The first thing I do in the morning is look at my device

Oh God, what am I going to do to get out of here? We're gonna be happy if we look ragged and torn by the end of our time on earth and we'll even be okay with living shorter lives if these lives are deep, rich, honest, bejeweled, shocking in where they've taken us, exquisite in who they've let us love and who has loved us, imperfect, idiosyncratic, even messy, even lonely. We got sober to feel deeply, to take risks. We didn't get sober to live forever but rather to feel alive. After years of staying up till dawn partying like maniacs, watching the sun rise now without anxiety is amazing. Never thought it would happen. Like a lot of stuff in our beautiful minds, the equation of sunrise-equals-sadness seemed to have solidified and there was no fixing it. Even recalling these memories makes Jardine queasy sometimes--that sensation of finally leaving a bar or club, way past its closing hour, and entering a grimly lit dawn, and getting into a taxi, somewhat mortified to be seen by the driver, suddenly depressed on a spectacular level and dying to be home, forced to see everything around her because the godforsaken sun is up. So funny how something so gorgeous, something that can evoke spiritual awe, became her enemy for a while. When she'd be partying into the wee hours and hear the first birds start singing, she'd actually hate the birds. Who hates birds? The stated goal is to `Prepare for and mitigate risk'. What we're actually doing is training them to design and create the very thing they are afraid could happen so that they might be forewarned and develop a strategy accordingly. The reasoning is quite simple: `What could our competitors do that would make us very worried? Screenwriters in Hollywood were used in a similar way post 9/11 to help US Homeland Security `prototype' scenarios for further terrorist attacks. This allowed military strategists to plan for possible outcomes, proving imagination can be a critical asset even in the very serious world of national security. In reality, our Risk Prototyping process is almost identical to an innovation workshop we might run, but, crucially, the frame of reference is different. We're asking people to create from a position of protecting what they know, as opposed to upending their own world. This allows the team to be more open, more willing to experiment and able to truly imagine what could be disruptive for their business. This kind of contrary thinking is an extremely useful tool in gaining insight and generating creativity.

Professor Sidney Dekker is an expert in the very sensible world of Workplace Safety, although, unlike many of his peers, he tends to have quite contrarian views. I have a few singing bowls set up in my space that are always encouraging me to play them; While it's important to set an intention and have a dedicated practice space, we have to be willing to let all of that go in an instant. The dog is barking at the door and there is an unexpected delivery we have to tend to. A child comes in to talk to us. We're on vacation and would rather practice on the beach (by all means do! We're too tired to get to the other room, and we decide to do our breathwork practice in bed, lying down in the morning. We go to our dedicated practice space and realize we're just too hungry and need to make a snack instead. No matter what's happening in our lives around our home practice, it's important to have a judgment-free practice. This can be challenging, especially with how inundated we are with imagery of people being healthy and spiritual all over social media and the internet. It can feel like we're doing it wrong because our practice looks really messy and inconsistent sometimes, or more often than we care to admit! I do not reseed or fertilize the acreage because of the danger of laminitis and because, in spite of the lack of choice grasses, my horses stay fatter than I want them to be. Horses that are ridden or worked and those with bad feet require shoes, and all horses, even if they have good feet, have to be trimmed, so it is necessary to find a good farrier. People have asked me why domesticated horses need shoes when wild horses do not. The answer is that truly wild horses were small, and their hooves, which grow constantly, were trimmed by continued walking or running over stony or hard ground as they foraged; Wild horses that escaped from domestication, such as the population in the American West, do not live as long as tame horses and often go lame because of hoof problems. Formerly, as they aged they were picked off by mountain lions and timber wolves, but more recently with the extirpation of predators, they die of starvation since they cannot migrate to new pastures. Most importantly, the horse as we know it has been much changed by human breeding to create a large, athletic animal as unlike its Asian predecessor as the house dog is to the wild dogs of the Eurasian steppes. While many domesticated horses retain the hardiness of their ancestors, many do not--particularly the most finely bred of them all, the Thoroughbred. Many people consider the Thoroughbred to be the most beautiful of all horse breeds, and many are highly intelligent--but they are bred for speed and athleticism while all else is ignored, including temperament and good feet.

