Grant Williams (00:41:16):
Because you can come at it from an adult space?
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:41:18):
Yeah, because all of a sudden you’re like, “I am not there. What can I do now? I don’t like it. I can move away. I don’t like it. I get in the car.” You know what I mean? I can have a conversation about it. There’s so many things can do, but we can’t access them if we’re coming from the fight or flight part of our brain.
Grant Williams (00:41:39):
With all that understood now, let’s talk about the horse component to this because this is the extraordinary part of this. So, explain and talk a little about the horse’s side of this, how that magic happens. I don’t even want to preface it with anything. I just want you to talk about it because it’s extraordinary.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:41:54):
A lot of people will ask, how do horses help? What’s the horse’s role in this? The first thing is that horses have the ability to create safe space for us. Yes, you’re right, Grant. They are enormous and powerful and they can be a bit intimidating or terrifying, but they also, when they’re at peace, we feel that peace. So there’s a somatic component to it. We feel it. When we connect a horse with a human, you can get connected to that peace and feel that safety. And when you feel that safety, you can’t access trauma without being safe because if you’re not safe, it’s not safe to be accessing it. So getting to that safe place is the first step.
Then the next step is that horses will show us where we hold it, how big it is, how small it is, how small we were, how big we were. They can give us so much information. And what happens in the context of our work is that you, the client, has the experience of seeing it, hearing it, feeling it. When we take you to those places and we start to process it, you feel it, but then you hear the horse, you see the horse, you participate with the horse. And so, we have this multi-sensory experience. This is the hypothesis part, that seems to make it so it sticks in your brain better than other approaches. It also builds in that sense of safety, access, because we help, with our words, with the integrative equine therapist words, we help you see how you got through it. So whatever those experiences were, when you become aware of them, sometimes people come, they aren’t even aware of what the experience was or what’s keeping them back. They just know what they do and they don’t like what they do. You know what I mean?
But when we get you to the core of what happened or what is happening or what did happen, we help you to see how you got through it and why it was age-appropriate and how great it was that you actually accomplished it so that you can then build a bridge to it. And that’s how we build the bridge to the conscious part of you, because now, you can actually do all kinds of things more than you could do then. All kinds of tools, all kinds of age-appropriate behavior, all kinds of things that were not safe when you’re a tiny, are really safe now.
Grant Williams (00:44:23):
When you talk about how you work with the horses and what the horses can do, let’s talk about that in real terms because it’s a little abstract and I can imagine people thinking, well, see, you just talked to therapists, but there’s a horse wandering around in the background. How’s that going to help me? The incredible piece of this is just this empathetic quality that the horses have. This intuition that until you first have it explained, which I hope you’re going to do now, and then experience it as I’ve done, it’s really difficult to even conceive of how something like this could actually work.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:44:58):
You described our first step of our first session, the you getting connected to all of you, the head, heart, and gut part, and through that connection we connect you with a horse. I think intuition is a good word. I think we’ve minimized intuition in our culture. I think another way of describing it is, we actually get ourselves connected enough to feel what actually happens in our world. Because once you learn to do this, you can feel more things in and around all kinds of situations that you might tune out, right?
Grant Williams (00:45:35):
But Lynne, you knew, maybe you didn’t know. But you had a very strong sense that I was going to react the way I reacted when I stood there and closed my eyes. You were trying to see which one of those horses I would connect with. So you knew. You know that there was going to be some physical reaction.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:45:50):
I knew it would happen.
Grant Williams (00:45:51):
So where does that come from?
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:45:53):
Well, first of all, I want to say that horses and humans have been connected for thousands of years. We have to remember that. If you want to go from a spiritual perspective, there’s something about horses and humans that was designed by something greater. Some people would say that, but horses read their environments and they read and live in community always. So they’re a prey animal. Their survival depends on being connected to each other and they live feeling that connection. If another horse notices that there’s something to be frightened of, everyone will know it at once in the herd.
So people are predators in their world or could be predators, and they can read people because they have to read people to be safe. So they’re reading what we call congruence. When we get you connected with yourself, aligned mind, body, spirit, then a horse will read that congruence and will tell us, tell you, tell people what’s really going on. So, a dog will show you what they know you want to see so you feel good about you. A horse will show you what’s really going on because their survival depends on it.
