Becoming Pure Positive Energy: The Energy You Were Born to Be
Sometimes you write a book, and sometimes a book writes you.
Becoming Pure Positive Energy began quietly. I wasn’t looking to write a book. But one thought became another, one page became another, and somewhere along the way, what began almost just for me became 370 pages.
The book brings together a lifetime of studying yoga and more than 25 years of teaching it—along with one question I have returned to again and again: What does it actually mean to live yoga? Not simply to practice postures, know the Sanskrit words, or understand yoga philosophy intellectually, but to live it.
Yoga Is More Than What We Do on the Mat
Long ago, I learned that yoga was never meant to be something we simply do on a mat. The ancient teachings of yoga give us remarkably sophisticated ways of understanding the physical body, breath, mind, energy, consciousness, behavior, and the continual changes of being human. But knowing those teachings and living them are two very different things.
Throughout my years teaching yoga teachers around the world, I have always wanted students to go beyond memorizing information. If you tell me a posture is grounding, I want to know: What makes it grounding? What changed in your body? What happened to your breath? What did you notice in your mind?
And if you tell me you felt the energy shift, my next question will probably be: “What exactly do you mean by energy?”
That question became increasingly important as I wrote this book.
What Do We Mean When We Talk About Energy?
We use the word “energy” constantly. We say we have no energy, we love someone’s energy, a room has strange energy, yoga changed our energy, or we need to protect our energy. But what are we actually describing?
Sometimes we are talking about physical vitality. Sometimes breath. Sometimes sensation, emotion, attention, mood, nervous-system response, or the subtle movement yoga describes as prana. These experiences can overlap, but they are not necessarily the same thing.
There is nothing wrong with the word “energy.” Its beauty and meaning come from understanding what we are actually describing. That is part of the journey of Becoming Pure Positive Energy.
Ancient Yoga Wisdom for Modern Life
The ancient teachings of yoga give us extraordinary maps for understanding ourselves. The koshas help us explore the different layers of our being. The vayus describe different directions and functions of prana. The gunas help us recognize qualities of activity, clarity, heaviness, and change. The chakras offer another way of exploring our physical, emotional, and spiritual experience, while Ayurveda and the doshas help us understand our individual tendencies and the continual process of finding balance.
And the physical practice of yoga itself can teach us far more than how to make shapes with our bodies. A forward fold can teach us something about surrender, a backbend can ask for courage, a lateral posture can reveal balance, a twist can become an experience of transformation, an inversion can ask us to trust, and an extension can teach us presence.
These teachings become meaningful when they stop being ideas we know and become experiences we recognize.
Your Body Has Been Teaching You How to Live All Along
One of the central ideas running through Becoming Pure Positive Energy is that the body is not separate from our spiritual lives. The body is continually teaching us.
The cardiovascular system gives and receives. The respiratory system receives and releases. The lymphatic system carries away what we no longer need. The digestive system takes something from the outside world and determines what can become part of us. The urinary system teaches release. And the nervous system is continually asking a fundamental question: Am I safe?
Even the movements we make in yoga can become a language through which we understand ourselves more clearly. Your body has been teaching you how to live all along. We simply have to learn how to listen.
What Does “Becoming” Mean?
For more than 25 years, I have begun the first day of my yoga teacher trainings with the same words:
“You must begin from where you are—but you do not have to remain there.”
I don’t think I realized until I was deep into writing this book just how much those words would become its foundation. We are always becoming. Our bodies change. Relationships change. Families change. Work changes. What we need changes. What we believe changes. Life asks us to receive things we never expected and release things we thought we would hold forever.
We can spend tremendous energy resisting that reality, or we can learn how to move with it. To me, becoming is the natural process of living. We begin where we are, become aware of what is happening within and around us, and continue to refine, adjust, and grow. Becoming is not a destination. It is learning to move with life as life continues to move through us.
REFINE · ALIGN · RELAX · LIVE.
REFINE what no longer supports the life you are living and strengthen what does. ALIGN the different layers of yourself so that what you think, say, and do begin to move in the same direction. RELAX the constant struggle to control everything. Radical Relaxation is not giving up; it is understanding that we can participate fully in our lives without believing we control every outcome. And LIVE what you understand. Spiritual Embodiment asks us to take what we know off the page, out of the yoga studio, and into the ordinary moments of our lives.
That is where yoga becomes real.
Who Is Becoming Pure Positive Energy For?
I originally began writing this book because I wanted my students to understand the different layers of energy—not simply to become better yoga teachers, but to better understand themselves and how to live their lives. Over the years, as I listened to more conversations about happiness, manifestation, alignment, vibration, and becoming, I kept returning to the same thought: the ancient teachings of yoga already give us an extraordinary map for understanding how all of this works together.
Becoming Pure Positive Energy is for anyone who wants to go beneath the words and understand what is actually happening within us—physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically, and spiritually. You don’t have to be a yoga teacher, or even know much about yoga. You simply have to be curious about yourself, the energy you bring to your life, and how greater awareness can change the way you live it.
Becoming Pure Positive Energy
Pure Positive Energy is not about pretending that life is always positive. Life includes grief and joy, beginnings and endings, effort and rest, holding on and letting go. Yoga does not ask us to escape those experiences. It gives us ways to meet them with greater awareness.
That is the invitation inside these pages: to understand yourself more deeply, recognize what brings you toward balance and what pulls you away from it, become more attentive to the language of your body, and understand the movement of your energy rather than simply talking about it. It is an invitation to soften where you have been struggling, strengthen what supports you, live what you understand, and keep becoming.
Becoming Pure Positive Energy: The Energy You Were Born to Be is available now on Amazon.
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With love and abundant gratitude,
XOMarianne
