Tami Simon: This program is brought to you by soundstrue.com. At soundstrue.com, you can find hundreds of downloadable audio learning programs plus books, music, videos, and online courses and events. At soundstrue.com, we think of ourselves as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey offering diverse, in depth, and life-changing wisdom. Soundstrue.com, many voices, one journey. [Music] You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Lauren Walker. Lauren Walker is a teaching assistant for Donna Eden and a certified energy medicine practitioner. She created and ran the yoga program at Norwich University for four years and now teaches energy medicine yoga internationally.
She’s been featured in Yoga Journal, in New York Times, and more. With Sounds True, Lauren has written a new book called, The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription, in which she helps readers uncover the root causes of specific physical, emotional, and psychological health challenges along with offering a treasury of potent self-care practices to accelerate healing. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Lauren and I spoke about how energy flows in the body in a healthy way moving forward and crossing from one side of the body to the other, and how we can make sure our energy is moving in this way by practicing what she calls the wake up, a five-minute essential energy medicine yoga practice that Lauren takes us through.
We also talked about specific energy medicine yoga practices for insomnia, digestive challenges, and how to listen to the body when we feel any type of pain. Lauren taught us how to listen to our meridian pulse and also a specific energy medicine yoga practice for developing self-acceptance and kindness towards our body. Finally, we talked about using energy medicine yoga to reclaim pleasure and connect with the living earth. Here’s my conversation with Lauren Walker. Lauren, to begin with, can you share with our listeners how you first came to combine yoga practices with energy medicine practices? How you first discovered that combination?
Lauren Walker: Yes, I was actually taking a break from my yoga teaching and was introduced to Donna Eden’s work. She’s the creator of Eden Energy Medicine. I started to practice her work and I was going through some quite challenging times in my life. I had just lost my yoga studio and ended up moving out of the country up to Canada, and was feeling really ungrounded and uncertain about my future and really grieving a lot of loss. I started practicing energy medicine and found it to be really powerful and helpful and supportive of the challenges that I was undergoing at the time. Specifically, working with some grieving that I was going through and a lot of the techniques in Donna’s work require doing long holds of different points on the body.
I would be doing these holds and waiting for the response of the body to kick in and I thought, “Well, why don’t I do some deep yin stretches at the same time?” Kind of maximize my time. I started to do these practices together just to really be more economical with my time and what I discovered was that both of the practices, the results became stronger and more vibrant when I wove them together. I kept doing this on my own for several years and when I moved back to the states in ’09 I started teaching at a military university in Vermont. These students were going off to essentially theaters of war all over the world. I wanted to give them tools to help them stay in their center, stay balanced, stay whole.
I started to introduce some of the techniques that I’d been practicing and then even more, I started to add more and more energy medicine techniques into the yoga classes and the results were really incredible. We started to document them. We did a couple of studies at the university with some of my more advanced students. It was just remarkable what was going on. I codified it, put it all together, wrote it down, and I showed it to Donna and she was really blown away with what was happening. Then I showed it to you guys and here we are.
TS: That became your first book, Energy Medicine Yoga: Amplify the Healing Power of Your Yoga Practice. Now you mentioned something interesting about grieving and holding a point for a long period of time that has been acknowledged to be helpful when you’re grieving. What point was that that you were holding on the body?
LW: The main point that I was holding at that time, they’re called the frontal neurovascular points. They are the points on the forehead. If you were taking a child’s temperature and you lay your hand across the forehead, you’d be covering those points. What that does is it keeps the blood in the forebrain and when you’re going through any kind of grieving process, you can tend to go into a fight or flight response. Holding those points keeps you from going into that response. It’s actually one of the techniques you use to help mitigate PTSD which is also a continuous loop of emotion that then triggers a physiological response in the body. I would hold these points and on the very top of the head as well are points for releasing grief from the body. I’d hold that set of points together.
I mean, I’d literally be face down in the grass sobbing, snotting, just in absolute misery and I would hold these points and that response would calm and soften and calm and soften and every time that grief would come up I would hold those points again. Depending on what it is that you’re dealing with and working with, it takes the amount of time that your body takes to digest and release that. Eventually what happens is you can think about the experience that you’re going through and it doesn’t any longer trigger that flush of chemicals through the body that throws you back into that response, so then it just becomes a part of your story, it doesn’t trigger you into a full meltdown. I would hold those points quite a lot.
TS: When you combined yoga posture with those points, what yoga posture or postures were you working with to help release grief along with holding those points?
LW: There’s a couple of different things that I would do. Sometimes I would do a reclining pigeon pose, so I’d have one knee bent in front and the other leg extended long behind my body, sort of a hip opening pose. Often I would do just the prostration, I literally would be face down and for me I prefer to do this on the bare earth so I wouldn’t even be on my yoga mat, I’d just be in the grass somewhere face down in the dirt with my head on my hands.
