Freedom, Dignity, Resilience

Visionary healer, speaker, writer, artist, land steward

Ariana is a visionary leader, successful entrepreneur, master somatic coach, zoologist, mother, artist, author, and international teacher of Embodied Leadership and founder of Equine Guided Coaching. She is a free spirit, rooted in the ancient wisdom of plants, animals and the natural world. With innovative vision, she weaves the biology of leadership, lessons from nature, and somatic intelligence into a unique process to achieve healthy success.

Ariana has worked with over seven thousand clients to claim their wildness, stand tall without apology and embrace their unique ‘way of being’. Her passion is to encourage people to heal themselves and the earth, in a beautiful reciprocal way, for our children, our grandchildren and our Mother Earth Family.

Ariana started her coaching career pioneering Leadership & Horses™ in 1989 and is a founder and iinfluencer in the horse as healer/teacher profession, with her Equine Guided Education and Coaching model that can be found worldwide. She has hosted over a dozen international leadership conferences in Leadership & Mastery and Equine Guided Education and is the award winning author of four books and numerous published articles.

Her teachings have been incorporated into numerous leadership institutes and equine therapy programs around the world including Institute for Women’s Leadership, Institute for Generative Leadership, Institute of Noetic Sciences, and Meridian University.

Ariana grew up training horses and winning champion awards in dressage, jumping, eventing, gymkhana, reining, and working cow horse. She received her Zoologist degree from UC Davis in 1984 with a specialization in Raptors and animal behavior. She learned through her diverse experience with horses and wildlife, that like all animals our primary source of communication is intuitive and deeply sensitive to the energetic essence of our environment. This gem of insight has propelled her into untethered territory where everything is connected and transformational change begins here. 

Ariana brought this intuitive wisdom to one of her early accomplishments as co-founder of Strozzi Institute and Strozzi Somatics. She developed leaders, coaches and healers in the art of mind, body, and spirit balance with horses as their teachers of embodied presence. After many years, Ariana branched off into her own Holistic Somatics™ driven by her desire and commitment to tap deeper into the ‘spirit’ component of the mind/body/spirit trio. 

Ariana grew up in two different worlds; the world of nature and the world of people. Her entrepreneurial instinct was sparked at a leadership conference when she saw the gap between the words people spoke and their non-verbal body language. She knew at that moment her destiny was to build a bridge between the natural world and the human world so each could heal the other. This epiphany led her to develop her unique approach that incorporates instinct, intuition and sense-ability into embodied leadership for a healthy planet.

In addition to her contribution to the horse world, Ariana is a creative visionary, successful entrepreneur, proud mother and award-winning author of four books. From 1996 to 2012, Ariana presented over sixteen international conferences with the intention to expand human consciousness and create new paradigms for healing, social connection and a respect for Mother Earth. She excels at thinking outside the box, challenging outdated paradigms, and creating new strategies to achieve amazing results. Her passions include sustainable land stewardship, healthy lifestyle practices, healing for the earth. 

When not working with leaders and horses, she loves cooking, gardening, growing medicinal herbs, and spending time in nature.

Founder of Intuitive Horsemanship™

As the founder of Intuitive Horsemanship™, Ariana knows from experience that creating unity and harmony with horses begins with you. 

As a Freedom Cowgirl, she has forged new paradigms for the horse human bond since 1989. She has courageously forged a path where horses are respected as our teachers and our healers.

Founder of Equine Guided Education & Coaching since 1989

Ariana has been developing leaders, coaches and teams for over three decades. Her ground breaking work in Leadership & Horses™ in the late 1980s evolved into an internationally known method in the equine therapy/coaching fields, now known as Equine Guided Education and Coaching. Her founding work in Equine Guided Coaching can be found around the world through a variety of healing and transformative programs as well as numerous leadership institutes.