Reconnect to life in ways meaningful to you.

As I focused, a thought grew, bringing to mind, You are what you think about. I'm forty-one, a volunteer being processed into a women's prison in Texas to attend the graduation ceremony for a writing program there. No phones allowed inside, no wallets, no pens, no lip balm--nothing but ourselves. They take our IDs at Central Control. The walls are painted with murals, and the place smells of cheap disinfectant, and beans and rice. We congregate in the gym, no AC, a fan turning slowly, and when I move my folding chair, the squeal of its leg against the floor echoes around the giant room. The incarcerated women file in, wearing uniforms, and we look at them and they look at us. No bodily contact allowed. It's been almost two years of sobriety for me, and I see everything from a different angle now, but I'm not sure how to see this day. Never been inside a prison. Don't know anyone here. This means we need people who can breathe life into the numbers and generate numerous outcomes and scenarios from them. With insight we can develop multiple ways of reaching our objectives and make richer decisions in increasingly complicated circumstances. In fact, it is those who can generate insight, and imagine impacts and consequences well beyond the accumulated knowledge and precedent they have access to, who have succeeded throughout history and will continue to do so in the future. It wasn't candle makers who imagined light globes, nor telegraph operators who dreamed up the telephone. Not only did taxi drivers not conceive of Uber, they have done much to undermine it in an attempt to preserve the status quo. Truthfully, the data on all of these existing business models was probably quite reassuring just before they were disrupted; However, numbers rarely point to how an entire category might be reimagined. What we must also remember about data is that it is largely a game of probabilities and likelihoods. The thing is, odds are not absolutes or certainties.

If something has an 80 per cent chance of occurring, there is still a 20 per cent chance that it will not. Intentions give you purpose and direction, and serve as a touchstone when developing a personal breathwork practice. If we don't tap into our motivation to connect to our breath on a regular basis, it's easy to get lost and forget why we started a breathwork practice in the first place. Intentions are different than goals, as they are less focused on outcomes and more about the driving force that's supporting your journey. An intention is like the North Star, a guiding energy that will bring you back home to yourself again and again. Without this aim and reference guide, our practice sessions can feel uncontained and unstable. Setting an intention at the beginning of your breathwork practice sets the tone for it and keeps you connected to why you are practicing. This becomes key when things get tough in your life or in your practice, as they inevitably will from time to time. It's also important because many of my clients have reported that when their lives get really great and full, their practice starts to wane. No matter the length of my personal breathwork sessions, I always make sure to set an intention. I have a very simple intention-setting practice of placing one hand on my heart, taking a couple of breaths in and out through my nose, and trusting the first intuitive hit I receive about my intention for that practice session. Across the creek the wooded hillside rose sharply. I recalled the local story that the stage coach from Muskingum had crossed the hills here during the early nineteenth century, and that if you looked closely you could find the trail the old stage road had left among the trees. The creek flowed two feet deep with a swift current; Could wagon wheels have forded it? I searched the hillside for any break where people may have built a road. Trees and underbrush hid the stagecoach trail, relegating it to the status of legend, just as they were in the process of pulling down the barn and shelter house so carefully constructed. Thus legends grow not only out of inhabitants' dimly remembered pasts but also out of the land itself. The sun stood on the tops of the highest trees on the western side of the creek. I turned to retrace my own path back up the hillside, leaving the woods to the chipmunks dashing among the leaves on the forest floor.

Entering the deeper woods, I heard the plaintive whistle and chirr of the wood thrush and the clear, three-note call of the wood warbler. This memory brought forth tiny old feelings of confidence and energy I possessed back before I lost my job at Boeing, and I saw my old self bent over a article, scribbling furiously on my notepad, underlining passages, unaware of anything or anyone, smiling whenever I read something that really struck home. The article was very old, written in 1930, but I couldn't remember the name. If I could relive every detail of bad times, couldn't I do the same with the times I'd felt good? Forgetting present time, I felt the coldness of the shop, the isolating breaks that had allowed me to study human psych for years, then zoomed in on the title, but could only see the author's name: Claude Bristol. Instantly I recalled the title, The Magic of Believing. Eerily the article's words flooded not only my intellect, but my body. The entire premise of the old article taught that anyone could think their way into better circumstances thus changing their lives. Zig Ziglar had written an introduction telling the reader: This little article. Running to my boxes of articles, I found it on the top, and opening it, again the words hit me in the face. For those of you who seek to learn and make progress, I gently lay this message in your laps. The head facilitator for the program stands--microphone screeches--and she introduces the first speaker. The woman gets up--white sneakers, a loose-leaf article carved with ballpoint ink trembling visibly in her hands--and clears her throat; And then the woman speaks, tells us--through dirt bikes and big brothers and ice cream and first love and three-legged cats and grandmothers and car accidents and fights and kitchen jobs and childbirth and Valentine's cards and loans--her story. And my heart is pounding, the room is humid with life, thick, hot; Forty-six years old, with seven years sober, and where am I these days? In an upside-down wonderland of highways and fig trees and movie theaters and hummingbirds and surfboards known as Los Angeles. I don't know what on earth I'm doing, but I'm doing it. Gertrude Stein said: You look ridiculous if you dance. You look ridiculous if you don't dance.

