The Energy to Heal, by Lauren Walker

Praise for The Energy to Heal “If there was ever a time for a book about healing from trauma, it’s now. Lucky for us, Lauren Walker has written just that book, offering hope and strategies for everyone who feels lost or broken.”

—Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle and Comfort “Lauren Walker brings in elemental correlates (air, fire, earth, water) and uses yoga to unravel the tangled emotional paralysis of PTSD.” —Loren Fishman, author of Healing Yoga and Yoga and Multiple Sclerosis “[Walker’s book is] practical and doesn’t require investment in anything other than time and devotion. I highly recommend it to you.”

—Alan Steelman, bestselling author of Yoga on the Yellow Brick Road and former member of US Congress (R-TX) “Lauren Walker is the pioneer in melding Eden Energy Medicine with the ancient, sacred practice of yoga … She skillfully shows you how to use EMYoga to tame the emotions that get in everyone’s way while utilizing the power of the method for cultivating a more enriching and fulfilling life.”

—David Feinstein, PhD, coauthor, with Donna Eden, of Energies of Love “No matter what hardships you’re enduring, or trauma you’re carrying around, this book promises freedom—the freedom of release, restoration, and renewal. Concepts and exercises are beautiful and potent, and Lauren’s kind and informed personality shines brightly throughout.”

—Cyndi Dale, author of thirty internationally renowned books about energy medicine “Lauren writes with immediacy and clarity … Here is a beautifully simple step-by-step process though these disciplines that gives a practical and grounded approach to your personal journey. Lauren walks with you on the path, providing opportunities for free exploration and helpful guidance to meet, befriend, and gradually heal your trauma.”

—Angela Farmer, international yoga teacher and inventor of the yoga mat

“Lauren is a gifted writer and wise soul who offers a compass for life, one that will guide you out of the stress, trauma, difficulties, and detours that you face.

She offers a way out by taking you deeper inside yourself to heal so you can discover real freedom, the kind that lasts a lifetime and makes every day a wild, wonderful adventure.”

—Regina Brett, New York Times bestselling author of God Never Blinks “This book is an accessible and relatable guide to self-regulation and healing.

It’s a must-read for anyone suffering from experiences they think they can’t overcome alone.”

—Karina Ayn Mirsky, MA, author of Make a Difference & Make a Living Teaching Yoga “The Energy to Heal is the most impactful tool out there. Lauren Walker’s clear and courageous voice will accompany you on your brave journey to the ultimate wellness. In these pages, Lauren teaches us how to stop the cycle of trauma for the health of our bodies and our world. Everybody needs this book on their shelf.”

—Hilary Crowley, author of The Power of Energy Medicine “Walker’s superpower is to blend insights from traditional and contemporary healing into an accessible and effective self-healing practice … Written in an articulate and personal voice, this guide offers simple energy practices and tools and makes sense of them in terms of the everyday tough stuff we face in our lives. This book is a gift and a resource for ongoing evolution of your body, mind, and spirit.”

—Ellen Meredith, author of The Language Your Body Speaks and Your Body Will Show You the Way “Every practice is lovingly and compassionately offered in accessible ways that will inspire you to nurture and heal yourself.”

—Tracee Stanley, author of Radiant Rest and Empowered Life Self-Inquiry Oracle Deck “Walker presents a wealth of insightful knowledge and practical application in one of the most reader-friendly styles I have seen.”

—Marshall Lefferts, author of Cosmometry

“Walker is truly an incredible gift as her Energy Medicine Yoga practices allow each of us to move inside our physical form and energetically heal traumas.”

—Marie Manuchehri, RN, energy intuitive and host of The Marie Manuchehri Show “[This book helps you feel] empowered, untethered, and free to live the life you long for.”

—Dondi Dahlin, bestselling author of The Five Elements “The Energy to Heal is the practical guidebook I needed, not only introducing me to healing through Energy Medicine Yoga, but also showing me that I already possess the tools I need to get started down this path ... I closed this book feeling empowered, knowing deep on a cellular level that I can heal my trauma, that I can move forward, and that I will be whole.”

—Tianna Madison, three-time Olympic gold medalist and domestic violence survivor “This highly accessible guide is just what you need to take your healing journey into your own hands.”

—Anodea Judith, PhD, bestselling author of Wheels of Life and Charge and the Energy Body “Nothing freed my mind and body from the trauma of my cancer diagnoses and treatments until I found EMYoga. EMYoga doesn’t ask that I leave my feelings at the door before I step on my mat. In fact, EMYoga acknowledges that I am an emotional being. EMYoga gradually relieved me from the tension of trauma and in such a gentle way that I didn’t always realize it was happening.”

—Michelle Waltz, EMYoga master teacher “EMYoga has helped me so much. I used to have a lot of difficulty falling asleep, but Lauren’s book taught me easy techniques to relieve stress, fall asleep, and stay asleep. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is stressed out (everyone).”

—Nick Urata, front man of the band DeVotchKa and Grammy-nominated composer/musician (Little Miss Sunshine)

The Energy to Heal: Find Lasting Freedom from Stress and Trauma through Energy Medicine Yoga © 2022 by Lauren Walker. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Edition First Printing, 2022 Book design by Samantha Peterson Cover design by Cassie Willett Figure illustrations by Mary Ann Zapalac Illustrations on pages 26, 37, 79, 106, 128, 156, 187, 191, and 192 by Llewellyn Art Department Llewellyn Publications is a registered trademark of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Walker, Lauren, author.

