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

somewhere between the sections on metaphysics and aromatherapy, I found his book Waking the
Tiger. When I opened it, I happened upon the epigraph to the introduction: “If you bring forth what is
within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you
do not bring forth will destroy you” (from the Gospel of Thomas). When I read those words, they
stopped me dead in my tracks. Right there, in a bookshop that had become the magic portal to my
future, yet another road to my healing and empowerment was revealed to me.
Ever since the sea change I experienced in my first yin yoga class, I understood its significance on
some deep, intuitive level, but it wasn’t until I found Levine’s book that I understood why it worked
so well. I wanted to shout from the rooftops the news about the pivotal dots that I had connected. I
couldn’t believe my good fortune: I’d finally found someone who understood what I’d been suffering
from and was able to tell me how I could free myself. In my early twenties, after having miraculously
survived severe depression and a dramatic swing into mania followed by a relentless cycle of deathdefying
panic attacks, I felt as though I had exited hell without an explanation. But there was no
guarantee that I wouldn’t just wind up there again.
One section of Waking the Tiger was particularly illuminating. In it, Levine says that when wild
animals are confronted by danger, they have the same fight-or-flight response that we do. Unlike
humans, however, they then have the innate ability to discharge their trauma and fear. He uses the
example of an impala being chased by a cheetah, which can run up to seventy miles per hour. Faced
with imminent death, knowing that it can’t outrun the cheetah, the impala suddenly chooses to play
dead. Although from the outside the impala appears motionless, on the inside the impala’s energy is
whirring through its entire system, its heart is beating wildly, and its nervous system is supercharged,
flooded with energy. When the cheetah, thinking the impala is dead, becomes disinterested and
wanders away, the impala, sensing the coast is clear, mobilizes and runs off the trauma, giving the
energy an outlet and restoring homeostasis.
According to Levine, a threatened human (or impala) must discharge all the energy mobilized to
negotiate a threat or risk becoming a victim of trauma. This residual energy does not simply go away.
It persists in the body and often causes the formation of a wide variety of symptoms, like anxiety,
depression, and psychosomatic and behavioral problems.
That animals know instinctively to discharge the stress that results from the fight-or-flight
mechanism and we humans don’t (despite allegedly being endowed with the gift of conscious thought)
is proof of our alienation from both nature and our biological rhythms. In the ancient past, people
were more connected than we are to the natural heartbeat of the earth and the cycles of the moon and
more reverent toward the cosmos than we are today. Somewhere along the way, with the advent of
societal “improvements,” we distanced ourselves from nature and from our own true nature; we
unlearned how to give trauma an outlet. If we are to cultivate own energy intelligence, we must turn
to nature as our teacher, emulating our animal counterparts and recreating for ourselves what the
impala knows to do instinctively. Only then can we live in harmony with our world and wake up the
energy that is waiting there inside us.
As humans, however, we do not best discharge trauma by running it off, unless we do it while
consciously acknowledging and processing our reaction to it. We discharge the nervous energy of our
trauma most effectively by moving slowly and mindfully—by engaging in practices that afford us the
space and time to experience our feelings.
Unreleased trauma quickly finds a place to settle in the body, where it disrupts the flow of chi.