GUEST POST: 1,000,000 Easy Ways to Get Healthy Right Now By Lauren Walker

Did you do a double take when you read that title? We’ve all got piles of articles pinned, with titles like: “8 Quick Ways to Happiness,” “21 Simple Ways to a Stress-Free Life,” “5 Quick Ways to Lower Your Anxiety,” “6 Fast Tools to Help You Get in Shape for Summer,” “9 Simple Tricks to Get Your Kids Off Their Computers and Go Outside”… On and on…We all pinned those with the best of intentions. Surely if I have 11 easy ways to stick to my diet, I’ll do at least one of them. 5 ways to stay organized? Eat your heart out Marie Kondo. But do you do them? Or do those 7 ways to feel happier jump out of your mind when you’re feeling low? Can you find those 5 ways to organize your office when you’re finally ready to clean?

Listen, marketers know what we’re looking for: Ease. Simplicity. Clarity. They know we have a lot on our to do list, they’ve done the research, and giving us a few “easy” things to do gets the most clicks.

Well, I’m not a marketer. I’m just like you. I’m a regular person with a lot on her plate. And, I’ll be totally honest, I’m kind of lazy. I want the easiest path for everything. So why did I write an article with a title like this? A million ways to health??

I’m going to let you in on a secret that I’ve been studying and practicing for decades now. If you want to optimize your output, if you want to be healthier, happier, more sane, more calm, more at ease in everything you do…If you want to be like a tuned-up orchestra, playing in perfect harmony and time, there is really only ONE thing you need to do. And that one thing is to work with your energy. By that I don’t mean to figure out if you’re tired or buzzy. I mean the very energy that you are in fact made of. That energy, the tiny, singing, bits of information that make up YOU, can be in tune, or out of tune. Out of tune, and you’re sick, tired, and miserable. In tune, and you are on your way to healing, joy, and manifesting your dreams.

I’m not making a joke when I say I’m going to give you 1,000,000 easy ways to get healthy right now. In fact, it is so easy to start working with your energy that you will actually get more than a million. Every second your body performs trillions of functions. And when you are functioning at your best, it is because all of the energy systems that make up your body (you have nine!) are functioning together, in perfect harmony. So, you don’t have to worry where you pinned those articles. You just have to do the Energy Medicine Wake Up technique every day, to start the cascade of millions of health-giving transactions in your body, mind, and spirit.

The Wake Up is essentially thumping on different points on the body, combined with a very basic movement pattern. It might sound simple, but it has profound effects on your energy. It gets your energy awake and moving forward and crossing over, which are the most important directions energy must move in the body for you to be able to heal. This crossover pattern—which shows itself in the twisting spiral of your DNA, at the smallest level, all the way up to the hemispheres of your brain, which operate opposite sides of your body—is present in every cell, tissue, organ, and system in the body. If your energy isn’t working in this crossing pattern—isn’t, in effect, crossing or spiraling—then your body is in a major deficit. In fact, your energy moving forward and crossing over is the very primary need of the body in order to heal. Conversely, every single disease pattern in the body has this lack of forward and crossing energy as part of its root cause. If you’re stressed or in trauma, the energies in your body are not working in the ways they’re meant to. Imagine if bumper cars were trying to move down the highway. They would just go in circles, hitting each other, getting stuck, creating chaos. This is your body’s energy under stress. The Wake Up is the first introduction of coherent energy into this chaotic system.

Think of your body like a sweater. You find the sweater on the floor of your closet, crumpled up in a ball. This is your sweater in stress! You pick up the sweater and shake it out, getting all the dust and dirt off it. Then you give it a rinse and wring it out to squeeze out any dirt. Next you stretch it out to reclaim its shape. You smooth it out to get the wrinkles out of it, and then you let it “rest” until it’s dry and ready to wear. This is your body! You need to do the same thing to your body: shake it out, wring it out, stretch it out, smooth it out, and let it rest. You need to do this on a daily basis, like changing the tablecloths at a fancy restaurant or simply mopping up your own table after breakfast with a little dishcloth. A daily check-in. I recommend doing the Wake Up in the morning, preferably before you start your day. You can also do it whenever you feel triggered, tired, stressed out, or off-kilter. The Wake Up is your baseline energetic practice: something you want to do every day to get your energies on the right track, moving in the right direction, and working in harmony and coherence for you. Doing the Wake Up regularly helps your energies form beneficial habits instead of habits that aren’t serving you. Especially if you’re recovering from stress or trauma or pain, chances are pretty high that these simple energy patterns are not on the right path in your body.