Title: The energy to heal : find lasting freedom from stress and trauma through energy medicine yoga / Lauren Walker.

Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Llewellyn Publications, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022001923 (print) | LCCN 2022001924 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738769493 | ISBN 9780738769813 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Yoga—Therapeutic use. | Energy medicine.

Classification: LCC RM727.Y64 W35 2022 (print) | LCC RM727.Y64 (ebook) | DDC 615.8/24—dc23/eng/20220217 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001923 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001924 Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business transactions between our authors and the public.

All mail addressed to the author is forwarded but the publisher cannot, unless specifically instructed by the author, give out an address or phone number.

Any internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific location will continue to be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to authors’ websites and other sources.

Llewellyn Publications A Division of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive Woodbury, MN 55125-2989 www.llewellyn.com Printed in the United States of America

Other Books by Lauren Walker Energy Medicine Yoga: Amplify the Healing Power of Your Yoga Practice The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription

For Glenn … and Louis

x

Contents

Disclaimer • xii Practices • xiii Introduction • 1 One: Starting Out: The Birth of Energy Medicine Yoga • 11 Two: Your Healing Path: You and the Five Elements • 23 Three: Preparing for Practice • 35 Four: Raise Your Courage with Water • 59 Five: Speak Your Truth with Wood • 81 Six: Transform with Fire • 107 Seven: Learn to Love Again with Earth • 129 Eight: Find Faith with Metal • 157 Conclusion: The Energy to Heal • 189 Appendix: Trauma Information for Certified Yoga Teachers • 193 Recommended Resources • 195 Bibliography • 197 Acknowledgments • 201 xi

Disclaimer

Energy Medicine Yoga does not diagnose or treat any illness, disease, or physical or mental disorder. The techniques presented here are not a substitute for medical advice or treatment for specific medical conditions or disorders. Consult your physician or other health care professional before starting this or any other exercise program or lifestyle change—especially if you are overweight, pregnant, nursing, or taking medications or have any existing medical conditions. Do not delay seeking a diagnosis or any medical advice or treatments based on information contained in this material. If you are in dire need, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-2738255. Energy Medicine Yoga, not limited to its creator, the company, and all who distribute its products, assumes no liability or responsibility for any and all claims of injuries and illnesses suffered while practicing these techniques.

By using this material, you are accepting that you have read, understood, and agreed to these terms and conditions.

xii

Practices

Practice: Release Stress Right Away • 8 Practice: How to Feel Your Energy • 19 Practice: The 5E Star Overlay • 36 Practice: Calming Breath • 44 Practice: The Wake Up • 46 Elemental Practice Template • 49 The Water Practice • 66 Deepening Water Practice: Clear Your Chakras • 76 Practice: Write Down Your Trauma Story • 87 Practice: Rewrite Your Story with You as the Superhero • 88 Practice: Hands Clench Jaw Shake • 90 Practice: Sounds of the Five Elements • 90 Practice: The 5E Star Breath • 91 Practice: Create Your Sankalpa • 95 Practice: The Temporal Tap—Empower Your Sankalpa • 96

xiii

xiv • Practices

The Wood Practice • 98 Practice: Find What You Love • 110 Practice: Calm Triple Warmer in an Instant • 117 The Fire Practice • 118 Practice: Work with Shock Points • 127 Practice: Commit! • 132 Practice: Simple EFT Recipe • 138 Practice: Get Grounded and Aligned • 144 Practice: Go Out in Nature • 145 The Earth Practice • 146 Practice: Alternate Nostril Breath • 160 Practice: Feeling and Releasing in a Safe Space • 165 Practice: Maximize Your Yoga Nidra • 173 The Metal Practice • 179

Introduction

Here is the truth: You have an endless ability to heal from any experience you’ve gone through, with an equally endless amount of power that lives within you at this very moment. That power is energy. You just need to learn how to use it.

If you’ve ever stubbed your toe and sat down to massage it, you’ve worked with energy. If you’ve ever had a headache and held your temples with pressure, you’ve worked with energy. If you’ve ever watched the Olympics and seen the athletes at the top of a ski run bang on their chests before they take off, you’ve seen energy work in practice. If you’ve ever taken several slow, deep breaths before answering a difficult question, you’ve worked with energy.

But maybe you’ve never thought of these things as working with energy.

And maybe you’ve never thought of working with your energy to help alleviate stress, to overcome challenges in your life, and even to work with the most intense traumas you can experience.

In the following pages, I’m going to share with you why working with your energy is not only the best way to deal with stress, challenge, and trauma but is also the essential way to truly heal.

I’ve been teaching yoga for twenty-five years and exclusively Energy Medicine Yoga (EMYoga) since 2009. I developed EMYoga while teaching at Norwich University, the oldest private military college in the country.

The students there showed me, in real time, that EMYoga is a powerful tool to help mitigate stress and overcome trauma. Since then, I’ve taught these 1

2 • Introduction

practices to thousands of students all over the world. The consistent feedback is this: EMYoga is magic!

But it isn’t magic at all. EMYoga is grounded in science and founded on ancient healing practices from all over the world. It is replicable anywhere by anyone, accessible, easy, and—like our desires for that other kind of magic— very, very powerful.

I’m going to explain to you what energy is, what Energy Medicine Yoga is, and why it works. Then I’ll give you a tool—like a compass for your life, called the 5E Star—that you can use over and over again to help resolve the traumas, stressors, and difficulties in your life in a way that is easy to understand and apply.

