Energy Medicine Yoga: Those Vibes Are Real
There are days when you don’t feel like training, when you feel like your energy is holding you back or weighing you down. Although it may not be a good reason to skip the gym, it’s not an excuse, either: Your energy impacts how you think, move and react, and it permeates every experience in your life. Everything is made up of energy. Every tangible, physical object, including yourself, is really a moving mass of swirling energy.
That said, you are not at the mercy of an unseen force. You can tap into your energy, learn its language and treat physical and emotional ailments—to become a more efficient and joy-filled human being who is maximizing every single day.
To some this seems far-fetched and a little confusing. To others, like Lauren Walker, creator of Energy Medicine Yoga, it’s a matter of wellness or simple hygiene. Luckily, it isn’t crucial that you understand the anatomy of energy or believe her. She just wants you to experiment and try some energy practices, and see for yourself.
After practicing and instructing yoga for several years, Walker decided to delve into the teachings of energy-medicine guru Donna Eden before incorporating the healing benefits of energy into her yoga practice. The result was unlike anything out there.
“It’s a power charge for your healing, for your growth,” Walker says of this new type of ritualistic grounding. When combined with intent-filled practice and focus, healing through energy allows for greater personal improvement because “energy is all there is.”
What is energy medicine yoga?
EMYoga is applicable to all types of yoga and allows those practicing it to tap into any of the nine energy systems in the body. The most well-known system comprises your chakras, but this is by no means the most important one. Through EMYoga sessions, practitioners learn that all energy systems are intertwined, and when one is thrown out of balance, it affects all others.
“Everything is interrelated in the energetic body,” Walker says. “So we work with all nine of those systems together, helping them to speak with each other, helping them to kind of move traffic along,” in an attempt to keep energy flowing, preventing it from getting “stuck in the body and the havoc that [it] causes.”
Clear the traffic jam
Blocked energy, Walker explains, typically manifests itself in pain. When you feel pain in the physical body, it’s energy’s way of speaking, letting you know that it’s stuck. “Nothing in the body should hurt, ever. Period,” she says. Even chronic pain that is usually brushed aside or goes unnoticed is stuck energy. Yet the body can heal itself when given the opportunity.
In a world that’s overrun by cancers, autoimmune diseases, mental health issues and allergies, combined with the fact that more and more people are turning to alternative medicines to help with dire health situations, Walker has found a receptive audience to her healing style of yoga.
“[People are] looking for answers. They’re looking for solutions,” she says. “They’re looking for ways to heal that don’t cause more problems than the original disease that they’re trying to heal. And what they’re finding is these things work. These alternative medicines work.”
Heal from the inside out
And while Walker recognizes that not all alternative medicine works to heal every disease for every person, she does wholeheartedly believe that the body is resilient and has the ability to heal itself, if you know how to help it.
“I truly believe that everyone has the capacity to heal,” the expert says. “I mean, I’ve known people who have healed from cancer. My teacher, Donna Eden, healed herself completely from [multiple sclerosis]. So I know that these death-sentence diseases are not death sentences.”
Find your voice—again
But this alternative medicine choice requires commitment in order to radically change your life, which can often be the most challenging part. And it all comes down to trust. Trust in yourself and your intuition. “Many people have lost completely their sense of intuition, let alone being able to trust it,” Walker says. “They have silenced that voice so significantly that it makes a rare appearance.” But that voice isn’t gone, it’s just dormant.
Walker likens it to practicing push-ups. When you work on push-ups consistently, you get stronger, and when you don’t, the muscles required to complete the exercise atrophy. Just like physically exercising a muscle makes it stronger, so does exercising trust in ourselves. “[Intuition and voice] are all energy systems and energy flows, so they come back when you start to work with them,” she says.
Practice makes perfect
And best of all, it doesn’t require a large amount of time to find your truth or tune in to your energy. In fact, she claims it’s “laughably simple.”
Walker teaches students how to reconnect with their intuition and how to use easy techniques to awaken a response in your body, mind and spirit. She has authored two books, “Energy Medicine Yoga: Amplify the Healing Power of Your Yoga Practice” (Sounds True, October 2014) and “Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription” (Sounds True, May 2017), that together provide both an overview and practical techniques you can use any day. Donna Eden has many books to explore regarding Energy Medicine including the classic book by the same name, “Energy Medicine” (Piatkus, May 2013).
For those looking for an even deeper connection to the body and its energies, Eden and Walker have collaborated on a game-changing digital course that takes you through the practices step by step. Together they lead the eight-week online training designed to shift longstanding patterns in participants’ underlying energy, which affects mind, body, and spirit. Through simple tools and practices that blend energy work with yoga, participants learn how to activate innate healing for greater balance, vitality and well-being.
The course provides the necessary tools to harmonize energies with a well-curated curriculum. Walker says, “If you start to work with your energy and just do these little techniques every day, the other choices and decisions on your journey will start to appear so easily.”
Seize the day
Imagine how it feels when everything is at ease: “You feel light. You feel energized. You feel joyful,” Walker says. Practicing EMYoga is supposed to get you to that moment when things flow easily and the body is brought to coherence, or “the least amount of effort for the most amount of effect or response.”
According to Walker, when your energy is coherent, everything requires less effort, allowing for more spaciousness, which in turn allows you to get the most out of your day. Though the task to harness your energy in order to become coherent seems daunting, Walker insists that it really comes down to creating an open dialogue with yourself.
“Once you learn to work with energy and understand the language of energy, and how to communicate with it, and how to understand how it’s communicating with you, everything and anything that you do gets easier and more efficient,” Walker says. Creating plenty of room for a healthy dose of carpe diem.
Ready to be the master of your body and the captain of your soul? Explore “Energy Medicine Yoga: Transformation Through the Subtle Body,” with renowned energy healer and Eden Energy Medicine pioneer Donna Eden and Energy Medicine Yoga creator Lauren Walker.
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About Lauren Walker
Lauren Walker has been teaching yoga and meditation since 1997 and created Energy Medicine Yoga while teaching at Norwich University. She teaches EMYoga across the U.S. and internationally, and has been featured in Yoga Journal, Mantra Yoga + Healing, Yoga Digest, and The New York Times. She was recently named one of the 100 most influential yoga teachers in America by Sonima. For more information, visit EMYoga.net.
About Donna Eden
Donna Eden is among the world’s most sought, most joyous and most authoritative spokespersons for Energy Medicine. Eden is a pioneer in the field of Energy Medicine, within both traditional and alternative health care settings. She is recognized for her ability to see the body’s energies and accurately determine the causes of physical and psychological problems based on the state of these energies, and to devise highly effective treatments. With co-author David Feinstein, Ph.D., Eden has written “Energy Medicine,” “Energy Medicine for Women,” and “The Promise of Energy Psychology.” Her abilities as a healer are legendary, and she has taught more than 100,000 people worldwide, both laypeople and professionals, how to engage their own energies.
Video credit: Mark Kuroda, kurodastudios.com
Photo credit: Mark Kuroda, kurodastudios.com; PeopleImages, Getty Images; MangoStar_Studio, Getty Images