Your Body Will Show You the Way: Energy Medicine for Personal and Global Change

Praise for Your Body Will Show You the Way

This delicious book teaches you how to listen and make sense of what your body is saying, and how to respond creatively. You’re going to love Ellen Meredith’s new energy medicine techniques to support awakening and change. I really believe that your life will be empowered and strengthened forever when you feel the confidence to communicate with your own body and allow your energies to guide you into better health and more joy and vitality — plus, you will have these tools for a lifetime. I am going to shout about this book from the rooftops! Superb!

— Donna Eden, bestselling author of Energy Medicine

Ellen will help you develop new ways of understanding and communicating with your body. You’ll learn to see with fresh eyes the situations in your life that have previously kept you stuck.… Ellen invites us to nothing less than a rebirth of ourselves, understanding the possibilities we have to shift and change and grow into a future we truly desire. These simple ideas are magnificent in their scope and can lead to a new reality within your physical body and your life.

— from the foreword by Lauren Walker, creator of Energy Medicine Yoga and bestselling author of The Energy to Heal

"Your Body Will Show You the Way is the title and promise of Ellen Meredith’s new book, and Ellen certainly does show us the way. She breaks boundaries, gets us thinking, inspires, motivates, and guides us in new ways of self-care, tapping into ancient wisdom that helps us deal with modern life and its challenges. This innovative book is without doubt a must-read!"

— Madison King, mentor, teacher, and author of Everyday Energy

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this book! So often we block ourselves from our own healing abilities. This book will help you discover how to both listen and respond to your body so you can begin to heal, grow, and thrive both inside and out. The techniques shared are clear and easy to follow, and Ellen Meredith’s fun-loving style of writing makes this book easy to digest. A must-read for anyone interested in learning more about the amazing power of bodily wisdom.

— Sherianna Boyle, author of Emotional Detox Now: 135 Self-Guided Practices to Renew Your Mind, Heart & Spirit

"If you are sensitive by nature and want to develop a deeper relationship with your body and your inner strength, Your Body Will Show You the Way works as a brilliant and loving map. Ellen Meredith’s book also includes powerfully vulnerable storytelling, which makes it so relatable. Full of insights and exercises, this book will help you bridge spirit, earth, and your body in a loving, concise, and very timely way."

— Lee Harris, author of Energy Speaks

"Your Body Will Show You the Way is a brilliant guide to resolving our issues at every level. Ellen Meredith has given us comprehensive, practical, and effective tools for internal dialogue, much needed as we deal with the overwhelming stresses of our time. Thank you!"

— Devi Stern, advanced Eden Method practitioner and author of Energy Healing with the Kabbalah

"Ellen Meredith’s Your Body Will Show You the Way is an essential guidebook for navigating these turbulent times of change, both personally and collectively. Come home to yourself through these easy-to-follow, transformational practices as you add your light to the world. Start today to live with more grace, ease, and joy! I highly recommend it!"

— Karen R. Onofrio, MD, certified Eden Method practitioner

"Once again Ellen Meredith takes us on a deeper, ‘inside’ journey to unlock our body’s own natural healing abilities. Gently guiding us and holding a safe, energetic space, she offers both emotional support and encouragement as she reassures us, ‘your body will show you the way.’ I encourage you to make a radical change and join Ellen in taking the next step on your inner healing journey to be well within."

— Dr. Melanie Smith, doctor of Oriental medicine, advanced energy medicine practitioner, teacher, and author of the Energy Medicine for Healthy Living and Tap Into Your Vagus Nerve’s Healing Power online series

BOOKS AND AUDIO BY ELLEN MEREDITH

Listening In: Dialogues with the Wiser Self

In Search of Radiance: Learning to Stand with Your Wiser Self (audio)

The Language Your Body Speaks: Self-Healing with Energy Medicine

BOOKS PUBLISHED AS ELLEN M. ILFELD

Learning Comes to Life: An Active Learning Program for Teens

Good Beginnings: Parenting in the Early Years, coauthored with J. L. Evans

Early Childhood Counts: A Programming Guide on Early Childhood Care for Development, coauthored with J. L. Evans and R. G. Myers

Copyright © 2022 by Ellen M. Ilfeld

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, or other — without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. It is not meant to take the place of diagnosis and treatment by a qualified medical practitioner or therapist. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given or liability taken. The author’s experiences used as examples throughout this book are true, although identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meredith, Ellen, date, author.

