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

When you draw back the bow, you prepare to greet life!
Every time you inhale, you are starting a new moment in your life. Inhalation is the ultimate
inspiration. It’s the beginning and the most yang expression of the breath. In the practices, when you
consciously direct your breath and inhale, you are embarking, venturing forth, gathering your life
force. It’s you filling up, preparing, surging, drawing back the bow.
The word “inhalation” was once synonymous with “inspiration,” reminding us to acknowledge the
ultimate link between breath and spirit. From the Latin spirare, “to breathe,” the words “spirit,”
“respiration,” and “inspiration” all share the same origin.
During inhalation, the chest expands and the lungs are filled with fresh air. But in the Waking
Energy sense, inhalation also signals the intake of life force. The body’s activity and creativity are
generated through the act of inhalation. It is an act of receiving. When you inhale, you are actually
collecting chi from the universe around you. When you consciously breathe in, every single breath
becomes supercharged with your conscious intention, becoming so much more than a simple
inhalation. The breath becomes a healing elixir. When you inhale, you are inviting energy to circulate
and nourish your entire internal environment. But it’s not just your lungs that breathe; your skin does
too. You literally absorb chi through the skin, which is your largest organ of respiration and exchange
with the world around you.
When you inhale, you are breathing with your entire body, the expanse of the protective canvas
that envelops you, drawing in vital information and energy to fuel your every movement. From subtle
to sweeping, from delicate to divinely expansive, your breath expresses itself through your upward,
outward, rising action.
The Spaces in Between: The Power of Suspension
Like the space between two waves, where potential is made manifest, the space between the
inhalation and the exhalation is where actions are born. In any of the practices you do, in your actual
movements, if you attend to that moment between in the inhalation and the exhalation, in that pristine
stillness you can gather your most powerful energy.
It’s also in the space between the inhalation and the exhalation where true wisdom is born. In that
space that seems to hang in the air, literally suspended for a seeming eternity, you can refine your
intention, plan your attack, and enlist the power of your mind to assist you in hitting your mark when
you’re ready to let that arrow fly. After you’ve gathered all your resources to perform a specific
action of your choosing, during the milliseconds preceding it is where your greatest power lies. It’s
there that you decide how the next moment will go, how this culmination of your efforts will flower.
It’s where patience and determination are born, the dynamic duo that truly can make anything and
everything possible.
Exhalation: Letting the Arrow Fly
When you exhale, you’re not simply emptying your lungs, but moving stagnant chi out of your body,
making space for new chi, for more life force to enter in. In Waking Energy–speak, although it is the
most yin expression of the action cycle you can participate in, you’re stepping into your power in full