When you have extreme stress, trauma, tragedy, or shock to your system, do the Wake Up. This is how you begin to work with your energy and take charge of your healing.

Practice: The Wake Up
The Wake Up literally wakes up the body’s energies and gets them moving forward and crossing over, the two most important directions of energy in the body. You can do this seated, standing, or lying down. You can also visualize the whole Wake Up if moving is difficult.

Breath: First, before you begin, take a few deep breaths. Breathe in the nose and out the mouth. In the Wake Up, you’ll always breath in the nose and out the mouth. This breath activates the parasympathetic nervous system, helping the body and mind to calm. It also allows you to release excess emotion or energy from the body. If you’re in an intense emotional place, this is the breath to use to help bring you to calm.

The Wake Up is made up of five steps, not a million:

1. The Four Thumps: Pinch your first two fingers and thumb together on each hand to form a little “beak,” and then tap or thump on your body as if you’re knocking on a door. Thump each of the following points for at least one full inhale in the nose and exhale out the mouth. You can thump each point for much longer as well.
   • First Point: Come to the tips of your collarbones and drop down about an inch.
   • Second Point: The center of your sternum—the very center of your upper chest, the bony chest plate. You can thump this point, or area, with one or both hands.
   • Third Point: The side of the ribs, about halfway down your side-body on both sides of the body.
   • Fourth Point: The cheekbones, directly under the eyes on both sides of the face.

   Option: You can do the “thumps” gently, even massaging with your fingertips instead of thumping.

2. Silence: After completing the four thumps, take several moments in silence. Coming into silence allows your cells to hear each other and your own inner music to come back into play. This silence is where you start to hear your inner truth.
3. Cross Crawl: March in place and tap each hand to the same thigh: right hand touches right thigh, left hand touches left thigh. Do this four to six times. Dust your hands off. Now cross them over. March in place and tap the opposite hand to the opposite thigh: right hand touches left thigh, left hand touches right thigh. Do this eight to twelve times, or twice as many as you did on the same side. If you tapped the same side four times, cross over for eight times. Cross crawl gets your energies crossing over the midline. This is the pattern that starts in your twisting DNA and goes all the way up to the hemispheres of your brain. When you are perpetually stressed or in trauma, your energies get disorganized and come out of this beneficial crossover pattern—sort of like a rerouting of traffic onto a longer and less-efficient path—and you may need to do this cross crawl several times a day while you’re healing and repatterning.
4. Zip Up: Place your hands in front of your pubic bone, an inch or so off the body. Set an intention. Lift your hands straight up the front of your body, all the way overhead, and then open them up and sweep them out to the sides and back down. Inhale in the nose on the way up, and exhale out the mouth on the way down. Do this two more times. Here you can add an affirmation to your day. You energetically bring this affirmation up from your root and into your brain and then seat it in the field of energy around your body.
5. Hook Up: Place one finger on your belly button and one finger in between your eyebrows. Press in slightly and pull up on both points at the same time. Take three breaths, in the nose and out the mouth. Let this lift you up as you set these beneficial patterns into your energy field.

Here’s a look at Lauren’s latest release THE ENERGY TO HEAL:

Lauren Walker has been a yoga and meditation teacher since 1997. She created Energy Medicine Yoga while teaching at Norwich University, and she has also taught at the Kripalu Center, Omega Institute, Feathered Pipe Ranch, Hollyhock Retreat Center, 1440, and at many yoga festivals including Wanderlust and Yoga Journal Conference. Her writing has been featured in Yoga Journal, Mantra+, Yoga Digest, and The New York Times, and she’s published two other books on Energy Medicine Yoga, both of which won the Silver Nautilus Award for best mind/body book. Lauren has also developed online and in-person classes as well as an online teacher training program and has built a community of International Energy Medicine Yoga teachers she personally trained.

COPYRIGHT (2022) Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. All rights reserved.