That’s it.

Energy + Energy Medicine Yoga + the 5E Star = your freedom from anxiety, grief, anger, fear, worry, stress, and trauma.

This isn’t a one-and-done practice. Because life isn’t a one-and-done thing.

Life is a long and winding road. Often beautiful, sometimes difficult, yet always interesting if you can put the right perspective on events that might otherwise seem overwhelming. Life is full of everything! It truly is the agony and the ecstasy. And the goal? To reach a long and healthy endpoint after a long and healthy accumulation of days and years, made up of moments in which you are deeply present, content, and even joyful. There really is no other goal. The richest person on the planet will still die and take nothing with them. It’s folly to aspire to things that are transient. Instead, I want to inspire you to release your difficulties and experience joy in the simple daily moments of life.

Whatever you’ve been through, I know you can overcome it. I’ve had students who have been through it, and I have too. I’ve seen such remarkable resilience and transformation in students who, before they studied with me, would have sworn to you that they’d never be free from their stress or they’d never get over this or that awful thing that happened to them.

But after doing this work, these students report feeling free, actually carefree. Their relationships are greatly improved, including their relationship with themselves. They’re happier, calmer, more open, and more generous.

When you see these students around, they are the ones paying for the groceries of the person behind them in line or volunteering for at-risk youth or

Introduction • 3

for Meals on Wheels or at the local animal shelter. They are the ones helping others, because they are now free of the burdens they have been hauling around, sometimes for years.

Now it’s time for you.

It’s time for you to put your burdens down.

Whether it’s the day-to-day stressors that are starting to add up and become overwhelming, a traumatic experience that happened in the past that is still consuming you, or a traumatic time in your life right now, these events actually all have the same physiological effect in the body. Trauma is an event that knocks you off your center and stops you from continuing your life along the same trajectory. And finally, trauma is now being understood to be completely subjective: your response is what defines a traumatic experience.

You can only take so much stress before you go over the edge. Over the edge is trauma—the result of events you can’t cope with. And that trauma is stored energetically within your body. This traumatic energy negatively affects your health on every level.1 The main thing that keeps a person from being free from trauma or stress is the mind. How you think about something determines how it affects you.

For the most part, your emotions are the things that are keeping you stuck.

And your emotions, for the most part, are the things that are causing you stress. And that stress breaks you down, leading to physical ailments. Even a physical trauma, once over, won’t be healed until you complete and release your emotional response to it.

The 5E Star tool I’m going to give you is your ticket to freedom from the emotional roller coaster of life. At last, a way to be at peace with your experiences, a way to feel the full richness of your emotions without drowning in them. Even desirable emotions like love, joy, and happiness can make you feel out of balance and uncertain, instead of grounded and full, if your nervous system is dysregulated due to too much stress.

Things like PTSD, depression, anxiety, and stress are ridiculously on the rise in our world. The times we are living through are heightened in a way that is dangerous and scary. And these events flow over into our personal 1. Nicole Cutler, “Learning How to Unlock Tissue Memory,” Integrated Physical Therapy & Wellness, accessed January 5, 2021, https://www.iptmiami.com/news/Learning_How_to _Unlock_Tissue_Memory.

4 • Introduction

lives. The pandemic, climate crises, racial reckoning, gender inequality, financial insecurity—these things affect how we think, act, and live. These are added on top of our own individual stressors from our jobs, families, and relationships, as well as our personal connections to those larger forces.

One of the things I teach in all my trauma classes and workshops is how quickly animals recover from stress and trauma by shaking their bodies right after a harrowing event. You can see that at your local dog park any day of the week. Two dogs have a conflict, and they bark and snarl and wrestle.

And when it’s over, both animals will shake their bodies off, releasing the energetic residue of the experience. Most mammals do this. You might have even done it yourself, actually finding yourself shaking involuntarily after an intense experience. But if you do it consciously, you can start to release the energy of trauma from your body, even of traumas that happened in the past.

There are actually entire trauma-healing modalities that are based on this natural animal function. The ability to release your trauma is built in to your operating system. You need to learn how to access this ability.

If you want to think, act, and live from a place of grace and power, you must be able to digest and assimilate your reactions to events, external as well as internal. From that place you can start to live your life with ease. You can have energy, strength, resolve, and resilience to show up with your best self, day after day, whether you are out on the front lines fighting for equality and justice, working in health care, teaching the leaders of tomorrow, or just trying to raise your family or live your own life in peace.

As you’re going through life with an intention to heal, it is good to remember the following: • Healing takes time.

• You must have the desire to heal.

• You must learn to be deeply nurturing with yourself.

• You must learn to be gentle and forgiving with yourself.

EMYoga Emergency Room Some of you might be thinking: I get it, she’s got some power tools. I don’t need to read through all the theory of why and how this works. I just want the tools.

My life is tough, and I need help right now.

Introduction • 5

If that’s the case, you can do the following things right away to help you through your day: •D eep breathing: Long, deep inhale, through the nose, and slow, longer exhale, out the mouth.

• S tar breath: Exhale with the sounds Whooooo, Shhhhh, Haaaaa, and Ssssss coming one after the other on one Breath.

•H old your head: Hold your hands or fingers anywhere on your head, deeply massage your scalp and down your neck, and then hold anywhere on your skull as often and for as long as feels good, especially the forehead.

•H ug your body: And give a deep massage to your whole torso. If anything is sore, massage the pain out of it. If the pain doesn’t go away, come back to this book and read why.