Often I would do another pose which is called downward facing triple diamond. My knees are bent to the outside, soles of the feet together, and then that same position with my hands so that it was a real release down into the earth, which I find is the best way if you’re really grieving because the earth has this energetic frequency, if you will, or this power to really hold you. That’s what it does, right, the earth holds us but if we surrender especially in a prostration and a grieving posture and just admit that we need help, we need support, we cannot get through this ourselves and we give ourselves over to that, it’s deeply healing.
TS: By going into this example, we’re giving our listeners a sense of what energy medicine yoga is like, this combination of energy medicine holding a point in the body or tapping a point and also a yoga posture put together. As I was thinking about this, I was thinking I wonder how someone who’s a traditional yoga teacher might feel, might they say something like, “Isn’t yoga enough?” I mean, the yogis, thousands of years ago knew what they were doing, we don’t need to add anything to the practice. What would you say to that?
LW: You know, I would say yes and, which is kind of a large premise in this second book, it’s both and, I do agree that the yoga practice itself is quite powerful. I mean, obviously, 5,000 years of tradition and practice. At the same time, there’s been a lot of changes in how yoga is taught in this country and a lot of the deeper techniques and the more advanced techniques have been lost. Yoga has really kind of become a very physical practice, almost exclusively a physical practice. Even these advanced techniques that a lot of teachers learn and some of us do teach, they can be kind of esoteric especially for beginners.
I find that that almost creates a separation which is the very opposite of what you’re trying to find in yoga. Some of these techniques are so fine and so specific and so advanced that they’re really not accessible or available to somebody that’s maybe just going to yoga once or twice a week. These energy medicine practices are so accessible, they are easy and they are so powerful. It just continues to blow my mind really about the results that I see in people that really they don’t even believe in energy, right. Which is one of those odd things to me but they don’t understand it, they don’t know what it is and they think it’s all just woo woo and then they do these practices and they’re amazed at what’s going on.
For me, and I think we spoke about this in our first interview together. For me, I’m interested in results. I want something that’s going to work for me and work for my students and work on a large scale. These techniques really, really do that. It’s not that these aren’t yoga per se because yoga is an energetic practice, it’s just another expression of the practice that hasn’t really been illuminated more than something entirely new and different even though it may seem like that.
TS: That’s very helpful. It’s almost like what you’re saying is that these energy medicine approaches might be embedded in the depth of yoga but not easy to find. You’ve brought them out into a higher relief, is that correct?
LW: I think so, I think for some of them, for some of them for sure they’re not in the yoga tradition but a lot of things have also been lost over the millennium so it’s hard to know what really was practiced thousands of years ago. I just trust Donna so much and I’ve seen the results of her work outside of yoga practice and then I’ve seen the power when they’re married to yoga practice and so for me now, that is yoga. If people are concerned that this isn’t traditional yoga, I mean, you know what’s going on in the yoga world.
There’s goat yoga, and naked yoga, and hula hooping yoga. What works for you? What is it that’s going to push you along your path, whatever path that’s on, whether it’s a spiritual path, or a healing path, whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve, that is your yoga. It’s very unique to the individual. I’m not going to say this is yoga or that is not yoga. I think that’s almost more detrimental.
TS: Very good. I’ve never heard of goat yoga so that’s interesting. Thank you. Now, at the beginning of your new book, The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription, you write about how energy follows certain rules and you list out five rules. I wanted to talk about particularly rule number four and five so we’ll get there quickly. Rule one, you say energy wants to move. OK? Rule two, energy needs space to move. OK. Rule three, energy follows particular patterns in the body. OK, I think most people are familiar with the meridians of the body and that energy flows and circulates and people are with us, but now we get to number four which I thought, “Huh.” Number four, the two most important energy patterns are moving forward and crossing from one side of the body to the other. I thought that’s really interesting. How do we know that, that those are the two most important energy patterns?
LW: I guess we would say you know that from when they aren’t working that way. If your energy is not moving forward and not crossing over, and there’s ways to test that which I do write about in the book as well so you can find out if your energy is moving forward or crossing over. If they’re not doing that, you see that in what’s going on in your body and in your life so you’ll be tired or you’ll be sick and you can’t get healthy again. You’ll be depressed and maybe there isn’t even a reason but you can’t get out of your own way. Those things happen if your energy is moving backward and it’s very easy to do a simple energy test to see how that’s working in the body.
Basically you walk forward and if you stayed strong then your energy is moving forward. If you walk forward and I energy test you and you test weak, that means your energy is moving backward. What that means is you’re in essence rowing against the current of your own life. You’re trying to go one direction but your energy is going in another direction. That happens for reasons. At the end of the day, you start to get tired, your energy starts to separate from that crossover pattern and start to move backwards so that you will go to sleep.
