Dear Friends,
For today's author interview I had a chat with Lauren Walker. She has a course with us entitled Change Your Life With Energy Medicine Yoga. As you read on you will see that Lauren is passionate about what she does, and she's good at it too! I hope you will find this interview very interesting and informative.
Madisyn Taylor: Hi Lauren, tell me about why you teach this style of yoga rather than the traditional yoga you were originally trained for?
Lauren Walker: I practiced "straight" yoga for years and loved it. I became a yoga teacher after just one year of intense practice because I loved how the practice felt. But I was still struggling with issues that I thought yoga would "heal." I was discouraged, often depressed, had horrible body image, and then was besieged by one tragedy after another, all of which put me into such a state of despair that my will to even live was extinguished.
It was during one of those despairing times that I came across the idea of energy medicine. The work had an immediate, profound, and positive effect in my life. I had taken a break from teaching yoga, and I dove into this new type of energy work. I started weaving it into my personal yoga practice and found that the effects were even more powerful than either system's benefits on their own.
When I went back to teaching yoga, I started to incorporate the things I was doing. The feedback that I got from my students was profound, so I just kept adding more and more. It became clear that this wasn't just a couple of little tweaks to a yoga practice, but almost an entirely new practice in and of itself. I started to codify it and wrote it down and teach it exclusively.
Now I can't imagine teaching anything else. The feedback I consistently get from the students and teachers I train is that this work is so transformative and so easy! Everyone thinks it should be the basic yoga that everyone learns, because no matter what style of yoga you practice, your energy has to be aligned for you to get the benefits of it. Also, energy medicine yoga can be worked into any type of yoga.
MT: Tell me how "energy" work relates to the type of yoga you teach.
LW: Energy works in yoga the same way it does in the human body and in the world around us. Energy is "the ability to do work," but it is so much more than that. It is really the underlying strata from which everything arises. Everything is made of energy vibrating at different rates. It is the speed of this vibration that makes things appear solid--like the human body or a chair--or invisible like the human aura or the air around you. We see how energy works by the effects it has in our lives. If you're healthy or ill, happy or sad, content or uneasy, strong or tender, all of those things are affected by, and literally caused by, your underlying energy. Most of us don't "see" energy, but we can still work with it in practices like energy medicine yoga--and we work with it in a very visceral way. You can start to feel your energy almost immediately when you do this practice using tools that are simple to use. Just like you swipe, click, or press buttons on your electronic devices, you've got areas all over the body, aka meridians, that readily respond to actions taken on the surface of the body. Things like tapping, massaging, holding, or swiping, in very specific places and very specific ways, create outcomes that are ridiculously powerful and potent. You'll start to feel more energized, strong, competent, healthy, and happy if you commit to this practice.
MT: In your course you mention the first and second rules of energy. What are they and why are they important?
LW: The rules are that energy needs to move, and it needs space to move. Since most of us can't see energy, we need to learn about it from its effects, and we learn that by learning its rules. Once you know the rules of anything, you can "play the game." Since energy is really vibration, it makes sense that it needs space to move. The vibration causes a field, and these fields interact in many ways. Gravity is a field we're all familiar with. Modern medicine has finally come to agree with what yogis have known forever: We have an auric field surrounding the physical body. Scientists now call this the biofield. Since energy is vibration and organizes itself in fields and other trackable forms, it needs space to move in order for it to be healthy. Energy that is stuck in the body causes pain, and, indeed, that is what most pain is: stuck energy. So we start to find this feedback loop in the body, and as we open up space for energy to move, pain can also move out and we feel better. The more space we create in the body, through the physical practice, the healthier the energy is, and a healthy energetic body creates a healthy physical body.
MT: In one of your lessons you teach us how to "wake up your energy." Why is it important to do this?
LW: Just like you go to sleep at night, so does your energy. In fact, it is your energy that precipitates your sleepiness and causes you to go to sleep. In the morning, or any time of day you're tired, your energy might still be sleeping or moving backward. If you don't wake up your energy, say, before you take a yoga class or go on a hike or go to an important meeting, you are working at a 50 percent deficit. It's as if you are trying to get to work, but your car is in neutral or, worse, going backward. Once you get your energy awake and moving in its most optimal directions, you start to see a huge leap in your own energy and performance levels.
MT: What can students expect from the course over the eight lessons? Walk us through their path.
LW: The eight lessons are designed to help you build an energy medicine yoga practice from scratch. Every week you'll learn a new energy system or a new energy concept or practice. You'll literally build your practice minute by minute. After the first lesson, you'll have three minutes, and by the end of the eight lessons, you'll have a full, tailored 20-to-30-minute energy-medicine yoga practice that helps you to align all of your energy systems to their most optimal.
MT: How much yoga experience does somebody need to take your course?
LW: This course will serve you if you've never practiced yoga before, or if you're a yoga master and want to learn how to understand and balance your underlying energy systems.
MT: What does the homework look like?
LW: The homework consists of journaling about what you've learned each session. It also includes making a commitment to practice what you've learned. By going from your mat to your notebook, you get a fully rounded understanding of this practice, and you start to track the positive changes in your life, which is a powerful experience.
MT: How does this work change your body and life overall?
LW: Each person will have a different experience with this work. It's been incredible to read the comments from people taking this class. It really runs the gamut. I see a lot of people who have pain issues resolved--and that is a powerful testimonial. People have all kinds of responses: more joy, less pain, more flexibility, more strength, less susceptibility to illness, flying through flu season unscathed, less anxiety, easier time getting work done, more spaciousness in their lives. Others have deep healing of serious issues in their lives, whether physical or emotional or spiritual.
The outcome you'll have depends on where in your life your energy is the most compromised. One of the rules of energy is that it has priorities. If you're quite ill, your body is going to use most of its energy to heal you. If you start to assist your energy with the work it needs to do, it can do its work better. So you can heal, and you can get things done easier. Your to-do list starts to get done, and you succeed.
MT: What are some reasons somebody should take this course?
LW: I think I'm biased because I believe everyone should take this class. There is no area in your life that wouldn't benefit from having your underlying energy working for you instead of against you. Even if you only do the first week of the class and learn the basic, essential technique to get your energy moving and set in its optimal directions--out of 50 percent and into 100 percent--you will have given yourself one of the biggest, most unexpected gifts ever.
I really can't say enough about how simple and powerful these techniques are. These are ancient practices, these are your birthright practices. Everyone deserves to know the simple ways the body and the mind work. Energy medicine yoga is like the instruction manual for you. No matter what you do, if your energy is on your side, you'll do it better, be happier, and be more successful.
I hope you enjoyed learning more about Lauren's work and feel her passion come through the page. I find her work very interesting and have already started to include these techniques in my own life. I hope you can too. Until next time!
Be well,
Madisyn Taylor
Cofounder, Editor-in-Chief
DailyOM
