Dr. Kimberly Ammerman
Healer at heart. Pharmacist.
Horsewoman.
learning alongside horses
Long before anybody called it a method.
The beginning
She trained her own horses.
She was three when it started. South central South Dakota. Her grandfather had ridden the rodeo circuit into his thirties, and a Shetland pony named Sugar showed up before she could really walk.
By nine she had Misty, a blue-eyed bay paint Arabian she trained herself. She dropped the saddle early and rode bareback. You feel more of the horse that way.
“I learned how to feel the power of the energy underneath my legs, and how to talk with the horse through body language.”
That is the whole method, learned before anybody had a name for it.
The pharmacy years
A healer by nature.
A pharmacist by trade.
Doctor of Pharmacy, University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Years of watching what medicine could reach and what it could not.
The horses were always still there.
The teachers
Three horses did most of the teaching.
Kim writes about them by name. They are the reason she does this.
Misty
A blue-eyed bay paint Arabian. Kim trained her herself and rode her bareback. When Misty slipped under a barbed wire fence, Kim broke the bottom two wires with her hands to free them both. She walked home bleeding with the reins tied to her leg, and Misty followed the whole way.
Rico
A liver chestnut with a flaxen mane. He went down on ice with Kim still in the saddle, got up, and came straight back to her. She had torn her Achilles. He let her get on from the wrong side and carried her two miles home.
Sidka
A two year old chestnut Arabian Kim pulled out of a slaughter pipeline. Scared, timid, trusting nothing. Kim was unsure of her own next steps at the time. They worked each other out.
Her words: He taught me not to leave a friend when the chips are down.
What she actually teaches
A client was sure the horse did not like her.
She had gone to groom him. He stomped a hoof and turned to bite at his own back. She took it personally.
Kim pointed at the flies.
He was stomping one off his leg. He turned to reach the spot his tail could not. A horse can feel a fly land on his back. That is how sensitive they are.
“She realized she was projecting her feelings of abandonment onto the horse. How many times do we humans do this in our everyday life?”
Kim did not fix anything. She let the horse be a horse, and the woman found it herself.
That is the craft. That is what the twelve weeks teach.
Now
A hundred acres in the Black Hills.
Kim works with people on the ground at her ranch near Whitewood, and she trains the people who want to do this work themselves.
She wrote the Healing Hearts with Horses chapter in Healing the Wounds of the Past: A Guide to Authentic Living, Hille House Publishing, 2023.
Fifty-five years in, she is still mostly just paying attention.