Interestingly enough, the only times that you don’t correct that is in the first trimester of pregnancy for a woman because you want the woman to rest. You don’t want to make that energy reawaken it if it’s telling you it’s time to go take a nap right now because the reason the body is tired is because it’s growing another body within it. You want that to speak to you and, “OK, I’m going to go take a rest now.” Instead of if you’re driving your car and you start to get tired, not maybe a good time to fall asleep. You want your energies to be moving forward. You see it from what you’re not achieving in your life, if that make sense.
TS: Let’s say, someone’s listening right now and they’re not sure if their energy is moving forward or if it’s crossing from one side of the body to the other. How could they assess that? Could they?
LW: You’d have to learn how to energy test which again is in the book but that is not something that you’ll just get right away. What I say to people is start to do the wake up technique which gets your energy moving forward and crossing over. You’ll notice when you do that technique, if it’s kind of confusing for you to do, especially that crossover pattern, then likely your energies aren’t crossing over and so it doesn’t feel comfortable to do it because your body is used to not doing it and so that feels comfortable. It’s like when we’re out of balance, we don’t always know we’re out of balance and we can feel comfortable in that out of balanceness.
Then when we start to come back into balance, that feels odd. If you’ve ever got in maybe a chiropractic adjustment, you got off the table and you’re like, “Wow, that feels really weird. I feel like I’m crooked,” when in fact that’s now straight because you’re so used to being crooked that that is what feels home for you. That would be a way without going to an energy practitioner and getting yourself tested or finding a friend and doing those tests to just see if it feels awkward then chances are your energies aren’t. I’ll also say this, most of us, our energies are not moving forward and crossing over. I would generally say, everybody needs to do that work of getting energies forward and crossing over.
TS: OK, let’s do the wake up then, Lauren. Can we do it together? You call this the essential energy medicine yoga practice. I have a sense that perhaps my energy is not crossing over the way that I would like or moving forward and I imagine the same may be true for our listeners. Can we do the wake up together right here at the beginning of our conversation?
LW: Absolutely, we can. What you’ll do is you’re going to breathe in the nose and out the mouth throughout this whole little section here. That’s the baseline of starting the wake up and then you’re going to find your collarbones and you’re going to go to the boney tips that are protruding and you’re going to drop down just about an inch and your fingertips will drop into a bit of a hollow. If you press that deeply, it may feel sore. Do you feel those points that I’m talking about?
TS: I’m with you.
LW: Yes, if they’re sore, that means right there that you need this, that you need to get the energy woken up. What you’re going to do right there is you’re going to tap or you’re going to thump with some vigor like you’re trying to knock on a door or Tarzan, like really bang on the chest at the same time that you’re going to breathe in the nose and out the mouth. This is basically the on button of the body. This is the first thing to do when you get out of bed in the morning or that 3:00 slump. Before you go get the double cappuccino, do this first and see if you even still want it because what this is doing is exactly what we’re talking about. It’s waking the energy up and it’s moving it forward.
You’ll thump there for a little bit and if you’re really tired, you might need to thump there for a while to get that energy awake. You’ll start to know as you do this every day how much you need to do it to wake up. If you’ve had a really long night, you may need to tap or thump here for a while. Then we’re going to go right into the center of the chest over the thymus gland. This is the second point on the four thumps and that jump-starts your immune system. If you’re not sure where these points are, you can just bang with your fist all over your chest just like Tarzan, just like the apes do to wake themselves up and prepare for battle or prepare for the day.
Then you’re going to go underneath your breast to the low rib cage and you’re going to tap or thump all over that area. These are spleen points. Those help to integrate and digest all your experiences, all your food, everything that you take into your body, the conversation that we’re having right now, and again, you’re still going to do that same breathing pattern in the nose and out the mouth. Then we want to ground the energy so that you can actually utilize it and not feel like you’re just floating around. You’re just going to tap right underneath your eyeball on the cheekbone and you’ll do a little bit of a lighter tap there and the same breath pattern, in the nose and out the mouth.
Then I like to shake my hands off, right, because your hands are electromagnetic so every time you’re touching or moving anything, you start to magnetize that energy. You can shake that off. Then we’re going to get the energy crossing over. I’m sitting in a chair and I’m going to do it sitting down. You can do it standing up. You can do it lying down in bed. You can visualize it if you’re unable to move at all, if you’ve got any kind of disease pattern or you’re paralyzed and you can’t move, you can visualize this and the energy will still move.
You’re going to start off tapping your same hand to your thigh. You can lift your leg up to meet your hand or you can just leave your legs down and tap your thigh with the same hand. We’ll do that about ten times and that same breath in the nose and out the mouth. Then you’ll stop and you’ll dust your hands off and then you’ll cross over so the right hand to the left thigh and the left hand to the right thigh. This is often when I’m teaching a big class and we’re standing up and we’re doing this, I’ll see people start to hesitate like, “Wait, is that right to left?” They’ll start to do the same leg and that to me is an indication that the energies aren’t naturally crossing over in the body and so it doesn’t feel normal or natural to do that cross over pattern.
