Whoa is important

It was Anne’s 1st day @ work. She had never had a job in 33 years. Now she was home from work.

I came into the house to get some carrots for the horses and at the front steps Anne greets me saying that she is leaving.

I ask where are you going?

Back Home! she says after talking to her Dad, he said I could come home. Oh really, I say and she only nodded her head.

I said, Anne when are you going to become a women? When are you going to grow up and do what you say your going to do? You made a commitment to stay for 14 days and you’re not even at the 4th day.

I can’t sleep and I need a good shower with warm water Anne says.

Bull shit, you’re full of it. What you need is to ability to manage your mind when you’re uncomfortable. You have no idea how to do that do you?

I am leaving Gary and I still want to work with you if you will have me. Anne says

This is not a team, Anne. You’re on your own making this choice. You’re not asking what I feel or think. It’s what Anne wants, Anne, Anne and Anne. You are self-centered and have no idea about being a part of a team. If you were willing to be a team I would be more willing to think about working with you. I am not sure at this point if there is anything to teach you until self-centeredness is not your only means of operation.

She left, not cleaning her space, not caring about the throw up and the piss that reeked from her messing all over her girlfriends car and the room and bed she stayed in. It was three rough days that we had been all about baby-sitting Annie. We had two goals for her to get up on Monday morning and make it to her first day of work and keep her job and her commitment to staying at the farm for 14 days. Up until this morning she was not functional. Now she was in her car driving off.

At the beginning of Anne coming to the farm we had a talk with her parents and they said they had no money to spend on her treatment. Mind you they both had spent over half a million on her already in treatment centers five of them. They said they were tired of dealing with her choices and spending money to help her get out of trouble. In fact her Father wished that she would be caught drinking and driving and thrown into prison. He thought maybe this would wake her up. I asked them to make a commitment to me that Anne could not go home and they would not help her out with money without coming through me. They both agreed to this but did not hold up to it. They had no ground and either did Anne

How can parents expect their children to hold up their end if they will not hold up their side as parents? This not so little girl was still very little and had no idea about responsibility. So where do you start to teach responsibility? Well getting a job and having some responsibilities is a beginning. Think about it though if you never had responsibilities and you did not want to have them how now after 33 years was she going to be able to pull off being successful with any responsibilities?

Inside of us we need to be able to recognize how to push down our feet and make things happen. We have to use our root system that is under the feet to feel planted enough to follow through. You also have to understand how to energize the root system and keep your self-planted until completion point. We are talking about something that you can not see but is for real. I am not being metaphoric; it is a push down and get rooted like a baseball player sliding into home base.

We also have to learn and help others learn what is it like to find energy to follow through. Is it in the head? No it is not. It is in the heart and that is easy to say but when your stuck and used to doing only what you want to do it can be a hard thing to figure out. Especially if no one has ever taught you were stood next to you helping out. Energy that does not have to do with the self-centered aspect is tapped into due to the awareness of choice and will power. It can be cultivated around the breast area and arms. We can use the breath to support the movement of the heart but the energy comes from the heart space. Most of the time self-centered people only have energy for what makes them feel emotionally excited.

These details are taught while riding a horse. The details again are rooting (grounding), energizing, and use of will power and awareness. Each component happens in four different places in the body. Who would of ever thought? Well, in some ways you have to be able to think but it is all about a feel not a thought. Awareness does start from the head and then moves elsewhere then the head. A friend of my Sylvester Becker is a life coach, and he described CowboyYoga like mortar to the blocks; it is what makes them stick together. Without feeling and awareness it is very hard to engage a new system. It’s hard to change an old operational system. In this case, Anne has been using this system for 30 plus years.

Ground is ground, and your roots, which you cannot see, have to get into the ground for them to work! Now if you’re rolling your eyes or LOL just hold on a min. It is not funny? This is a real thing. You might have been lucky to have worked hard enough in your life that made you had to keep your feet planted. The end result was a job completed. You might have a Grandma that just did not put up with any Bull Shit! If so she role modeled for you what it was to be grounded. But in the case of an addict most of them do not know how to choose there feet naturally and when they get scared guess what? They run to their drug of choice. They’re uncomfortable.

It is not hard to feel your roots even though you cannot see them they are easy to feel. It is even easier to feel the difference between when you do and when you do not have them. Another place that I use the horses. They will tell you if you’re grounded or not.


There is the root of a person’s ability to stop. Stopping is a universal thing. If you do not know how to stop a horse you cannot stop your self from any kind of addition. If you can not stop yourself from saying negative words when you’re angry you will not be able to stop an addition. You might be able to change addictions, but that is way different then stopping the active addictive personality. I see it in lots of AA groups there all sitting around drinking coffee and smoking; two of the worse things you can do if your an addict.

As parents if you cannot stop your child from doing something not so good, them how are you going to stop a horse? Believe me it is not about being able to stop a horse that is so important. It is about seeing, feeling, hearing, and then intellectually connecting all the new information together. That first piece of information is about how powerless you are using the system that is in place at the moment.

Most of the time I am not teaching anything new. I teach information and details that helps people choose to use tools that they might not be using. One of these most common tools is grounding.

If you cannot teach your child, (dog, horse, staff) “Whoa” then most likely you can’t teach your self “Whoa!”.

Whoa! Is so big and so important. Who would of ever thought that such a simple almost only country word would be so important? Well, it is not the word that is important; it is what is behind the true energy of the meaning of the word that is important. It is like the Marlboro Man, that image was real. This was not some guy that came out of the city and we taught him how to ride in a few days and took a shoot. No this was a real person that had roots with depth to them.