Jennifer Kries - Waking Energy: 7 Timeless Practices Designed to Reboot Your Body and Unleash Your Potential

For my mother, Jane, who was and always will be Waking Energy

Contents

This book is really a love letter. Its my souls autobiographya weaving together of my personal discoveries, a tapestry of every healing movement that has changed and continues to transform my lifeand the program I developed to share this gift with you.

As a professional ballet dancer, I spent years of my life treating my body like a performance tool, pushing myself past every conceivable physical limit. On stage, I was ethereal, powerful, magnetic. At times, I even felt superhuman. I cherished the thrill, the sheer elation that swelled inside me when the curtain went up, the honest sweat that soaked my costume from the exacting effort necessary to make the nearly impossible appear effortless. When I filled the stage with something beautiful, I was completely fulfilled. And when the last note sounded and everything went dark, I wanted more.

Dancing was the only thing that could magically take all the stuff insidemy brains incessant chatter, the worry, the regret, the stressand purify it, burn it all clean. Left in its place was a feeling of rebirth, an incredible lightness of being and a deep satisfaction in my soul.

And yet, right alongside this unutterable joy, I also felt incredible pain and anguish. Behind the velvet curtain, grueling, hours-long practices and bloody feet were the norm. The more it hurt, the more I suffered, the better, because it was a palpable sign that I was working hard toward my goal. This total dedication at all costs was reinforced by my ballet masters and mistresses (even ballet terminology speaks to domination). It seemed I was doomed, like Moira Shearer, a slave to the dance in the movie The Red Shoes, to love a profession that demanded I be its prisonertrapped in front of the mirror for hours, day after day, my innocent, earnest young body constantly scrutinized through the warped and critical lens of my teachers. I can still hear the sharp echo of their voices: Not strong enough, Not fast enough, Not thin enough, Not pretty enough. In reality, I was all those things and more. But because I was fed by a constant stream of negative projections, its no wonder I couldnt see it.

In spite of it all, I lived for it, because performing was my salvation and my greatest joy. As soon as I heard the magic words, Places, please! and felt the quiet beat before the stage lights went upso bright they literally blinded menone of it mattered. Not the packed theater, the critics, the hundreds of pairs of watchful eyes in front of me. No longer the dancer, I was the dance. I was the flow. I wasnt just in the zone; I was no longer of this world. The moment I stepped on stage, I had wings. I was a prisoner no more. I was beautiful. I was transcendent. I was free.

When I danced, gratitude rushed through the river of my soul, overflowing its banks, sweeping away any last trace of the pain. In those precious, ephemeral moments of bliss, every single cell in my body vibrated and pulsated with a transcendent joy. Even though I didnt know it at the time, I was tapping into my life forcethe energy of creation, my essential aliveness. It was the energy of truth, passion, purpose, transcendence. I was harnessing it.

Words fall short in describing the insidious cycle that I willingly sacrificed myself to in dancethe descent into hell and then the payoff, the indescribable high, the out-of-body bliss I feel when I rose above the mirror prison, when I escaped from the jealous, soul-crushing comments from teachers and peers. When I took flight, it all went away. I lost myself to the movement, that unspeakable ecstasy that I created with my body. Sometimes I barely recalled even hearing the applause when the curtain fell. And somehow it really didnt even matter, because I was already inhaling the sweet ethers from the upper stratosphere, floating higher than most humans could ever hope to fly.

Even now, I dont understand how to explain this deep, crazy love to someone who has never experienced this addictive sicknessthe sensation of knowing that the moment I stepped on stage, I had wings. I was a prisoner no more. I was beautiful. I was transcendent. I was free.

To everyone who witnessed my lightning rise as a dancer, it seemed very clear that what I wanted most from life was to be a great artist. I too was convinced that what I wanted was to be Baryshnikov in a womans body, with the same power and mind-blowing ability. But in truth, unbeknownst to me, quietly breathing and biding its time in a vault in the deepest reaches of my psyche was another truth: I was driven to achieve these heights to win adulation and love from a father who had always withheld it, because in spite of my worldly accomplishments, somewhere inside I believed that without his love and acceptance I was unlovable, anonymous, worthless.

All along, buried in a place that I couldnt access, I guarded an all-consuming desire to be lovedwholly lovedand accepted for who I was. I wanted to be loved for me. But I didnt know it then. Or if I did, I certainly couldnt admit it to myself. When you believe that youre not worthy of being loved, how can you admit to wanting something you feel you dont deserve? What I did know was that I yearned for the ability to heal the wounds I had sustained on the battlefield of my childhood, look past the poor choices I had made in partners, and find the kind of compassion and loving-kindness I yearned for and believed were out there for me.

This truththat I hid an all-consuming desire to be lovedhad me locked into a perpetual cycle of self-sacrifice and crushing disappointment, pushing me into undermining, self-sabotaging choices and leaving me depleted and drained. And I buried it so far inside my own psyche that it took a career-threatening injurytwo of them actually, and later a nervous breakdown and near-suicidal depressionbefore I would begin to unravel the mystery I had so long denied, before I would embark on the journey to explore many paths to healing that would change my life.

I sustained my first significant injury while on tour in London and was forced to take a hiatus from dancing. It was there, while offstage, that I turned to Pilates for rehabilitation and also learned to teach it. So astounded by its miraculous effects in my recovery, I introduced it to public gym facilities back in the United States, eventually opening my own studio. An accomplished producer, Cal Pozo, discovered me there and asked me to cocreate and star in The Method, which became the first-ever Pilates video in the late 1990s. Though I had been teaching Pilates and yoga (and still actively performing) for years prior to the videos publication, its overnight global success marked the beginning of my career as a mind-body-spirit expert.

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 awaketo loving myself and finding my true power.

J ust 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 mothers 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.