If that’s the case with you, you might go back and do that same whole little pattern again, same hand to leg and then cross that over. If you are working with any kind of disease pattern in your body, you want to do that whole little cross over thing two or three times at a time and three or four or five times during the day because that habitual pattern of not being crossed over which is called homolateral is really set in the body. You have to do the work of getting the energy to cross over.
We’ll just shake the hands off and then we’ll just do the last two pieces of the wake up. Bring your hands right to the low body right in front of the pubic bone and you can either touch your body or be slightly off in front of your body, and you can make an affirmation here if you want. Maybe something that is if you’re starting your practice or starting your day, something that you want to be good or happy or joyful in your day or healthy, and you’ll inhale and you’ll draw your hands right up the front of your body to your mouth and exhale to shake your hands off. We’ll do that two more times.
Inhale, draw the energy up, exhale release. One last time. Then the last thing, we just want to set this whole thing into the body. You’re going to put one finger, I like to use my middle finger in the belly button and one finger right between your eye brows, in your third eye and you’ll press in and pull slightly up and you’ll do three breaths in the nose and out the mouth. Then just release and shake your hands off. There it is, that’s the wake up.
TS: Wow. That took us less than five minutes.
LW: Yes, you can do it really quickly. You can do the whole thing in a minute or two.
TS: Which brings me to maybe what’s kind of a strange question. Just doing that now and also since I’ve been exposed to other energy medicine yoga techniques that you’ve taught, I’ve seen that they’re wildly effective and yet I don’t really use them. I bet other people are in that situation where they’ve been exposed, they have a powerful experience, but then it just doesn’t become part of our daily vocabulary somehow, our daily way of being, unless we get sick and then it’s like, “I have to do that.” I’m curious, why you think that is?
LW: I think you nailed it right there when you said unless we get sick. I have a little section in this book called to change, you have to change. We’re just creatures of habit and we do what we do and especially those of us that are into this kind of work and all of these listeners right now, we’re exposed to so many different modalities and teachings and they fire us up and then it’s like, “Well, but my life is fine. It’s OK. Everything is just going along and so I don’t really have the need to change anything.” It’s when you have a need to change something that you are going to really gravitate towards doing these practices more consistently.
If everything is going great in your life right now and you’re happy and you’re joyful and you’re healthy and you love your life and you love your work and you have great relationships then maybe you don’t need anything new in your life. If any of those things are not optimal right now for you, that’s when you’re going to start to do these more consistently. I find that especially people that come and take a training with me, of course, they’re taking this training so that they can go and teach this workout into the world but they also have those same challenges.
If you start to put these in different ways of your life, I have one student, she’s like, “I just don’t have the time but then I started doing the wake up in the shower and now I cannot go through my day without doing it.” If you start to do just the wake up every day, give yourself a chunk of time. In the book I suggest 30 days but you can even go shorter than that, 10 or 11 days and start to actually write down if you notice anything different in your life. That’s when you’re going to start to use this more consistently. “Oh my god, everything is changing now. This is shifting, that is shifting.” Then you’re going to do it more consistently but if you don’t need something just because you hear it’s good for you or you felt it one time was good for you, you may not continue to use it but you will know it’s there when you need it. That’s really key as well.
TS: Now, I pulled out an interesting quote from your new book, The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription and here’s the quote, “Nothing in your body should hurt. If it does, that is your body trying to send you a signal.” I thought that was really interesting because I think a lot of us get used to certain things in our body hurting like, “Oh, that’s my old hip. It always hurts.” “Oh, I often get headaches,” or something like that. “No big deal, I get headaches, they come, they go away.” Yet it seemed that you are saying no, your body is asking you to pay attention in a certain kind of way if there’s a part of your body that hurts. I wonder if you could speak to that.
LW: Yes, I mean, I think you’re right. We do get complacent and just accepting and our bodies are so resilient and we just think, “Oh, that’s just my body. That’s my trick knee.” I also get headaches a lot so I think, “Oh, that’s just me getting a headache again.” The truth is that’s not, we don’t have to have that be our baseline experience. When the body is talking to you and one of the languages of the body is pain, it’s giving you information.
My mom said this, I gave her one of these alternative books, I think it was on nutrition to read and it was about headaches and she thought, “How interesting? Having a headaches doesn’t mean I have a deficiency in aspirin.” Right, it was just a wake up to her like of course, your body is not saying, “I need aspirin.” It’s saying, “There’s something out of balance.” You can just take aspirin and we are a culture that likes to just have a quick fix for whatever is going wrong, or you can look a little bit deeper and see what is going on. What is causing this? What is continuing this pattern of dis- or unease in the body and do something about it because that’s just your body talking to you.
If a friend of yours says, “Hey, I need some help right now. I need you to come over and help me do this project.” You can ignore them or you can go and help them. It’s the same thing, your body is saying, “Hey, I need some help right now.” Do you want to ignore that? Do you want to answer the call of your body who’s really, the body is talking to you all the time and you have an opportunity to have a conversation with it or you can just walk away and take some aspirin. The challenge is that the more you ignore things, the larger they get. It starts as a whisper and then if you don’t listen, eventually it’s going to come in as a scream.