Grant Williams (00:47:22):
The form that that takes in terms of the physical reactions of the horse to, and again, just so people understand the process, you stand in the field and you talk and you ask questions and very simple questions, and I don’t know if everyone does. So I stood there with my eyes closed and just listened to the questions and just answered them without being distracted by anything around me. And you are very aware of the horse. And at first, my awareness was a little bit of nervousness and apprehension being that close to a horse and have my eyes closed, but trusting that the horse wasn’t going to trample me. But then that shifted into something else. It was just this… You talk about that connection. It was this feeling not of being apprehensive but completely at peace that there was a horse around and when the horse would dip in or dip out, it didn’t come as a surprise. It just reaffirmed something or it’s really hard to describe the experience.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:48:25):
I like to say that when we work with a client, on the outside, if you’re watching it looks like two people standing in a field with a horse.
If you’re on the inside, it’s a beautiful dance because it’s a coming and going and it’s releasing. You hear the releases of the horse, but at the same time, you’re feeling what’s shifting in your body or you see the coming close and you’re in a very tender moment maybe, and the horse comes close or you’re experiencing something that felt really overwhelming and really big and the horse moves away because we work with our horses at what we call at liberty, which means they can come and go in the experience. But then we read what’s happening in the experience from the horse by giving them the freedom to do that work. I’m going to give you an example because I think this might be a good way of showing what we’re talking about.
I had a client once in Rhode Island who was in the field with the horse with me. She was describing being very young, let’s just hypothetically, we’ll say four. And she had to be very guarded, and the horse is walking around us in a circle at the same distance, and she’s very anxious as she remembers this experience. So the horse is not grazing or relaxed. The horse is very vigilantly walking in a circle around us and she says the word, “It’s like I was an armadillo. I had to have a shell on.” And the horse is walking in a circle and we get further in the process where we get to know the very young her who feels like she has to have the armadillo shell, and she starts to cry and the shell starts to, in her mind’s eye or in her experience, she starts to drop that armadillo shell and the horse literally bolted to the other end of the field, which was about an acre field. And she opened her eyes, of course, she was like you, was standing there with her eyes closed, and she says, “What happened?”
And he started walking back to her and he put his head on her heart because it frightened him as she changed, she dropped her shell. He went, “Whoa, what’s that?” Took off. And then was, oh, it’s you. Came right back in. That’s a very graphic experience. You can remember other kinds of experiences like that, but that’s a very good example because the horses can see what we see, they can feel what we feel. They can be connected and show us sometimes what we’re too scared to see, which helps us to see it, which helps us feel safe enough to see it. And that act of staying there in the experience processing it, helps us to build that bridge because it brings it into conscious awareness rather than keeping it stuck over there, where we don’t really want to look at it or don’t really want to feel that anymore or don’t really want…
And the power of the experience that gets held, when we hold those experiences, there’s a lot being held in terms of energy and can be perceived as a woo-woo word, but it’s like a lot of that energy can move then because we’ve released it and when we release it, the horse can show us, oh wow, not only did you feel that, it happened, you hear it or you see it. That’s why I say it’s like it’s a multi-sensory experience that helps it to move and not be an issue anymore. We have clients who they had something they were processing that they were always drawn into, and it’s not even interesting anymore. Doesn’t even cross my mind. And that’s freedom. We help people find freedom and the ability to connect differently with people.
Grant Williams (00:52:43):
My experience was interesting because what it did for me, it’s funny, I’ve spoken to so many friends about this, trying to explain how it works, and I still can’t do it. I’m so glad that you are doing all the heavy lifting here. But it was really ultimately, it just gave me understanding is what it gave me. Understanding of things that I didn’t even know that I needed to understand. That was a really interesting thing for me, and it brought a clarity to things that I didn’t even know were opaque at all, and it was truly an extraordinary experience. Help people understand the kind of things that you treat with equine therapy and what exactly you do at Beachwood. And then let’s talk a little bit about Inspired Living, because that’s the online…
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:53:23):
We’ve helped people with heart disease. We had somebody who came… I love this example because we actually have data about it. That’s the other thing. We like to say we measure the magic. We know that people, like you said, it’s like we don’t know. It’s hard to describe it. It’s this thing, but we have a lot of data, which is awesome, and Brown University’s got a paper where it’s cool because there’s actually data about it. But some of the data, for instance, is that we had a person who came with heart disease. She’d had a major heart incident, and her resting heart rate was like 165, which is very high, and by the time she finished six or seven sessions at Beachwood, her resting heart rate, and this is not just at Beachwood, this is like her resting heart rate out in the world was 85.
