When Pam Billinge's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she noticed how her horse’s behaviour changed in response to her emotional turmoil. Thus began a transformational journey in which Pam came to fully understand the depth of the spiritual relationship between horses and humans and the horse’s infinite capacity to help us heal. Pam began integrating her horses into her coaching and psychotherapy work in 2008, and from there developed her pioneering horse-led coaching and therapy practise through which she has supported many individuals from all walks of life.

 

In her second book, The Spirit of the Horse, Pam describes how she came to writing:

 

'You should write a book,’ he said…

‘Yeah! Right!’ I didn’t take his comment seriously, and tried to move the conversation back to the project in hand….

I dismissed the notion out of hand, but a seed was lodged…digging itself in and slowly taking root. Me? Write a book! How amusing.

And yet…what if tried…no-one need ever read it … or even know.

So, little by little my book came into being, long before I put pen to paper. Until one day ... I typed at the top of the screen: ‘My Story'.

Often I wrote through the blurred vision created by my tears…I laughed too, almost as much…As my fingers clattered across the keyboard it was as if all those I had lost sat with me in my small office overlooking the golden wheat-fields of summer. Until I came to write about January 2012. Then a darkness descended and I clicked the document shut... It was too soon…'

 

Writing has taken me to the core of my lived experience, usually nature and my beloved horses are at my side too as I travel. Writing is most easy for me when I am outdoors within eyesight of the herd. When I am writing I am at peace. I process. I understand. I am somehow able to access a wisdom which is at other times silent or muted. I notice how it is simply to BE. Writing connects the bits of me which get lost or fragmented. It helps me to say the unsayable and dream of the undreamable. In surrendering to the flow of the written word I feel more able to surrender to the flow of life and to trust. I love the crafting of the sentence, the paragraph, the phrase, working a manuscript like a large lump of soft clay. In editing I satisfy the need to understand and communicate my truth, in the most detailed and forensic way.  Writing is also about finding the courage to be seen and to be heard. To have and hold my voice. It isn’t always easy. Sometimes it is painful and requires me to fully integrate my struggles and losses. 

 

As a coach of writers I bring all this. And, as in all my coaching work, a sense of fun, gratitude and unconditional regard.