Yoga Nidra and Grief

In my Essential Yoga Nidra volume, over 7 hours of Yoga Nidra recordings, I dedicated a Yoga Nidra practice entirely for grief. As I was writing out my Yoga Nidra script, I learned so much about grief and the power that Yoga Nidra has to help us all work through grief.

Grief is a regular part of life. Whenever grief comes to visit you in your life, whether it is cyclically or in unique moments, it's always an invitation to practice deep Awareness. Yoga Nidra is a way of practicing sourcing your deepest strength by experiencing your True Nature, that of Awareness itself. From this place of deep Awareness, you will not replace grief with other emotions, but rather learn to welcome it, see it for what it is, and be the witness of it. Doing so, you will come to know your grief for its unique power to help you experience yourself as Awareness. Yoga Nidra can help you to discover the part of you that is powerful enough to survive any loss and powerful enough to sanctify any event that occurs in your life as you weave together the beautiful and textured tapestry of life.As you come to know yourself as Awareness, you will free yourself from being identified as and attached to emotions such as grief. Doing so also allows you to welcome grief, to hear its message in your heart, and ultimately release grief and allow it to cycle out of your orbit when its time is over.

If you are feeling grief in your life right now, I invite you to give yourself a moment and ground yourself to whatever your body is feeling in this moment. Give yourself a moment to open to your senses, as you relax and close your eyes. Maybe send a few breaths out your mouth with a sigh to release any tension you may have. Yoga Nidra is a relaxing yet powerful method to acknowledge your grief as a witness of your love, a testament of your strength, and a guide that leads you toward your highest being.

What’s Yoga Nidra?

Yoga Nidra feels like a guided meditation. Usually in a Yoga Nidra practice, you will lie down, get comfortable, and listen to a facilitator lead you through deepening layers of Awareness. The primary objective in Yoga Nidra is to begin to explore your True Nature, that of Awareness itself.

Yoga is the “yoking” of body, mind, and spirit. As explained in the second verse of the ancient Yoga Sutras, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” The goal of yoga is to experience samadhi, the home of our Universal Oneness. Grief, like all emotions, exists as a ripple in the pool of consciousness and obfuscates your ability to yoke your body, mind, and spirit to experience your True Nature, that Oneness, of Awareness itself.

Emotions like grief are nothing to reject or be ashamed of. On the contrary, they are beautiful ways to practice waking up to Oneness. Through practices like Yoga Nidra you learn to even appreciate grief for what it is, a way of bringing you to greater Awareness because it is something you can practice being Aware of.

Yoga Nidra helps you leverage emotions like grief as a powerful way of practicing Awareness and even learning to identify as Awareness itself. When identified as Awareness, you experience that part of yourself that has emotions but which is larger than emotions, and is not driven by them. As such, you begin to see powerful emotions like grief with a level of loving objectivity. You learn to hear the true message behind the emotion and acknowledge your grief as a witness of your love, a testament of your strength, and a guide that leads you toward your highest being.

What’s Nidra?

There are thousands of pathways to Oneness. Nidra is perhaps my favorite. Nidra is like napping your way to enlightenment! Nidra is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning sleep but more accurately refers to that state between waking and dreaming consciousness. Yoga Nidra is a Tantric practice and is as old as Yoga.

Usually a facilitator will verbally lead practitioners through deepening Awareness by suggesting things to be aware of. Practitioners are to practice observing and not reacting to anything that arises. This process of guided Awareness usually causes practitioners to become very relaxed.

Yoga Nidra uses relaxation as an essential method of downshifting your nervous system to enter the Nidra state, so you can practice your most natural state of relaxed Alertness. This Nidra state helps you to achieve experiencing the world with increased objectivity about all the things you might be aware of, including body, thoughts, sounds, etc. In this Nidra state, you achieve an entrance into deeper Awareness. Not only do you come to experience greater Awareness, you begin to see yourself as Awareness itself, coming to know itself through all the things you might be aware of.

As I lead practitioners through Yoga Nidra practice, I encourage them to greet everything that comes into their field of Awareness, acknowledge it for what it is, and simply practice observing it. Once in a while you may choose to also respond to the information but this practice helps us to stay out of reactivity and into responsiveness, action based on our deep consciousness.

Yoga Nidra’s Power for Wholeness

How Yoga Nidra Makes You Whole

Like I said, Yoga Nidra’s main intention is to practice Awareness. As you begin to identify as Awareness itself, coming to know itself as all the things you can be aware of, you come to experience your True Self, that which is whole, true, pure, and healed. Grounded in this deeper reality of your True identity, you gain not only a greater perspective about your life and problems, but you also experience the truth that as Source, there’s nothing you can’t do, be, or heal from.

