Terms of Use

1. Who we are

Equine Therapy Malibu is the practice: the trainings, the certification, the sessions and the corporate work. Shakti Ranch is the place, fifteen acres in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu, California, where nearly all of it happens. In these terms, we and us mean the practice.

The ranch is a private home as well as a working property, so its street address is not published on this site. Formal notice can be sent to hello@equinetherapymalibu.com, and we can give a postal address on request.

2. What this website is

It describes the practice and the ways into it, and it carries forms for getting in touch and an assistant for finding your way around. It is not where a session is bought and it is not where a course is taken. Everything that involves money leaves this domain, as section 9 sets out.

3. Learning, therapy, and who holds which license

In this field the two words mean different things and the difference is regulated, so the site is exact about them and this section is the place that says why.

Equine Assisted Learning is time spent on the ground alongside horses, held by a facilitator. It is educational and experiential. It is not psychotherapy, it does not diagnose or treat anything, and it does not create a clinical or therapeutic relationship between you and the person holding the session.

Clinical therapy, where it is offered, is delivered by licensed staff and named as theirs. Angela Schellenberg, MA, LMHC, LPC, LPCC, is the licensed clinician on the team.

Rose Mary Riggs is a Certified Equine Guided Educator and a Yoga Therapist with roughly two decades of practice, and she is an EAL facilitator. She is not a licensed psychotherapist, and nothing she holds is psychotherapy.

The practice is named Equine Therapy Malibu and several of the sessions on the scheduler carry the word therapy in their titles. That word in a name is not a statement about who is licensed. If it matters to you which of the two you are booking, and for anyone booking on behalf of a client, a patient or a team, it usually does, ask before you book and we tell you who is holding the session and in what capacity.

4. Not medical care, and not a crisis service

Nothing on this website, and nothing said in a session or a training, is medical advice, a diagnosis, or a substitute for care from a licensed professional. Decisions about medication, treatment or clinical care belong with the people already providing them.

Nobody is watching this website or its inbox around the clock. In an emergency in the United States, call 911, or call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

5. The site assistant

The button in the corner of each page opens a chatbot whose job is to understand what you came for and put you in front of the right page or the right person. It is a program and not a person, it is not therapy, not clinical advice and not a substitute for asking us, and although it is given careful instructions it can be wrong: it is told not to quote prices, dates or cohort details, and to hand anything it has not been told to a person rather than guess, and where it is confident and mistaken the page it points you to is the thing to rely on, not the reply. Please keep clinical and medical detail out of it, for the reasons in section 4, and please do not use it for anything other than questions about the practice and this site.

It is not the way to reach us, and in an emergency it is not a way to reach anybody. If you write to it about being in danger it stops and gives you the same lines every time: call 911 in the United States if anyone could be in danger, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line, and outside the United States your local emergency number. Where what you type goes, and what we may keep of it, is section 4 of the Privacy Policy.

6. The training, and what it qualifies a graduate to do

Level 1 produces a Shakti Ranch certificate of completion. A certificate of completion records that somebody took the course. It is not a certification and it qualifies nobody to hold sessions for other people.

Level 2 is enrolled and paid for on this site, is open to Level 1 graduates, and produces a Shakti Ranch Certified EAL Facilitator. That is a credential issued by Shakti Ranch and it means what Shakti Ranch says it means: that its holder has completed this program and can facilitate Equine Assisted Learning within the scope the program teaches.

It is not a state or national license, it is not accredited by any licensing board, and it does not authorize anybody to practice psychotherapy, counseling, or any other regulated profession. A graduate who already holds a professional license keeps working inside the scope that license gives them; the credential adds a method, not a scope. Graduates are facilitators and not therapists, and describing themselves otherwise is outside what this credential supports.

Acceptance onto Level 2 is at our discretion, and a place can be declined without a reason being given.

7. Continuing education

Equine Therapy Malibu is not a continuing education provider and does not issue continuing education hours. Where hours are available on a course, they are issued by the approved provider who is named at the point of enrollment, under that provider’s own rules and their agreement with the relevant board. Whether a particular board accepts them is a question for that board, and worth asking before enrolling if the hours are the reason you are coming.