So, she came to us because she believed there was an emotional or a trauma-related component to her heart issue. We were able to help her process that, and it changed her trajectory of her life. We have people with fibromyalgia who have come and don’t have fibromyalgia symptoms anymore. We have folks who have diagnosed anxiety disorder or people who came to us, for instance, before COVID with anxiety, went through COVID without anxiety. So anxiety, depression, we have folks who’ve been suicidal. We have folks who just have that nagging sense that they just can’t feel fulfilled or they can’t get to what they want in a relationship. We can help with all kinds of things because nobody really realizes that almost all of it has to do with what we would call shifting perspective.
So getting to know yourself in a way that gets you to the core of what happened and how you got through it. There are so many times that we disconnect in order to get through, and when we disconnect, then it’s really hard to connect safely with people without disconnecting. Like I say, horses live in connection. It’s where they find safety because they have to. We also are designed to live in connection, but our world does not make it safe to be connected, and we’ve got to figure out how to be safely connected or we’re not going to survive.
Grant Williams (00:56:20):
Well, and that’s where the online community comes in. So talk a little bit about that before we wrap this up.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:56:25):
So Inspirited Living actually started before Beachwood. I thought that what we needed was a place for good news, for people to be able to share what was going on really in their lives. And from this whole perspective of understanding that we can’t become our whole selves without really doing that reflective work, I developed a course called Becoming You and I developed that and placed it on the Inspirited Living website. And so, that was the, how do you find connection in the world with people who are like-minded, who going to be safely connected? Because the purpose of being together is to inspire, uplift and support. Inspirited is a 15th century word that means to inspire, uplift and support.
And I wanted this place where people could feel that they could inspire, uplift and support and that they could be inspired, uplifted, and supported. That was even back maybe in the 2010, ‘11, right after the 2008 crash, and it was like the world was chaotic and we need a safe place. We need a place that we can talk about the good stuff. Not all the fear and not after 9/11, all of it was fear. That’s what Inspirited Living started as.
And then I started developing this work at Beachwood and it’s like, oh, well Beachwood is the personal place. That’s the place that people can go to shift perspective, to get to the core of the stuff that they want to work through to feel better and to get safer and feel like they can live connected. So you can come to Inspirited Living through Beachwood, you can come to Beachwood through Inspirited Living. But Inspirited Living is the idea that I think all of us would like to live in the world safely with value, with purpose, with people who are interested in helping us find our value or understand our value and perceive our purpose so that we can then go out and be, again, what I believe that divine being in a human body, doing what we’re supposed to do and being who we’re supposed to be in the world because everybody deserves to do that. Everybody deserves to be that.
Grant Williams (00:58:49):
It’s so fascinating. Whereabouts are the various Beachwoods? I know of one down in, obviously in Wellington, obviously, and Rhode Island, but where are the others?
Lynne Bryan Phipps (00:58:56):
So we have Rhode Island. I go down the coast usually. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. area, Maryland, Florida, that’s in Wellington, and then California. And next, we’re opening in Chicago.
Grant Williams (00:59:11):
Chicago. Ooh. They’ll be a bit chilly in the winter. Get the blankets for the horses and they’re going to need blankets. That’s for certain. Well, look, Lynne, this has been absolutely wonderful. I’m so glad we got the chance to do this. And it’s funny, this year for me, we’re already halfway through April, which is just terrifying. But I found myself on this journey that I never set out to follow. It was really just the way I was feeling about the world and questions I had about the world. And I strongly suspect that you and Beachwood in some way, are responsible for that by awakening me to this sense of there’s something that I’m just not quite comfortable with and not quite sure about, and I’m just trying to figure it all out. And it’s led me to a series of profound conversations with people.