Title: Your body will show you the way : energy medicine for personal and global change / Ellen Meredith.

Description: Novato, California : New World Library, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A discussion of the principles of energy healing, a theory of medicine that views disease as the result of energy imbalances in the human body. Includes guided meditations, energy exercises, and stories that illustrate key concepts-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022020300 (print) | LCCN 2022020301 (ebook) | ISBN 9781608688227 (paperback) | ISBN 9781608688234 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Energy medicine. | Mind and body therapies.

Classification: LCC RZ421 .M47 2022 (print) | LCC RZ421 (ebook) | DDC 616.89--dc23/eng/20220603

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022020300

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022020301

First printing, September 2022

ISBN 978-1-60868-822-7

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-823-4

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Judith Evans, soul mate, who held a space and grounded me to write this book …

To Donna Eden, sistah-from-another-mother, who held a space for me to fly …

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: Inner Guidance

Chapter One: From the Inside Out

Chapter Two: Rename, Reframe, and Reclaim

Energy Medicine to Calm Reactivity When Stuck Waiting

Exercise: One Hundred Gifts of the Body

Guided Visit: Cradle and Clear an Organ Space

Chapter Three: Just Connect

Protocol: Just Connect

Protocol: Restacking Your Boxes

Chapter Four: Beyond Binary

Guided Visit: Breath Is Your Teacher

Exercise: Let the Earth Breathe You

Protocol: Anchoring in the Stabilizing Sphere

Chapter Five: Keeping the Gates of Self

Exercise: Pet the Doggy / Pet the Kitty

Protocol: Porcupine Reset

Protocol: Flip Your Halos

Protocol: Open Sesame

Protocol: Energy Relay Reset

Protocol: Gatekeeper Syncing

Chapter Six: Enter the Stream

Guided Visit: Clearing Templates from the Temples

Guided Visit: Energizer Stream

Guided Visit: Yin Protector Stream

Guided Visit: Heart/Connection Stream

Guided Visit: Choice/Discernment Stream

Chapter Seven: Ground and Center in a Changing World

Guided Visit: Conception and Comprehension Streams

Protocol: Clearing the Sacred Baton of the Self

Protocol: Zigzag Hook-Up

Chapter Eight: Ground in Your Inner Wisdom

Exercise: Spinal Fluid Screen

Exercise: Grab and Walk Away

Exercise: Metabolizing Eights

Guided Visit: Nourishment Stream

Guided Visit: Embodiment Stream

Chapter Nine: Holding Together in the Face of Change

Exercise: Baklava Restoration

Guided Visit: Purpose Stream

Guided Visit: Enactor/Enforcer Stream

Chapter Ten: Reweaving the Tears in Your Fabric

Protocol: Body Weave

Guided Visit: Give and Receive Stream

Guided Visit: Distiller/Refiner Stream

Chapter Eleven: Flow

Exercise: Touch Bath, Qi Bath

Exercise: Electrics Eye Hold

Guided Visit: Waters of Life Stream

Guided Visit: Distribution Stream

Chapter Twelve: Your Web of Meaning

Protocol: Epicenter Repair

Exercise: Harmonizing Hook-Up

Chapter Thirteen: The Web of Connections

Protocol: Renovating the Rooms of Your Chakras

Protocol: Fishing in the Chakras

Protocol: Spidey Webworking

Protocol: Balancing Your Sonar Rings

Chapter Fourteen: Spirit in the Body

Protocol: Opening Your Cosmic Gates

Exercise: Expand to Your True Size

Exercise: One Hundred Gifts of the Heart

Exercise: Seven Sacred Gifts

Protocol: The Ming Men Passage

Conclusion: Let Your Body Show You the Way!

Appendix A: Simple Energy Self-Test

Appendix B: Which Stream Do I Visit When?

