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

interpretations of our inner energy architecture, though its functions and aims are the same. Each
system is its own energy world, an interplay between subtle energy pathways, channels, and organs
affecting all the body’s systems, all the way down to our cells. The systems mirror one another in
many ways, and at some strategic points share several common energy distribution and transformation
centers. The traditions feature many of the same components with different names and associations, in
keeping with each one’s respective history, philosophy, and science. You’ll discover that a central
aspect of each of the practices is directing energy into the life-force center, the navel center, in one
tradition called the Sea of Chi. It’s here that some of the greatest energy transformation takes place,
which is why the practices themselves were originally designed. Not only does keeping the life-force
center awake and alive keep the organs well-nourished with fresh oxygen and blood; because it
serves as a major energy distribution center supplying chi to the rest of the body through the meridian
system, it means you are more awake and alive.
When you arrive at each of the practices in Part Two, you will naturally examine more closely
how each of the wisdom traditions has designed this sacred inner space, each of their specific models
for harnessing and cultivating your life force—for waking your energy. As you go deeper into your
exploration of the practices, you will likely break into a smile when you start to see the many
similarities and understand that the end goal is the same: partnering with the body to live your best
life.
For all the qigong-inspired and inner-alchemy practices we will be learning, we are going to
work with the subtle-energy anatomy based on the traditional Chinese medicine model, which
incorporates energy pathways, called meridians, and storage and transformation centers, called elixir
fields. For our yoga-inspired practices, including kundalini and the Tibetan Rites, we will be
referring to the Hindu yogic tradition’s system, in which energy pathways are called nadis and
transformation centers are called chakras. All the practices in Waking Energy will follow one of
these two templates, with the exception of Pilates, which does not ascribe to either specifically, but
borrows from both and relies on stimulation of the lymphatic system, another subtle-energy system in
the body, which will be described in detail. Once you draw universal energy in from nature through
your body’s portals, it commingles with your own and gets refined in these storage and transformation
centers, producing more usable energy and creating balance and harmony in your own ecosystem.
We are comprised mostly of water, approximately 70 percent, which is conveniently infused with
electro-conductive ions—among others, iron, magnesium, manganese, sodium, and potassium—so if
your subtle body is a magical bioelectric web, then your physical body is the most perfect conductive
environment for it. Water makes possible the interaction between your subtle body and the body you
can see.
When you breathe, when you smile, when you kiss someone, when you dance, whenever you
move, contracting and releasing the muscles of your internal oceanic self—your rushing rivers and
your quiet streams—all of this pumps and propels subtle energy through a complex and intricate
topography that is uniquely yours.
Imagine wearing a vast, simultaneously diaphanous and dense, internal compression garment—the
matrix of your connective tissues. Woven throughout your body are fasciae, fibrous sheets and bands
of collagen-based connective tissue beneath the skin that internally shape the body we know and
inhabit. Fascia attaches, stabilizes, encloses, and separates our muscles, ligaments, tendons, bones,
membranes (like the dura mater, the sheath surrounding the brain and spinal cord), internal organs,