And that journey for me, will continue through this year for sure with some of the other work I’m doing. But I want you to let people know how they can A, find out more about Beachwood, but probably more importantly, contact you directly if people want to either talk to you about coming to see you or working with you because I’m living proof and I can offer the greatest testimonial that I can possibly give you that it’s an extraordinary process and will be a profound experience for anyone that decides to go and give it a try.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (01:00:16):
Well, thank you, Grant. It is an honor to work with each and every person that I work with personally or that any of our trained people work with, because the process, it’s amazing that it can be so… So the way you can measure a process is if you have something that happens so consistently, and we have a lot of parameters that make it a very consistent process. And it’s amazing to me how unique an individual, each experience is because each one of us is unique. And that again, has to do with, from my perspective, this sense that we are created by something greater to be that unique and individual being in the world. And I am honored to help each and every person who wants to dig into who they are, who they want to be, and who they want to become.
Grant Williams (01:01:09):
And so, just let them know how they can do that.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (01:01:12):
Beachwood is www.beachwood, B-E-A-C-H-W-O-O-D-R-I.org because that is a nonprofit. So that was the one that we could get at the time. It had to have the R-I in it. So, beachwoodri.org and/or Inspirited, I-N-S-P-I-R-I-T-E-D Living, L-I-V-I-N-G .com is Inspirited Living. And my direct contact email is Lynne, L-Y-N-N-E @beachwoodri.org.
Grant Williams (01:01:53):
Terrific. Lynne, this has been wonderful to see you again, and I’m so glad we got another chance to have this conversation. So thank you for giving up your time. It was lovely to see you. And again, thanks so much for doing this.
Lynne Bryan Phipps (01:02:04):
It’s great to see you too. Take care.
Grant Williams (01:02:05):
Alrighty. Bye-bye.
There you have it, folks, my conversation with the wonderful Lynne Bryan Phipps.
Now, before the usual disclaimer that ends these podcasts, I’d like to just add a little more information about Beachwood in the hope that you may be able to help Lynne and her staff with their remarkable work:
Beachwood provides services and training in Integrative Equine Therapy (IET), a unique protocol for treating anxiety, grief, trauma, PTSD, and other stress-related conditions in a truly extraordinary way—with the help of horses. Although Beachwood has a veterans programme, Lynne and her team work with people from all walks of life and of all ages. In my personal experience, Beachwood is a wonderfully welcoming place.
I absolutely had the same questions you likely do about how horses could help humans heal—until I met Lynne and worked with her in 2024. That experience opened my eyes to something remarkable. Beachwood Integrative Equine Therapy is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation, with the goal of providing services regardless of whether individuals have health insurance or the means to pay—and you, dear listener, can make a tremendous difference.
There are many ways to get involved. You can choose to support an individual, fund a programme, or sponsor one of the amazing horses. You can give directly—including via donor-advised funds—through Beachwood’s website, and of course, you can work directly with Lynne to plan your giving.
If you’ve enjoyed my work over the years and are in a position to make a financial contribution to Beachwood to help support the incredible work they do, please consider making a donation.
You can make a big difference to people’s lives by clicking the link below and donating whatever you can:
beachwoodri.org/donate-integrative-equine-therapy
A contribution to Beachwood is a solid investment in helping to meet the significant need for mental health treatment. Data shows that Integrative Equine Therapy is faster and more effective than traditional therapies, making it possible for Beachwood Centers to see more clients and have a greater impact on the wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities. All individuals who receive financial support for IET at Beachwood qualify through a referral by a health services professional or clergy member, which ensures that they have a genuine need for that support.
And finally—perhaps most importantly—if you or anyone you love is suffering from stress, grief, or trauma-related illness, please reach out to Lynne and talk with her about IET and Beachwood to see if it might be right for you. It’s a truly wonderful place with the kindest, most caring staff imaginable.
Lynne’s email is:
lynne@beachwoodri.org
…and the Centre’s website is:
www.BeachwoodRI.org
That’s it from me for another episode. My thanks to Lynne, and as always, my thanks to you for listening. I’ll be back with another podcast in the very near future. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening.
Nothing we discussed should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully, entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets.