•M assage: Massage your belly button and the small of your back, one at a time and then also together, and then hold both those areas, like a belly-back sandwich.

•H um: Any note, any tone, any pitch, for as long as you like.

If you need help now, try these quick tools. Later you can come back to the book and read about why they work and what more you can do to heal.

What Is to Come?

In the following pages, you will learn what energy is, how it truly is medicine, and how it can bring everything that has fallen apart together again in a divine union called yoga. I’m going to share with you very easy tools and techniques, some of which you’ve maybe already seen or used yourself in life, that will help you overcome the biggest challenges to reclaiming your freedom and your joy.

Most trauma—except physical trauma, which requires healing of the physical body as well—is emotional. In other words, you have an experience and your emotional response to it is so intense that you cannot continue on in your life in the usual ways. You might not think emotions are that powerful, but if you remember the experiences in your life that stick with you, whether joyful or challenging, how do they stay with you? You might be able

6 • Introduction

to recall a fight you had with someone years ago. Do you still get angry or shaky when you think of it? Or perhaps someone wronged you, and when you think of it you’re filled with an emotional need to set things straight. Or remember the day your spouse asked you to marry them. Do you fill with happiness? The emotions conjured up here in the mind lead directly to the cascade of chemicals in the body that make us feel how we feel—whether it’s remembering an event or having an experience right now.

If you don’t have the tools to process your difficult emotions, they stay with you in a damaging way, causing more stress and, ultimately, physical problems. Emotions carry energy. They affect you physiologically. The science is there to support this fact.2 But the science doesn’t help you to deal with your emotions. That’s where EMYoga comes in.

Chapter 1 gives you the foundation and background of Energy Medicine Yoga and how it relates to healing trauma and stress. Chapter 2 explores healing from the perspective of Chinese medicine’s Five Element Theory, the basis for the 5E Star. There is also a quiz in Chapter 2 that will help you understand the lens through which you see things: your individual element.

Knowing your own element will give you insight into which of the practice chapters will be most helpful for you. Chapter 3 lays out the foundation of the practices. I’ll give you the first two things you need to do to heal. Then I’ll share the practice template that is the basic recipe for each elemental practice, as well as guidance for journaling. Chapters 4 though 8 explain each one of the five main difficult emotional responses we have for any event, based on Five Element Theory. Even if you don’t understand where a feeling comes from, you still feel the stress of it, and that stress leads the body into breakdown. And no matter how wide and varied your experiences are, there is actually an easy process to work with all of them: an easy way to learn the five “umbrella” emotions that hold all the variations within them, and an easy way to release them. You can learn how to release the energy of the emotion, release the stress, release the trauma, and release the physical imprint of that emotion. This is the magic of the 5E Star that I’m going to share with you.

2. Candace B. Pert, The Molecules of Emotion: The Science behind Mind-Body Medicine (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 133–46, 179.

Introduction • 7

Chapters 4 through 8 each contain a practice that will help transform a challenging emotion into its balancing counterpart and release the energy that has been holding you back. Each event you experience must have balance in each of the five emotions or elements in order for you to be free and “let it go.” Each chapter includes practices you can do, both on the mat and off, that will help nurture you through this journey. The practices in each chapter can be done all together in a yoga flow practice as I outline them, but they can also be done by themselves as stress and trauma first aid whenever you need them.

You don’t need a yoga background or any experience with yoga at all.

There are practices that you’ll do on a yoga mat, and I’ll talk you through them all. But there will also be practices you can do anywhere and at any time. The yoga asana, also known as postures, are becoming more popular and familiar as yoga expands across cultures. But asanas are only one aspect of the yoga practice. The physical poses in this book are simple, accessible, and easy to do, but if you don’t feel called to the mat, or you don’t want to or are unable to do the asana poses, you can still release your stress and trauma through the other practices. This book, and this work, will meet you where you are and will help bring you where you want to go.

Deal or Heal?

Energy medicine techniques are ancient and powerful. They have been used with transformative results for thousands of years. By weaving these techniques into a yoga practice, as I’ve done here, you are boosting their power a thousandfold. And in the following pages, I’ll explain why.

The truth is, if you suffer from trauma or stress, or you have in the past and haven’t resolved it, you are working at a deficit in every area of your life.

Maybe you’ve gotten adept at dealing, but that isn’t the same as getting into calm. I promise you that calm is in there—and it isn’t that hard to get to. It’s actually easier than you ever thought possible.

The beautiful thing about EMYoga is that it works in conjunction with any other modality you’re working with, and I want to emphasize here that if you are in a really challenging place, please reach out to someone for help.

There is power in your hands to create a change in the electric and chemical pathways in the body, and that is an intrinsic part of this practice. When

8 • Introduction

you get to the practice chapters, you’ll see that they include various “holds.”

Holding a particular area (or two) of the body to bring about a directed and specific outcome is a big part of EMYoga.

I’ll show you what I mean.

Practice: Release Stress Right Away Think of something that causes you some (but not too much) stress, perhaps a past event or even a difficult passage in a book, or just someone taking too long in front of you ordering their coffee. Now put the palm of your hand on your forehead like you’re taking your temperature. Most people feel an immediate sense of relief, a grounding. You will feel like you’re coming back to yourself and are able to think clearly about things. This hold covers a set of points called the OMG points. Have you ever seen a person react to an intense experience, whether joyful or difficult, by exclaiming, “Oh my God!” and throwing their hand to their forehead? Well, that’s how the points got their name. Now that you know this hold, you’ll see it all over the place, from movies and TV shows to your friends and family. This is one of the cool things about EMYoga: it is the most natural, intuitive expression of your energy. Your energy knows what to do even if your conscious mind doesn’t.

