Lauren Walker's Blog

WHY ICELAND?

If you’ve heard the calling, heard the nudge to go on a Mystical Journey, I invite you to join me…

Iceland is one of those places that somehow got wedged into my unconscious mind and has become a place I must visit. I’ve seen the pictures of the crazy Northern Lights, the gorgeous waterfalls, the ocean cliffs. I’ve read about the energy infrastructure where greenhouses dot the landscape, natural geo-thermal activity heats the country, and hot springs abound. I’ve listened to Bjork.

But that can’t explain it all. Not really.

As a traveller of the world, I pay deep attention when something speaks to me. It is like a notice from the universe. It is a tuning in to your own soul. This is what happens in the best case, when you’re deep in your yoga practice, or deep in your meditation, and all of the sudden, hidden things start to reveal themselves. Things about yourself that have been unclear, clarify. Judgements shift. Wonder emanates. You must listen to these tendrils of noise from inside. It is dangerous to deny the voices from your soul.

The time we’ve chosen to go to Iceland is deliberate. The dark of the moon in November. We’ll have enough daylight to explore the beauty of the landscape, and enough dark to ensure we get a to spend some time with the magic of the Northern Lights.

Journeying to Iceland is an epic journey, it isn’t like flying to a tropical beach and lounging around for a week doing yoga and drinking out of coconuts. That’s fun too! But we’re going for something deeper. An epic journey into the deepest core of our own selves. We’ll use this time, right before the New Year, to define what it is we want to create for our own lives and what we want to UN-create that isn’t working well or serving us any longer. Like Frodo searching for the Ring, like Odysseus searching for the way home, like Dorothy, searching for the Wizard, we’re going on an epic journey to search for what each of them ultimately found: the sense of peace and joy that come from your innermost truth of Home. The Sat Guru: The teacher within.

This trip will be an illumination of The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription (released September, 2017 from Sounds True). A living journey of the book that will help you heal, ground, center and thrive.

Iceland is renowned for its geothermal energy, which they use for everything from baking bread, drying fish, heating outdoor pools and of course, heating houses and green houses.

One of the reasons I’m so excited to go to Iceland and to teach Energy Medicine Yoga there, is this fact of energy sufficiency. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. But sometimes we feel full of energy, and sometimes we feel depleted. Why is that? Over in Iceland, we’re going to explore the powerful energy that is simply present in the earth for tapping into. We have the same ability to tap into hidden reserves of energy, both from the earth itself, and from our own bodies. We’ll explore this concept deeply and learn to work with and dance with this energy in order to balance, heal and thrive.

The other extraordinary event that we hope to encounter is the Northern Lights. We’ll be in Iceland during prime viewing times. The Aurora Borealis (named for the goddess of dawn and the Greek name for wind) are caused by the collision of charged energetic particles with atoms in the high altitude. This begins on the sun’s surface with an ejection of a cloud of gas. Once this gas cloud collides with the magnetic field of the earth, it causes the particles to become charged and when they collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere, they create this incredible display of color, moved around by magnetic fields. We will spend time meditating under this charged sky, but more than that, we’ll see if it’s possible to channel and harness that huge energy, into a more subtle, useable form of energy for our own bodies. We’ll experiment with the power and energy of the universe, harnessing and bringing home this ability to generate all the power you need to fuel your best life.

This will be a Once in a Lifetime experience, a chance to study your own inner landscape in one of the most awe-inspiring landscapes on the planet, with Energy Medicine creator, Lauren Walker, and Ayurvedic Healer, Elaine Doll.

If you feel the calling for this epic journey, please join us. I promise you, it will Change Your Life Forever!

Energy Medicine Yoga Retreat | Iceland

If you send your $500 deposit by July 31, you are eligible for the buddy discount. See event page for more info!

I lay on the earth by the side of the creek. Walker creek, it happens to be called. I was still in my snowsuit, and the ground was still hard, not frozen hard, but spring cold still. There were patches and chunks and mounds of snow, but there was no doubt that the thaw was under way. I could hear it in the creek, Walker creek, my own namesake creek, rushing by. It was so loud! Thunderous! Roaring! The only other thing I could hear was the occasional crow, screeching overhead as he perched on a high branch and looked down at me and the dog, skeptical.

As I listened to the water run, I traced it back in my mind from where it came. It had just been snow lately, and not so very long ago. It had been snow up on the big mountain. The big mountain behind my house, over a few foothills, rising up and filling up with snow all winter long, and letting all of us, me, the whole town, people from all over the world, ride all over its flanks on bits of wood, whooping and hollering with joy!