What’s more, the more you wake up to your True Being through practices like Yoga Nidra, you begin to see the entire world, including emotions, experiences, sensations, etc, as pointing to Awareness itself.

Soon you begin to see the entire world, and your own life in particular, as a love note from the Divine. You exist as the product of Universal form and energy (practriti) waking up Universal consciousness (purusha) through the experiences of your life. With this Awareness you live your life with greater consciousness. Through practices like Yoga Nidra, you may even come to even appreciate the vicissitudes of life as beautiful reminders that you are consciousness experiencing waking up unto itself through this textures experience of life

Please enjoy this free Yoga Nidra for Grief recording (below). I loved putting it together and have found it very useful in my own life.

If you are interested in facilitating Yoga Nidra yourself or want to learn more about this fascinating practice, you might consider downloading my Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training. It’s 20 hours of classroom recordings, a 60+ page manual of teaching direction, plus over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts. It’s very affordable and I’m even offering payment plans during COVID

Thank you!

Do you know anyone who could benefit from Yoga Nidra for Grief? Mind passing it along?

Loving The 4-Train: Compassion, Being, and Loving Yourself

You Don’t Need to Change

You don't need to change. You don't need to improve anything. Just love the world and love yourself as a beautiful part of the world.

Mary Oliver opens her exquisite poem, Wild Geese, with these words:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

(Read full poem)

Fundamentally, you are perfect just the way you are. That might sound trite. It might sound tired. Nonetheless, it’s truly the greatest message I could ever offer. That and I love you. It’s true. I may not even know you very well. We may have never met. But you’re a human being with dreams and emotions and hopes and dammit, we are all here working out our existence the best we can, struggling and loving and learning to wake up to the power of our own existence. There’s something very beautiful about that. That beauty exists within me and it exists within you.

Loving yourself is to love the Universe

Now with over 100 pages in Yoga Nidra scripts!

To learn to love the world you gotta first learn to love yourself. The world—the entire Universe— is a projection of YOU. What exists outside of you also exists inside of you therefore, the best way to learn to love everything is to love yourself. You know, “be the change” and all that? Well what that means is that everything in the Universe comes from Source including you so by effecting yourself you effect everything else. Loving yourself is to love the Universe.

There’s a great irony in loving things just as they are because as you allow yourself to simply be just as you are, devoid of the shoulds and the what-ifs, it actually gives you freedom to recognize exactly the ways in which you are programmed to grow.

It goes back to something I’ve often said which is:

In order to get there you have to be here and here is always changing.

Truly we exist as the love child of the Universe: that which is pure spirit, which just is, which needs nothing to exist and that which is finite, imbued with form, subject to change and death. There is only now. There is only HERE. But “here” is a treadmill at our feet.

The entire Universe is involved in some dance between presence and movement and I suppose we need to simply join the dance. Get dressed up and fu@#ing join the dance!

Holding Space

We practice deep compassion as we extend this same privilege to other people and things around us and allow them also to simply be, especially those things that would easily turn our hearts bitter.

As we practice yoga and meditation, we cultivate and practice understanding our own being. Doing so helps to reduce the suffering known in the ancient Sanskrit wisdom traditions as Dukkha, that suffering which holds us back from experiencing our highest self.

One enormous act of compassion is holding space by being with a person or thing and allowing them to be just as they or it is. I'm thinking of a friend who is sick or experiencing something mentally or spiritually challenging or (heaven forbid), holds a different political view or opinion about what’s going on with COVID. Simply being with that person (6-ft. apart of course) and holding space for them, without the need to fix or change anything, just being with them, allows a deep compassion to exist between the two of you. Perhaps one of the greatest acts of love is to truly see a person and allow them to simply be how they are. To love them as is.

Practice making room in your heart for that which would sooner canker your heart toward someone or something or make your mind fester with shoulds and what-ifs. Holding space for someone or something, doesn’t mean you have to invite them over for dinner or send them a card on their birthday. Rather you simply offer compassion toward them (or it) by not becoming sour. Sometimes that means practicing not having an opinion about it (read: Lionel Richie is my Guru). And by so doing, you ultimately offer your own heart and mind in the same compassion—the heart that flourishes when it feels abundance and love, not bitterness, and the mind that abounds when it is sheltered from should and what-ifs.

Here is a simple example of holding space:

World: The NYC 4 Train once stopped en route ultimately causing me to miss my flight home.

Me: Bought a NYC 4 Train T-Shirt as an act of holding space for the 4 Train.

World: Just as it is.

Me: Loving the world as it is.

This week, I invite you to practice holding space for things that you either don't understand or which bother you. May this be our daily practice. May love for yourself and the world be our eternal practice.

Please share this!

