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

Through this sacred union of opposites in nature and in ourselves, we can create the fertile ground
for our own transformation and evolution. Through the merging of our outer physical body (yang) and
our inner energy body (yin), we have the marriage of great “minds.” As you will come to see for
yourself as you move through the practices, we have the potential to achieve our most vibrant health
when we live in balance, yielding unfathomably limitless seas of energy.
Yin and Yang in the Body
The Waking Energy practices engage our body and mind and teach us to live proactively, helping us to
cultivate a new kind of consciousness—movement that heats the body and then cools it, regulating the
relationship between yin and yang within us that yields energy. When we move consciously in ways
that moderate our inner energy “temperatures,” we can balance and harmonize the body’s energy
systems, providing a powerful antidote to the effects of today’s modern world. We do this by making
time for “active” muscle-building, heart-strengthening exercise that creates heat and allocating an
equal amount of time for “passive” body-opening recharging, for the still, deep, slow-moving
stretches and conscious breathing that take us inside our bodies, into our emotional life where stress
is stored, so that we can liberate chronic physical holding patterns and truly calm our minds.
Just as they are in nature, yin and yang in the body are in a constant state of flux, continuously
subtly supporting, repairing, balancing, and transforming into one another. It’s this constant
transformation that is the basis for all change in the body’s ecosystem, a give-and-take relationship
that is the activity of life itself. Breathing is an example of this constant and unbroken flow—an
inhalation always follows an exhalation until the end, our last breath.
Periods of work, high activity, output, and exertion are always followed by rest, recharging, and
recovery. When we don’t rest, when we don’t breathe properly, when we don’t honor our body and
trust its wisdom, yin and yang become imbalanced. They argue, just as we do.
When we work excessively and don’t take the time to rest or when we engage in intense, highoutput
workouts without ample recovery time, yin doesn’t cool and nourish yang. Or when we don’t
move enough, when there isn’t enough yang energy to warm and nourish our yin, then we can
experience poor circulation and cold in our extremities and feel sluggish, lethargic, and depressed.
Where one is deficient, the other is in excess, requiring a rebalancing that can be achieved by
receiving energy-work treatment or through your own conscious energy cultivation—movement!
Sacred Geometry: Waking Energy in the Practices
The term “sacred geometry” is often used in kundalini yoga practices to describe the exact gestures
and positions of our limbs that lend themselves to receiving and channeling energy to specific areas
of the body to effect energy transformation. Certain shapes and positions allow the body to better
funnel and transform energy, which facilitates subtle energy cultivation. Now that we know about the
myriad energy pathways in our bodies, when we perform asanas, “poses,” or kriyas, “exercises,”