My family complains about how much time I spend on my device or computer

Maybe I should focus on something smaller, like a better job or seeing myself living in a sunshine-filled state. And there were nights that were not. It took years to love the sunrise again, to see it as something besides punishment, or a symbol of guilt, or a vague threat. Now it can be a hopeful moment. A bath of light. And silence. We've also found it can be a work period before the e-mails flood the inbox, when kids have just left for school, the house is quiet, and thoughts and ideas have room to spill out and onto the article. We used to hear people brag about getting up before dawn to write and we'd grit our teeth and smile and think silently: Really? How wonderful for you. I hope you die. Now we see that the very idea that we could change our patterns and enlarge our work-life twentyfold was horrific because it meant that every day that we did NOT do that, we were forfeiting something we loved. To do this we need to get among it. Genchi Genbutsu is a Japanese phrase that means `Go and see for yourself', or, roughly, `Get your boots on'. It is an integral component of the Toyota Way. Factory visits were a crucial part of the creative process we engaged in when we worked as creative and strategic directors early in our careers in advertising. We strove to interrogate the product, to see how it was made, bought and used. Going to the factory often allowed us to see things, to create distinctions and identify insights that most people had taken for granted or else missed completely. Legendary Madison Avenue `hot shop' Doyle Dane Bernbach used this method to generate advertisement headlines such as: `Ever wonder how the man who drives the snowplow . David Ogilvy, another legend of the Mad Men era, used the same process to sell Rolls-Royces when, after driving one for himself, he discovered that `At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. This experiential gathering of insight has applications far beyond the hedonistic offices of Madison Avenue.

Dr Natassia Goode is a senior research fellow in the Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems at the University of the Sunshine Coast. One of my favorite aspects of breathwork is that it is portable. You don't need a special outfit or props to practice; Early on in my private practice clients asked me for tips on what they could do breathwork-wise to support them outside of our sessions and their personal practices. Below are three of my go-to mini practices to support those real-life moments when you need to stay grounded. If you tend to get stressed at work, feel anxious preparing for difficult conversations, or feel out of your body before getting in front of a large crowd, try the Five-Breath Grounding Practice. Set a quick intention. Place your feet on the ground, hip distance apart, and take five deep breaths in through your nose and long exhales out of your mouth. Notice how you feel afterward. When you feel emotionally or mentally overloaded and need a quick time-out, try the Five-Breath Reset Practice. Set a quick intention. Using horses for timber-cutting damages the forest floor far less than using heavy machinery. One farmer claimed that his team of Belgian draft horses could plow a field as quickly as it took another farmer to plow with a tractor, that harnessing and caring for horses took no more time than maintaining machinery, and that using horses was more enjoyable: while working, he listened to birdsong and wind, whereas the farmer on the tractor listened all day to the metallic groan of the internal-combustion engine. A young man raised by countercultural parents who later started a tree nursery farmed his own land with horses in the Maryland hills. Returning to horse-drawn equipment for farming and timbering may be part of the solution to carbon emissions. I first loved horses (not a conscious decision, as most of our likes and dislikes are not) when I watched two large bay farm horses grazing in a pasture near where my cousins lived in Jefferson County. An aunt and uncle rented a rambling old country house, and when visiting them, we went often to the neighbor's farm to watch the animals. I do not know whether it was their intelligent faces, graceful necks, or sheer impressive size, but I spent a long time talking to them and decided, of all farm animals, I liked horses best, although I loved my puppy and my cat. It was the beginning of a lifelong infatuation. I was destined to become a horse nut.