Yoga Nidra: Emotions, Thoughts, and Beliefs

Yoga Nidra: Waking From The Dream

Yoga Nidra is a fascinating process of coming to know Self through the relaxing and mindful process of layered Awareness. Essentially, Yoga Nidra acts much like a guided meditation where the practitioner lies down, closes their eyes, and listens to the facilitator lead them through layers of Awareness, such as being aware of sensation, thoughts, emotions, etc. This has the effect of learning to observe all the changeable aspects of what we typically identify as, your ego elements like body, thoughts, emotions, etc., as the illuminating tools to help you practice experiencing your True Nature, that of Awareness itself. When rooted in this ground of your being, you continue to live this human life, but with greater perspective. You still are very aware of body, emotions, thoughts, etc, but Yoga Nidra helps to give you the perspective of what they are. Truly these elements are mere tools to help illuminate what I call your Both And Nature, the part of you that is BOTH pure consciousness (perusha) and form (pracriti), that is both that which is infinite and finite. Coming into this Both And Nature is another way of expressing the end goal of yoga as stated in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, to arrive at the place of grand Singularity, that of complete Oneness.

So this yogic Oneness is the goal and Nidra is the method. Nidra refers to that in between state, somewhere between waking and dreaming. Nidra is achieved through relaxed awareness and is the secret door that opens you to experience your True Nature. It’s as simple as listening and relaxing. In truth, what seems like sleep is actually helping us wake up to our True Nature. It sometimes takes a relaxing of the rigid confines of our rational thinking, perhaps the most pervasive and strong element of our ego, to realize that we are more than our ego.

What you listen to in a Yoga Nidra practice is all the things that filter into your Awareness. Mostly these are the elements of the ego. Understanding them as tools to illuminate our Awareness. This helps us to see things such as thoughts, beliefs, and emotions for what they are—parts of us that cannot define who we are but which point to our Divine essence. Though we may have thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, we are not thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. They are mere tools, games to play in the beautiful mortal experience, as we wake up to our Divine essence through this textured and beautiful thing called being human.

Don't Think Everything You Believe: Moving Past the Rational Mind and Understanding Thoughts, Emotions, and Beliefs

Thoughts, emotions, and beliefs are powerful elements in our lives. For many, they seem to rule our lives. Yoga Nidra is a powerful tool to understand our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs for what they are and begin to see them with a proper perspective.

Yoga Nidra is a Tantric practice. Tantra refers to a school of thought that says everything is part of a non-dualist great whole. In Tantra, the idea is that anything that suggests we are separate from anything else, is an illusion. Yoga Nidra explores perhaps our 5 greatest layers of the ego called the maya (illusion) kosha (sheath or body) By understanding our maya koshas, we can learn to not identify with the changeable parts of our beings but rather to use them as a way of exposing our True Self, Awareness.

The Pranayamaya deals in part with energy and emotions, the Manomaya kosha with mind thoughts and how thought leads to emotion, and the Vijnanamaya kosha, beliefs, dreams, the collective unconscious and even our own deep wisdom. Just like everything else in the maya kosha realms, our thoughts, emotions, and even beliefs change. To think of them as reality is a misidentification away from your True Nature, Awareness.By understanding your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs for what they are, you dismantle their control over you. Instead you begin to identify with Awareness that experiences emotions, thought, or belief, for example, without confounding your identity as that emotion, thought, or belief.

Like everything, learning to use an emotion as a method of experiencing your True Self may seem like a tall order. Of course it may take practice to be aligned with Awareness enough to become objective about harsh thoughts or emotions but hey, that's what we are practicing by taking this course, right?

The Realm of the Mind: Manomaya Kosha

Things like anxiety, fear, or heartbreak, can't co-exist while you are relaxed. That's big! It is one reason why we emphasize relaxation so often as we begin the Yoga Nidra process. When relaxed, you may then observe any emotion arise and see it for what it is: an interesting part of you that changes and that ultimately may help you grow greater Awareness. Not Truth, not who you are.

Practicing switching between perceived opposite emotions is a skillful way of stimulating your brain and allowing you to witness and be with, rather than react to, certain emotional states. Remember that sometimes this takes practice but can be very effective even from the first practice of doing this.

In the late 1950's, Joseph Wolpe added to Pavlov's work by developing a treatment for anxiety using counter-conditioning. He stated that anxiety symptoms were lessened or eliminated when stressors were presented gradually and also systematically and paired with a relaxation response. Relax and then address your emotion to see it with the right perspective. Remember you are Awareness that experiences emotion, not emotion itself. Yoga Nidra can help some practitioners deal with some of the things that give them stress and even trauma because Yoga Nidra helps you to be relaxed enough to observe all kinds of benign objects, like the sensation of your hands for example, as a way of learning to also witness things like stress and emotions with the same kind of objectivity. When practiced regularly, it weakens your stress response and instead you can merely observe something that otherwise would stress you out.

