Leslie Kenton Endless Energy

How long have you longed for more energy? At last you can tap into energy at your core with this practical and inspirational guide. Leslie and daughter Susannah uncover the vital connections between high level health and fully living out who you really are. Using simple yet potent energy-enhancing techniques for your body, mind and spirit, they show you precisely how to realize your full potential and reach new heights of personal freedom, good looks, creativity and joy.

From the back cover ENDLESS ENERGY by SUSANNAH & LESLIE KENTON

How long have you longed for more energy? At last you can tap into energy at your core with this practical and inspirational guide.

Susannah and Leslie Kenton uncover the vital connections between high level health and fully living out who you really are. Using simple yet potent energy-enhancing techniques for your body, mind and spirit they show you precisely how to realize your full potential and reach new heights of personal freedom, good looks, creativity and joy.

All the information, guidance and encouragement you need is inside. Now it is up to you.

Extract ENDLESS ENERGY by SUSANNAH & LESLIE KENTON

Health is a process of unfolding - the process of becoming who you really are. This journey towards endless energy asks that each of us discover her own path to wholeness. Becoming a conscious traveler, a willing participant in your own journey can bring infinite gifts ...wellbeing...personal beauty...freedom.

Nothing gives a woman power so much as energy. It brings a light to your eye, a glow to your skin, an edge to your personality. When you are riding a wave of energy it seems to carry you wherever you want to go. When it crashes it can leave you feeling lost and lumpy. Energy is elusive stuff.

Working with women all over the world, hearing from them by letter, chatting with them over lunch, there is always one question that comes up: Where do we get more energy? It is an important issue, a question we have wrestled with a lot in our own lives. It is also an issue which has particular relevance to women. Why? In the answer to this question lies the inner secret to accessing energy in its most powerful and fulfilling form. For as women, no matter how "liberated" we think we have become, few of us live out fully who we really are. And it is in doing this alone that you tap into the reserve of endless energy which lies at the very core of your being. This may seem a strange notion. After all, energy - the text books tell us, can only be measured in terms of calories. And what does at the core mean anyway?

When we say at the core we mean that part of you which is deeper than your personality. It encompasses your very essence. It is that in you which makes you unique from each and every person who ever lived and from which, when you know how, you can access universal life energy directing it towards whatever ends you choose. More about all this later. As far as energy existing only as calories is concerned, any book or so-called authority who tries to convince you of this is either naive or sunk knee deep in the mire of nineteenth century science.

As a woman, the way you experience and express energy is more complex than a man simply because your biology is much more closely linked to nature's cycles - the waxing and waning of the moon, the movement of the tides, the energies of the earth, menstruation. To live at peace with yourself, to ride the waves of your biological, spiritual and emotional energy with grace and confidence (and make the best use of all three) you need three things: First you need an awareness and a respect for the cyclic nature of energy and an appreciation for all of its different qualities. Second you need to know how to manage your energy when it needs managing - how to get down when you are strung up, how to heighten vitality when you feel low, and how to access stamina and sustained power for long term efforts. Finally, and most important by far, you need to cultivate the art of living from your core - by dissolving any obstructions to the full expression of your beauty and authenticity. For there, at the deepest center of your being, at the source of all your hopes and dreams, the font of your own personal brand of endless energy is to be found. Tap into it and you begin to access a power for health, beauty, creativity and joy which is universal and yet which expresses itself in a highly individual way - as the uniqueness of you. This is what living with endless energy is all about.

Each woman, each human being, is utterly unique. Like the seed of a plant which has encoded within its genetic material the characteristics that will in time produce the full grown flower, each of us comes into this world carrying a package of as yet unrealized, but incredibly rich, potentials. We call this seedpower. These physical, psychic and spiritual potentials create each woman's uniqueness. She is rather like the individual brush stroke the zen painter uses to represent one leaf on a shaft of bamboo. The leaf he paints is totally singular - like no leaf which has ever existed. And yet within its uniqueness is encompassed universal beauty and life energy of the highest order. So it is with each human being. Within the individual genetic package which is you is nestled your very own brand of seedpower - a seedpower that encompasses far greater physical, creative and spiritual potentials than any of us could hope to realize in only one lifetime.

The remarkable thing about a seed is that very little is needed for it to develop into a plant: some good earth, rich in organic matter, some rain (not too much or the seed will rot), the sun (not too much or the young leaves will burn). These three simple things can provide the environment in which, thanks to its seedpower, the tiny plant grows into a full blown flower.

People - you, and us, and the man who works in the corner shop - are very much like plants. Each of us develops out of our individual seedpower from the core. All we need is a good healthy environment which allows this unfolding to take place. The only problem is, more often than not the environment - physically, emotionally, spiritually, socially - in which we grow does not support our full unfolding. And so, like a plant trying to develop in depleted soil with too little rain, too little sun, or a seedling trying to grow around a stone, we develop our own brand of distortions. These distortions can be physical - a sunken chest, poor posture, or an excess of fat created to cushion us against a harsh external world. They can be emotional - a sense that we cannot trust ourselves, intense shyness, lack of confidence, or a feeling of being unworthy or guilty. They can even be spiritual - a sense of meaninglessness which leads to addiction, a greed for material things which no matter how much you acquire never fills up the emptiness, a lust for power. Gradually such distortions become so much a part of our lives that we can come to feel they are part of who we actually are.

Of course distortions are by no means all bad. Some help define our values. For instance a woman who has grown up in a family where she was continually treated as the scapegoat may develop a passion for helping the oppressed and make a fine career for herself as a social worker or political reformer. Someone raised on bad food who grew up constantly ill, like one of us (Leslie) may develop a fascination with finding out what kind of lifestyle promotes good health then spend much of her life helping to create it for herself and others. Another woman who grows up in a bourgeois family where social hypocrisy is the rule, in her rejection of it, may be driven to create a life for herself of breathtaking authenticity - perhaps as an artist who wrestles with the deepest human questions in an attempt to bring her own truth into material form.

But there are also negative aspects to the distortions that develop when individual seedpower is thwarted. In some way each of us has been pushed too hard in an attempt to negotiate obstacles in our path. We've had too much responsibility perhaps, or poor nutrition, hypercritical parents or teachers. Sometimes we have just been born into a family with which, no matter how benign, we have little in common. As a result we can spend a lot of our lives feeling like a toad among ducks.

This situation - which tends to be the rule rather than the exception - can severely disrupt your ability to draw upon energy from your core. It also tends to produce artificial behavior, like phony personalities or false images and psychic prisons into which we try to squeeze ourselves. Then a lot of energy which should be available for creativity, high-level health and joy, instead gets bound up trying to maintain these artificial creations. What is worse, this in turn can result in a sense of feeling separate from oneself, of not trusting yourself and of never being able fully to enter into what you are doing with joy. In a woman it often creates a sense of not living comfortably in her own skin, feeling bad about her body and bad about herself, all of which makes her prey to eating disorders and to exploitation by our materialistic society. She is made to feel that being who she is, is not enough - that in order to be acceptable she has to change... to get thinner... drink a particular brand of coffee... wear certain perfumes... buy expensive clothes.

Foreign Publishers ENDLESS ENERGY by SUSANNAH & LESLIE KENTON