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

laughing at gravity.
After twenty-one repetitions of the Down-Dog and Up-Dog combination, he moved more slowly
and deliberately. Standing still, he took a deep breath and exhaled like a lion. Then with his hands on
his slightly bent knees, he contracted his abdominal area with such force that he carved a kind of
canyon out of his own midsection. Suddenly, all I could see was his rectus abdominus (the central
abdominal muscle) flaring out like a cobra, as if it were undulating inside his belly. Seamlessly, he
moved the snake in and out and side to side—the kind of abdominal rippling a belly dancer might
perform.
I recognized the esoteric breathing and abdominal massage to be the same that only special sects
of yogis perform. I had seen it demonstrated at an ashram in upstate New York many years earlier.
Now, as then, I was in awe.
After repeating this abdominal ritual three times, he rose to an erect stance, took three power
breaths, and brought his hands into Prayer Position, with his palms pressed in front of his heart and
his eyes closed. A full five minutes passed as I waited, breathless.
He opened his eyes and smiled. I will never forget what he said afterward—not to me, but to the
panoramic world around him—the mountains, the trees, flowers, and birds: “Pura vida!” (Life is
good!). Then, before I could even grasp that it was happening, he had broken the “fourth wall” of his
sacred ritual. He looked right at me with an even bigger smile and said, “Come, I will teach you.”
Right there on the grounds of a gorgeous Costa Rican outpost, in my best sleepwear, with this
handsome superhero as my very own private instructor, I became privy to a thousand-year-old secret
ritual.
I swear to you that when I stood where he had been spinning and pumping and breathing, I felt an
incredible rush of energy shoot through my body. I must have gasped aloud, because he laughed gently
and said, “Si, cara (Yes, my dear) . . . just ride it.” In an elegant, dulcet-toned English accent, he
softly said, “Close your eyes and breathe it in.”
In that moment, my perception of time changed. I must have lingered there for ten minutes before
he gently interrupted me with his hand on my shoulder. I wanted to continue swimming in that sweet
vortex of liquid velvet—the enveloping energy spiraling up into my body from the earth below.
With a knowing smile, my charming, radiant new friend told me to stretch my arms out at shoulder
height with my palms facing down to the earth and spin clockwise, “the direction of time,” so that I
could “surrender my ego to the universe.” I loved the idea that by spinning I could relinquish my ego
and my judging mind and travel into a realm of real substance.
“Where are my palm fronds?” I asked coyly.
He chuckled and told me that he had added them to the original movement that his father had
taught him as a child, so that he could feel as if he was flying. When I said I wanted the full effect, he
retrieved them, and with the anointed palm fronds in hand, off I went, my arms outstretched. One
revolution, two, three, and by the fourth I was incredibly dizzy. Somehow I managed to say, “I think I
need to stop!” With that, he gently held my shoulders and told me to rotate counterclockwise once and
breathe deeply so that the dizziness would subside.
“How long did it take you to be able to spin twenty-one times?”