Rescued Hearts: When Healing Becomes a Coming Home

Some films we watch. Some films seem to recognise us.

I have watched Rescued Hearts at least four times. If it were permanently available, I know I would watch it many more. And strangely, I miss it.

That is perhaps the simplest way I can describe the effect this beautiful documentary has had on me. I miss knowing that I can reach for it. There are moments when something in me remembers a scene, a horse, a human being, a silence, a breath, a tear, and I want to return.

Not necessarily because I need to understand anything. Sometimes I simply need to remember. To breathe. To soften. To love.

To come back into my body and gather towards myself the parts of me that, at different times in my life, learned to become quiet, hidden, protected or somehow left behind.

Rescued Hearts is ostensibly a film about horses and their extraordinary relationships with human beings. Filmmakers Dana Croschere and Krisanna Sexton travelled widely exploring the mystery, lived experience and emerging science surrounding the horse-human connection.

But I experienced it as something much larger. For me, Rescued Hearts is a love letter to trauma and transformation. And perhaps, ultimately, to love itself.

The strange landscape of healing

I have worked in the healing world for many years. Before acupuncture, coaching, meditation and the other practices that have subsequently woven themselves through my life, I worked in adult mental health.

I have spent much of my professional life sitting beside people in the landscapes we call anxiety, trauma, grief, pain, fertility struggles, hormonal transition, illness and change. As humans, we naturally want people to feel better. We want suffering to stop. We want the frightened nervous system to settle, the pain to ease, the body to heal and the person we love to return to themselves.

Yet the longer I live and work with people, the less convinced I am that healing is simply about returning to who we were before something happened. Sometimes there is no going back. There is only going through. And somewhere in that going through, another self begins quietly emerging.

This is one of the truths I felt Rescued Hearts understood without needing to shout it. Trauma and transformation are not necessarily opposites. Sometimes they occupy the same landscape. The wound is not something I would ever romanticise. Suffering does not automatically make us wiser, kinder or more evolved. Trauma can devastate lives.

But when suffering is met by enough safety, presence, compassion and love, something else can become possible. Not the erasure of what happened.

Transformation.

Perhaps we do not need to be fixed

There is something extraordinary about animals because they do not require our biography before they meet us. A horse does not need our CV. A dog does not ask whether we have been successful. They do not require an explanation for why we are frightened, grieving, overwhelmed or unable to trust.

They meet what is there.

And perhaps this is why animals sometimes reach places in us that words cannot. The nervous system understands presence long before the intellect has constructed an explanation for it. Anyone who has truly loved an animal knows this. There are times when an animal simply being beside you changes the atmosphere of a room.

Nothing has been solved. Nothing has been analysed. And yet something is different. A breath becomes deeper. A shoulder drops. The vigilance softens. For one small moment, the body receives the message:

You can be here.

That is not insignificant. Sometimes that is where healing begins.

What animals know about presence

We humans are extraordinary creatures, but we are also the greatest escape artists. We live inside stories about our yesterday’s and tomorrow’s. We rehearse conversations that may never happen. We carry old voices inside our heads. We imagine futures, relive injuries, anticipate danger and attempt to control what cannot possibly be controlled.

Animals keep inviting us somewhere else, here, now, this breath, this body, this patch of sunlight, this field, this moment of now.

Watching Rescued Hearts, I found myself thinking again about how much of healing is really the restoration of relationship?

Relationship with our bodies, relationship with the earth, relationship with other beings, relationship with the frightened or wounded parts of ourselves, relationship with life itself.

Perhaps healing is not always about becoming somebody new. Perhaps sometimes it is about remembering the self who existed underneath all the adaptations we needed in order to survive.

The parts of ourselves we left behind

All of us learn ways to protect ourselves. We become very competent. We become funny. We become agreeable. We become invisible. We become indispensable to everyone around them. We learn to never ask for anything. We learn to keep moving. We become extraordinarily good at taking care of other people while quietly losing contact with ourselves. These adaptations are intelligent. They helped us. We survived.

But there comes a time when what once protected us can begin to imprison us. Healing then becomes a kind of gathering. A returning for the selves we abandoned because, at the time, it was safer not to be them.

The angry self.

The frightened self.

The joyful self.

The sensual self.

The wild self.

The grieving self.

The playful self.

The child who needed somebody to say, I see you. You can stay. I think this is partly why Rescued Hearts affected me so deeply. It did not feel as though it was asking wounded beings to become something more acceptable.