Appendix C: List of Exercises, Protocols, and Guided Visits

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Foreword

It feels like the whole world is teetering on a precipice right now, where our very survival as a species is at stake. Instead of gently walking back from the cliff’s edge, we continue to fight about all our problems from opposite sides of a gasping divide. We’re like polarized ends of a twirling baton, held apart by a rigid line. This mimics the opposites we feel in so many places in our own bodies and minds. We ping between happy and sad, manic and tired, angry and inspired, productive and frustrated. To mitigate this, many people talk about meeting in the middle — that we should come together in the center from our positions on the poles.

But what if we did something different? Instead of meeting in the middle at some arbitrary point on some arbitrary line, what if instead we allowed ourselves to expand spherically? Take any point of contention and unfold it into a sphere — like the shape created by that spinning baton — not spinning over the cliff, but spinning in a skillful hand. That sphere can encapsulate all of a situation, or all of us together. Not together by making us the same — like dissolving a cup of salt in a cooking pot. But together like a delicious stew — all our differences flavoring the whole. What if we were together in a world of shared understanding, shared differences, a shared desire for safety, love, nourishment, expression?

Perhaps our frustrations about the state of the world and the state of our own health are giving us valuable information that we simply don’t understand yet, because it is part of a bigger picture: the picture in the sphere, not the picture in the point. What if we started to look at our desires for personal and global transformation from this new vantage point? Not teetering on the edge, not stuck in the middle, not polarized at the extreme, but encompassing the whole.

That is the vision and the gift that Ellen Meredith shares with us in her new book, Your Body Will Show You the Way: Energy Medicine for Personal and Global Change.

I have known Ellen for many years, having studied with her in Donna Eden’s school Innersource to learn the inner dynamics of energy healing. As a testament to the power of our shared lineage with Donna (the grandmother energy teacher), Ellen and I have both taken Donna’s work and morphed it and translated it through our own lenses and experiences, as many of her students have. I created and wrote three books on Energy Medicine Yoga. And though I studied alongside Ellen for years, I did not know she had her own hidden inner gifts that led her to Donna. She is a magical and talented healer and teacher in her own right. When The Language Your Body Speaks, her first book on the power of energy medicine and healing, came out, I was wowed and inspired. And now, in this new book, I am honored to preface her well-tuned gift to you as a seeker of health and wholeness.

Ellen’s vision of this new, whole and healed reality manifests in the creation and telling of a new story. The power of this book lies in how skillfully Ellen leads us on the journey of what this new reality might look like and how we might get there.

Nothing less than re-creating our current worldview is called for. The outdated and incorrect vision of ourselves as purely physical beings held hostage by the polar opposites that dominate critical thinking in areas like health care, education, and politics — really every part of our lives and shared experiences — is primed for a change.

To create something new from the pieces of the old is linked to one of my favorite things to do, and that is to recreate. Specifically meaning to play, relax, reinvent, and expand into joy and fun. Doing something again and again — like skiing or walking the beach or playing tennis or sitting by a creek — is how we might currently think about recreation. But what if we could re-create our worldview — making it better, evolving it, expanding it, and enjoying it? What a fun and different way to look at the world!

I kept dipping into and out of this book, first in the mind of the writer, then in the mind of the student just drinking up knowledge, wisdom, and yes, stories. Stories are what we yearn for. They’re what give us connection and a deeper meaning in our lives. Stories are how we explain ourselves to ourselves to make sense of the world around us. And stories are what change the narrative.

The stories Ellen shares of her clients are powerful and resonant — people’s struggles, challenges, resistances, hopes. Then she steps up to each person, and the magic begins. She leads us through what her energy guides teach her in real time, and then she teaches us how to find those same energies in ourselves, complete with our own personal awareness and transformations.

We’re invited right into this wonderfully woven work to re-create our own story.

Ellen will help you develop new ways of understanding and communicating with your body. You’ll learn to see with fresh eyes the situations in your life that have previously kept you stuck. You’ll learn how to reframe your experiences to give you a different perspective. You’ll learn how to feel your situation from the inside instead of thinking about it from the outside, and you will gain a whole new experience of simple concepts like grounding and expanding.

