What Creating a Horsemanship Brand With My Dad Taught Me About Horses, Trauma, and Healing

I want to tell you a story about my horsemanship entrepreneurship journey. And how it taught me powerful lessons about horses, healing, and trauma...

Back in 2020, I was trying to figure out what kind of online business I wanted to create.

I had recently graduated with a diploma in marketing and communications, and I knew I wanted to use what I had learned to work with clients and eventually build something of my own. I also knew I did not want to go get a traditional 9-to-5 job. Wild spirits cannot be tamed. Or caught in the 9-5 grind, am I right?

At that point, most of my professional experience outside of marketing had been in makeup artistry. I had worked freelance for a couple of cosmetics companies as a makeup artist demonstrating their products, and throughout college, I had done weddings and photoshoots to help pay the bills.

I loved parts of that work, but I knew that I didn't want to build an entire business around cosmetics.

So I wasn't really sure what I was going to do...

It was Spring of 2020. I was back living at home, after graduating college, uncoupling from my former long-term boyfriend, and spending a winter in Texas.

I knew I needed to build something for myself that would give me some legs. It was the beginning of Covid. I needed to make some money and move out from my mom and dad's.

Through the big picture window, I saw my dad walking across the yard.

And suddenly I thought, That's it.

That's the business I should create.

I should create a business with my dad and take his horsemanship teachings online.

It was 2020. Online businesses were just about the only businesses that were open, and I already knew how much time and location freedom meant to me.

I had recently gotten home from spending the winter in Texas, where I had been able to work remotely doing freelance marketing for clients, something I still do today through my marketing business, The Branding Pen.

I had gotten a taste of what it felt like to be able to work from anywhere, and I wanted more of that.

And so my dad and I started the adventure of creating Cowboy Campus.

Building Cowboy Campus

We took the horsemanship my dad had spent decades teaching people in person and brought it online.

We built an Instagram account, a YouTube channel, a website, and online training programs. It gave us a way to impact more people with solid, natural horsemanship teachings without them needing to physically come to our ranch.

Over time, we even coined a term for my dad's particular approach to natural horsemanship: collaborative horsemanship.

At the heart of collaborative horsemanship was something really simple: Your relationship with your horse should feel as good to your horse as it does to you.

But as we built Cowboy Campus and more people came through our programs, I started noticing something.

Most of the people coming to us were women.

And many of them seemed to have two very distinct needs.

Cowboy Campus was incredibly well equipped to solve one of them.

The other one was different.

The First Need: Better Horsemanship

The first thing these women needed was better horsemanship.

They needed better tools and a better understanding of how their horse thinks, acts, learns, and responds.

They needed confidence in training their horse.

They needed to know how to problem-solve when an issue arose instead of feeling helpless when something went wrong.

They needed to know what to do when they were out on a trail ride and their horse spooked.

They needed to understand how to prevent problems before they happened.

They needed the confidence that comes from knowing what to do when a sticky situation arises.

They needed to learn how to become the leader of their own little herd of two.

And this was exactly what Cowboy Campus was designed to teach.

My dad's teachings helped people become better horsemen and women. They taught people how to create a horse that genuinely wanted to be with them and near them. They taught people how to understand their horse instead of simply reacting to their horse.

Those skills matter tremendously.

But there was another need I kept seeing.

And horsemanship alone couldn't fully address it.

The Second Need: Healing the Human

Some of these women weren't only struggling with their horse.

They were carrying the memory of what had happened to them in their own bodies.

They had been through horse-related accidents, falls, wrecks, scary rides, or frightening experiences on the ground.

Maybe it happened in the arena.

Maybe it happened on the trail.

Maybe it happened on horseback or standing beside their horse.

But whatever had happened, the experience didn't necessarily end when the accident itself was over.

Their bodies remembered.

And that's where I started to recognize a gap.

Horsemanship is, in many ways, mechanical. You can learn what to do with your hands, your seat, your legs, your timing, your pressure and release. You can learn how to read your horse and how to respond when something starts to go wrong.

All of that can make you safer and more confident.

But what happens when you know what to do and your body is still screaming that you're not safe?

That's different.

Many of these women didn't just need to train their horses.

Some of them needed to retrain their own bodies to feel safe around horses again.

