11/23/2025
Finding Peace… Through Horses
People spend their whole lives searching for peace, trying all kinds of things to feel settled and whole. But if you spend enough time around horses, you realize something important — they’re searching for peace too. In fact, peace is what drives nearly everything they do.
A horse’s deepest instinct is to find comfort, safety, and calm. Even the “naughty” behaviors — the spooks, the pushiness, the refusals — almost always trace back to one simple thing: the horse is trying to find peace again. They don’t complicate it. They don’t overthink it. They just seek peace in the moment.
So why is peace so hard for us to find, when horses seem to make the pursuit so simple? Maybe we humans look in the wrong places. Maybe we cloud our minds with things that don’t matter. Maybe we even disrupt the peace around us without realizing it. Horses feel this, too — ever notice how one person can walk into the barn and every horse settles… while someone else steps in and instantly the whole herd tenses? Horses read the peace, or the chaos, in us long before we do.
In many ways, people are the biggest roadblocks to peace — in our lives and in the animals around us. Our thoughts, our fears, our stress, our need to control… all of it can ripple through a herd faster than a gust of wind. From the biggest examples — conflict, violence, destruction — down to the smallest moments, like our own anxious minds, peace slips away when our hearts aren’t settled.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Horses remind us that peace is available when we quiet ourselves and put things back where they belong. “For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” — 2 Timothy 1:7
If we’re not in a peaceful place, something needs to change — inside us first. The answers are there. Our horses feel it long before we do. And just like them, we can choose the harder but better path: to seek peace, protect it, and live from it.
