The Energy to Heal: Find Lasting Freedom From Stress and Trauma Through Energy Medicine Yoga

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Energy to Heal: Find Lasting Freedom from Stress and Trauma through Energy Medicine Yoga © 2022 by Lauren Walker.

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First e-book edition © 2022

E-book ISBN: 9780738769813

Book design by Samantha Peterson

Cover design by Cassie Willett

Figure illustrations by Mary Ann Zapalac

Illustrations on print pages 26, 37, 79, 106, 128, 156, 187, 191, and 192 by Llewellyn Art Department

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint 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

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Llewellyn Publications

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2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

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Manufactured in the United States of America

For Glenn

… and Louis

Contents

Disclaimer

Practices

Introduction

one: Starting Out: The Birth of Energy Medicine Yoga

two: Your Healing Path: You and the Five Elements

three: Preparing for Practice

four: Raise Your Courage with Water

five: Speak Your Truth with Wood

six: Transform with Fire

seven: Learn to Love Again with Earth

eight: Find Faith with Metal

conclusion: The Energy to Heal

appendix: Trauma Information for Certified Yoga Teachers

Recommended Resources

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

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 800-273-8255. 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.

Practices

Practice: Release Stress Right Away

Practice: How to Feel Your Energy

Practice: The 5E Star Overlay

Practice: Calming Breath

Practice: The Wake Up

Elemental Practice Template

The Water Practice

Deepening Water Practice: Clear Your Chakras

Practice: Write Down Your Trauma Story

Practice: Rewrite Your Story with You as the Superhero

Practice: Hands Clench Jaw Shake

Practice: Sounds of the Five Elements

Practice: The 5E Star Breath

Practice: Create Your Sankalpa

Practice: The Temporal Tap—Empower Your Sankalpa

The Wood Practice

Practice: Find What You Love

Practice: Calm Triple Warmer in an Instant

The Fire Practice

Practice: Work with Shock Points

Practice: Commit!

Practice: Simple EFT Recipe

Practice: Get Grounded and Aligned

Practice: Go Out in Nature

The Earth Practice

Practice: Alternate Nostril Breath

Practice: Feeling and Releasing in a Safe Space

Practice: Maximize Your Yoga Nidra

The Metal Practice

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 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 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 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.

If that’s the case, you can do the following things right away to help you through your day:

• Deep breathing: Long, deep inhale, through the nose, and slow, longer exhale, out the mouth.

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

• Hold 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.

• Hug 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.

• Massage: 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.

• Hum: 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 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 one gives you the foundation and background of Energy Medicine Yoga and how it relates to healing trauma and stress. Chapter two 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 two 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 three 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 four though eight 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.

Chapters four through eight 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