Waking Energy 7 Timeless Practices Designed to Reboot Your Body and Unleash Your Potential

Wings of Victory
Oh, how I love Wings of Victory! This exercise will put you through your paces, but it is amazing,
incredibly uplifting, and fulfilling. It instills a feeling of real power and inner confidence, restoring
your belief in yourself. It stimulates your lymphatic system and strengthens your heart, specifically the
venous return. (One of the reasons that musical conductors are so long-lived is that they are constantly
moving their arms above their hearts, aiding in the blood flow back into the heart; this exercise
simulates that very action, resulting in untold benefits.)
It activates and strengthens anahata, the Heart Chakra, helping to release anger and
disappointment and usher in love and forgiveness. This kriya and the next one, Taking Flight, both
work with the sacred geometry of the heart. The sixty-degree angle at which we hold our arms is a
direct conduit for moving heart energy, for opening the heart up to receive nurturing, healing universal
love, and to then give back to the world—again, love in abundance.
Whenever I do this exercise, I think of one of my favorite birds, my beloved albatross, which
spends most of its life “on the wing” using a technique called “dynamic soaring.” As they fly,
albatrosses angle their wings into the wind in order to gain height and move into the “boundary field,”
a smoother current that exists above the frictional layer of headwind that would ordinarily slow them
down. This current enables them to stay in the air, sometimes traveling as far as ten thousand miles
without flapping their wings, before landing to refuel. They move like true tai chi adepts, flying with
the flow, literally extracting energy from that field to buoy them and carry them aloft, a true real-life
model of effortless effort. And you thought kundalini was hard!
1. Sitting in Easy Pose, raise your arms up overhead into a large V shape, a forty-five-degree angle,
and fold the tips of the fingers, just the first knuckles, in toward the palms with your thumbs
pointing straight up to the ceiling.
2. Focus your gaze on a point in front of you. I suggest using creative visualization here, perhaps a
cherished goal you want to pursue in your life or a person important to you. When the going gets
tough, you’ll want to have this image readily available to help vanquish negative thoughts and the
desire to quit. (Trust me, you may want to quit—but you won’t!)
3. With your arms outstretched, separate your thumbs from your other fingers and feel as though your
thumbs are conduits for heavenly energy to beam down into your body, not only through your
Crown Chakra, but literally through your thumbs.
4. Start the Breath of Fire, inhaling Sat and exhaling Nam. Now that you are becoming more
practiced with the Breath of Fire, see if you can actually jump right in and establish a more
vigorous pace from the onset of the exercise.
5. As you pump your diaphragm in and out, stoking your inner fire, stretch your arms out even more
expansively, spreading those big, beautiful wings, the biggest wings you’ve ever seen, out into
space. As you think of rooting even deeper into the earth, rise! Like the albatross, feel your
boundlessness, feel your infinite power, feel your radiance rising up through your body!
6. Continue inhaling and exhaling powerfully for up to three minutes, feeling your heart opening and
kundalini shakti rising inside you to do her nurturing, energizing work.
7. After completing your three minutes (you can work up to as much as seven or eight minutes in this