Habituation is when you bring attention to something that is persistent and in so doing the stimulation eventually loses its power to cause a reaction. It's like sleeping through white noise. Once your mind has heard the noise, can acknowledge it, it can stop becoming agitated by it and simply move on. It can relax. The sound (or other stimulation, read pain or emotions) may still exist, but they don't have the same power over your mind.

The Only Way To Get There Is To Be Here: Emotions and Beliefs

Failure to acknowledge where you are in life ironically keeps you locked in that place like a prisoner. Don't deny the emotion, for example. Rather, Yoga Nidra helps us to face whatever comes up for you and practice witnessing it. Therefore emotions will often lose their power to control your life.

Some cool things about the layer of beliefs, symbol, and dreams, the Vignanamaya kosha:

It lies beneath our rational mind. P.S. "rational" isn't Reality (with a capital R)--it's just the best way our brains seem to create an order in an otherwise chaotic world the best it can.

A compounded thought turns into a belief. Think it long enough and you actually believe it. Like everything else in this Universe, beliefs are neither True or not true. They are just beliefs. They come and go.

Archetypes are a fascinating way of examining the Vijnanamaya Kosha. When I think of a wise person, I think of Gandalf, the wizard from Lord of the Rings. He is my archetype I hold for my inner-wisdom. If I were to summon that wise person inside of me, the one that knows the answers and can tell me where to go, I'd think of Gandalf and see what he says. I know that Gandalf is really just the deep wisdom part of me.

Remember that what comes up when we examine our dreams, symbols, and archetypes, lies beneath our rational mind and therefore doesn't always make sense, nor does it need to. Just have fun with it and see if it speaks to you. If not, think of it as an interesting way to practice paying attention and move on. It's like examining your dreams for symbols that might represent something happening in the conscious realm. Just have fun with it.

As always, our primary objective with Yoga Nidra is to cultivate and identify as Awareness. Allow everything that presents itself as you welcome, recognize, and witness it, as a tool to practice Awareness.

RIP 21st Yoga and What's Next

I hope you’re doing well during these weeeeird times!! I hope you’re still taking deep breaths. I know I am.

Last week I personally finished my 14-Day Gratitude Challenge. It’s such a simple yet powerful practice. You can start whenever you want. It’s free and will probably only change your life, but whatever…

Something particularly sad occurred for me and many in Salt Lake City last week. On Friday afternoon my beloved home studio, 21st Yoga in Salt Lake City, Utah, announced that they would be closing its doors...forever.

I’m heartbroken. The casualties from COVID are legion.

I really, really loved that studio. I’ve owned and closed two yoga studios. For me running a studio was only matched in difficulty by having to close the studio. I’m sad for me. I’m sad for Lucy and everyone who made that place run so well, and I’m sad for the many people who practiced within those hallowed walls.

I want to offer a huuuuuge public shout out of love and gratitude to Lucy, the owner of 21st Yoga, who really did an incredible job with that studio. She provided a beautiful, non-judgemental, and caring place for so many to teach and practice. She truly made a safe haven for the community. She worked really hard to make it a place of inclusion, especially for the LGBTQ+ crowd. Lucy, with the help of her inimitable staff, kept a beautiful, clean, and welcoming studio. Huge, huge thanks to the anchors of that place, people like John Cottrell, Kim Dastrup, Austin Morrell, Jenny Wigham, and others.

Hats off and big, big, big round of applause for an incredible job.

I was one of the original teachers at 21st Yoga. After only a couple of months working there, I announced that I’d be moving to NYC, then for a vagabonding trip around the US and Europe, ultimately living in the South of France for a year. Nonetheless, every time I came back to offer a training, retreat, or to visit family, there was always a place for me to teach at 21st Yoga. I have always felt welcomed, appreciated, and loved at that studio. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

The teachers at 21st yoga are nothing short of family.

I’ll miss you dearly, 21st Yoga.

There was an indomitable energy at 21st Yoga. As you know, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only repurposed and redirected. So, what’s next for all that energy at that incredible studio? What’s next for the yoga community in Salt Lake City and for myself. Who knows but I’m sure something beautiful will arise from the incredible energy that had developed through 21st Yoga. Whatever happens going forward, I’ll always be grateful for 21st.

In the immediate, here’s the ways you can connect with me.

Yoga for Stiffer Bodies Instant Download

I’ve made a Yoga For Stiffer Bodies Instant Download that you can purchase on my website.

This is a 60-minute, full-spectrum yoga class which mobilizes joints, activates and stretches major muscle groups, and restores energy. This Is a moderately-paced yoga class with plenty of options for variations of poses. This Is yoga for however your body is today. In this class, you'll experience standing poses, gentle backbends, hip openers, twists, and forward folds. You'll leave this class feeling energized, alert, and calm.

