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

help them recapture the spirit of youth. And they did this by nurturing their heart-mind and removing
themselves as much as possible from the superfluous emotional machinations of life. They created the
perfect conditions, perfect soil where flowers could blossom in the body and the mind, constituting
the perfect container for the soul that would someday travel. How they accomplished this was by
generating something called “inner virtue,” and they achieved this not only through the physical
practice we learned in Awaken and Play, but with the Inner Smile and Cosmic Healing Sounds.
They cleared their spiritual decks to make the way for purest energy cultivation. The mind is both
our greatest ally and our greatest enemy. They figured out that if they could love and nurture the body,
the mind would be at its best and primed to be “under their command,” in the military jargon Master
Chia uses frequently in his teachings. In order to achieve balance in the body and activate the mind for
higher practice and then higher travel, one had to take care of business on earth first. I came to the
conclusion that it all boiled down to one simple formula: gratitude, forgiveness, and love. This is
what woke the child within, and with it the greatest joy and energy.
For me, as a dancer who had lived her life focusing entirely on what the body could do and how it
could perform, this was a paradigm shift. The idea that a grown man was dedicating time to smiling
and whispering sweet nothings to his organs—a man I esteemed so highly—was compelling. During
those formative moments when I was watching him, in the montage reel that started playing in my
mind, there was an immediate and dramatic refocus from macro to micro in an instant, and oh, so
poignant an instant. The focus shifted from the scene in which I was only concerned with the
externals, an unrelenting athletic coach tapping my foot on the ground and demanding that my body
machine produce more, that it fly across the stage higher and higher and turn faster and faster, to a
scene in which I as my present self was suddenly brought to my knees by being invited into the inner
sanctum that was responsible for it all, into the flesh and beating-heart blood of it all, to bow my head
in gratitude and acknowledgment and actually engage in a practice in which I thanked the body for
everything it did.
And why was it so poignant? Maybe you can guess. It seemed like something that was long
overdue. And though I didn’t cry during the actual practice, that first night of the conference on a walk
around the campus right after dinner, as I watched the sunset and thought of the healing rosy glow
Master Chia taught us to use for cleansing the heart, I started to cry, and then sob, and then wail, right
there with the mountains and evening songbirds as my witnesses. I cried for my sweet body and all
the years I had taken it for granted.
The Inner Smile practice, just like the sequences in Awaken and Play, spoke to me, because I
knew in my heart that it was the way that I would return to the beautiful, pure, joyful child I was
before life happened. It was one of the greatest surprises of my life to be introduced to my body in a
way that had nothing to do with how it performed on stage or for others. It was a simple, joyful loving
acknowledgment of who I was inside and all that there was inside to love, just as I was, without any
attachment to the outside world or who I was supposed to be to impress others, without trying to be
someone other than who I truly, authentically was. Suddenly, there was no room for fear, fear of
shining too brightly, fear of being too strong, fear of getting punished just for being happy. Who would
have guessed that this extraordinary collection of practices would lead me to a place of such healing
that I would rewrite my original, internal script, befriend myself in such a profound way that I would
reparent myself, and love myself in a way I never dreamed possible, leading me to make sense of my
place in the world, finally.