TS: Sure. Someone says, “I’m going to listen to my headache or neck pain, back pain,” whatever it might be. How do they do that? How can energy medicine yoga help them really tune in to the message that’s being delivered?
LW: Doing that is really the practice, it’s tuning in. Having a daily practice where you’re doing these different techniques and listening to what’s happening, so something very simple that we do every day is called clearing the gates. It’s a specific massage on the hands and the feet which hold a lot of points of the body that again give you information. You start to palpate all of these different points on the hands, on the feet, on the core of the body, on the legs, and there are maps to what these points mean. Initially, you don’t need to know what every point is. You just need to palpate and if you find pain and you work that, over time that pain may just dissipate the more that you work it and massage it and smooth it and do some of these techniques.
If that pain doesn’t resolve, then you go to the maps and you look and you say, “Oh, interesting. That area of pain falls in either this element.” Maybe it’s in the water element which is one of the five elements, part of the theory of this. Maybe it’s on a particular meridian and you’re thinking, “OK, that’s the large intestine meridian so maybe that has something to do with my digestion.” You start to have this relationship with the pain and if the pain doesn’t resolve then you go deeper and you find out what area that’s in and then you do the next layer, the next step, which is to work with that specific organ or that specific meridian or whatnot to find what it is and to move it out.
TS: When you say palpating the hands and feet, what exactly do you mean?
LW: Really, it’s kind of a medical term, it’s palpating, it’s just a deep massage but you’re really tuning in so it’s not just that you’re floating over the area but you’re deeply pressing and you’re feeling for any areas of pain and you’re moving those out. You can get really specific like we do this massage around the eye socket because there are many meridians that start or end around the eye and so we work on the bone around the eye socket. Your bones aren’t smooth.
They have little divots and bumps in them and when you take your time to go really specifically and really slowly through all those areas, you start to feel things that you don’t when you’re just quickly going over something. You’re literally massaging the body looking for areas of pain. That’s the most general. We’re looking for pain. When we find the pain, that massage is also how we move the pain out of the body. If that pain doesn’t resolve after certain amount of time, then we look a little bit deeper. OK, what is going on here that this is not moving and not resolving?
TS: I’m curious within all of the different energy medicine yoga on the spot kind of techniques that you use, and this is a strong language but kind of the, I was going to say miracle cure. I’m not exactly sure if I mean that but if there’s like, this is the move you make when you’re feeling this, and oh my god you will be so surprised about how effective it is. If there are a few things like that that you do on a regular basis that you can introduce our listeners to.
LW: One of the ones that I say is the party trick, this is the one that gets people to see how powerful this work is, is working with digestive issues. Many people in this country have digestive issues on both sides of the spectrum. Either they have constipation or they have diarrhea. Those are the two ends of the spectrum. There are points that you can work on the legs to help the digestive tract and help those disorders. It happens very quickly.
If you’ve ever suffered from any of those disorders, you know how uncomfortable it can be and that is one that consistently shows up on the miracle board for people that have had relief from those symptoms just by doing these simple techniques of working these. They’re called neurolymphatic reflex points on the thighs. What that also does is it deeply increases the flexibility in the body. We do it, we sit on the ground and we do work on the thighs and then we stand up into forward bend and people are consistently two, three, four, five inches deeper into their forward bend. It gives people an idea of how quickly energy can move in the body.
TS: Where exactly are these points on the thighs, Lauren?
LW: The outside, if you had pin stripes on the thigh or like a seam of your pants, it’s the exact side seam on the outside and the exact side seam on the inside. If you are working with constipation, you’re going to massage and deeply, I mean, so deeply that it’s almost like you want to jump out of your skin. It’s incredibly, incredibly painful and you work from the hips down towards the knee if you suffer from constipation. It makes sense, you’re pushing downward outward, right. If you struggle with loose stool or diarrhea, you’re going to go from the knee up towards the hip on the same points. Depending on how severe what you’re working with is, you might do that three or four or five times.
If you do this as part of your daily practice, you’re just going to maybe do it a couple of times within working all of these other neurolymphatic points that are on the core of the body. Just doing that one on the thighs, people have such a quick response and I give that to a lot of travelers because a lot of people’s digestive systems go haywire when they travel. I get messages all the time, “Oh my god, you saved me in Zimbabwe. Thank you.” It’s really powerful. Again, it’s so simple. These techniques are incredibly simple, it’s almost laughable how easy they are and we’ve just never been given the basic instruction manual of how this body, mind, spirit thing that we are works.
TS: It’s so funny that you called it a party trick. I mean, anybody at this party have constipation or diarrhea? Raise your hand.
LW: I have strange parties at my house.
TS: There you go. Now, what about energy medicine yoga to help with sleep?
