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

your position, but in a way that is palatable. Remember, you’re the one in control, titrating how much
you feel.
After you’ve moved into the deeper expression of the pose, use your breath to do a body scan,
seeking out new areas of greatest sensation or discomfort and deliberately breathing into them. Your
body scan will lead you to the first of a few proverbial forks in the road—one of several you’ll
encounter over the duration of any given pose. At this juncture, if you feel that your body is capable of
going beyond the range of motion your prop affords you and you are ready to accept greater sensation,
make some strategic physical adjustments to facilitate a deepening of the pose. You can turn the block
under your head to a lower height or remove it entirely; you can shift a blanket or bolster out from
underneath your hip (or move it farther away from you) or drop down onto your elbows. Do whatever
you feel you need to do to allow your body to release further and move, without straining, into a
greater range of motion.
If, on the other hand, you feel at this juncture that you’ve gone beyond the range of motion that you
thought you could handle when you were greeting the pose, you can bring a prop back to its original
height or replace a blanket or bolster. If you’ve dropped down onto your elbows and feel as though
it’s too much, you can lift up and return to straight arms.
Step 4: Surrender
As your body continues to open, what lies underneath the surface of your consciousness will now be
revealed, like an iceberg with only a quarter of its mass above water. Emotions that are out of
balance will inevitably arise. Your next step, surrender, occurs when your entire body is willingly
partnering with you and there is very little holding or tension remaining, in the sense of protective
guarding or muscular armor. This is when you really start to physically, mentally, and emotionally let
go and you open to the sensations and feelings that arise, instead of recoiling from them in fear.
Surrender means accepting what is. It means accepting what is already here and giving up the fight
that keeps you in limbo, struggling against what cannot be controlled, so that you can invite peace into
your being. It involves trusting that your breath will carry you through to a place where you begin to
unblock your energy pathways, liberate holding patterns in your tissues, transform your emotions, and
take back your power. Simply stated, surrender doesn’t mean losing a fight; it means finding the
courage to know when to yield—all in the spirit of self-love and self-preservation. It means trusting
your body’s wisdom to reveal your purest life force.
By this point in any given pose you’ll be at around minute three or four. As you continue breathing
and surrendering to gravity, when you encounter challenging sensations that bring up uncomfortable
feelings, each time you exhale, here is where you’ll want to really start relying upon your mantra: “I
am letting go of anything I no longer need” or “I am letting go of anything that no longer serves me.”
It is very important that, as you speak the mantra in your mind, you visualize stagnant energy
leaving your body and going down into the earth, where it will be recycled. Rely on your breath here
and remember that it’s the most powerful transformation vehicle you have.
After repeating the mantra several times, you may find that your body responds by opening more
than you anticipated, like a thirsty plant when it finally gets watered. If you sense that your range of
motion has shifted and exceeded what your props or body affords you, here is another opportunity to