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

throughout the body and helping you to cultivate even more. This doesn’t just optimize your actual
breathing apparatus; it gives your internal organs ample space to function at their best, properly
suspended with integrity in their organic places that nature designed, where breath and energy can
flow freely, nourishing everything it flows around and through.
Ideally, you want to establish a posture that makes you feel tall, rooted, and easy, so your chest is
free to do its utmost in helping you to expand your breathing range and, hence, your waking-energy
aptitude. Since the lungs are soft structures, they only occupy the room you make for them. You want
to give them as well as the upper-body muscles and bones that house them an optimal environment to
make breathing an effortless and complete exchange with the world around you, so that you can
maximize your own energy-cultivation efforts. This happens when the shoulders are held open, back,
and down to create the greatest expanse possible for every beautiful breath. Since you’re delivering
molecules of oxygen to your cells and expelling carbon dioxide, you want to be able to maximize your
uptake and put some oomph behind the expiration, so that there is a complete cycle of cleansing as
well. Complete breathing cycles help to counteract the buildup of toxins in the lungs caused by
environmental pollutants and allergens.
Think for a minute about how your body reacts when you jump into the ocean and it’s really cold
water—how your shoulders rise up around your ears and your ribs expand beyond their normal range.
It’s all happening to accommodate the extra breath you need to signal to your sympathetic nervous
system, which is responsible for your stress response, that all is well and that you will either soon
adjust to the temperature or quickly make your way to the dock to sun yourself with the seagulls.
Breathing is an automatic function controlled by the respiratory center, but it’s also a musculoskeletal
endeavor as well, and because of this, making sure your body is well aligned is integral to breathing
optimally.
Even if we’re not swimming with a Polar Bear Club, we tend to overwork the shoulders, raising
them up, again to create the space needed to take a deep breath. This is often a sign of atrophy in the
respiratory muscles, because even though the diaphragm is one of the primary organs responsible for
respiration, it underfunctions in most people. Instead, the chest muscles are recruited to overperform,
leading to bad breathing habits. You want to maximize your breathing apparatus, which literally
connects you to your greatest energy source—the outside world—by strengthening it with deep
diaphragmatic breaths. With a little patience and practice, the lungs, the diaphragm, the muscles of the
abdomen, and the circulatory and lymph systems welcome the rigors of deep breathing.
Think of your whole body as a large, round, red, happy balloon that fully expands and naturally
contracts with each breath. Like every inch of the balloon as it is inflated, you want to send your
breath not just into the top and front of the chest and belly, but deep into the sides and back of the ribs
themselves and into the uppermost and lowermost lobes of the lungs. When we inhale, we need to
think of it as sending the breath down into our feet, into our deepest belly, then into the chest and up
and into the head, and of course into every last inch of the body. When we exhale, we start by
emptying through the feet, up into the legs, into the belly, using the abdominals to accentuate the
contracting of the abdominal wall, helping the stale air to exit the chest and body completely, and
finally visiting the head once again.
This is how you make each breath really count. When you’re relaxed and breathing lower into the
body, expanding the rib cage both laterally (side to side) and sagittally (front to back), you can really
start to wake your energy, sending the breath down to nourish your primary energy centers. When you