Donna Eden is one of the foremost energy healers and teachers on the planet. She created Eden Energy Medicine, which is a brilliant and simple paradigm for aligning all of the energies in the body to activate them toward healing. Donna is blessed with the ability to ‘see’ energy. This is a skill that many people have as children, which is weaned out of them by a society that doesn’t place value on things outside the Western model of science.

Donna was also afflicted with many health challenges as a young woman, including MS. She was told by her doctors that they couldn’t do anything more for her and she should find someone to raise her two girls. Instead, Donna took her health into her own hands. Literally. With her ability to see energy, she started to monitor her own body and see where things weren’t connecting or moving in the right direction.

Einstein taught us that ‘energy is all there is,’ so when Donna began to heal her energy systems, her entire body began to heal. She is now over 70 years old and has a vibrancy and vigor enviable in people half her age! Beyond healing herself, Donna took the skills she gained and started to work on clients. She then wrote the first of many books, Energy Medicine, teaching these simple and powerful tools to the world.

I was lucky to encounter Donna and her work at a time when my life felt like it was falling apart. The elegance and simplicity of her program allowed me to come into a resonance with my body that I’d never felt before. I started adapting her work to the practice I was steeped in, which is yoga.

Over the years, I developed a system that marries her powerful work with the already powerful system of yoga. Instead of just being a ‘layering’ of techniques, Energy Medicine Yoga proved to be an integrated, turbo-charged system of yoga. It allows the body to gain even more benefits from a standard yoga practice by organizing the underlying energy in the body first. This lets the yoga benefits really take hold and even increase.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Donna some questions about her work. Instead of paraphrasing, I think it is more powerful to hear her words directly…

Lauren Walker: The Daily Energy Routine, from which the EMYoga Wake Up is adapted, is based on your years of experience treating clients. You’ve taught that almost everyone has the same few imbalances in common. What are those? And why is this?

Donna Eden: Everyone’s energies can be thrown off in different ways. Each of us has a unique energy constellation. But the stresses and compromises our lifestyles require do lead to a number of common problems:The energy system that governs our threat response, called the triple warmer in the Chinese system, tends to be chronically overstimulated. As a result, it pulls energies from the other meridians, reducing our overall capacity to function optimally.

Another type of energy, which I call the Celtic weave, is meant to cross over from one side of the body to the other, which is reflected in the way the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, as well as in smaller cross-overs, such as the energies of specific organs or even cells. When these energies don’t cross over properly, which is called a homolateral pattern, you can’t think as well and your body can’t heal as well.

A third common imbalance is called neurological disorganization. The energies in the brain become scrambled for many people in our society, which requires so much more intellectual thought than physical activity. Again, this interferes with clear thinking and the ability to function at your best.

LW: Is it true that we can shift our essential health baseline by doing a few simple exercises daily?

DE: What surprises people is how easy this is. Tens of thousands of people throughout the world are doing our Daily Energy Routine every day. More than 200,000 took up our ‘Daily Energy Medicine Challenge,’ following along with a series of our practitioners on YouTube or Facebook every day for a month.

The Daily Routine helps with all the imbalances mentioned above. Part of what I love about your approach with Energy Medicine Yoga is it builds the most powerful Energy Medicine techniques into a daily yoga practice.

LW: We both talk about the root cause of every disease pattern being energy not crossing over and moving forward. Have you seen huge health changes in clients by just doing this? Can you give an example?

DE: Yes, I have absolutely seen huge changes by doing just that. I was just at a workshop where one of our teaching assistants found her way to my work as a last ditch effort following a lifetime of depression. She had worked with numerous psychotherapists with no lasting gains. But she very proudly announced to the entire class that what turned it for her was doing the ‘homolateral crossover,’ an exercise designed to get the body’s energies crossing over adequately. She was feeling improvements within a few days and a permanent change had occurred within a few months. I know that many of your asanas, such as EMY eagle, your sun salutation series and janu sirsasana with spleen strengthening have the same effect.

LW: I’ve adapted EEM to a yoga practice. One of the rules of energy is that it needs space to move, which is why yoga is such a great fit. When you see someone practicing yoga, what do you see in their energy fields?

DE: When an asana stretches an area, it activates the meridians that move through that area. The chakras become stronger and better balanced when the physical movements open the parts of the body in which these chakras are situated. This will be evident to anyone who sees or otherwise senses the body’s subtle energies. What I’ve witnessed is as a person does yoga in a comfortable and proficient way, their stresses are dissipated in front of my eyes.

LW: Everyone who is ill is looking for a ‘miracle.’ You’ve had many miracle cures happen both for yourself and for many clients. What is your take on miracles? Can someone increase their possibility of a miraculous recovery?

DE: I believe people absolutely can and do increase the possibility of a ‘health miracle’ by participating in their energy systems so those systems function optimally. Then they are in alignment with larger, universal energies that have amazing healing power.

LW: What has EEM taught you about living a healthy and balanced life?

DE: There are a million answers to this. At the most basic level, for me, I would not be alive today without energy medicine. It saved my life, and that leaves an impression, so it has become a natural part of my daily activities. It gives me the tools to come back into balance, harmony and flow with my soul, my spirit and deepest purpose. It reminds me that we evolve in accord with the energy systems that run through us and are all around us.

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