So you might as well dance. And of course, that's a simple two-outcome example. In real life, outcomes are rarely binary. Life is neither linear nor tidy. Having said that, this is one of the primary reasons we like to lean on data so heavily. It tends to clean life up for us. Think about the standard deviation graph, or `bell curve', as it's more commonly known, as a visualisation of this data-driven tidiness. Before we `smooth out' the data for reasons of interpretive assessment or like-for-like comparisons, there is considerably more natural variance. People or behaviours that vary wildly at either end of the data set are often neatly pruned off and smaller variations are massaged into a pleasing curve. Of course, this can be extremely useful, but it's worth remembering that this is a sanitised picture of reality with extremes and outliers often taken out of consideration. And let's not forget: sometimes it is these extremes that change the world for the better. When setting your intention, it's important to keep it affirmative, clear, and focused on your internal well-being or personal and spiritual growth. There are many intention practices out there for manifesting tangible things like houses, careers, and relationships, but for the purposes of setting your intention before breathwork, it's most potent to focus on your personal, internal desires. Here are some examples: You can use your intention throughout your practice as a foundational guide to help you stay connected to your practice. At the end of your session, it can be helpful to journal about your intention in your notes as a way to further integrate the intention. If there is one consistent issue that many of my clients bring to their first sessions with me, aside from anxiety and stress, it is not knowing how to prioritize themselves. This has been a huge theme in so many lives, myself included, and starting a breathwork practice can be a wonderful, tangible way to take one step toward putting yourself first. By the time this article makes it into your hands, I'll be a mother, which I already know will change my entire life. Not only will it help me grow and expand to new lengths, it will also challenge the work I've been doing on myself for the last sixteen years around my own self-care and learning how to put myself before others.

Thankfully, I have been supporting parents in my practice for years and have learned from their bravery, honesty, and vulnerability some of what it takes to show up for your family without losing yourself. It was May 19, 1997, and although the foal had been due at the end of April, the spring had been cold, and a mare can prevent the birth until her instincts tell her the weather is favorable. Because new horse mothers are fiercely protective and will not tolerate dogs or other horses--even stable mates--near their young for several weeks after the birth, I left my dog, Colleen, in the feed room and hurried downstairs with the mare's grain. There on the straw lay the foal, kicking the gate. My other mare and pony gelding stood watching at the far end of the barn, separated from the foaling stall by two gates. Even Soxie, the barn cat, kept her distance, perched on a rafter, but curious nevertheless. The foal was palomino-tan with a white blaze, black mane and forelegs, and white tail and hind legs, an unusual coloring that I knew it would not retain since almost all foals change color during their early months or years. The mare nickered to me. When I petted and praised her for her accomplishment, she lowered her head to be stroked; Equine labor is shorter than women's but more violent. In addition, although delivery is usually less complicated than it is for women, mares have more difficulty carrying the infant to maturity. I do so without the slightest fear but that it will turn your world entirely upside down--bringing you health, wealth, success and happiness, provided you understand and accept it. Reading the words, I remembered why I had been selected out of thousands of smarter people trying out for Wheel of Fortune! For months, I had concentrated on seeing myself winning on the show. I wasn't worried about not making the cut, because I had pictured myself spinning the wheel and winning! This power can be proved by the teachings of the Bible, certain well-established laws of physics and, last but not least, just plain common sense. How could I have forgotten this? Because for the last two years ALL your thoughts have been focused on the horrible atrocities that surrounded you daily at work and then again in court. I answered myself, then, Keep reading came into my head, and I continued reading. That had been the answer to the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune that I had won so much money from!