They needed to be able to apply their horsemanship from a calm, regulated nervous system instead of trying to remember everything they had learned while their own body was bracing for something terrible to happen.

And that matters for the horse, too.

Your Horse Can Feel You

Horses are incredibly sensitive to what is happening around them.

When you climb into the saddle already tense, anxious, braced, or waiting for something to go wrong, your horse can respond to that.

That means you can have all the horsemanship tools in the world and still feel like something isn't quite clicking.

You may be able to solve much of the problem through better horsemanship. You may become a much more capable rider. You may make yourself and your horse considerably safer.

But if your nervous system is still responding as though the original accident is happening all over again, there's another piece of the puzzle that needs attention.

That's the piece I became fascinated by.

And eventually, it's what led me to create Herd of Two Healing.

Horsemanship Matters. But Sometimes It Isn't the Whole Answer.

I want to be really clear about something.

I still believe horsemanship matters enormously. In fact, I know it does. It's the foundation.

If you've been through a wreck or horse-related accident, there are situations where stronger horsemanship skills very likely may have prevented the accident from happening.

That was something we saw with women coming through Cowboy Campus.

Sometimes there were skills, knowledge, timing, or tools that could have changed how a situation unfolded.

So yes, work on your horsemanship.

Learn your horse.

Learn how horses think.

Learn what to do when something goes wrong.

Learn how to become a confident, capable leader of your herd of two.

That work can be preventative.

But what about after the accident has already happened?

That's where we have to look beyond prevention.

Because once the accident is over, you can teach your mind everything there is to know about horsemanship, but your body may still remember what happened.

As Bessel van der Kolk famously put it, "the body keeps the score."

You can logically know that you're safe and still feel your heart race when you put your foot in the stirrup.

You can know exactly what you're supposed to do and still find yourself bracing.

You can love your horse deeply and still feel fear around something that once brought you nothing but joy.

That's why I believe rebuilding confidence after horse-related trauma requires us to work with the rider, too.

Not just the horse.

The Beginning of Herd of Two Healing

That realization sent me down an entirely new path of learning.

I became a certified yoga teacher, completing my training in Tantric yoga because I wanted to deepen my understanding of the relationship between the body, mind, spirit, trauma, and healing.

I continued studying the nervous system and became certified as a Nervous System Coach.

And I continue my education in somatic and nervous system healing because I wanted to understand what was happening beneath the surface for the women I had watched struggle with this for years. (Certification in Somatic Healing #2 coming up! I'm addicted.)

Now I'm bringing those worlds together.

Herd of Two Healing is being created around the idea that yes, you may need better horsemanship.

But you also need something deeper.

You need to work with your own nervous system.

You need to rebuild safety in your body.

You need to learn how to regulate yourself before asking your horse to regulate alongside you.

You need practices you can do with your horse and practices you can do without your horse.

Because ultimately, I don't just want to help women become technically better riders.

I want to help women feel safe again.

I want to help you rebuild your confidence in and out of the saddle.

I want you to feel free, empowered, beautiful and expansive in the saddle.

I want to help you reconnect with your horse without constantly waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

And ultimately, I want to help you recreate that feeling of belonging on horseback.

Because I know how heartbreaking and identity-shattering it can be when something you have loved for so much of your life suddenly doesn't feel like home anymore.

When horses have been part of who you are, losing your confidence around them can feel like losing a piece of yourself.

And I don't think the answer is simply telling women to "push through it."

I think we can do better than that.

We can honour the body.

We can learn from what happened.

We can become better horsewomen.

We can learn to work with our nervous systems instead of fighting against them.

And slowly, we can find our way back to ourselves, our horses, and that feeling of belonging again.

That is what Herd of Two Healing is about.

Because sometimes the horse isn't the only member of the herd of two who needs help feeling safe again.

The Herd of Two Healing guided healing community will officially open in Spring 2027. Those on the waitlist will be the first to know when the healing community opens and will have access to founding member pricing, which you'll be able to lock in for as long as you remain part of the community. The price will never be that low again.

Until then, follow along.

I'll be sharing letters from my own healing path, along with what I'm learning about horses, trauma, the nervous system, somatic healing, confidence, and finding your way back to feeling safe in and out of the saddle.

And then, in Spring 2027, we'll begin together.

All my love,

Shelby