Pick up your quill or your paint brush, or your song or your dance, to create and recreate and create again. Ellen guides you to tease apart your difficulties and challenges and understand them in a new way so you can expand into the beautifully shining mosaic of your life; to decrease resistance and discover peace and intimacy with your body and energies; to find healing where healing is possible, and acceptance and calmness in any situation. And from this, she invites you to learn what your body’s energies are telling you and how, together with those energies, you can co-create a new, healthier and more easeful reality. A better story.

The teachings here are deceptively simple and fun. In fact, you can do these practices with your whole family; children especially will love the creativity and imagination and engagement. And doing it together with your loved ones and giving the next generation these powerful tools is the perfect way to incorporate this new way of looking at the world.

Ellen invites us to nothing less than a rebirth of ourselves, understanding the possibilities we have to shift and change and grow into a future we truly desire. These simple ideas are magnificent in their scope and can lead to a new reality within your physical body and your life. But Ellen doesn’t stop there. She continually draws the parallels between our limited thinking of our own lives and health, and the way we’ve limited healing in the world as a whole. And she helps us see that we can apply the principles of individual healing to collective and global health. She is offering us a massive paradigm shift.

It is a shift we desperately need right now.

It is a shift we are well poised and positioned to make.

And Ellen’s book is one of the best guides to help take us there.

Lauren Walker,

creator of Energy Medicine Yoga

and bestselling author of The Energy to Heal

Introduction

Inner Guidance

It’s one of those days when the apparent craziness of the world has gotten to me: my mind has fogged, and I feel exhausted; my gut, head, and muscles ache; my emotions are building up steam, like a pressure cooker. I hear myself start to panic: Oh no, oh no, what’s wrong, what’s going on? Am I getting sick?

If I can stop, hunker down for a moment, and ask, What do I need right now?, I hear, Use your hands to cradle your face.

Then: Breathe in on a count of three and out on a count of five.

Then: Just connect — use your hands to hook up your head and heart, your heart and gut, your front and back, your two feet, et cetera.

Then I see an image of a spiderweb that has been ravaged by a careless hand. I pull at the threads and rebuild the web, strand by strand.

When I stop to listen and follow the guidance of this awareness inside me step by step, it shifts the logjam of my mind, body, and spirit. The panic lifts, and within a short time, I can see how to proceed with more grace and sanity.

Sometimes the instructions are quite specific. I’m shown a posture to take or a gesture that would help. Other times I’m told something cryptic I need to unpack and figure out: Move your headquarters to your solar plexus and think from there. Or I hear something generic: Come home. Show up for yourself. Sometimes I get nothing — no images, no words, no thoughts — and I have to accept the emptiness as my guide.

Tuning to inner guidance was not my initial instinct or what I was programmed to do in this life. I grew up in a family that loved to intellectualize, make theories, talk about grand and far-flung ideas; they tended to ignore the body as an inconvenience. I wasn’t taught to respect this instrument, and as a result, I grew increasingly sicker as my physical systems broke down and I had no idea what to do to restore them.

After years of suffering from blood sugar crashes caused by the stress of not knowing how to nourish myself; migraines triggered by competition between my brain and body; and energy rushes and crashes set in motion by a system that revved and strained its engine each time I could not get into gear, I finally understood that my symptoms were a communication and that I needed to show up and participate in the conversation!

I had spent thousands of dollars on tests and treatments, supplements, special diets, healing plans, and trying one recommended road to recovery after another before I finally understood that other people couldn’t heal me. The medications and supplements could not heal me. And not even following the recipes for wellness — telling me what ideal diet, sleep habit, exercise, spiritual practice, belief patterning, or lifestyle I should follow — did the trick.

The trick was that I needed to show up, learn how this body, mind, and spirit might best collaborate, and discover what it means for my unique self to get well and flourish.

My body knew how to heal, but I needed to learn how to stop damaging it faster than it could mend and to stop throwing chemical, nutritional, and behavioral solutions at it from outside, so I could grow well from the inside out.

Whenever I come home to my body and let the built-in inner guidance system show me what is needed, right now, it changes my world.

The suggestions my body guidance gave me were all a form of energy medicine: tools that could shift my body’s function and communications energetically, just as pills are designed to shift the body’s functions chemically.