I thought of Dr. Masaru Emoto and his experiments with water. How frozen water changes its crystalline structure when it is exposed to certain emotions. The emotion of anger and hatred make the crystals all wonky, unbalanced, ugly. The emotions of love, joy, the music of Mozart, Beethoven, make the frozen crystals beautiful. Balanced, symmetrical, elegant and detailed.

I thought of all the frozen water that had been exposed, all winter long to the over exuberant joy of the thousands and thousands of skiers and snowboarders on this big mountain. As the melted mountain snow rushed by me now, I tuned in, and could feel it again. The ‘Woot Woot’ of a million voices, raised in orgasmic exultation to the sky. Each individual feeling of joy, was released as each snowflake warmed, melted, careened and cascaded down the mountain, and then past my head, here, in Walker creek. I felt it! The joy! The happiness! The freedom of floating and flying through endless layers of crystalline water.

What a gift this second reading of joy. What a gift to be able to sit, still, for half the afternoon, and listen to the music of the creek.

I lay there while the sky filtered past grey, into the late afternoon clearing blue that always hits our sky at sunset. I watched the sky turn pale, and pink, and then I stood up and shook myself out. The dog stood up too, and shook his little puppy body, him, in a constant state of joy just from being alive, and being out in the woods and being tuned to the endless aromas of life in the forest.

I wanted to bow down to the creek, for giving me another glimpse of this glorious winter. My favorite season, literally melting itself away into a memory. So I did bow down. I put my face into the creek, and took a drink of the melted joy. And then I shook myself off. The puppy looked at me strangely with his head cocked to the side. But then I stood up to go, and he shot out in front, leading us back down the path, which was even now a little more melted. A little more spring like. Neither of us turned around. We just walked on. Into the gloaming.

Everyone asks me all the time: What exactly is Energy Medicine Yoga?

For the longest time I didn’t have an answer. I mean, I created this, I’ve been teaching it for years, and practicing it for years. It isn’t like I don’t know what EMYoga is. Its that it has been very difficult to describe or explain it in easy ways.

My mentor and friend, Leslie Hoffman, of the New York Open Center, exhorted me to find a way to make my message simpler.

The truth is: I believe it actually is very simple to be healthy. So it shouldn’t be hard for me to explain how.

My second book, The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription, will be published this September. It was written to be a comprehensive guide to health and healing anything that ails you. Nothing like taking on an easy topic!

And though the book is thorough, extensive, and truly comprehensive, it really is about how simple it is to achieve and maintain health.

The things we need for a healthy life are clean food, clean water, clean environment. Once we have those we can move on to the higher desires of life, creativity, joy, connection.

The problem we face in our world is that nowadays we have to strive extra hard to find those simple things. Our grandparents never heard of ‘organic’ food, because it was all organic. Now we have to fight to keep chemicals off our plates, our bodies, our clothing, our air, our building supplies, our cleaning supplies. On and on is the list of things we now have to fully research so we are not inadvertently opening ourselves up to the slew of problems that we, in our rush of progress, have created.

So….again…what is Energy Medicine Yoga?

It is a simple, integrated way to bring balance, health and joy to your life. That’s it! And it really is simple!

We all want a five star life. Everything going along smoothly and well. So how do we achieve that?

This Friday, at 6pm, I’ll be Live with Sounds True talking about magic, and how to bring that into your life. Its easier than you think, and it holds the underpinnings to bringing the elusive balance into your life.

Then in April, I’ll be interviewed by Dondi Dahlin, author of the amazing book, The Five Elements. As part of The Shift Network Energy Medicine Summit, we’ll talk about the Five Elements in healing and in EMYoga and how simple it is to weave in powerful healing tools into your existing yoga practice.

That’s what EMYoga is. Simple tools. No more time than you already give to your physical practice. I developed these techniques over many years, but they came together as a system when I was teaching yoga at Norwich University, the oldest, private, military college in the country. These students have no extra time in their days. Many of them sleep 4 or 5 hours a night while taking on incredibly demanding academic and military responsibilities. So I wanted to give them tools to make their lives easier, more integrated. To find ways to create more time, sometimes out of thin air, to make their days feel more expansive. And it worked!

If you’re feeling overwhelmed in your life, there really are simple things you can do to give yourself more space, more time, more freedom.

Energy is the underlying principle of everything, so getting your own energy to work for you is the number one priority to health.

Lets start here:

Thump your chest like Tarzan.

March in place and hit your same hand to knee for ten times. Then march in place and hit your opposite hand to knee ten times.

There. You just jump started your energy and got it to cross over. Those are the two most healthy patterns of energy in the body. And it is really that simple to do.

Do those two things every day for a while and notice if anything else in your life shifts.

And we’ll keep this conversation going…..