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Online, Live Restore Yoga

Wednesday, May 6th at 10:00 am MDT

In this very gentle, Restore yoga practice, we’ll restore ourselves to wholeness using gentle mobilization and breath work (pranayama) to circulate energy. Then, we’ll change low-vibe energy in the form of muscular tension to high-vibe energy in the form of vitality by doing long, slow stretches. We’ll also set ourselves up on some support for some luxurious resting poses. I’ll be sharing some stories, chanting, and I’ll play my clarinet.

I’ll be recording the class so if you can’t make it, you can still receive a recording of the class and do it when it suits you. Enjoy this class from the comfort of your own home! You’ll want a yoga mat, a blanket, and a cushion (yoga bolster and blocks if you have them). Register on my website. You’ll receive a welcome email with the Zoom link to join our class. You’ll need a computer, laptop, smart phone, iPad, or tablet to attend this class. If you haven’t used Zoom before, it’s pretty simple.

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2 Online Yoga Nidra Classes, Wednesdays 6 pm MDT and Sundays 9 am MDT

This Wednesday May 6th 6–7:15 pm MDT. Duality vs Non-Duality

Our True Nature is a non-duelist awareness. Cool. What's non-duality? Well, duality deals with two things, this and that, as separate things. Non-duality melds the two opposites to understand that they equal a third, larger, and more expansive entity, larger than the sum of their parts. Like the combo of chocolate and peanut butter is exponentially much more than either chocolate or peanut butter alone. In this session we will use myths, stories, symbols, and the tool of opposites to explore the part of us that doesn't exist in duality. We will practice experiencing ourselves as the grand Singularity.

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Two Online Classes in Partnership with Kim Dastrup

Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12 pm MDT.

Kim and I share this dynamic asana class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12 pm MST. I usually teach Tuesdays and Kim usually teaches Thursdays. Class is by donation, though suggested donation is $10/class or you can buy a pass for the entire months for $50. The button below at the time of class to join. A donation link will be provided at the time of class.

Classes vary each week: Flow, Core, Deep Power, Gentle Flow, Restore, and teacher’s choice.

Usually an active class but appropriate for all levels.

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Private Online Yoga Classes

I’d love to meet with you regularly for your private, online yoga session. This can also be a private yoga group session. Together, we can meet your yoga needs, be that for strength, rehabilitation, calm and stress relief. I have a pro-quality studio set up at my house so you will almost feel like you’re at the studio. Plus, I can arrange to send you audio and video recordings as well as lesson plans for yoga homework!

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In-Person Socially-Distanced Classes Coming Soon

It’s starting to become safer to offer some socially distanced classes, limited to a smallish group of people. I’ll let you know when I have something put together.

In the meantime, thanks for reading my newsletter and blog. Thanks for your incredible support. These are crazy times to be sure and we all gotta take it a day at a time and keep breathing. We gotta put ourselves in a good place through yoga, meditation, and gratitude.

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Thich Nhat Hanh: A Once-in-a-lifetime Moment

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Here’s a moment I will never forget… 

Thich Nhat Hanh was going to be at an anti-war rally in Seoul, Korea and there was no way I was going to miss it. 

It was 2003, mere days after the US had declared war on Iraq. My wife at the time and I were living in Korea working as English teachers and studying Kouk Son Do, a form of meditation based on Korean Buddhism which was introduced to us by our friend and assistant director of our school, Moon Jin-Soon. Despite the anti-American sentiment in Korea because of America’s decision for war, I nonetheless wanted to demonstrate my desire for peace. 

We took a train 2.5 hours to Seoul, and headed to the large square to join more than 10,000 people at the peace rally. We quickly spied a group of buddhist monks in their grey habits. We recognizable them thanks to the fact that we had visited many buddhist temples and monasteries as part of our meditation practice. 

One of the monks noticed us as well. We were holding signs on which we had scrawled, “Americans for Peace” in bold letters. He met us with an easy, broad smile and introduced himself in excellent English. “No war. No nuclear,” he said warmly. We reciprocated and quickly became acquainted, sharing warmth and appreciation for each other. Soon crowds began gathering around us like flies and reporters started snapping photos. Our new monk friend squeezed between us and the three of us hoisted our signs for peace in the air in solitary proclamation.

Suddenly, the enormous crowd of more than 10,000 people hushed to an alarming silence as a different group of a dozen monks wearing brown habits took the stage. It was Thich Nhat Hanh, the world-famous Vietnamese Thien Buddhist monk and peace activist with a small group of monks. He stood before the 10,000-person crowd and gave a beautiful speech on peace and offered prayers, sang, and rang bells. He instructed us all to meditate on peace and think, “brotherhood, brotherhood,” as we inhaled and “peace, peace,” as we exhaled. Then he and his monks began a slow peace walk through a cordoned off portion of the crowd. 

