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

The labyrinth is the map of life’s twists and turns that, if followed like your soul’s own sacred
mandala, can help you find what has been seeking you. Moving beyond our own love, into the ocean
of cosmic oneness energy on earth, we swim inside the sea of synchronicity itself, living into our
highest purpose, a glowing embodiment of our own radiance. Like the wise adepts who came to meet
themselves, moving through their timeless systems for millennia before us, we can travel across time
through the labyrinth’s meandering arcs, renouncing the outside world for the sake of returning to our
light, to ourselves. It is the pathway home.
Somehow we are always and forever returning to the beginning when we’re walking the path of
the labyrinth. As we approach the doorway to the beyond, we are peering in closer to our true nature,
our timeless essence, our immortal souls. Through this new way, this Waking Energy Way, we have
touched our own divinity, visited the world unseen inside us that exists beyond our sight, beyond our
knowing, just as we will one day merge with the world unseen that lies beyond. This is the place
where we launch ourselves after dedicating ourselves to nourishing and loving these bodies that we
will one day say good-bye to. It is the knowledge of this good-bye, the very real knowing that we are
just “renting” these “earth suits,” that we can use to inspire us to make the most of every day that we
are still here. In fact, all the practices you’ve learned in Waking Energy will help you to do this.
Truthfully, I never actually had the patience to walk a labyrinth until recently. I used to go to
Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires with my mother, and I would also bring her as my guest when I taught
at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. Her favorite pastime was walking the labyrinth. She was by
far one of the most extraordinary and fiery intellects I’ve ever known, and also one of the most
impatient people ever. Somehow she reserved all her patience, it seemed, for walking the labyrinth.
Demonstrating a kind of reserve that was truly exceptional, especially for her, whenever she stepped
into the labyrinth, it was like the first moment I stepped into the temple at the Tibetan sanctuary in
Woodstock, New York. It was clear that she was not only stepping onto sacred ground, but reverently
into another world.
In Mexico, from day one of our arrival she would demand that I accompany her to the labyrinth.
And every day that I resisted, she would ask not once, but a few times, like the bubbling, provocative
child she was, with a sparkle in her eye that meant her request was more like a demand, as if to say:
“You’ll be sorry if you don’t, because you’re going to miss one of the peak experiences of your life!”
Every morning at breakfast, relentlessly, all the while wearing a broad, knowing grin (knowing she
was provoking me) like the little girl she was, she’d ask, “Wanna go to the labyrinth with me today?”
Finally, I would submit. But even though I was captivated by the spiritual idea of it and found its
arcing pathways exquisite, and even though I have always loved the kind of order it offered and
embraced ritual, it inspired rebellion in me. It made me feel as though I wanted to draw outside the
lines. As I watched her through my peripheral vision, gracefully gliding forward through the inner
circles, the arcs and narrows, and of course her beloved spirals, it was everything I could do to stay
the course and behave. Her diligence, her dedication, her solemnity and trancelike devotion to the
thing, her absolute gravity made me want to fly off into space.
And that’s exactly what I would do. In the middle, at a glaringly inappropriate time, in a
decidedly un-Buddhist-like fashion, either when I found myself back in the very center of it or on one
of its outermost circles, I would use my long legs to strategically step over the arcs and turns, to free
myself in the very same way I rescued myself from that first death-defying sixty-minute sit at Kripalu.
Shortly after she passed away in July 2014, although I knew she wouldn’t have wanted me to, I