Chris Lombard has worked with more than 2,500 horses across Maine and beyond in his 22-year solo career.
He’s loved them all, but two in particular shaped him and his life: Rocky, a client’s foal who became his own, and Tally, a horse who came into his life by surprise shortly before Rocky’s death.
The Pownal man wasn’t looking for either one; he knew they were meant for him because, when together, he felt as comfortable as he does when he’s alone.
Lombard connects with these horses, and makes a living teaching other horse owners to do the same, through the effort to build an honest relationship with the animal. For those who take his guidance, it’s a process that can grow beyond a working partnership — and into something spiritual.
It all follows from the first moment someone feels truly “seen” by a horse, according to Lombard.
“The relationship takes on a life of its own and takes you for a ride after that,” he said. “You just have to keep saying ‘yes’ to it.”
Numerous trainers have made names for themselves in recent decades by shifting away from the use of physical force that once characterized popular horsemanship, and instead focusing on working cooperatively with the animals. But Lombard has had a uniquely strong impact on the horse community in his home state — and more people are catching onto messages like his, he said.
Today, Lombard is an author of two books and has a busy schedule teaching clinics. Many Mainers may know him from the Common Ground Country Fair in Unity, where he gives demonstrations and inspired the design on posters for this year’s upcoming fair.
All of it grew by word of mouth from a single post on an online message board in 2003, the only advertising he’s ever done.
Several years before that, Lombard was introduced to horses for the first time as a young adult living in Portland. Though he was going through a painful time in his life, everything felt OK when he was around the animals.
That feeling led him to take a leap of faith and move out west, where he spent two years learning at ranches in Colorado, California and Arizona before returning to Maine.
At the time, he was learning from changing trends in how to train and relate to horses.
For most of human history, people relied on working horses for survival: transportation, farming, warfare. That meant they’d often do whatever it took to make a horse get the work done if the animal wasn’t cooperating.
But after the invention of the engine mechanized those functions, horses became more like pets and people saw more possibility for relationships with them, according to Lombard. In Maine, some still work with horses on their farms or in their forests; others ride them, keep them as companions or adopt them as rescues.
When Lombard was starting out, alternative methods of working with horses that focused on cooperation were growing — but they still focused on getting a horse to complete a task, he said.
For him, connection is now an end to itself.
He’s not alone: Warwick Schiller, a horse trainer in California, was recently profiled by the New York Times Magazine for his own switch to an approach that focuses on horse-human relationship instead of obedience training.
“I think horses lead us to consciousness,” Schiller told the magazine. “I think that’s what they’re here for.”
In the 1980s and into the 1990s, a handful of horse trainers had risen to celebrity status for philosophies broadly called “natural horsemanship” that aimed to work more in partnership with the animals’ nature. Natural horsemanship has since been criticized in some parts of the horse world for allegedly using these natural cues for more negative reinforcement or not fully understanding horse psychology.
Even if it did have limitations, early uses of natural horsemanship gave results that looked like magic: horses would move without leads or respond to apparently invisible cues. That fed the image of “horse whisperers” with special abilities to understand the animals, aided by a 1998 movie of the same name featuring Robert Redford in the lead role.
Lombard doesn’t believe in that. He has been labelled a horse whisperer himself in the past, but teaches that it’s possible for anyone to develop this ‘magic’ by opening themselves up to a personal connection.
That idea has been gaining traction in horse circles, aided by websites and social media, and he feels this is a pivotal time for horsemanship — the biggest change since domestication.
Lombard believes Maine, and New England more generally, is a leader in that shift because of its unique horse culture.
Unlike western states, there isn’t big money to be made here from horse breeding, shows or competitions. The state is also home to numerous equine rescues and welfare efforts.
“Horses are a labor of love for Mainers,” he said. “It’s something that’s in your family, in your heart, in your home. It’s something that comes from the inside out.”
Val Rich, owner of Serendipity Stables in Glenburn, has been hosting Lombard for clinics at her farm since the early days of his career, when a friend recommended she get in touch with him before he became too popular.
At first, the clinics were a little like a natural horsemanship circus, she said, with many participants and observers moving in and out for different lessons over the course of several days. They’ve changed over the years to small, intense four-day clinics that focus on connection.
Each clinic is a profound experience for her and all participants that’s hard to put into words, she said.
They move through stages. The first is asking people to connect with their pasts, their intentions, their challenges and their pain. All of that will appear in a horse’s behavior as they respond to someone’s energy and body language.
“Horses want the real you,” Lombard said — and they’ll accept that real self even if it has a troubled past.
At heart, he believes, horses and people are similar: they have fears, they want to live a safe and happy life. Connecting with them requires the person to recognize how they’re living and why, then take control of it.
Doing so is an ongoing, sometimes challenging process. Lombard himself is still growing.
But horses recognize the effort, he said.
Sometimes, they’ll sense people’s internal walls and walk away. That can bring out feelings of worthlessness or blame in the person, but it reveals pain that needs processing.
“What the horse is doing, is it’s showing reality,” Lombard said. “If you have walls and you’re repelling connection, the horse takes the shape of that.”
Working through those walls with an animal is a powerful, deep experience that’s more than physical or technical. A growing number of horse therapy operations is one piece of evidence for that, he said.
“The spiritual world is always present. Many times we can feel it rather than see it,” Lombard said. “[Working with] horses is a way you can see it put into action a little easier than in the regular world.”