you sleep.
Part II – The Energy Clean Up
Apply what I call the ‘5 Non-negotiables’ (5NNs)3 to recalibrate your nervous system, clean up and free your energy. These five simple but powerful strategies are unique to my work, will very quickly begin to affect your sleep and energy levels – sometimes within just 72 hours of using them – and begin to lay the foundations for the sleep and energy tools to come.
Part III – Fast Asleep: Creating Pure, Deep Sleep
Next you’ll be ready for the Pure Sleep Programme to help you refine and deepen the quality of your sleep, and make way for healing and further energy optimisation. The tools here range from small and practical changes that you can make immediately (the Essentials) to the Deeper Tools, which work on the innermost level to bring about even more profound changes, which will also affect your waking hours.
Many of the Deeper Tools are based on Eastern philosophy on energy cultivation and health, and so incorporate yoga, chi kung (qi gong), breath exercises, visualisation and mental imagery, affirmations, mantras and more. These techniques work on the factors that influence your sleep at the innermost level. Some of them may be new to you or seem somewhat more esoteric than the more functional tools in Part I, but I simply ask that you try a few of them with an open mind and note how they affect and enhance your energy and wellbeing. What have you got to lose?
Part IV – Wide Awake: Doing The Real Work
In this Energy for Life Programme I share techniques and principles that I have been teaching people, as well as practising myself for a number of years, and as such have been rigorously tried and tested. These exercises and tools will help you to tap in to the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy you need to create something more of your life. Be prepared to go deeper with this section.
You might feel tempted to dive straight into the sleep and energy programmes but I ask you to trust the process and go through each of the four stages in turn. As you’ll discover in the following chapters, I’ve developed and fine-tuned the FAWA formula over many years and each step is vital in creating that transformational sleep–energy balance. Therefore, waking up and cleaning up your energy in Parts I and II is a prerequisite to rediscovering the energy you’ll need to get the maximum benefit from the programmes that follow in Parts III and IV.
Warning: Side effects from using the four-stage FAWA formula will include finding peace, inner safety and calm amidst the chaos. You may also find that somehow, for some reason, you simply feel less busy although you still get a lot done. Be prepared because you may also begin to experience more happiness and joy.
A New Way of Living and Thriving
I believe that we are in the midst of a very significant time in our evolution – a time when the old ways of being, doing and living are no longer working for us and, if we try to keep doing it the old way, we risk simply burning out. Technology is evolving so fast and it is forcing us to find different ways to go deeper, our DNA cannot keep up and so what we’re experiencing is a vital step in our evolution, which is responding out of necessity to enable us to do more than merely survive. All the way down to the cellular level and beyond to the microcellular level, changes are taking place in order to enable us to adapt. Strands of DNA, hitherto thought of as junk, are becoming activated and functional to enable us to adapt to a world that’s going faster: to help us think faster, respond faster, live faster. And all due to living in a way that is unnatural to us.
Technology is our greatest drive to evolve – it’s a gift.
Nature has given us a way in which we can do this through the magical process of sleep but we need to understand it and learn how to do it in a way that will enable this vital transformation to take place.
The FAWA formula will help you to sleep well but it goes far beyond this. You will learn how to tap into energy that will enable you to start truly living and evolving. I hope that the fact that you’re holding my book in your hands means that you are ready to work with me: that you are sick of feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and surviving; that you long to slide effortlessly into pure, deep sleep from which you wake up with the energy to face life.
I’ve had the immense privilege of being able to help so many people and I continue to do so. I never stop feeling grateful for this, nor do I ever take this for granted. I say thank you every day and several times a day. I am now ready to share what I have learnt.
Chapter 1
Getting Ready to ‘Be the Change’
‘If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.’
Albert Einstein
Possibly the hardest part of learning to sleep deeply and living vibrantly is acknowledging that something needs to change. You need to change. And change can be painful.
If you know anything about behaviour change you’ll already know that it takes a certain amount of time to break a habit and to form a new one – usually about 21 days. Cultivating the right frame of mind by being in a state of receptiveness enables that change to happen more easily and starts to take hold immediately. So before you embark on your mission, you may find the following helpful in preparing your body and mind to becoming the change you seek.
Slow Down and Prepare to Sleep
Slow down as you read. This is not an exercise in speed-reading. Every now and then put the book down and just allow the words to sink in, so that you start to integrate the techniques simply by reading them. This in itself will bring about the softening that is needed for deep sleep to take place.
Prepare to sleep even while you’re reading this book. By this I mean, lighten up, drop your shoulders and relax. So many sleep/energy problems are simply due to us trying so hard. To give you an example, when I demonstrate breathing techniques I often observe how – before even starting the exercise – the person will sit bolt upright with an intense look of concentration on their face, jaw clenched, shoulders hunched and, in one case recently, right on the edge of her chair while gripping the seat – as though she was just about to set off on a race!
Stop trying so hard. It is this same rigidity, and desperate bid to control, for perfection, to get it right … that often stops us sleeping in the first place.
Gentle Discipline
You may find that you’ll need to exercise some gentle discipline and give up old ways of being to restore your sleep–energy balance because I’ll be asking you to make some changes to your daily routine that may feel uncomfortable or unaccustomed.
Now if you were a teen coming to me with sleep problems, I might have something different to say. I might remove the word ‘gentle’ from the equation (sometimes I need to be a little tough in order to help bring about changes). I might have to crack the whip to get the electronic devices out of the bedroom in order to help them clean up their act and establish healthy, sleep-conducive routines and habits, as this is what is called for in this situation.
However, I can only ask that you find a balance between applying gentle discipline and strong willpower to make these powerful tools work for you. Are you the perfectionistic, driven, teeth-grinding control freak or a floppy teenager? Forgive the labels but I’m exaggerating
