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

helped, something inside me said that I needed to effect a sea change of my own, from within. So
while I was in search of ways to heal my physical body, I concurrently and instinctively started to
seek out practices that viewed the body as an integrated whole, where nothing was separate and
everything was connected.
My journey continued with hatha yoga, but there too I continued to let my ego dominate, and
instead of following my breath I would track how high my leg could go or how deeply I could coerce
my body to twist into a pose. It wasn’t until I discovered yin yoga, where I was forced again to slow
down and feel, that I learned to leave my ego behind and came to truly understand that the mind–body
connection was an undeniable truth. As difficult as this may be to believe, after just one two-hour yin
yoga session, my back pain went away. It was the defining moment when I made the connection
between the wisdom of the ancient practices that inform this book and the way to free my soul. The
impact of the release I experienced, the depth of the emotional clearing throughout my body with this
simple, but profound practice, and the new awareness I cultivated changed my life forever. I was
finally free not just of the lower-back pain that plagued me. I was free.
With a new kind of inner fire ignited, I voraciously quested for more. I was determined to learn
all that I could about healing my psyche and my body, and each step I took confirmed over and over
again that the two were inextricably linked. It was as if my path had been preordained, because one
magical discovery led seamlessly into the next.
After falling completely in love with yin yoga, I wanted to be able to teach it. I located intensive
workshops that were perfectly timed with holidays. I found myself logging countless hours in study
and reading voraciously into the wee hours. I traveled thousands of miles and frequented renowned
wellness centers like Kripalu and Omega to study with some of the leaders in the field. The yin yoga
and mindfulness meditation doyenne Sarah Powers not only led me to Jon Kabat-Zinn, molecular
biologist and mindfulness pioneer, but also to some of my other cherished subtle-arts luminaries like
Hiroshi Motoyama, famous for his modern scientific work on the meridian theory, and Taoist adept
and qigong master Mantak Chia, whose work fascinated me, captured my imagination, and fed my
soul. Serendipitously, while filming that first ever Pilates video, I met Gurmukh, the queen of
kundalini yoga. They began my love affair with the ancient wisdom traditions, which continues to this
very day.
Every investigative foray I embarked upon on in this healing journey was an attempt to solve the
inscrutable mystery of how pain became vested in the body, a focused mission to finally heal my
lower back and find fluidity and vibrancy in my body once again. But alongside this compelling need
were an insatiable, burning curiosity and a primal suspicion that there was more, that we are far more
capable than what we are led to believe. Each practice I explored and added to my arsenal was
confirmation of my own inner strength and natural talents. I was finally able to free my life force,
which was being misused, abused, and outright wasted because it was following an outmoded script,
and show it a new route, a new way of being. By studying these ancient practices and integrating them
into my life, my own ability to wake my energy grew, and I came closer and closer to wholeness, to
glowing health and radiance, with every step I took.
My remarkable transformation forged along the journey through these practices has cultivated an
extraordinary lifelong friendship—with myself. After what feels like a lifetime perfecting this lifeforce
flow, of refining and perfecting the exercises into Waking Energy, I’ve developed a powerful
combination of serenity, self-confidence, and self-love. When I look back at myself as the dancer on