These OMG points are technically known as the frontal neurovascular reflex points. When you have a stress response, the blood leaves your forebrain and goes to your extremities to prepare you to run or fight. This is the start of a whole cascade of stress responses in the body. When you hold your hand over your forehead, you interrupt this stress response. The blood stays in your forebrain, magnetized by the electromagnetism of your hand. This allows you to think creatively and act intelligently. It stops the stress hormones from flooding your body, and it starts to interrupt the limbic loop, which is when your emotions flood your brain and your brain kicks out more chemicals in an endless cycle of trauma-inducing stress.

Introduction • 9

Figure 1: The OMG points The next time you find yourself in a difficult situation, try this hold. You’ll see how quickly it works. It literally brings the power of your reactions and your healing into your own hands. That is the beauty of EMYoga: it gives you back your own power. If your power, your sense of self, your soul has been lost or, worse, taken from you due to continual stress or trauma, you no longer need to feel lost and powerless. You don’t have to be a victim of the circumstances that led you to this book. You can reclaim the goodness, and even the sweetness, of life. And you can do it right now. I promise you, it is possible.

My Credentials I’ve trained in, studied, and taught this work for years, but never did it prove its power and value more than when I lost my best friend and ex-fiancé, PJ, when he was killed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Living through that—a massive police response out of proportion to a disturbance, the manhunt, search dogs, helicopters, the coast-to-coast media coverage in print, television, and radio (most of it lies), and PJ’s eventual killing—fried every circuit I had. I climbed into bed and tried to will myself to die. I spent a full year in shock, rage, and grief before I realized I was going to live. And since I was going to live, I’d have to figure out a way to do it better than what I’d been

10 • Introduction

doing. I took every tool I had, every skill, every bit of wisdom and help I could get, and practiced them like my life depended on it—because it did.

When I was finally free and finally at peace, when I could finally look at the world again with love, with awe, with reverence, and with joy, I sat down and started to write this book.

I knew that hundreds and thousands of other people were also suffering and might also have been told that they could probably get through their pain but that their trauma would always be with them. All it took was one minute of scrolling through the news to see that the whole world was in stress, the whole world was in trauma. What if I could reach even one person and help them out of their pain? What if I could reach more? What if I could help you?

I believe that the trauma we see in our world today is on a continuum.

Hurt people hurt people. The more trauma there is, the more trauma there is. We see it happen from generation to generation, from person to person.

And the only way to truly be free is to break the chain. First in your life. Then in your family. Then in the whole world. We really can have a world of peace and beauty and goodness. But first, we need to clear away the things that are keeping us from that beauty. First, we need to heal.

one

Starting Out: The Birth of Energy Medicine Yoga

If you want to heal your trauma, release your stress, and move into the life you truly want, you must be able to live fully in this world. Every day brings stress and triggers. To know how to process, move through, and release them is to move through life with ease so you can be engaged and excited. And so you can be at peace.

Now is the time to claim or reclaim the beauty and power of who you are.

The part of you that was not affected by the trauma, the part of you that is not perpetually stressed out. This is the part of you that is still whole, the part of you that holds the light and the truth of who you are.

What Is Energy?

Even though you experience the world and respond to it primarily through your five senses, underneath and within everything you see, touch, taste, hear, and smell is something more subtle.

Those five senses, housed in the physical body, look physical. You might think that you’re made up of blood and bones and skin and hair. Eyes to see, ears to hear, skin to feel. And on one level, you are correct. But you are also

11

12 • Chapter One

much more than that. Or really, you are much less. You are mostly made up of empty space. Actually, 99.9999 percent empty space.3 Everything that you see around you—everything—is simply vibration, sound, light, and attractive and repulsive forces, or polarity.

The concept of energy has been taught for centuries in the most ancient healing systems on the planet, including two that we work with in EMYoga: Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. You’ve likely heard the words chi, or qi, or prana. The Iroquois call it orenda. The Hopi call it catori. It’s been called spirit, life force, and vital principle. The ancient traditions have always known about this energy that animates the physical body. In fact, the inhaled breath is called inspiration, meaning “to bring spirit into the body.”

This life force is much more than a subtle energy that animates you and me. The ancient wisdom traditions that originally taught us about energy are now being confirmed with modern science. This energy is the very animating force of the universe. It is the tiny, tiny, tiny vibrational bits of information that make up the “soup” of everything. Originally called the aether, these tiny bits of vibration are all connected at the smallest level. They are called Plancks or Planck Spherical Units, named after Nobel Prize–winning physicist Max Planck, who determined this smallest measurable unit of “stuff.” The Planck field resonates everything into being. Millions of magnitudes smaller than an atom, these tiny Plancks vibrate, and that vibration creates polarity or charge. That charge, positive and negative, causes the bits of vibration to spin. And that spin brings matter into existence.

Everything in the universe is spinning. The galaxies, the planets, clouds, water, our own atoms, the blood in our veins. As things get more complex, they become more organized, but their expression is still rooted in spin. We can see that in the swirls of our fingerprints, the whorls of hair on our head, water spiraling down a drain. We also see it in the spinning of hurricanes, tornadoes, and solar systems.