I had read several of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books and had admired his work for many years. As he slowly came closer and closer to where I stood in the crowd, each step a prayer for peace, I was quiet on the outside but screaming in excitement on the inside. I felt equal parts humbled and star-struck. He was an undeniable rockstar in the Buddhist world and I was thrilled to be experience this powerhouse peacemaker in person. 

As Thich Nhat Hanh slowly led his intimate procession through the silent crowd, our new monk friend leaned in close to us and whispered, “Stay close to me.” I looked at his face and he had a glint in his eyes, like he was planning some sort of surprise. 

We stood and watched in reverence as Thich Nhat Hanh passed with his monks. Suddenly, I felt someone gently pushing me from behind. Surprised, I turned my head and was met with a huge smile from our new monk friend. He gracefully and assertively lifted the barriers that kept the crowds back and gently ushered us to join the back of the slow processional, placing himself in the rear. Before I even realized what was happening, I had become a part of Thich Nhat Hanh’s peace posse. Holding my “Americans for Peace” sign at my heart, I walked silently through the crowd as 10,000 pairs of eyes looked directly and silently at me, our heart repeating silently in tandem, "brotherhood, brotherhood... peace, peace..."

Then, breaking the silence, I heard, “Scott!” I looked into the crowd in complete surprise to see my friend Moon Jin-Soon. Her presence at the rally was a complete surprise to me. As I passed, she reached out her hand. I grabbed it, tears streaming down both of our cheeks. 

Thich Nhat Hanh led the procession in a circle and eventually, after several minutes, back up on the stage in the center of the enormous crowd. I stood there on the stage on display before thousands of people knowing that this was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. 

Once Thich Nhat Hanh had finished his remarks, prayed again for peace on behalf of all of us, everyone uniformly bowed, remained held in a second of silence, then erupted in uproarious cheers. 

Surreal.  

The ceremony over, we were instantly flooded with hordes of people patting us on the back and taking more pictures. Onto the stage ran our friend, Moon Jin-Soon. We embraced each other and began crying again, feeling unified in our desire for peace and grateful for our friendship. 

The three of us trained home together happily sharing stories and basking in the love of the day. On the way home, Moon Jin-Soon told us that the monk who had befriended us and ushered us into the march was a pretty big deal in Korean Buddhism. It was providence that we happened to meet him.

I’m grateful for peace. I’m grateful for Thich Nhat Hanh. I’m grateful for my opportunity to participate in that peace rally. I’m grateful for friendship. I’m grateful for love that defies cultures, time, and generations. I’m grateful for providence. I’m grateful for Thich Nhat Hanh. I’ll always be grateful for and remember that experience until the day I die.

What are your once-in-a-lifetime moments that you're grateful for?

Learning to Fail

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Some of the greatest lessons in my life have been due to my failures. You? What are some of your BEST failures, I’m talking business, school, relationships, the whole gamut? I guarantee they have also been some of your best teachers, even if we can’t see that . . . yet.

Photo by Alex Adams

Freaked to Fail

In high school I remember being so incredibly afraid to one day open my own business because…. what if I FAILED! Of course I had an extremely limited idea of what success looked like and what it took to find success.

Well, fast forward a few decades and I’ve opened and failed businesses. I've learned not to be afraid of failure. Sure, it's hard and nobody want's to fail but I’ve picked myself up from some very hard places and moved on. It's was because of some of these failures in many aspects of life that I’ve learned what I need to do in order to enjoy some great success in so many avenues of life, including making a living doing what I absolutely LOVE which is teaching yoga and meditation. Making a living doing what I love= one big, fat success.

I think about all kinds of things I've failed at from relationships to jobs to ideas. Each one has taught me an invaluable lessons. I’ve since learned not to be afraid of failures. They are powerful lessons that have shaped me into who I am today.

One of My Favorite Failures

When I was 19 I needed to earn some money for college so I was determined to do whatever it took, no matter how unpleasant the job was. Well, I got a temp job working on a construction site. I was utterly horrible at construction but was too damn proud to quit. Eventually the foreman fired me for my ineptitude. At the time I was incensed but I later realized how much of a favor he did for me. I wasn't serving ANYONE at that job, least of all myself. He freed me to go and look for my next job, one that I did so well that in a matter of months, the owner of the small company actually asked me if I wanted to become partners.