I can’t pretend that everything I’ve learned about energy medicine arose solely from dialogue with my body. In my early twenties I was sitting at my typewriter, waiting for inspiration to write a poem or story. Instead, I realized I was seeing a kind of ticker tape in my head, like they used in the old stock market. Only there were letters on the tape instead of numbers. I wrote them down as the text scrolled through my inner screen and then was rather stunned to read this message:

You have asked to know us, and so we are here. We have been with you for a very long time, and now you are ready to come stand with us. We will work with you. Let your Wiser Self which observes continue the writing at night, and we will come through with a few lines. Simply don’t block the connection. Past awareness of us is imminent. Someone will give you a plant to water; be aware of the plant processes of growth. Surely you can grow plants?

This was the start of a conversation with my inner teachers, seven groups of consciousness I call my Councils, that has continued for upward of fifty years. They have provided me not just with channeled information but also with an intensive experiential training in exploring consciousness itself. The root of this training focused on helping me understand that we are multidimensional beings who span a spectrum from spirit to mind to body — and beyond. Healing ourselves involves being able to step in and actively co-create the body-mind in alignment with the spirit. Among the Councils’ members were healers and teachers from many traditions, including shamanic and earth-based ones. Thus, much of the guidance was in the form of activities, explorations, and experiences — very down-to-earth.

After learning about consciousness and energy medicine through intense training with my inner teachers, through practice as an energy healer and channel with more than ten thousand clients and students, and, since 2007, through study with energy medicine pioneer Donna Eden, I have come to see energy dialogue via the body not only as key to healing my own dis-ease and ailments but also as a doorway through which each of us can learn how to create personal, social, and planetary well-being.

In this book, I am showing you how to find this doorway within yourself and inviting you, in your own ways, to step through it.

Energy medicine is the practice of communicating with yourself using the language of energy. You are made of energy; your body communicates with itself using energy; and your actions and choices are fueled by energies as well. You are essentially a matrix of swirling, intertwining subtle forces, not the solid thing your mind perceives.

The guidance I get when I tune in to my body taps into this energetic exchange. What I receive is not always in words, and it isn’t usually philosophical beliefs or platitudes. It arises in pictures and direct knowing, feelings and sensations, nudges or clear understandings. It comes to me in the language my body speaks: energy. And I try to respond in kind, communicating not just with thought or words but energetically, with movement, gesture, image, sound, smell, sensation, activity, and more.

When you can tap into all that communication through energetic exchange and partner with your own subtle energies, you will find yourself able to heal most anything. Beyond that, you will discover your own individual ways to be well and flourish.

This seems like a big promise. But it is really just common sense:

•If you can communicate with yourself and within yourself, you can activate the amazing internal guidance system built into how we are structured to determine what you need moment by moment.

•You can also make clearer choices about what you do and how you do it.

•When you can communicate this way, your body feels heard and supported and stops shouting at you with symptoms.

•In addition, your stress levels drop, because you are aligned within yourself, from inner truth through outer expression.

•Your body can then use its resources to heal rather than needing them to cope with stress.

•The instructions that allocate resources and guide your body to function shift to actively support well-being rather than dis-ease.

•This fuels you to develop your gifts and fulfill your potential.

An unexpected benefit of learning to hear body guidance is that it opens you and provides the instrument for hearing the guidance of your Wiser Self and Councils as well.

Your inner guidance system is not just a right-answer machine, telling you, Yes, do this or No, avoid that. It is also not just a place to seek higher spiritual guidance from your Councils, though that is valuable. It is a form of inner wisdom, built into the instrument that is your body, specific to you as a soul having a human experience. It’s a source of ongoing specific and pertinent insight about what is happening within your creation of self and world — what is needed, what is intended, what is viable or unsustainable, and so on. It’s there to help you see more clearly, choose more wisely, and experience more fully.

And it is the doorway to everything: healing, fulfilling your soul’s potential, peace, radical change.

