Walker - The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription

This book would not have been possible without the generous support of Donna Eden, David Feinstein, and their school, Innersource. Their passion for teaching, sharing, and healing is unbounded, equaled only by their generosity. What they have given the world is an unprecedented path of healing, and with their blessings I am honored to adapt and promote their work through the lens of yoga. The Five Elements Body Ailments table, the Five Elements Mind Ailments table, and the Five Elements Self-Inventory have been adapted from the Innersource curriculum, with their generous permission.

Energy Medicine Yoga is backed by thousands of Innersource-trained Energy Medicine practitioners all over the world. If you are dealing with something beyond the scope of self-practice, please contact one of them at at the back of the book.

For You, for healing

Contents

Prescriptions for Your Health

Be the Mountain; Be the Skier

B y my third winter downhill skiing, I was really learning how to drop in. In yoga, dropping in means to let go of the chattering mind and let yourself be taken over by the immediacy and intimacy of your practice. In skiing it means to go over the edge, down into the bowl, down into the gravity of your chosen run with complete abandon and trust.

The two are nearly identical.

I was finally learning to trust my body, to trust my gear, to trust my instincts. The snow is different every day: fresh, deep, sticky, graupelly, chicken-heady, icy, powderthe list to describe the consistency of the snow goes on and on. Then theres the ambient weather. Is it actively snowing? Sleeting? Raining? Graupelling? Sunny? Cloudy? Foggy?

We go down the same mountain, over all its flanks, day after day, hour after hour. The repetition builds confidence and strength. But there is also pure joy. The body goes into a joy response that many people liken to orgasmsimply by sliding down a hill covered in snow.

Energy Medicine Yogathe marriage of Energy Medicine with a tantra-based yoga practicehas the same possibility and the same parallel. We come to our yoga mat day after day, hour after hour. Our energy, like the snow, is also changeable; every day its different. But we do the same moves again and again. There isnt anywhere to get to. Theres no prize at the end for the most downward dogs. It is simply the moment that is sublime. It is like coming home to a feeling of goodness in our own bodies.

This is the important part: We need to feel good in our lives and in our bodies just as we are right now. We need to know how to self-soothe and how to heal. So many of us go for the outside stimuli of drugs, alcohol, shopping, sugar, or sex when were uncomfortable, bored, or tired. If were sick, we go for outside cures: pills, surgery, radiation. But we must learn how to simply and effectively take care of ourselves from the inside to be healthy and happy.

In my first book, Energy Medicine Yoga, I used the metaphor of grooming the ski slopes on the mountain as being equivalent to grooming the energies that run the body. We usually think of grooming in terms of our teeth, hair, makeup, and overall self-care. But like grooming the ski runs, we groom our bodys energiesthe meridians, the chakras, the aura. We fluff them all up; get them smoothed out, cleaned, and organized; and off we go. Just as the runs on the mountain are groomed each night before the next days skiers arrive, our energy systems need daily grooming.

Now lets extend the metaphor. Once you go off into your life, you become the skier on the mountain. You are now taking these energy systems with you because they are you, and they are constantly changing. Being the mountain, you must come into stillness, calm, and solidity, having your energy work to help you ground and center. Being the skier, you must come into movement, the flow of life and experiences, and have your energy maintain its balancing work, no matter what is going on.

Each of us is really a moving ball of energy, fields and lines, vortexes and swirls, all zooming around our central core, and were moving through the world, which is full of millions of similar but different energy systems all zooming around. We tend to see these energy systems and ourselves as fixed figures. But really we are just zooming bits of information and light. Its all very Jetsony, except its invisible and its real.

Energy Medicine Yoga taught how to groom the mountain, the physical structure of the body. In this book, youre going to learn how to be the skierhow to be the energetic structure, how to master the art of moving through the constantly changing world without falling down, ejecting from both of your skis, losing your hat, mittens, goggles, and poleswhat is called in ski language a yard sale! Another ski phrase that is helpful is this: its all about the recovery! Sometimes what the mountain throws at youwhat life throws at youis too much to handle. How you negotiate and recover from it is essential to maintaining your health and sanity. If you ski up to a cliff, you might not want to launch off and go sailing thirty feet into the air. You need to know how to sidestep around it, how to sideslip down the icy shoot, how to bring yourself to safety. When you start to lose your balance because youre leaning too far forward or too far back, you need the inner awareness, strength, and skill to bring your body back over your skis so you dont wreckon the slopes, or in your life!

In yoga, we are constantly uniting opposites: yin and yang, extension and contraction, the individual soul and the eternal Soul. Because we are both the physical structure and the energetic structure, we must be able to affect change on both of these levels. It isnt an either-or proposition, as this book will show, but a both-and. We are both the physical structure and the energetic structure. Neither is more important, but the energetic structure is often ignored for lack of information, knowledge, or tools to access it.

The goal is to be both the mountain and the skier. As the mountain, you have your underlying energy systems working at their best. As the skier, you navigate your life and are able to handle anything it throws at you. You can recover and thrive no matter what comes your way by understanding how to work with energy in movement.

PART 1

Mind

Understanding Energy

Your thoughts and beliefs are the single most important indicator of your state of health.... Your beliefs and thoughts are wired into your biology. They become your cells, tissues, and organs. Theres no supplement, no diet, no medicine, and no exercise regimen that can compare with the power of your thoughts and beliefs. Thats the very first place you need to look when anything goes wrong with your body.

CHRISTIANE NORTHRUP, MD

Goddesses Never Age

Energy and Mind-Body Health

E verything in the universe is energy vibrating at different frequencies. If you want to affect the physical matter that is your body and the invisible matter that is your mind and your soulin the most efficient and powerful wayyou must learn how to work with your own personal energy. This book is a guide to help you do just that. Specifically, you will learn how to work with and balance the energy systems that make up your body and that you experience indirectly by their effects.

Because most of us dont see energy, it can be hard to understand how it is the most powerful force in our lives. But we generally dont understand how our cell phones work, or our TVs, or the physics behind an airplane, and yet every day we use these technologies, completely trusting.