My Yoga Nidra Teacher Teaching Taught Me to Fail

I used to own a few yoga studios. They both failed. One of the highlights of owning these studios was when I was able to proudly host one of my greatest Yoga Nidra teachers, Dr. Richard Miller, for a weekend of workshops. Ironically, despite the great success of the workshops, he was the last big event we hosted before we had to announce that we were closing our doors. Concluding the weekend of workshops was an intimate dinner with a few teachers and Richard Miller. I came a few minutes late because I had to have a meeting with my entire staff letting them know that we were going to be closing our doors. When I told this unfortunate truth to Richard Miller, he leaned in close to me and without hesitation said, “congratulations!”

At the time I was taken aback, but with reflection the lessons I’ve learned from that experience are like gold in my hand. Not being weighed down by trying to make a brick-and-mortar business stay afloat has freed me up to concentrate on projects like my Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training, Yoga Teacher Mentor Program, and projects like my Yoga Nidra Scripts booklet.

When I look back at owning the studios, I met my wife at that yoga studio and I often tell her that if I went through all that stress, heartache, and trouble only to have met here then it would have been worthing it. That’s true but the incredible gifts I’ve learned extend beyond just finding the love of my life. Ironically, I’ve learned so much about owning and running a business by all the ways that my previous business didn’t work. Both studios I opened are STILL running, but with different owners. I suppose I should be proud to have helped created such beautiful places to practice yoga. When I roll by those studios, I think, “Good on ya! I hope you’re doing well,” and “MAN! I’m happy not to own those anymore.”

Failures are perhaps some of our biggest teachers so maybe we don’t have to be so afraid of them. Maybe we can even have fun with them and dare I say, even be grateful for them. Inevitably, they help us evolve into into our highest being.

What are the failures you’re grateful for?

Yoga Nidra Scripts and Yoga Nidra Trainings

Why Yoga Nidra Scripts?

I’ve been creating Yoga Nidra scripts and Yoga Nidra Trainings for years and would love to share a little about what Yoga Nidra is, how it can heal, the value of a script, and how to move beyond the script to truly meet the needs of yourself and your students.

Yoga Nidra is the transformational so-called “yoga of sleep,” a very approachable yet effective way of experiencing the Oneness of your being through the process of a relaxing journey through deepening layers of Awareness. The fact that Yoga Nidra is so easy to practice and often leaves practitioners feeling rested, illuminated, and calm, makes it a popular, simple, and effective way of exploring one’s higher Self. Yoga Nidra is like napping your way to enlightenment!

Yoga Nidra may be easy and relaxing to practice but teaching it effectively can be difficult. I’ve spent many years, and countless hours learning how to teach Yoga Nidra effectively. I’ve logged many thousands of hours teaching Yoga Nidra and have learned through trial-and-error what best to do and NOT to do in order to hopefully facilitate an effective Yoga Nidra experience for myself and for students. In the spirit of helping others learn to teach Yoga Nidra quicker than it took me, I recently took 20 Yoga Nidra practices that I thought could be helpful on a broad variety of subjects and compiled 20 scripts is designed to put the words of effective, and what I hope are skillful, Yoga Nidra practices in your hands so that you and your students can also benefit from these practices.

The Healing Power of Yoga Nidra

Yoga Nidra is but one practice that leads people to experience their highest Selves and to come to the ultimate state of Oneness with all things. The explicit purpose for Yoga Nidra is to layer your attention through the illusions of the ego (the mayakoshas) in order to dis-identify as the ego and instead identify as Awareness itself. Doing so heals what I feel is the fundamental human problem which is feeling separate from Source.

I believe that wellness is the byproduct of Awareness and as such, the Awareness a practitioner may experience through Yoga Nidra can catalyze myriad other kinds of transformations in many practical and useful ways such as help with stress, grief, setting goals, starting your day, getting great sleep, achieving a state of relaxed alertness, and even creating abundance in your life. These are just a few of the many topics you’ll find in this volume of Yoga Nidra scripts.

These Yoga Nidra scripts are valuable because a Yoga Nidra facilitator works hard to create the right conditions for relaxation and the layered Awareness to occur. Plus, once that state is successfully achieved, a facilitator can then use their knowledge of the mayakoshas (layers of the ego) to effectively work on whatever needs attention, be that something physical, energetic, mental, or even spiritual or unconscious. I’ve organized these scripts in a way that hopefully makes that process automatic and easy.

Yoga Nidra Training

Perhaps you’d like to learn how to create your own scripts or learn to improvise a Yoga Nidra class to meet particular needs and learn how to lead yourself through a Yoga Nidra practice without using a script. Reading a script might be perfect for you as you learn to find your own voice teaching Yoga Nidra. I truly believe that each teacher has a unique quality about them and a special ability to benefit the lives of the students they come in contact with. There’s really nobody else who can teach like you do. While a Yoga Nidra facilitator can be skillful or not skillful about leading the practice, there’s no “right” way to teach. There are certain important principles about what Yoga Nidra is and what the practice is pointing to. Once you understand that, you’ll find your own way to arrive there and will be able to lead your students there effectively using your own voice. This is why I’ve developed in-person and online Yoga Nidra trainings.