It seemed to ask something much gentler:

What becomes possible when a being is finally given enough safety to become itself?

Rescue is rarely one-directional

There is another reason this film lives so strongly in me. I love rescue animals. And I love “rescuing” animals. And increasingly I wonder about the language of “rescuing”. We imagine that one being is the rescuer and another is the rescued. But anyone who has opened their home and heart to an animal knows how quickly those boundaries blur. We may give them shelter, food, medical care, warmth, time, patience, a safe place to sleep.

Quietly, they begin giving something back. They interrupt our urgency and self-importance. They bring us outside. They insist upon routine when grief has made time shapeless. They teach us to communicate without language. They expose our impatience. They demand presence. They make us laugh when we have forgotten that we could. They help us cry when we believe there are no more tears.

And eventually we may discover that somewhere in the process of offering another being a safe place to land, something within us has landed too. Who rescued whom Perhaps that is the wrong question. Perhaps the relationship itself is the rescue.

Love does not prevent grief

There is another truth threaded through loving animals. If we are fortunate enough to love them deeply, eventually that love asks something almost unbearable of us. To lose them. Grief is the price we never quite agree to, yet somehow accept every time we allow another being fully into our heart. And still we do it. Again and again.

Because love changes the architecture of a life. The animal who once occupied a bed, a field, a stable, the back seat of the car or the space beside us on the sofa eventually occupies an invisible place within us. Their physical life ends. The relationship changes. But love does not simply disappear. Love never dies.

Sometimes grief itself becomes evidence that something mattered enormously. And perhaps the invitation is not to stop loving because loss is inevitable. Perhaps it is to love more consciously because it is.

The body remembers safety too

We speak often about the body holding trauma. I think we need to speak just as often about the body learning safety. The body can remember the hand that hurt it. But it can also learn the hand that waits. The nervous system can learn danger. It can also learn gentleness. Trust may return in tiny increments, a deeper breath, a gentle touch, a step closer, a willingness to sleep deeply, when vigilance gives way to curiosity, choosing proximity rather than escape. These moments may look insignificant from the outside. They are not.

They are the quiet choreography of a nervous system discovering that the world may no longer be exactly as dangerous as it once was. Perhaps this is one of the great gifts animals offer us. They make healing visible. They remind us that trust cannot be demanded. Safety cannot be forced and love cannot be hurried.

We can only create the conditions in which another being might choose them. And perhaps we deserve those same conditions ourselves.

I miss this film

I have rarely said that about a documentary. But I miss Rescued Hearts. There are moments when I want to reach for it in the way I might reach for a familiar book, a meditation, a beloved piece of music, a walk through a particular landscape or the quiet presence of an animal. Not because it gives me answers.

Because it helps me remember the questions that matter. What if healing does not mean becoming who I was before? What if the parts of myself I considered broken were actually protecting something precious? What if tenderness is not weakness? What if presence is medicine? What if another species can teach us something about being human? What if love is not simply an emotion, but an environment in which transformation becomes possible? And what if we stopped asking ourselves to be healed before allowing ourselves to be fully loved?

Coming home

Perhaps that is ultimately what I experienced in Rescued Hearts. A remembering of home. Home within my Heart. Not home as a geographical place. Home as the moment we stop abandoning ourselves. Home when another being meets our eyes without asking us to become anything else. Home as silence that does not need to be filled. Home where grief is being allowed to sit beside love. Home as the moment something frightened within us realises that it no longer has to hide.

Maybe none of us emerges from life unwounded. Perhaps that was never the promise. But we can become more whole. We can gather ourselves. We can learn to stay present to the places we once fled. We can become safe companions to ourselves and, from there, perhaps become safer companions to one another and to the animals with whom we share this extraordinary earth.

Yes sometimes healing arrives through therapy, medicine or through the hands of another human being. Sometimes it’s through silence, movement, meditation, nature or time. And sometimes it arrives on four legs, stands quietly beside us and asks absolutely nothing.

Except perhaps that, for this one moment, we stop running, breathe, and remember that we are still here. And that there is still love. There is always love. And that may be where the journey home begins.

About Rescued Hearts

Rescued Hearts is an award-winning documentary by filmmakers Dana Croschere and Krisanna Sexton exploring the mystery, science and lived experience of healing through the horse-human connection.

The film is currently being shared through selected screenings and limited worldwide online events.

Learn about the film:
Rescued Hearts official website

Watch / join the waitlist for the next online viewing:
Watch Rescued Hearts

Find upcoming screenings:
Rescued Hearts events and screenings