LW: Yes, that’s a great one. Again, after digestion, sleep, those are the three pillars of health and Ayurveda is, sleep, digestion, and creativity. For sleep, a quick one is similar to what we did earlier, putting a hand on the forehead. You can also put your hands, cup your hands over your eye sockets. There’s a technique specifically for insomnia called the Brazilian toe technique which sounds way sexier than it is. It’s essentially holding different toes with your hands. It’s a little more complex than I can just tell you right here.
What I will tell you is I do write about it in the book and it is one of the videos that is coming with this enhanced eBook so that you’ll be able to watch me doing the technique and see how to do it. I think you probably could also, I bet there’s a YouTube video from someone in Donna’s tribe doing it. If you can’t wait that long, if you really struggle with insomnia you probably want to get this today. It’s called the Brazilian toe technique. Again, it’s really simple, it’s just working with those meridian points on the feet and bringing the energy down and grounding so that you can sleep. It’s wonderful. Very powerful.
TS: Now, I want to read another quote from the new book, The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription, and you write, “Part of my mission as a teacher is not only to empower people, to encourage people to think and work outside the box, but to help people reclaim pleasure.” I wonder if you can talk some about the pleasure that you find and that you think people can find through energy medicine yoga.
LW: Yes, the body itself is pleasurable. I’m a tantra yogi and tantra in the West has really just been equated with sex which is unfortunate because it is such a wide and deep and profound practice. Sex is only one element of tantra and the reason that is acceptable in tantra yoga and in many other yogic traditions, there’s a very ascetic quality and sexuality is denied, it’s because nothing is denied in the path to enlightenment in tantra yoga. The physical body is geared towards pleasure. I think that’s really been lost in our world, it’s so overstimulated and we’re always questioning and seeking for all of these pleasurable experiences outside of us and they lead to addictive behaviors.
You can see that in the epidemics of addiction in our culture when what we’re really just seeking is pleasure, is joy, is release from the struggles of life. That is all available within us. That is what the body is geared for is joy. You see it in little babies, they play with their toes for hours and they’re laughing and giggling. We have that capacity within us. A lot of these practices bring that feeling back and that acceptance and that allowance and encouragement to find that feeling sense of pleasure in the body and to go around, people have a lot of shame around feeling pleasure whether it’s sensual or sexual pleasure in the body because we’ve been told it’s all about no pain, no gain.
People think, “OK, working out it’s going to be painful, it should be painful, and then I’m going to get,” whatever, stronger, faster, six-pack abs, whatever it is they’re going for. The truth is from the yogic perspective, specifically the Ayurvedic perspective, that working the body is about longevity and health and even if you’re an elite athlete, working towards that is about building your resilience and joy. It’s not about no pain, no gain. We get onto the mat and we explore these poses and these different techniques to circumvent some of those things that have been stopping people from feeling that pleasure and to give them that permission and then the feeling, a deep stretch is so incredibly pleasurable in the body.
Just these techniques of speaking to the body, the first time my students feel their meridian pulses and feel the connection of these pulses when we’re trying to speak to say the spleen meridian, people light up. It’s so incredible. It’s like speaking a foreign language when you go to another country and you stayed there immersed for several months and all of a sudden you get that one day where you’re fluent and you can hear and understand everybody, it’s that same thing with your body and it is joyful. It is pleasurable. It is a pleasure to be in this body. I think that’s really important for us to come back to and away from this abusing the body to try to get it to look or be a certain way but to accept it as it is which is incredible.
TS: Feeling the meridian pulses, I don’t know if I’ve ever done that. Could you help us feel a meridian pulse in the body? Is that possible here?
LW: Yes, I can. Let me see what I’ll do. OK, here’s an easy one. At the wrist crease, the front of the wrist where there’s that line right there at the wrist. There are three points, they are called source points which bring energy directly to the organ. You can either lay one finger across the wrist crease or you can feel, I’m going to tell you what the three points are, in the very center of the wrist is a point for we call it circulation sex or the pericardium. That’s the protective layer of the heart. Then you have these ropy tendons and on either side outwards from those so right in line with the pinky and right in line with the base of the thumb, you have these other two meridian points which are for the heart and for the lungs.
If you just lightly rest your fingers on those points, and it’s a very light touch, you’re not doing a death grip there. Just maybe the weight of a quarter on your hand and you’re just going to rest there and you’re going to tune in. Now, what you may first feel is the blood pulse under one of your fingers where the thumb comes in because you’ve got a very powerful pulse point there. If you can go slightly away from that and just tune in underneath your fingers to what you’re feeling, you’re going to feel what does feel like a blood pulse. It’s not a dissimilar feeling to that but what that pulse is, is actually the meridian pulse. It’s the energy from the meridian coming up to meet your hand. It can take a little bit and I’m doing it myself right now and I’m starting to feel it right now.
TS: How do you distinguish from the blood pulse and the meridian pulse?
