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

make adjustments that will take you deeper in the pose.
Repeat your mantra. Then simply melt.
Step 5: Honor
Aligning with our overarching theme for the practice, the next step in your progression, honor,
follows on the heels of surrender. As you continue to sink into the earth and stretch even more deeply,
encountering sensations and emotions that run the gamut, do your best to honor the feelings that arise.
If surrender means accepting what is, honoring is the next evolution of surrendering and signifies
consciously acknowledging the gift of your new awareness—paying homage, offering reverence for
this shift in thought, which has a directly positive impact on your physical being and energy.
Honoring emotions, thoughts, and memories is akin to showing gratitude for them. Your body feels
this and celebrates your mind’s expansion by leaping for joy internally. When you’ve surrendered to
what is, you give up the story of whatever was tormenting you as well as the accompanying sensations
or emotions; and when you honor your decision to be in the present, you liberate yourself—you feel
free and energized!
Harkening back to our Dragonfly example, it’s possible that at this point you’ll experience the
shadow side of your emotions, feelings that you would prefer to deny. Every pose affects specific
meridian channels as well as the corresponding “shadow” and “in balance” emotional states I have
listed for you in my instructions. Simply by virtue of moving through the pose, you’ll be contacting the
shadow and transforming it into balance and energy with your intention and breath.
For instance, you may feel an emotional imbalance corresponding to the liver-gallbladder
meridian pair as frustration, stress, or anger. To honor it, simply breathe deliberately into your arising
emotions and into the organs that are targeted by the pose you’re in. Then you’ll use your breath and
focused intention to bring them into a higher vibrational state by infusing them with the matching
balanced emotion. In this way, your breath, like a glowing pipe cleaner, goes plunging through your
meridians, whisking away the detritus from accumulated stress in your tissues, organs, and chakras,
and you’ll bring your shadow emotions into balance, transforming them into the higher, positive
vibration that results in new energy.
As you continue to melt and breathe, allow the feelings to come up without becoming attached to
them or judging them. Breathe into them, honoring them with your attention. On your exhalations,
repeat your mantra and let these emotions and mind states go. Let them exit your body. Then allow
yourself to go even deeper into the pose with as little effort as possible. Let yourself sink deeper into
the floor—or if you are challenged to your capacity with the stretch you are feeling, stay exactly
where you are and just continue to focus on your breath.
Step 6: Open and Energize
Around minute five, you’ll move into the deepest expression of the pose. Although you’ve actually
been opening your meridians ever since you took your first breath in the pose, after spending several
minutes in the pose you are ready to maximize your earlier investment of effort to remove stagnation
and unblock your energy pathways by moving into the greatest range of motion your body affords you