I am not sure why horse people are thought to be so eccentric while those who devote themselves to tennis, golf, skiing, or cycling are not. As I did my menial job, I started to picture myself happy and walking along a beach. Three hours later when the alarm for our last ten-minute break sounded, I grabbed my article and opened it. I sat frozen. On almost every article, something awful and obscene had been written in thick black permanent ink. Those awful girls watched from a distance, laughing. This time I felt sorry for them. They would be here for the next 30 years. I would not. Ignoring them, I opened the article and read: This idea will shake you to the foundations of your being. It will destroy old false concepts and replace them with new ones. Jardine has a friend--a tough dude, massive arms, beard, leather vest--who, once a year, drives to the Texas desert and sleeps alone with no tent for three nights to reset his spirit. He comes back and talks tenderly about being awake and looking at the constellations and the night animals and noting the smell of the air, dozing off and then waking as the sun starts melting the darkness on the long violet-black horizon, and how he feels a part of things again. Jardine was at a writers' and artists' residency on a Maine island one summer, and a painter there decided to stay up all night by himself, and to wander, sketching and taking photographs of the moonlit woods and ocean and then the sun coming up and capturing how it changed the mood and spirit of the place. He was a minor anarchist, simply by going against the rules of day and night. And he felt dopey and silly the next couple of days, a bit off, discombobulated, his door cracked open a sliver to mysteries and new ideas. Amanda heard an author she loves, George Saunders, say at a reading that he'd learned to let go of things not meant for him. A simple statement that felt all-powerful. She speaks these words to herself every day. Let go of the things not meant for you.

Chardonnay, it turns out, was not meant for her. She is an expert in system thinking and accident causation. Natassia encourages businesses to use systems thinking models to analyse incidents in the workplace, rather than focussing on the behaviour of injured workers. She tells the story of the head of a freight transport company coming to her in exasperation with the company's high incidence of minor sprains and injuries. They had decided the problem was that the workers were just rushing. But Natassia had to see for herself. The company she was working with had located its head office and management far away from the airport and the tarmac where the actual freight handling took place. Natassia talked to as many people in the chain as she could. She watched the workers themselves. In doing so she noticed that, despite items being clearly marked as two-person lifts, they were being lifted by only one. So she asked them about it and found out `there just isn't enough staff. Inhale through your nose as long as you can without discomfort, then exhale as long as possible through your mouth. Repeat five times and notice the difference. If your mind is racing and you can't get it to focus on the present moment, try the Five-Breath Alignment Practice. Set a quick intention. Take a deep inhale through your nose while counting from 1 to 5. Exhale through your nose while counting from 5 to 1. Repeat this five times and become aware of where your mind lands. When possible, practice your breathwork in nature. This is an incredible way to connect to the elements and the earth, which further regulates your nervous system and deepens your breathwork practice experience.

Some of the most profound breathwork sessions I've had personally have been outside either in the woods or near the beach. Perhaps the unusual zeal ascribed to equestrians is that horse sports are some of the few avocations that require a living partner whose needs are more imminent than the care lavished on sports equipment. Of course, there are aficionados of other animals--dogs, cats, cattle, goats, sheep, racing pigeons--but in no other case do person and animal form a working unit. I love the creak of saddle leather, the sway of a horse's back at the walk or canter, and contact with its mouth through the reins; I like driving a tractor, but doing so does not give me the same feeling as riding a horse. The reason so many women participate in horse sports is that a man on a horse has no advantage over a woman on a horse. Riders do not control horses but harness their energy by working in partnership with them, and women have always had to work in partnership. Except for the tradition of ladies' harness classes, there are no separate divisions for women and men in horse shows as there are in almost all other sports. Women have competed equally with men in all types of riding after abandoning the sidesaddle, and since the middle of the twentieth century women have dominated the horse show circuit. While most jockeys are men, most exercise boys and many trainers and grooms now are women. During my first ten years, I devoted much time to acquiring model horses, reading and collecting horse articles, and designing and building my own model horse farm from cardboard. It will eventually remove fear and worry from your life. It will release you from chronic nervous tensions, chase the butterflies out of your stomach, restore your self-confidence, give you a more positive attitude and enable you to face things you've been running away from, for years! Like working out, at first you don't feel the full effects. Sometimes I was still disillusioned with society, so sad about the future for all those women left in a toxic work environment, earning less pay for the same job and losing earned promotions to incompetent males. When the negative thoughts wouldn't leave me, I hung my head and prayed for guidance. It shocked me, nearly knocking me over when help came right away, the Voice, again, inside my head (God? After losing my job I had been so depressed it was hard to get out of bed. How the hell was I to go for a walk when I couldn't even get dressed, take a shower, or get off the couch? I had been living in my sweats, and my next thought, or Voice, prompted me to just slip on my clumsy Ugg boots, walk to the door, and open the door, walk down the short flight of stairs, through the small parking lot, and to the mailbox.