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

Wherever chi is obstructed, stagnation occurs, leading to disharmony and imbalance; that area can
then become a chronic seat of pain and/or, ultimately, even disease.
The Waking Energy Way is the antidote, but the yin yoga practice in particular is especially
effective, because its languorous rhythm encourages introspection. It’s your chance to be the impala
and discharge your trauma—but not by running away from it. You do it by getting still, going deep,
opening, and investigating. Although you may feel a certain anticipatory anxiety about the thoughts and
feelings that could arise, it is the allowing of what reveals itself to you that makes metamorphosis and
waking your energy possible.
The Lion and the Lamb
Time records itself in the deep connective tissue of the body, where traumatic physical and emotional
experiences find a home. When engaging in a yin practice, it isn’t at all uncommon (and in fact is both
natural and desirable) to release emotions that accompanied an original trauma. We can become
angry, anxious, or frustrated and start to express powerful emotions through laughter or tears. This
somato-emotional releasing is remarkably cathartic and therapeutic, physically and emotionally, and
perhaps the most extraordinary benefit of the yin practice.
In the practice, what may appear at the onset to be a relatively innocuous pose, a sweet little
lamb, can very quickly become a lion, roaring at you with a deafening, undeniable rush of sound.
What you’ll do is pay attention. You won’t try to ignore the lion’s roar. Heed any voice or primordial
instinct you have, showing it kindness and adjusting your body accordingly, so that it can be your very
best waking-energy partner.
We’re taught to move away from discomfort, to mask it, hide it, to shush it away. Yin asks us to
do just the opposite. It invites us not just to move toward discomfort, but to go inside it. Yin proves
that whatever you anticipate isn’t as scary as you thought it would be; on the contrary, unexpected
relief and surges of energy flood your entire being when you lean into the poses and invite the
“flames” of your emotional fire to consume you. Yin asks you to befriend what you perceive as a
predator—not only to hold out your hand to the ferocious lion, but to feed it, pet it, and then lie down
with it like a trusting lamb.
When you relax and allow sensations to come up in the physical postures without trying to
mitigate or fix them, a magical alchemy takes place. Mind and body unite in peace and calm. When
you can start to accept as truth that there is no good or bad, just energy, then you can experience the
unfolding, releasing, and rising of stuck prana, bringing everything back to a place of equilibrium,
where new energy awakens.
The emotional life of the body is central to yin. The visceral correspondence of organs and
emotions and how we perceive this connection lie at the heart of the practice. For me, because of this
vital aspect, yin yoga became the vehicle, along with therapy, for healing my personal pain. I learned
that trauma needs to be discharged from the body and that healing is predicated on the confluence of
our ability to find an outlet and our desire to become whole again, to initiate our own healing and
reclaim parts of ourselves that got buried or lost along the way. This is the true gift of waking yin
energy and what inspired me to want to reclaim myself—hope.