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

After my epiphany with Pilates and in answering the very real need to continue my own
transformative mind-body journey, I delved headlong into the world of the ancient Eastern subtle
healing arts. I traveled metaphorically thousands of miles, from China to India to Tibet, meeting with
masters and studying with adepts (scholarly sages who transmitted many of the ancient practices
contained in this book) who had dedicated their lives to uncovering the secret to living a life of peace
and abundance. Through these ancient practices, I learned how to navigate life, turn my pain into
beauty, and embrace a path to healing and being “awake”—to loving myself and finding my true
power.
Just when I had myself convinced that I had turned every stone and cleared all the dark passageways
of my psyche that prevented me from being all I could be, life tested me with another kind of trial. In
January of 2014, after ending a relationship, I found myself suddenly single in a new city on the other
coast. And just as I was starting to lick my wounds, my mother’s cancer came back. Everything in my
life seemed to explode and disappear all at once. This was a new kind of pain, not turned inward the
way it had been with my depression, but like a maniacal driver, dragging me along on an open road
for sport with my feet chained to the back of the car. When I lost my beloved mother that July, the pain
was so intense that I found myself crumpled into the fetal position, sobbing and railing at the sky, not
once, but many times.
I felt utterly helpless and alone, brought literally to my knees, and I wasn’t sure that I could rise
again. It was here, in my darkest hours, humbled beyond anything I’d ever known, that I circled back
through my own history, integrating and falling in love again with the very same practices in this book
that you too will soon experience. I tapped back into my essential aliveness, my life force. Every day,
no matter how I felt, I dedicated myself to connecting with myself, to loving myself—to manifesting
balance, strength, and radiance. I rose again. I thrived, both physically and emotionally, in ways that I
wouldn’t have thought possible. I reclaimed myself. And each element that now comprises Waking
Energy reminded me how.
The writing of this book, which I began just as everything in my life fell apart, was divinely
timed. When I first conceived it, it was wholly intended for you, but along the way it became my
salvation once again. It not only became my journal, but a kind of memoir, my Zen koan, my daily
ritual, my compass. Each time I sat down to write, I knew I was weaving the strongest fabric yet—a
collection of teachings and wisdom that helped me to trust in my own strength again, to believe that I
was held, supported, and nurtured, cradled in my own love for myself with the universe behind me.
The hummingbirds and ravens who landed in the fountain outside my window every day became my
companions, bearing me up on their wings. The messages of the ancients whispered on the wind,
calling my soul to climb higher, to have faith, to hope.
The work and way of being contained on these pages not only restored me to myself, but helped
me to give birth to a more authentic, brighter, self-loving, confident me, not once, but over and over
again, every single day. And I lived every word I wrote in real time—my heartache, despair, anxiety,
fear, loneliness—all answered by the magic of the practices, each day something different, another
challenge, a new mountain to climb, and each time a new discovery that led me back to myself, my