Protect Your Energy: A Gentle Guide to Nurture Your Nervous System, Cultivate Rest, and Honor Your Needs

Protect Your Energy: A Gentle Guide to Nurture Your Nervous System, Cultivate Rest, and Honor Your Needs

Make vital shifts in how you use your energy―and how you rest―by understanding your nervous system through gentle guidance and practices. “This book is a balm to my nervous system.”― Alex Elle , author of After the Rain We live in a world of more―work more, earn more, do more―but as Zabie Yamasaki writes, “The truth is sometimes what our nervous systems need is less .” In Protect Your Energy , Zabie helps us connect to our inner wisdom to make the powerful changes we need to reclaim control of the thousands of ways our energy is depleted each day. Protect Your Energy helps us compassionately learn to listen to the messages our bodies are sending us through our nervous system. With evidence-based practices drawn from Polyvagal Theory, as well as yogic philosophy and personal experience, Zabie shares practical wisdom to help us turn inward to effect small but vital changes that make living in our fast-paced culture more sustainable. Protect Your Energy offers: • Reflections to help us understand both where we are and where we want to go • Restorative and accessible practices to help us understand our energy drains and honor our capacity • Support to set and hold supportive boundaries, unwind burnout, and much more. Zabie shares, “You hold the wisdom, beauty, and power you need to find relief. And amid all of the noise, your connection to your body and nervous system is your most important teacher.” “As a therapist, I’ve read countless books that promise restoration but few that deliver it the way Protect Your Energy does. Zabie Yamasaki writes with the rare combination of clinical wisdom, lived experience, and deep humanity. Every page is infused with her heart-centered approach―an invitation not only to soothe the individual nervous system but to imagine what collective, systemic healing could look like if rest and compassion were at its core. This isn’t a book about quick fixes or self-optimization. It’s a reclamation. It is remembering that tending to our own energy is an act of resistance in a culture that profits from our exhaustion. Zabie’s voice is both balm and blueprint: gentle, grounded, and profoundly transformative. Protect Your Energy will become a companion for anyone who has ever over-given, over-functioned, or quietly burned out while caring for others. I’ll be recommending it to my clients, my colleagues, and every healer I know. Protect Your Energy is a meditation in tending to ourselves in a world that encourages and rewards functioning from a place of over-productivity. This book changed my life.” ― Sahar Martinez, Psy.D, LMFT, PMH-C , founder, The Process Wellness Collective “ Protect Your Energy is the book I have been longing for―for myself and for those I love―as we try not just to survive but truly thrive amidst the heartbreaks of our world. It invites us into a slower, softer, and simpler way of being so we can listen to our deepest needs and honor them without apology. Zabie helps us to know that relief is possible and living with ease is within our power.” ― Eileen S. Rosete , author of To Tend and To Hold Zahabiyah (Zabie) Yamasaki, MEd, RYT, is an award-winning trauma-informed educator, yoga trainer, and sought-after consultant and speaker, as well as the founder of Transcending Trauma through Yoga. Her work has been featured on CNN, NBC, and more. Her yoga as healing program is implemented at several universities including the University of California (UC) system, USC, Stanford, Yale, University of Notre Dame, and Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Trauma-Informed Yoga for Survivors of Sexual Assault , Trauma-Informed Yoga Affirmation Card Deck and flip chart, and two children’s books .