Why is it important to get to know this guidance system and access this doorway? Increasingly, all of us are being buffeted by shifts in our circumstances, thinking, and the world as we know it. This deeply affects our ability to heal, be well, and evolve our bodies (and social structures) to handle new situations. If I can’t tune in to my inner guidance system for truth and clarity about my own soul’s choices, I am at the mercy of the swirling winds of change and the theories, competing beliefs, and even slippery facts of our present time. Inner guidance acts as a crucial anchor in times of uncertainty.

Radical change is likely to be the theme of our shared reality for some time to come. I think it is ironic that 2020 was the year when crazy worldwide upheaval manifested in the form of a global pandemic, social disruption, collapse of infrastructure, and collision between autocracy and the voice of the people — 2020, which for eyes means perfect vision!

Around 2010, one vision my inner teachers offered was that we were entering a new era that would be ushered in by at least thirty years of radical change. The word radical derives from the Late Latin word radicalis: forming the root, inherent. And so radical change is not so much about altering the outer conditions or arguing over new policies and rules as it is about experiencing a transformation in our hearts and minds, in our habits and ways of communicating.

From my perspective, that is great news. You can transform the outer world by refocusing your attention on the core. As my Councils put it, The task is to find the true shift that brings you home when homeless, into safety when threatened, into allegiance when split, into connection with the inner sparks that will fuel this journey.

And they added: As you learn to do this, you bring others along.

I have come to see this new era as the rise of empowered yin. After some ten thousand years of extreme yang — outward-focused growth, evolution, and actions — the tide is turning to pull us inward again, gently leading us to get to know our roots, our receptive and creative side, our ability to gestate new life in the womb of inner awareness.

It is something like a new tooth erupting: we are going to love it when it arrives, but in the meantime, the gums are inflamed, and it is painful to chew.

I grew up in the feminist 1970s, marching to transform the world. We proclaimed, The personal is political. We pushed as hard as we could for justice. Some things changed, but a lot didn’t. The systems that create inequity continued their inevitable advance toward this moment, when they are finally collapsing under their own weight — unsustainable, unaffordable, and unlivable.

Now, the world is changing us. I like to think mother nature let us have our freedom to run amok, to live in disharmony with her and with our creature nature, until this moment. Today, she is inviting us, event by event, to wake up to what we have been doing to our bodies, minds, and spirits. We are being shown how life as we have been living it has affected our physical, mental, spiritual, and societal health and the health of the planet.

What we took for granted, what we considered order, what we thought about ourselves and other people are all coming into question. We are being unmasked, even those of us who felt awakened and evolved. And within that process, mother nature is giving us the opportunity to evolve further and come home to wiser ways of being. I’m not blaming mother nature here for the collapse of societies as we’ve known them — I am giving her credit!

Play with It!

Put your hands out in front of you, like an old-fashioned balance scale. On one hand put going back to the way things were. On the other hand put moving forward to a new configuration. Let your hands shift up and down with the weight of each choice and see which weighs more for you right now.

If your hands showed you going back to the way things were, get back in bed or find somewhere to be by yourself. Hunker down and try the following sequence:

•Pet yourself like a dog or cat. Start at your temples, one hand on each side of your head. Stroke up around your ear and down behind it, bringing your hands down to squeeze your shoulders. Then return to stroking again, to calm the freakedout being that wants to scurry back to what felt like security. Good dog! Good kitty! (For a fuller explanation of this exercise, see Pet the Doggy / Pet the Kitty, pages 101–2.)

•Trace hearts over your anatomical heart to walk back any emotional reactivity you are experiencing.

•Connect in with yourself in very physical ways, intuitively placing your hands wherever they want to be on your body. Use your healing hands to speak fluently to your creature self, consoling and bringing you home.

When you feel ready, keep reading.

If your hands showed you moving forward to a new configuration, take a moment to think about where your body wants to sit, lie, stand, or move:

•Do you want to be in a certain room, outside in nature, next to a loved one?

•Do you need a certain color around you, to breathe in a certain scent?

•Do you need a particular song playing to accompany you?

Ask what this self needs now and then supply it, even if what you need seems dumb or can only be supplied symbolically. You might use an object from around the house; a talisman; a representative from nature, such as a stone, a flame, a glass of water, a growing plant, or