My mare Xanadu had a fine, placid temperament but the worst feet of any horse I have ever owned, and she was constantly throwing shoes and injuring the pads. Flipping through the articles, I got the answer and read: You do not need to know the HOW, you need only visualize, dwell upon the outcome wanted. But it hurts to think about what I don't have. Just do it. I could clomp through work, focusing on what Janet had said and get upset, or I could follow through with what every bestseller taught and replace my negative fears. Okay, where do I start? I know what I don't want. What do I want? I want to have a job where I change people's lives and make a lot of money. I want to be a millionaire, living in Malibu, California, on the beach, in the sun. She'd hate the sun. She'd hate the day. One morning, Jardine arrived home in downtown Manhattan and had to navigate through an army of cyclists gathering on her block for an early morning ride. She did so with her head down to hide the mascara smudged down her cheeks and her psycho-pinned pupils. She hated the cyclists. She hated their bicycles. She hated wherever they were going to ride--and, mainly, she hated the lonely dank bed she was about to fall into, her own ride being over. She told herself that her kind of ride was a fair trade--night for day. Wild fun for ensuing depression.

And some nights were worth it, no doubt. Sidney told us, `Too much safety thinking is oriented from the perspective of what is wrong, and not enough looks at what is going right. He found there was no difference. The behaviours were essentially the same. In other words, the different outcomes were not process-based but included others things, such as attitude, communication, a willingness to speak up and the ability to call `stop' when things did not seem right. Often times, insight is more about changing the question, being willing to explore a different hypothesis or diagnosis, than it is about generating more information. Borrowing some more wisdom from Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, `In business, most deep strategic changes are brought about by a change in diagnosis -- a change in the definition of a company's situation. In his 1946 article Psychology for Musicians, Percy C Buck writes, `An amateur can be satisfied with knowing a fact. A professional must know the reason why. We need to be as obsessed with why circumstances are as they are as we are with what is happening. In other words, rather than simply treating symptoms, we need to identify and correct the causes of dysfunction and error. You're okay and your practice is too. The most generous gift we can give to ourselves is to drop the judgment and shame around our practice and simply do what we can each day. As someone who suffered from brutal self judgment and shame most of my life, I can tell you that softening up and allowing myself to color outside the lines, so to speak, in my breathwork practice and other areas of my life has opened me up to such immense freedom and lightness in my heart. It can be annoying to hear a lot of noise while you're trying to find your zen, but it's part of life and we need to learn to adjust to it. I remember ages ago being on a silent meditation retreat and on day three wanting to crawl out of my skin because I felt like the man next to me was breathing too loudly. I literally felt like I was going insane, and I was convinced he was ruining my retreat experience. When I think about it now I laugh, but at the time it was incredibly aggravating. One tip I learned early on was any outside sound that bothers you is simply an invitation to anchor yourself back in your breath and in your body. The beauty of a breathwork practice is you have an actual noise machine with you, your breath, that you can change the volume on if needed to support your mind to settle during your practice.

If you're sensitive to outside sounds, I suggest breathing a little bit louder to help you ground into your practice and stay in your body. Because she raced for an unusually long time, she also developed arthritis earlier than most sport horses do and in her later years became less and less willing to jump or work on the flat. Although I loved her, I will never have another horse with bad feet. The teeth of domesticated horses need to be filed, or floated, once a year, due to uneven growth of the surfaces after maturity. A gland in the jowls secretes fluid that cleans the teeth, while grinding grass keeps them level. Horses kept continuously in stalls develop uneven teeth because they never chew their natural food--grass--but instead are fed hay and grain, which are somewhat abrasive. My horses spend twelve to twenty-four hours in the pasture during summer and fall, so their teeth are in good shape. The mare Kestrel lived to be thirty-five, and Xanadu lived to be thirty-one. Decades ago, twenty years was considered old age for a horse, but now many can be active far into their twenties due to the senior equine feeds that have been developed. Wild horses would die of starvation before reaching half the age of well-cared-for domesticated equines. In 1998, at the annual Horse Progress Days event held in Holmes County, I learned that many farmers have returned to plowing with horses for several reasons: the outlay of capital is smaller than the cost of machinery, they can farm smaller and hillier fields with horses, and there is less risk of injury than with tractors. I left the bathroom feeling better. I began to picture in detail a big white wide-open beachfront home, with the ocean as my front yard. It didn't work. Doubts and fear and the sensation of grief swallowed me whole, and I ducked into an empty office, sobbing, shoulders shaking, hopelessness weighing me down until I was sitting on the cold, filthy cement floor. It wasn't working. There is no way my dreams were going to happen here, and my body wasn't fooled by the thought. In fact, it seemed mad. I understood I wasn't to worry about the how part of it but keep picturing what I want and then listen if I get an idea or inspiration to do something. But from the dungeon I'm trapped in here to a place in Malibu?