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

and tumbling down the side of a hill? This is how you will play today! You will be using your body to
blissfully merge with nature, unreservedly jumping into the fray, more concerned with the thrill of the
swoop and swell in your belly than you ever were about potentially skinning your knees as you leapt
off the swing at its highest point. Now as a grown-up, with new skill sets and allegedly endowed with
greater reserves of patience and focus, you have an advantage over your child self, mature talents that
you will apply to your energy cultivation.
With them, you will connect to nature anew, giving yourself over to a new way of seeing the
world as your energy playground. You will acknowledge, inhabit, and explore your very own
beautiful body both as an energy vessel and the way back to your childlike knowing, instincts, and
spirit. In the end, waking your energy is, more than anything, a returning to what you’ve always
known how to do best—perhaps the most precious and elusive skill we humans possess—finding
your innate joy, something that can only be experienced fully in the moment.
Be a child, and join the dance of life! Once you invite your imagination to take part in this new
dance and acknowledge that energy is everywhere, you will be able to access it literally by
summoning it—by placing your attention on wherever it is you want to invite the energy to flow. The
Chinese say that chi follows yi, the “mind” or “intention,” and “Where intention goes, energy flows.”
I hope for your sake that that expression will become a part of your life from this moment forward.
The primary reason that the Waking Energy practices are so powerful in making our energy
“visible” to us is that every movement in the practices is done in tandem with a conscious breath, and
it is breathing that serves as the major conduit for chi and its distribution throughout the body,
facilitating the transport of freshly oxygenated blood through our entire circulatory system to enhance
the lives of all the cells in our body—the process that literally creates the “juice,” the elixir of life,
that awakens our senses as we’re doing it.
Your subtle energy will feel different from practice to practice. You may feel an overall sense of
flow, a heightened awareness of energy circulating throughout your body, or relief, spaciousness, or
lightness in your heart. You could feel an overall pulsating sensation or a more rising and
empowering sensation with the more yang practices, such as after a kundalini sequence or following
the Pilates mat work. Or you may experience the deep, grounding, and energized calm following even
one yin pose. In the Love Thyself exercises in Awaken and Play specifically, you may feel anything
ranging from a tingling sensation or buzzing in a specific body part to a sense of holding something
fluffy, like a cotton ball or what you imagine a miniature cloud would feel like between your hands.
You may feel suddenly permeable or sense a pleasant warmth spreading all over your body; you
may have a foreign, but curiously soothing gurgling sensation in your stomach or a new sense of
openness or spaciousness in your body, particularly in areas where you typically hold tension. You
may feel actual relief from pain. There may be a pulsing or magnetized feeling between your hands
when they’re rubbed together (charged) or heat coming from your hands when they are applied to the
body to rub, massage, and stroke it.
Emotions also may begin rising up and out, from uncontrollable tears to laughter, deep peace, or
pleasure. You may feel high, as if you have had a few glasses of great red wine, or sense radiance
rising to the surface of your skin, like the pearly luminescence inside an oyster shell. You could feel a
pervasive, warming bliss, or even ecstasy. Perhaps better than any other sensation you may
experience, you may feel as though you are finally “coming home.”
Another important aspect of dancing with chi is to become a witness to your own moods, patterns,