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

stop. Be true to your own power and move through the discomfort,” she said as she cheered them on
in her powerful singsong way. “Just three more now, and you’ll feel a freedom and bliss unlike
anything you’ve ever known, and you will know that you were the one who made it happen.”
And it was true. I watched these new mothers go from sleepily rubbing their eyes to rising up like
spring flowers, rosy cheeked and ready for anything. After each sequence they performed, they
became brighter, and, strange though it may sound, they appeared to be moving into themselves.
Energy was rising within their bodies and radiating outwardly, right before my very eyes. It was a
remarkable transformation.
It wasn’t until I did the first kundalini yoga practice of my own that I really understood what a triumph
it was to complete even a single kundalini sequence. The magic is in movements that demand you go
well beyond your comfort zone, successfully traversing what I like to think of as the “fire swamp”
from the movie The Princess Bride. It’s not just moving through the “discomfort zone,” but surviving
the signals your mind sends you beseeching you to abort your mission, as you’re steadfastly working
your way past pain into trusting the wisdom of your higher self. You have to move beyond what can
feel like the “pain threshold” to claim the prize that waits for you, smiling, glowing, and rejoicing on
the other side—your authentic self and your true radiance. This “breaking on through to the other
side,” I quickly figured out, was the serpent’s secret. It was what held the power to vanquish the ego,
which likes to deal in the currency of limitation, and introduced you to your higher mind, the place
where kundalini devotees claim your infinite potential can be realized—where anything is possible.
Relating to the first three chakras, the seductive pull of ego, or the “lower mind,” is a strong one,
because it is concerned primarily with survival and getting needs met. When challenged or
discomforted, it flips into a kind of primal fight-or-flight response, wanting to keep things at a status
quo and return to the homeostasis it knows. Thoughts of doubt start to proliferate, telling you that you
“can’t make it through another minute.” It drags you by the hair in order to get you back under its
thumb, to return to the all-too-comfy passive couch of familiarity, running the show and returning you
to the same negative loop of thoughts that yield the same unproductive results.
Mark Twain once said, “Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the
difference.” When you try to argue with your lower mind, it reacts in much the same way that an
anxiety attack can take you prisoner within seconds when you resist it. All I have ever wanted, I
thought to myself, as I watched the women persevere through the trial by fire, was to be free of the
foibles and terrors of the lower mind and be able to soar above it. This was my opportunity to do it.
Having suffered more than once in my life from severe anxiety, I was struck by the thought that this
was an antidote if there was a next time—if I started to feel its creepy, relentless vine dance up my
spine and into my throat. I have come to know in no uncertain terms that one must be able to recognize
yin and yang in all things, to know how energies match one another. In this domain, where we are
talking about cultivating the fire power to take on our own minds, we need something of equal
strength and power.
The kundalini sequences I watched Gurmukh teaching demanded a sheer tenacity and
determination, a pointed physicality, to make it past the anxiety and on through to the other side. Some
of the moments seemed utterly impossible; the mothers were being asked to cross barriers that were