LW: The other ones that you’re on, the circulation sex and the heart points, there isn’t a blood pulse underneath that so that’s quite easy to feel. When you’re working on a line that also has a blood pulse, it does take a little time for you to distinguish it but the more that you work with these, the more that you’ll feel the difference between those two. When we use these in class, we’re usually connecting two points together to get a meridian to either release excess energy or to draw more energy into the meridian to charge it up, so to speak.
You can feel, you’ll start to feel the difference. The meridian is a little bit more pointed, it’s a bit of a tighter point. The blood pulse can be a little bit more dispersed. When you’ve got them both together, you’ll really feel, you’ll start to feel that difference. At first, it might be a little bit more challenging. It takes a couple, two or three minutes sometimes and if you’ve never done this before, if you’ve never held these meridian points, it can take some time. If you’re depleted, it can also take time.
I was working on a woman who had maybe given birth about nine months or so before and it took almost 20 minutes for me to get her kidney energy to come up and meet me because she was so depleted and exhausted from delivering the child and then having a newborn and all of the changes that that was bringing into her life and her body was depleted. It can take a lot of time if you don’t have a lot of energy for that meridian pulse to come up. When you feel it, it’s amazing. It really is, it’s like learning a different language, so exciting.
TS: Thank you for sharing that with us. Now, when we were talking about how energy medicine yoga can help us connect with the pleasure of the body, you mentioned how many of us have some sense of shame. Maybe it’s about our body image or just in relating to ourselves and allowing ourselves to have the kind of pleasure that’s possible. I’m curious, within energy medicine yoga, how you might help us turn towards ourselves just with more self-compassion. I mean, in many ways, the whole practice seems like it’s geared towards helping people cultivate self-compassion, at least that’s a natural outcome. Is there something specific for someone who’s in that situation who has difficulty relating to their body in an accepting way?
LW: Absolutely. This is where we kind of veer slightly off into something that really doesn’t seem like traditional yoga and that’s doing some of these tapping exercises. These come from EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique and different tapping protocols. I’ve adapted some of them to be a little bit more simple and a little bit more direct. One of the things that I encourage if people are having body image issues, firstly, is to look at diet and nutrition and I write about that extensively because I think our diets really contribute to disempowering us. Mostly, we’re trying to lose weight instead of nourish ourselves.
When we start to nourish ourselves deeply and in a way that the body wants to be nourished, we move away from that place of beating ourselves up. We come back into that joy and that feeling of peace within the body. That also can be a big leap for a lot of people and so there’s a couple of different tapping protocols that I do. One of them is just looking at yourself in the mirror and it really is empowering to do that, just to have that piece added in is to look yourself in the eye. Just smoothing behind your ears like you’re pushing your hair back behind your ears and you can do that a few times smoothing back and then you can do tapping.
It’s called the temporal tap where you tap from the front to the back along that temporal bone, which is really right there right above that where you’d be smoothing your hair back. Say to yourself three statements looking yourself in the eye in the mirror, and one of the statements has to be absolutely true right now. If you’re really having a difficult time loving yourself or accepting yourself, you don’t want to start with a statement like, “I love my body,” because if you know in your heart that that’s not true, that’s going to resonate. You want to start with something that is true. It can be anything. If you’re really struggling with the self-acceptance, it might be difficult but you’ve got to find something that you love about yourself.
“I love my hair. I have great toes.” It really could be that. I mean, it seems kind of silly but it’s got to be something that’s true. You start with that true statement and the body takes that in and then the other two statements kind of piggyback on to that and start to resonate with that sense of truth. “I love my toes.” You tap front to back and then, “I’m happy,” and you tap front to back, and, “I love my body,” and you tap front to back. If you start to do that every day, your resistance will come up and you can spend some time journaling about that or writing all of those. “It’s a lie, I hate my body. I’m ugly, I’m fat. I can’t stand it.”
Then, you go back again, and you say, “I love my toes, I’m joyful. Today, I love my body.” Little by little, things are going to start to shift and that will start to overtake you, that feeling of love that is really your inherent nature. I think it’s really important to start to view your body from the inside instead of from the outside. What does your body do for you that you love? You get up every day, you’re strong, you go for a walk. What does your body do for you? Do you love to dance? Does your body support you while you dance?
Something that you can find that joy in instead of looking at yourself from the outside and saying, “I don’t look like X, Y, or Z,” because that’s completely irrelevant to the spark and the joy and the specific you-ness that is important to be in the world. If you can come into that place, then you can start to shift those overlays of unlike or dislike that you’re still holding onto.
TS: OK, Lauren, just two final questions. Do you see energy medicine yoga as a new field?
LW: I think I would say yes. I think I would say yes because it is, it really is so different from the kind of yoga that we’re seeing today all over the country and all over the world. It’s different enough that I think it could be considered its own field and I would love to see it become so widespread that people just know what it is from hearing the name. I also think that while it is its own thing, what’s beautiful about it is that you can really adapt it to any practice that you’re already doing, so you don’t need to throw out your hot Vinyasa flow or your Iyengar yoga or anything that you’re currently doing and then adopt energy medicine yoga.
