Heart Bridge Initiative brings together two distinct but deeply complementary approaches. Each is powerful in its own right. Together they create something that addresses the full spectrum of the human experience — from the measurable and physiological to the somatic, the emotional, and the profoundly personal.

HeartMath Heart Coherence Techniques

HeartMath is a scientifically researched system built on more than thirty years of peer-reviewed research by the HeartMath Institute. It is founded on a remarkable discovery: that the heart has its own intrinsic nervous system — approximately 40,000 neurons — that communicates with the brain continuously and shapes the quality of our thinking, our emotional regulation, and our physical health in ways that most of us have never been taught to understand.

The primary measure of this heart-brain communication is Heart Rate Variability — HRV — now recognised as one of the most reliable biomarkers of overall health, resilience, and nervous system function. HeartMath coherence techniques train the nervous system into a measurably different state: one in which cognitive clarity sharpens, emotional regulation improves, physical recovery accelerates, and the quality of every relationship — with oneself and with others — becomes genuinely, sustainably different.

These are not soft outcomes. They are measurable, replicable, and they compound with consistent practice. The floor rises. And as the floor rises, the entire experience of daily life rises with it.

Equine Gestalt Coaching Method (EGCM)

The Equine Gestalt Coaching Method was developed by Melisa Pearce of Touched by a Horse and is a ground-based, experiential coaching approach in which horses serve as active co-facilitators. There is no riding involved. All work happens on the ground, in relationship, at a pace entirely determined by the individual.

Horses are profoundly sensitive to the authentic state of the human nervous system. They respond not to your words, your history, or the version of yourself you have learned to present — but to who you actually are, right now, in this body, in this moment. They cannot be fooled by performance. They respond only to truth. And in their company, the gap between who you understand yourself to be and who you actually are becomes visible — gently, honestly, and with a quality of compassionate precision that changes everything it touches.

Wayne and Sharon completed their three-year EGCM certification together, graduating in September 2017. The horses you will meet at Heart Bridge Initiative are not props, and they are not therapy adjuncts. They are our colleagues, our teachers, and the irreplaceable heart of this work.

Co-Founder · HeartMath Certified · EGCM Certified · Interior Designer

Sharon was born with something that cannot be taught and is not common — a heart full of love and a natural capacity for compassion and empathy that has shaped every dimension of her life. She feels what others carry. She receives people at a depth that most individuals experience only rarely, and that those who have been received by her tend to describe as unlike anything they have encountered elsewhere.

She is also, by her own preference, someone who does not seek the spotlight. The gifts she carries — the sensitivity, the deep perceptiveness, the capacity to sense what is true beneath what is performed — are gifts she has spent much of her life quietly offering rather than openly claiming. She does not need to be seen as different. She simply is.

When Wayne met Sharon in 1982, she was shy and reserved — deeply uncertain of herself, uncomfortable in social situations, and genuinely happiest in the quiet company of nature, of growing things, of the living world that has always made sense to her in ways that the human one sometimes has not. She brought three children into the world and raised them — now in their thirties and forties — with the same unwavering love and loyalty that characterise everything she does. The health and wholeness of their family, through everything it has been through, is in no small part her achievement.

What Sharon endured during the years of Wayne's darkest struggles was not small. The people around her advised her to leave. They told her she deserved better. And she endured their judgement with the same quiet faithfulness with which she endures everything — staying, holding, loving, not because she lacked the courage to go, but because she possessed the far rarer courage to remain. The transformation of their marriage — from a relationship shaped by Wayne's wounding into the genuine, deeply trusted partnership it is today — is a testament to what that faithfulness made possible.

In 2012, Sharon faced a pancreatic tumour that required surgery and a recovery that asked everything of her. She met it with the same grace she brings to everything difficult — not without fear, but without surrender. That experience deepened something in her that was already profound, and accelerated the inner work that the horses, and the EGCM certification she completed alongside Wayne, would bring to its fullest expression.

Sharon is also a qualified interior designer, with a natural eye for beauty, symmetry, and the relationship between a living space and the wellbeing of the people who inhabit it. She has offered that gift generously to friends and family across many years — creating environments that hold and restore the people within them. She knows the Latin names of most plants. She can grow what others, with formal training, cannot. She is, in the most complete sense of the phrase, an Earth child — someone for whom the intelligence of the natural world is not a concept but a daily, lived, intimately known reality.

Her dream — and it is a dream Wayne shares with absolute conviction — is to create a healing ranch: a piece of sacred land where the horses live alongside gardens Sharon tends, where the community can come for healing not only through what Heart Bridge Initiative offers, but through the land itself. Where the trees breathe, the plants grow, and the earth beneath your feet is itself a source of restoration.

That dream is on the horizon. And everything Heart Bridge Initiative is building is part of the path toward it.

A brief introduction — for the full portraits, see Meet the Herd in the blog

No introduction to Heart Bridge Initiative is complete without introducing the five horses who are its living, breathing, daily heart. They are not props, tools, or therapeutic adjuncts. They are co-facilitators — beings of extraordinary sensitivity, distinct personality, and profound wisdom who bring to every session what no human facilitator, however skilled, can fully provide.

Blue is our Gypsy Vanner herd leader — sixteen and a half hands, one blue eye, and the gentlest heart in the field. He will wait, with infinite patience, for the real you to arrive. Allegra is our only mare — an Arab-Andalusian cross who models unapologetic selfhood with an elegance entirely her own. Full Flight, our Quarter Horse, finds every unguarded edge with surgical precision and extraordinary compassion — the most honest mirror in the herd. Zorion, our second Gypsy Vanner, is so deeply grounded that simply standing near him changes something in your nervous system. And Regalo — our twenty-two year old Paso Fino elder — demonstrates every day what the quiet authority of complete self-knowledge looks and feels like.

They are, each of them, irreplaceable. And they are waiting to meet you.