Beyond Traditional Horse Training & Instruction|Wholistic Riding

KOKO
Night’s Golden Dawn
The Bodhisattva Mustang

When I met Koko, she was four and I was twenty-seven.
We are now thirty-two and fifty-six.

I was not looking for a horse.

I was not looking for anything.

I was in the darkest place of my life. Empty in a way I could not explain. Alone in a way that had nothing to do with whether people were present.

A co-worker found a horse rescue online hoping that seeing horses again might lift my spirits. I made an appointment to drop off donations.

That was all I went for.

And then I met her.

She was a bay mustang mare with a snip on her nose. Black mane. Black tail.

Wild. Abused. Rescued.
That was her story.

They told me her name was Koko. That in the Blackfoot language, Koko means night. That they had named her that because they had never met such a dark horse — darkened by everything that had been done to her.

I looked at her.

And I saw myself.

The fire. The wildness that could not be contained. And beneath it — the shrinking. The darkness that comes not from who you are but from what has been done to you.

I knew that darkness.
I had been living in it.

I adopted her that day.
Not because I had a plan.
Because something in me recognized something in her before my mind had caught up.

I renamed her Koko’s Tse Tsan.
Night’s Golden Dawn.

In Tewa — a name I had loved since childhood and always saved for a horse I hadn’t yet met.

She had been waiting for it.

This is the moment.

I am telling her how proud I am of her.
She has just cantered under saddle for the first time with one of my students.

Someone snapped this photo without me knowing.

This is what Wholistic Riding looks like.
Not a technique.
Not a method.
A conversation.

A woman I met after adopting Koko was a Reiki Master.
When she met Koko she said — “She’s a Bodhisattva.”

I thought that was a type of mustang.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have put off entering paradise in order to help others attain enlightenment.

Koko is, quite simply, The Bodhisattva Mustang.

She is my teacher and the inspiration for Wholistic Riding and the Horse Mindset Academy. She also helped me evolve the Perfectly Empathic program.

She required me to drop below the fear.
Below the noise.
Below the contracted, managing, invisible version of myself I had learned to become.

She required my full presence.
My genuine energy.
My complete truth.

A wild horse does not accept performance.
She reads what is actually there.

And what was actually there in me —
she met without judgment.
Without condition.
Without asking me to be anything other than exactly what I was.

For a woman who had spent her life contracting herself down to a size that felt safe for everyone else —

That was the most radical thing I had ever experienced.

She became my teacher.
My healer.
My reason for doing every single thing I have done since.

The energy healing.
The riding instruction.
The biomechanics.
The animal communication I practiced quietly for years before I ever gave it a name.

All of it came from her.
All of it came from what she required of me.

Sister

One afternoon, years into our life together, I was grooming her in silence.

I had been doubting myself as an animal communicator. Doubting that I could truly hear her the way I heard other animals.

And then — in the quiet — her voice came.

Not in words.
In a picture. A feeling. An absolute knowing that landed in my mind as clearly as if she had spoken aloud.

Sister.

Not mother.
Not owner.
Not human.

Sister.

Because she was a wild horse who had known her mother, her father, and her herd and the full language of her kind. I was not her mother. I was her equal. Her herd. Her kin.

And in that one word —
I understood everything.

How she had always been speaking.

In pictures. In feelings. In flashes of knowing that moved through my mind like light through water.

How long she had been waiting for me to go quiet enough to hear her.

How the silence was not empty.

It was where the real conversation had been living all along.

“Learn her language first, then ask her to learn yours. You cannot expect them to learn your way if you cannot understand theirs.”

A cowboy said that to me once.
I never knew his name.
I never forgot his words.

Koko made sure of that.

She is now thirty-two years old.

Still bay. Still fire. Still completely herself.

And she is still teaching me.