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

It is my guess that when you taste this Power of Love practice and try the Inner Smile, you will
like it, perhaps even love it, and then start to laugh or cry or maybe even sob the way I did. And now
that you’ve practiced yin yoga and are familiar with the idea of releasing held emotions, you won’t
think me a sadist if I tell you that I hope you do cry. I hope that you give yourself that gift of true
liberty and freedom and that afterwards you allow yourself to celebrate the release, acknowledging
the new flow, the very palpable flow of energy you will feel gently circulating inside your own body.
It is your body’s way of saying thank you, nodding and smiling itself, in deepest appreciation.
Waking Energy Pearls of Wisdom
When I think back to the 2007 workshop with Mantak Chia and the many extraordinary things I
learned from him, I can say unreservedly that, aside from the bounty of the actual practices, these
three pearls were among the most precious gifts he gave me: “Count your blessings,” “Befriend your
enemies,” and “Train your army, because God doesn’t care about germs.” They not only sum up the
entire Power of Love practice, but have become formative guiding lights in my life, as I continue to
live my way into the answers, using these wise directives as my very own expansive lessons. These
pearls, along with one of my other favorites of Master Chia’s, “If you can’t listen to your own body,
how will you ever be able to listen to someone else?” offer an important perspective in the Waking
Energy Way.
Count Your Blessings
The act of waking energy inside your own body, the Waking Energy Way, begins and ends with
gratitude. There is no more effective gratitude or forgiveness exercise than the ritual of the Inner
Smile. The Inner Smile shows you that the energy of love begins with you, right there, inside you.
With the Power of Love practice, you come to know firsthand what love really feels like, because you
are generating it within your own being first, for yourself, born out of the acknowledgment of who you
are and all the gifts you have right there inside you.
Now that you have taken a tour of your inner topography with the yin yoga practice, gone deep,
opened, and energized, and are more familiar with your organs and their associated emotions, we
will actively experience what it means to “smile” at them and generate a deep appreciation for them
and their role in our lives. Our organs are blessings, and once we start acknowledging them, it’s easy
to then experience the benefits of all that flows from them. When you feel grateful, when you take
stock of the bounty in your life, you want for nothing.
The act of feeling gratitude activates the relaxation response in your central nervous system the
same way a smile does, making every system in your body happier and better able to perform. When
you acknowledge the gifts you possess and learn to love yourself first, you actually generate an
abundance of love to give to your own organs, which are responsible for keeping you alive, and then
you have more energy to give to others; this is how you do your small part to help to heal the world.