The spin of each particle creates a field around it, a field that occupies space and contains energy and information. Think about walking close to an electric meter box. You feel and hear a buzzing. It gets louder as you get closer, 3. Trevor English, “Due to the Space Inside Atoms, You Are Mostly Made Up of Empty Space,” Interesting Engineering, February 28, 2020, https://interestingengineering.com/due -to-the-space-inside-atoms-you-are-mostly-made-up-of-empty-space.

Starting Out: The Birth of Energy Medicine Yoga • 13

and as you move farther away, it gets quieter. That field of energy extends only so far, and then it dissipates and no longer interacts with your field.

These fields contain particles that eventually spin into matter. It’s hard to talk about energy as not only a thing but also a process and a capacity, but in fact this is what it is. Energy is mass. Remember Einstein and E = mc2? E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. That means energy is the same as mass moving very, very, very fast. But it is still mass. So energy and the physical things we see around us are the same. The reason we see a person or a car or a chair instead of empty space is because of the way light reflects off and absorbs the moving components of the mass, primarily the electrons that orbit the nucleus of each atom. And the reason you can’t just sweep your hand through a wall is because those same electrons that reflect light push back against the electrons in your hand with more power than you have to move through them.

Although you feel solid, you are actually a latticework of energy systems.

You are vibration and light.

You are not separate from the fields of energy that make up the planet, the trees, the animals, the water, the rocks. You are simply one unique expression of the infinite potential of the universe. And because you are made up of spinning bits of energy—also known as chi, qi, prana, Plancks, life force— you also have the ability to change the vibration and patterns of your expression. You can change from a pattern of trauma to a pattern of joy. You can change from a pattern of stress to a pattern of ease. You can transform the energetic bits of information that make up you, just like tightening or loosening the pegs on a guitar will bring it into or out of tune. You can come into tune, into harmony, into ease, contentment, and joy. This is the energy of Energy Medicine Yoga. It is you. You are energy!

Take a moment to take that fact in, because understanding this essential component of your very makeup is the thing that will help make it easier to change your state from one of stress and trauma to one of ease and grace. It’s easier to change things on this subatomic level before they get stuck in your body on a physical level.

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Trauma Is Also Energy Trauma comes in varying degrees, but the techniques in this book work for any and all of them. Something might seem small to one person, but it might have shaken up your world more than you want to admit. On one end of the spectrum is acute stress, and then there’s chronic stress and simple daily stress. There is acute trauma, repeated trauma, and remembered trauma. All of it works in the body in the same way, and all of it needs to be cleared.

I’ll explain the science and physiology of trauma in Chapter 6. What is important to know here is the body’s emotional response to trauma. In doing deeper research on the effects and healing possibilities of trauma, I found one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read, from the therapists at Integrated Physical Therapy and Wellness: Emotions are the vehicles the body relies on to find balance after a trauma … A stressor that is too much for a person to handle overloads the nervous system, stopping the trauma from processing. This overload halts the body in its instinctive fight or flight response, causing the traumatic energy to be stored in the surrounding muscles, organs and connective tissue … The predictable effect of stored trauma is degeneration and disease … Recovery from trauma is the process of the body finding balance and freeing itself from constraints.4 I want to repeat that last sentence: “Recovery from trauma is the process of the body finding balance and freeing itself from constraints.”

This is exactly what we’ll do in this book: find balance and free ourselves.

Can You Really Heal?

The amount of trauma and stress in our lives today is huge. Most of us have it, we don’t want it, and we’re afraid we’ll get more of it and then be overwhelmed by it. And the truth is, trauma happens when we are overwhelmed by a situation and lack the skills necessary to deal with and release it in the moment.

4. Cutler, “Learning How to Unlock Tissue Memory.”

Starting Out: The Birth of Energy Medicine Yoga • 15

Once you understand how to process stress and trauma when they happen, and how to build your resilience so you can process and release old traumas in the body, you’ll have a complete understanding of how to work with these energies. Trauma and stress can have a huge place in our minds and bodies, depleting and depressing us. But the simple truth is this: it is only energy. This is not to minimize its impact, because a 747 flying through the air is also only energy. But knowing that it is energy means you have a way to work with it. It is not some boogie monster who has taken over control of your life. It is an energy that can be worked with and released. The more you start to resonate with that concept, the easier it will be for you to understand and articulate what is happening once you start doing this work.

You’ll know when you’ve released the stressful and traumatic energy because of the cascade of positive things that will start to happen in your life.

You’ll be able to sleep better; you’ll digest and eliminate food better; you’ll feel calmer, happier, and more creative in your life; little things won’t bother you so much anymore; your relationships will improve; your physical body will heal. It’s like taking a stick out of your eye. All of a sudden, you can see the world again. But more than that, you can embrace it again and be part of it.

The bridge to get there is using the energy inherent in your own body as the medicine it is meant to be.

What Is Energy Medicine?

Energy medicine was the first medicine on the planet. It is the medicine intrinsic to your own body. It’s your built-in operating system. The ancient healers and shamans and medicine women and men knew this and knew ways to help you activate your innate healing process. Energy medicine primarily uses the electromagnetism in your hands to move stuck energy through the body. That’s the essence of the work. Simple as could be. And yet powerful beyond belief.

Massaging specific sore areas, tapping on particular points to bring new patterns into your brain or body, holding areas of the body that are known to activate intended responses: all this and more was practiced by our ancestors and allowed them to bring forth their descendants—you! It’s what kept our ancestors alive and helped them to evolve and thrive on the earth long before Western medicine arrived. These techniques continue to prove their worth

16 • Chapter One

today as more and more research is confirming that the mechanistic model of Western medicine is incapable of helping us deal with the modern challenges of life and frequently causes more problems in its effort to “cure” us.5 But energy has no side effects, no contraindications, no limits.