The beauty of it is that you can start to weave these techniques into whatever it is that you’re doing right now and receive all of the benefits and transformation that energy medicine yoga offers within what you’re already doing. I think again, it’s a both and, it is its own unique practice and it’s completely available to align with whatever you’re already doing.
TS: OK, now, a final question. At the beginning of our conversation, you talked about the period in your life when energy medicine yoga came online for you and when you were grieving and lying in the dirt, actually, and discovering some of these techniques and how they fit together. What I’m curious about is how you see our relationship with the dirt, with the earth itself as part of energy medicine yoga and how people can contact that right now.
LW: That’s a beautiful question. It’s so interesting. During the summit with Sounds True, Donna Eden was talking about the grid lines of the planet and being similar to the grid of the body which is the deepest energy system in the body, it’s what all of the other energy systems attach onto. It’s similar to the bones of the body, if you were looking at it from a more Western medicine perspective. The grid of the earth lies on top of the earth and those lines are all over the planet and there are very potent ones that are where a lot of sacred sites are on the planet. The old telegraph system in the United States used to be run on these ley lines.
It’s just natural energy of the earth that’s available, free energy that’s available all over that planet. There is a kind of three- or four-foot-deep layer of active electrons, ionized electrons available all over the surface of the earth, part of the Schumann Resonance which is the energetic vibration that we’re all attuned to that keep us feeling good and happy, that is a vibration on the planet. The earth holds these energies on the surface and anytime we can tap into that, we get that free. It’s free healing energy. My favorite way to practice yoga is barefoot and if I can make it on the naked earth and you can feel that energy feeding you because that is how we draw energy into the body.
We have a point on the bottom of the foot that draws up this earth energy. It’s available at all times and a lot of the work that I do now more and more is about helping to heal ourselves and helping to heal the planet with this energy, with these practices and techniques. When I teach at Holly Hop, which is such a powerful place on the earth, and when I teach in Iceland, it’s about connecting with these areas of potent energy on the earth and aligning our energies with those energies so that we have this mutually beneficial healing.
We both need that so much, both ourselves as individuals need to be healed and the planet again is crying out in pain to be healed. When we start to do these practices together in this symbiotic relationship, the healing is so beautiful and so powerful. Right now it is so, so necessary and important and we need to take a page from the native traditions all over the planet who know how to work with this earth energy and who teach us how to work with this earth energy. Again, if we would just tune in and listen, and so that’s one of the things that I’m trying to do, that I work with and that is the most exciting part for me of energy medicine yoga.
TS: Now, I doubt that people will rush outside naked but they could probably rush outside barefoot.
LW: Yes.
TS: If I were barefoot on the ground, these points at the bottom of my feet that you referred to, what would I do that would be of benefit not just to me but to the earth?
LW: A lot of that is about your intention. We feed in as well as we take out, and so if you’re sending your love into the earth and you can do that simply by walking barefoot. Again, it’s one of those things that the body awakens and the earth awakens to you and just feeding that energy through you into the earth but we can also, we do practices of taking care of the earth. I love Martin Prechtel, he says he’s always throwing jades into bodies of water because that is what the gods want. Building little altars everywhere, every time I go hiking in the woods I stop somewhere and I put a few rocks and twigs and sticks together and make a little design in the earth or I’ll take a rock and I’ll write on another rock, I’ll write love or joy.
These things might seem simple and silly and maybe irrelevant but the truth is if we start to treat the earth with reverence in small ways, then we can start to learn how to treat the earth with reverence in larger ways. Our actions have huge effects and small effects that build up together. When we do ritual together in larger groups, like I’m talking about taking these groups to these places, and we call in these elements and we work with them and we give this reverence and this honor and trust that the earth knows, the earth has consciousness. We speak to that consciousness and that starts to change things.
There’s study after study, if you speak to your plants, they thrive and they bloom. That is true, the world knows what we’re doing and we have to up our game here. We’ve got to stop destroying the planet and we start doing that with small steps in our own small environments. If you’re going barefoot on the earth and you’re going to maybe stop spraying Roundup on the earth because you don’t want that to go into your bare feet. Right there, you’ve already started to heal your small area of the earth and then maybe you’re going to get a beehive. Then you’re going to start to see how your inclusion of your sacred practice to the earth starts to feed back and forth and you start to heal each other.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Lauren Walker, she’s the author of the book, Energy Medicine Yoga: Amplify the Healing Power of Your Yoga Practice, and also a new book called The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription. Lauren, thank you for your clarity and always your bravery. You’re such a vulnerable truth teller. I always love talking to you. Thank you so much.
LW: Thank you, Tami. It’s been a pleasure.
TS: Soundstrue.com, many voices, one journey.