8. Horses, land, and risk

Horses are large animals with their own opinions, and the ranch is open ground in a canyon. Being around either carries risk that care and instruction reduce but cannot remove, including risk of serious injury. Anyone coming to the ranch takes part on that understanding, follows the safety instruction given on the day, and is bound by the waiver and participation agreement provided before or on arrival. Where those documents and these terms differ about a session at the ranch, those documents govern.

Nobody under eighteen takes part without a parent or guardian agreeing to it. We can decline or end a session where somebody is not safe to take part, and where the herd, the weather or the ground says so.

9. Bookings, enrollment and payment

Sessions are booked and paid for on Acuity Scheduling, which holds the calendar and processes the payment. Enrollment for Level 1 leaves this site for the page of the separate provider who sells the course and takes that payment. Level 2 is enrolled and paid for here, on a checkout page that Stripe hosts: our server asks Stripe to open it and sends you there, and the card is typed on Stripe’s page. It was by application until September 2026 and is not any more.

Level 2 can be paid in full by card, by bank transfer at the lower price, or in four monthly payments taken from the same card. The four payments come to the same total as paying at once: the plan carries no interest and no fee of its own. It is held by Stripe as a subscription that ends itself after the fourth payment, so nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel. What happens if you leave the cohort partway through is on the cancellation page, and paying this way does not change it.

The Members Day membership is paid by monthly subscription on a checkout page that Stripe hosts: our server asks Stripe to open it and sends you there, the card is typed on Stripe’s page, and the subscription is held by Stripe. It renews each month until it is cancelled, which can be done at any time by writing to us; the month already paid for stands and is not refunded, as the cancellation page sets out. Nothing on this website itself ever asks for or handles a card.

Prices are the ones shown at the point of sale. Our cancellation, rescheduling and refund terms are on the cancellation page; where a proposal or a confirmation states different terms for a specific booking, those govern, and for the Level 1 course the terms are the selling provider’s rather than ours.

10. Using this website

Use it lawfully and in good faith. Please do not attempt to disrupt it, break into it, scrape it wholesale, or use the forms or the assistant to send anything unlawful or abusive. The forms carry ordinary anti spam measures, the assistant limits how many messages one address can send in a minute and in a day, and we can decline to respond to anything sent through either.

11. What belongs to whom

The text, photography, drawings, video, course material and branding on this site belong to Equine Therapy Malibu and Shakti Ranch, or are used with permission. Reading it and linking to it is welcome. Copying it, republishing it or selling it is not, without permission first.

Course materials given to a participant are for that participant’s own use. Being certified to facilitate this work is not permission to teach the curriculum, run the course, or present the training as your own.

12. What you send us

What you write in a form or an email stays between you and the practice. We ask first before publishing anything that identifies you, including a testimonial, a photograph, or a story from a session, and an answer of no is an ordinary answer that costs you nothing. Consent given once can be withdrawn, and we take the material down.

13. Links to other places

This site links out to the scheduler, to Instagram, to the provider who sells the Level 1 course, and to podcast and press pages elsewhere. Those places run under their own terms and their own privacy policies, and we do not control what they do.

14. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

This website is provided as it is and as it is available, without warranty of any kind. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising from using it, or the assistant in section 5, or relying on what either says.

This section is about the website. What happens at the ranch is governed by the waiver and participation agreement in section 8 and by the terms of the booking, and nothing here limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for personal injury caused by negligence.

15. Changes

These terms can change. The date at the top says when they last did, and continuing to use the site after that means the current version applies.

16. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict of law rules, and the courts of Los Angeles County, California are where any dispute about them is heard, except where your own local law gives you a right to go elsewhere.

17. Contact

Questions about these terms are welcome at hello@equinetherapymalibu.com or (310) 709-8618. Equine Therapy Malibu at Shakti Ranch, Santa Monica Mountains, Malibu, California.