And it works.

It’s time to start looking at “medicine” in a different way. This medicine is not like taking a pill. It is about understanding and utilizing the healing power you have within your own body: the power you have to work with your mind, body, and energy to reprogram it from holding on to difficult patterns and chemical releases to being in a state of ease and healing. These practices guide you to where trauma and stress are held and then teach you how to release them.

I found my way to energy medicine through the work of Donna Eden, an internationally known healer, writer, and teacher who brought her multiple sclerosis into total remission, essentially healing herself of a disease that Western medicine still insists can never be healed. She also cured her tuberculosis and her acute allergies to almost everything, all by utilizing the energy in her body. Donna literally sees energy the way you and I see cars and trees. She mapped in her own body what ancient seers and healers mapped centuries ago, although she didn’t know that at the time: meridian lines (where energy flows in the body), chakras (where energy swirls in the body), and Auras (where energy surrounds the body). She ultimately mapped nine distinct systems. She teaches people who don’t see energy how to work with all nine of these systems in a holistic way, the same way they work together in your body, and she calls it the Eden Method.

It is this method that I studied when I found myself lost in my own stress and trauma. The traditional yoga practices I’d learned and taught for years weren’t helping me overcome my trauma. But what Donna taught me did.

And when I put her work together with my yoga practice, it worked even better.

5. Terry Lynch, “Why Are Doctors So against Alternative Medicine?,” Irish Times, May 24, 1999, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/why-are-doctors-so-against-alternative -medicine-1.188177.

Starting Out: The Birth of Energy Medicine Yoga • 17

What Is Energy Medicine Yoga?

From the moment I started practicing the Eden Method, my stress diminished. As a seasoned yoga teacher, I started adding these potent techniques into my yoga practice. The relief came even faster than when I did the energy medicine techniques on their own. Everything worked better. Both practices were more effective when done together.

The reason for this falls under the two most important rules of energy you need to know.

Rule number one: Energy needs to move. Think of stuck energy like a traffic jam. There are hundreds of cars all needing to go to hundreds of places, and they can’t. The drivers are either fuming, anxious, scared, or annoyed, and they are ultimately not doing the jobs they were on their way to do. This causes pain for each individual driver and pain for the whole area where this big mass of cars is stuck. If you have pain in your body, you have stuck energy. Energy needs to move.

Rule number two: Energy needs space to move. In order for those cars to continue on their way, whatever was blocking the traffic in the first place needs to be resolved. Those cars need space. Same in your body. Do you ever sit slumped at your desk for hours and when you finally stand up you automatically take a big, deep breath? Your diaphragm is compacted in that slouch and has nowhere to move, causing your breath to get more shallow and recede into the upper lobes of the lungs, which triggers a mild stress response. As soon as you stand up, the diaphragm expands, a deep breath sinks into the lower lungs, and you feel calm again. Energy needs space to move.

These two rules are a succinct explanation of a yoga practice: moving the body to create space for energy to move. This is how Energy Medicine Yoga was born.

The more I moved and stretched in my yoga practice, creating space in my body, the more these energy medicine practices could do what they were designed to do: optimize the direction, speed, congruence, coherence, and communication between all the different systems toward a unified, harmonious whole. The body becomes like an orchestra playing a symphony after tuning their instruments.

When I say energy needs to move, that isn’t quite correct, because energy is always moving. Energy is motion. Remember those vibrating Plancks?

18 • Chapter One

But it can be moving and stuck at the same time. Think of a toddler having a tantrum. That toddler sure is moving! But she is not moving in a way that is helpful to or harmonious with the whole. So when I talk about stuck energy causing pain, think about the temper tantrum. Instead of energy moving in that chaotic, disruptive way, you want energy to move in a coherent, intelligible way. Like water in a meandering river, calmly and continuously moving downstream. Or that orchestra, with all members playing their instruments together, taking you on a journey through music.

The Nine Energy Systems of EMYoga There are nine energy systems we work with in EMYoga. They all interact and interconnect, and all the practices we do affect them. They come from several different traditions from around the world and were focused on individually for a long time until Donna Eden put them all together. Every person has every one of them.

1. A ura: This is the first energy system to appear around the first cell in utero. It is the blueprint and surrounding energy of any entity. It is the atmosphere of the body, the field that surrounds and protects you.

2. E lectrics: This system connects all the other systems together electrically and is already apparent in the rhythmic movements of Earth energy that pulse through the first cells. This will eventually become your heartbeat. Like little outlet plugs, there are specific points you hold to reach the electric components of the body.

3. R adiant Circuits: These are the energies of joy and healing, and they arise naturally from the vibrations caused by the electrics pulsing.

They can go anywhere they’re needed among the rest of the energy systems to help support your healing.

4. C hakras: As we grow energetically, we accrue information. That information drops into us like pebbles into a lake, causing ripples of energy. These ripples eventually become the spinning vortices of energy that are our chakras. They are the energetic hard drive of the system, holding all our experiences in vortices located (mainly) along the spine.

Starting Out: The Birth of Energy Medicine Yoga • 19

5. M eridians: These lines of energy emerge from the repetitive movement of the Radiant Circuits, becoming grooved pathways that link organs together through the body in one continuous line of energy.

We break this line down into fourteen parts to talk about each segment separately, but the meridians are really one long pathway.

