Since founding SoulWorks Coaching® in 2000, Monique Morimoto Flaherty, MS, CPCC has supported scores of women, entrepreneurs, small business owners and nonprofits in creating lives and organizations that reflect the deepest Self. Monique founded Diamond Horse Coaching in 2009 to add a profound experiential component to her work.
Monique has been passionate about horses since she was a little girl. The beauty, majesty and freedom they inspired in her nurtured her throughout her adolescent years. Yet despite this love, she had few opportunities to interact or be with them. Her horse experience resided in the realm of reading every book she could get her paws on and playing horsey in the back yard with her best friend, Mary.
In 2004 her Dad died revealing to her the preciousness, fragility and momentariness of life. This, and her years of coaching and being coached, motivated her to reconnect with those lost aspects of her self that at other times had seemed too frivolous or imposing to pursue. She attended her first equine assisted learning workshop delivered by her now dear friend and colleague, Nicole Birkholzer. She was hooked!
Within a year she bought her first horse, CatFish, who is currently retired in Florida (he’s not yet taken up golf), continued to work one-on-one with Nicole and participated in workshops offered by other practioners. In 2009 Monique enrolled in Wisdom Horse Coaching’s apprenticeship program and began participating in Nicole’s Equine Facilitators’ Practicum Group.
Monique has felt called by various horses in her life to be a catalyst for deepening the horse-human connection. It is her belief that the natural world, its sentient beings and our human capacity to connect with Nature and animals are key to the transformation we are undergoing as a society and world. This connection brings us back to our primal wisdom, roots, animal natures and our souls in ways that are profound and often wordless. As we make these connections with a horse we open ourselves to viscerally experience the subtle and not so subtle impacts of how we are showing up in the world. This is a precious relationship for horse and human, enabling growth and insight at many levels.
What does she love about this work? “The indescribably magical connection that is possible between a horse and a human opens us up to the beauty, power, grace, stillness and vitality that are inherent to our essential nature. This revelation gives us the capacity to live from the place of who we really are and to be at one with our selves and life itself.”
To sign up for the next retreat, workshop or for one-on-one coaching email Monique at mq@diamondhorsecoaching.com
Visit Horseplay Stables, the barn she works out of in Milton, MA!