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

5. Flex your right foot, making sure that the pinky-toe edge of the foot is pressing firmly into the mat.
Mind you, this is not the easiest thing to do, so take a moment and make sure that you have
achieved this position. You’ll have to maintain some of your focus here while you are
multitasking and splitting your concentration, dedicating some of it to reaching in opposition and
working the left leg with the utmost precision.
6. Lengthen your left foot into a long point as you draw the navel deeply in toward the spine to
prepare, and reach tall through the crown of your head. Employing opposition is the key to
preventing your torso from rocking forward and backward when the leg moves front and back in
the next steps.
7. Externally rotate the left leg in the hip socket, and then, as you inhale, kick the left leg forward
toward your nose in a long stroke followed immediately after by another little kick, so that the
feeling is “KICK-kick.” As you’re doing this, press the left hand into the mat for greater stability
and lift your chin and chest to maintain optimal side-lying posture.
8. Then, without so much as a second’s pause, KICK-kick the left leg behind you, maintaining the
same plane of motion (moving the leg neither higher nor lower). The leg is swinging back into the
position dancer’s call an arabesque, reaching long through the leg with a pointed foot. Squeeze
the buttocks firmly as you kick backward.
9. Repeat for a total of eight sets (front and back make one set).
Classic Teaser
The Classic Teaser challenges what you thought you knew about yourself and reveals new levels of
patience and capability. It builds extraordinary integrated abdominal and back strength, strengthens
the quads, lengthens the hamstrings, and improves overall coordination, balance, and stamina.
1. Lying on your back, draw your knees into your chest and reach your arms long overhead, holding
them six inches above the floor behind you.
2. Extend your legs straight up to the ceiling, and then come into the heels-together-toes-apart
position, externally rotating your legs in your hip sockets while squeezing your inner thighs
together. Even as you establish your balance here, you’ll already be working very hard, so to
lighten the load, imagine that you are shooting sparks through your fingertips and toes, trying to
send those sparks as far away from your core body as possible.
3. Drawing your navel deeply into your spine, lower your legs as far down to your point of control
(the point where your abdominals are engaged and your lower back is securely rooted into the
floor). Keeping the legs exactly where they are, in your established point of control, you will use
the power of opposition to roll up.
4. Reaching with equal and opposite energy and strength through your fingertips and toes, inhale to
prepare. Then immediately exhale and lift your arms toward your toes, peeling your body off the
mat one vertebra at a time without letting your legs move. Do your best here, and if it’s too much,
bend your knees slightly as a modification.
5. Come up as high as you can, with control, and then, at the height of the movement, with your arms