6. T riple Warmer: The complexity of our energetic and biologic form gives rise to our complex immune system, which is run by Triple Warmer. Triple Warmer was once a Radiant Circuit and a meridian, and it now takes on the job of identifying and conserving “Self ” against “Other.”

7. F ive Elements: The Earth rhythm that was first evident in the electrics now spreads out and differentiates, aligning the emerging body with one of five different elements. Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal encompass everything in the universe, from the seasons to parts of the body, emotions, physical structures, and more. We’ll explore this system in depth in Chapter 2. The five elements are the lens through which we’ll view our trauma and our healing, and they make up the framework of the 5E Star healing technique.

8. Th e Grid: This is the deepest energy system—like the skeleton in the body or the chassis of a car—and it is what all the other energy systems anchor to. It doesn’t appear until there is enough density in the other energy systems. It is the only system we don’t work with directly, but it is affected by all the work we do here.

9. Th e Celtic Weave: This is the outermost layer of the Aura. This system weaves all the energies of the body together. It serves as the outer membrane latticework of our energies, as well as threads through all of them like needlepoint. It is also the name of the technique for helping do all of the above.

Practice: How to Feel Your Energy One of the most exciting things I teach is how to feel your own energy. The energy systems in your body go from dense to diffuse, but there are access points to all of them, and you can really feel them. If you put your hand over

20 • Chapter One

the top of a steaming mug, you can feel the energy, in the form of heat, rising from the mug. If you put your hand over your heart, or on the side of your dog or cat, you can feel the heartbeat putting out its electrical rhythm. If you stub your toe and it hurts, you are feeling energy that just got disrupted. If you massage your toe with your hand and after a while it stops hurting, you’ve just felt a dispersal of stuck energy moving back into its designated patterns.

All of the techniques for working with energy are easy to do, but they require some practice to become fluent in them, just like with any new language. Trust your intuition and know that you cannot hurt yourself or do things incorrectly when working with energy. This is a relationship you’re cultivating, so be patient and curious.

Here are some more pointed ways to feel your own energy: 1. How you feel is how your energy is feeling. Are you in a good mood today? Are you depressed? Anxious? These feelings are energy. The word emotion can be broken down to “energy in motion.”

2. How your body feels is energy. If you have any food sensitivities and you eat that food, you usually feel bad. This is your body giving you energetic information. You don’t feel good—that is energy.

3. Rub your hands together and shake them off. Starting at about body’s width, bring your palms slowly together. Keep your attention on the space between your hands and notice the feeling of slight denseness between them, almost like you’re squeezing a cloud. This is your Aura. This is one of the easiest energy systems to feel.

Moving Energy with Your Mind Moving energy is also different than moving your body. You can move energy with your mind, with your imagination, and with visualization. So while this book’s movement aspects focus on EMYoga on a yoga mat, these practices are still accessible to you no matter what your physical abilities may be. You don’t need to do the yoga poses at all if you aren’t called to that. There are many other ways in each section to work with releasing stress and trauma.

The EMYoga asana poses in this book are only one aspect of using the 5E Star. If movement is a challenge for you, simply read the practices. This is the first step to doing the yoga practices for everyone. Reading them, and

Starting Out: The Birth of Energy Medicine Yoga • 21

visualizing them in your mind as you do so, activates the same energies as doing them on the mat. It is the same phenomenon as how visualizing yourself weightlifting will increase muscle mass.6 This is one more reason why working with your energy is so crucial. It is the subtlest of “things” in the universe, and yet it is the most powerful.

So now that you know what energy is and how it combines with yoga, let’s get to the tool that is going to heal your life.

6. Janette Hynes and Zach Turner, “Positive Visualization and Its Effects on Strength Training,” Impulse: The Premier Undergraduate Neuroscience Journal, August 2020, https://www .researchgate.net/publication/343834259_Positive_Visualization_and_Its_Effects_on _Strength_Training.

Body, Mind & Spirit / Energy Healing / Yoga “Walker eloquently reminds us that our bodies have a remarkable ability to heal, that they contain boundless energy, and that we can harness it intentionally.”

—Dawson Church, PhD, bestselling author of The Genie in Your Genes

R ELE A SE YOUR PAI N W ITH

energy medicine yoga We all struggle with stress and trauma. It takes a lot of energy to get through difficult experiences, and most of us don't fully process or release that energy. It remains in our bodies, quietly breaking us down. But what if you had simple, practical, and gentle tools to truly heal from your stressors? The Energy to Heal gives you just that. Perfected over years of study, Energy Medicine Yoga is a customizable program with step-by-step practices that help you recover from trauma and gain resilience. Lauren Walker’s unique healing system combines yoga and energy work with the five elements, helping you reclaim wellness and joy. This book teaches you how to respond, rather than react, to triggers and ultimately diminish their effect on you.

“Finally, a practical guide based on ancient wisdom that teaches us how to feel and heal with subtle energy. Walker makes the seemingly impossible a simple reality.”

© GREEN KAT PHOTOGRAPHY

—Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP, bestselling author and creator of LifeSpa.com

L AU R E N WA LK E R is the pioneering founder of Energy Medicine Yoga (EMYoga), which she created while teaching at Norwich University. Lauren teaches all over the world, and her writing has been featured in the New York Times, Yoga Journal, Mantra+, and Yoga Digest. She's published two other books on EMYoga, both of which won the Silver Nautilus Award. Lauren has also developed online classes and fosters an international community of EMYoga teachers.

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