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

to work with it in our daily lives. The mind always tries to take us out of the present moment and
embroil us in its escapades.
The solution for the mind’s unilateral capriciousness is meditation. Just as savasana helps you to
integrate the healing benefits of your yoga practice, meditation, the art of attention, deep quiet,
introspection, and detachment, serves to unite all the other practices in the Waking Energy flow.
To start the journey toward enlightenment through meditation, we’ll explore a mindfulness
meditation practice that will bring you into a realm infused with the perfume of the Upanishads, a
collection of the world’s oldest Sanskrit texts on meditation and philosophy dating back to roughly
1700–1100 BCE. You’ll sample a collection of simple practices here that will start you, if you are a
beginner, on your insight journey. I hope they seduce you to engage in regular practice. If you are a
more seasoned meditator already, you can use these meditations for inspiration and variety, allowing
them to elevate you to new heights of awareness by breathing new life and dedication into your
existing practice.
The rewards of meditation are incalculable. Although modern science has had quite a love affair
with meditation, having studied its merit and effects for many years, so much of what goes on in the
mind during meditation is still beyond human understanding and eludes even the most expert of
experts in neuroscience.
Like all yin practices, meditation stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, showing us the
way to smooth inner seas by inviting ourselves to become more tranquil. Neuroscientists have proven
that meditation can actually shift brain activity away from the stress-prone right frontal cortex to wave
activity in the calmer left frontal cortex. This mental shift decreases the negative effects of stress,
mild depression, and anxiety. Just as you did with the Inner Smile and Cosmic Healing Sounds
practices, with mindfulness meditation you’ll activate the relaxation response, redirecting your energy
away from the amygdala, where your brain processes fear and triggers the stress response. As a
result, you’ll be able to cut stress off at the pass, interrupting the negative chain of events that would
affect your body adversely, before stress even has a chance to take hold of your mind and do its
damage.
A true testament to our neuroplasticity, meditation is the tool that can effect some of the greatest
internal reprogramming, dramatically shifting our perspective and thus increasing our capacity to
grow and change our brains on a cellular level. This inner shift alone can make more energy available
for productive endeavors. What engine drives these types of shifts? Your willingness and the desire to
begin.
When mindfulness meditation is practiced regularly, it feels as though you’ve won the lottery—a
windfall of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being—leading you to a higher level of
mental acuity and capacity, a deeper level of relaxation, and peace of mind. Most important,
mindfulness meditation opens our hearts in a way that expands our lives and those of everyone we
touch.
the moving into stillness practice
TIME OF DAY: Morning or evening