I love to teach live Yoga Nidra teacher trainings because I love to see how people are using this practice. I see so many different kinds of people in my trainings including, yoga and meditation teachers, reiki and other energy workers, geriatric health professionals, high-performance coaches, high school teachers and counselors, mental health therapists, parents, and even family and divorce lawyers, because each person understands how this transformative practice can help the part of the world that they are blessed to work with. I’m also really happy to offer my online Yoga Nidra teacher training so that people all over the world can learn the principles of effectively leading a Yoga Nidra class along a timeline and location that works best for them.

My trainings explore the principles and fundamentals of Yoga Nidra to first outline the “what and why” of Yoga Nidra in order to then understand the “how” of Yoga Nidra. I find that organizing the trainings in this way enables teachers to facilitate this transformational practice with the power of doing so in their own voice to match their own specific needs as well as those of their students. Also, I strongly believe that once you know what you are aiming for, you will likely find your own pathway to get there, one that feels perfect for you. Eventually, you’ll be able to create your own scripts and improvise a practice that is powerful and necessary to yourself and your students. The aim for my trainings is to help those who are passionate (or even curious) about facilitating Yoga Nidra and learning to move beyond these scripts and create their own scripts as well as conduct 1:1 Yoga Nidra Dyads, a completely improvised experience based on the real-time awareness of their students.

In my latest edition of my online Yoga Nidra training, I’ve included a PDF of over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts to the training to help teachers begin to lead effective Yoga Nidra classes right away while they are learning to find their own voice.

Online Yoga Nidra Training: Now's The Time

Online Yoga Nidra Training

I hope you are safe and not bored to insanity given this global pandemic.

Perhaps now is the time to finally learn how to become an incredible Yoga Nidra teacher. Yoga Nidra is the process of understanding the beautiful innate wholeness that is inside of you that IS you in a way that also promotes deep relaxation, calm, and nourishing rest. It’s truly like napping your way to enlightenment!

Plus, the world needs Yoga Nidra now more than ever to help us all be at our best during these crazy unstable times.

I’ve developed an online Yoga Nidra training that prepares you to understand not only how to lead effective and powerful Yoga Nidra experiences for yourself and others, but also teaches you the fundamental principles of the practice so that you can learn to customize the experience to meet the needs of whomever you’re teaching.

While you’re learning to develop your own voice, I’ve included a PDF booklet of over 100 pages of great Yoga Nidra scripts.

My training is the audio and audio/video recordings of a live training so you will have the benefit of hearing many of the same questions and comments from other participants. You are always welcome to send me questions and comments along the way.

This training is an instant download and you can accomplish it on your own timeline. You can start teaching Yoga Nidra right away with the scripts as you’re learning how to develop your own scripts.

With This Training You Can Offer Online Yoga Nidra Classes

This training will pay for itself in no time! Personally, while I’m quarantined at home I’m earning more than $400 USD a week offering Yoga Nidra classes virtually via Zoom. Plus, I’m going to be offering a “how to” workshop about offering virtual classes very soon.

Training Costs Only $345

I know that the Wellness Industry has been hit hard with this pandemic. My sincere desire is that you learn how to lead this practice effectively so you can begin to work with your own clients and students and share this incredible practice in a way that also supports you spiritually, emotionally, and even financially during these crazy times. I am also offering to split the payments into three monthly payments if that would help you to make this investment. That and I stand by my work so if you don’t love it, I also offer a no-questions money-back guarantee.

“I just wanted to mail to say that I completed the training at the end of last week - wow, just wow, I really enjoyed each element of the training (especially the talk between everyone about their own experiences). The training was a very timely purchase and study time during this weird time we find ourselves in....it’s definitely helped me in staying aligned and in the vibration I need right now.”

— Bev R.

“I just completed your on-line Yoga Nidra TT. It was truly a wonderful, enlightening experience. Very grateful to have had the opportunity.”

— Chrissy W.

This 20-hour Yoga Nidra intensive is designed to deepen your knowledge of Self through Yoga Nidra as you learn to guide yourself and others through effective and varied Yoga Nidra practices. It is perfect both for teachers interested in teaching Yoga Nidra as well as students who simply want to deepen their practice of Yoga Nidra.

This intensive will be available through audio/video recordings and through a manual in the form of a PDF.

What’s in this course:

• A library of Yoga Nidra training that you can access whenever you’d like

• A deeper understanding of Self through Yoga Nidra

• A course of profound relaxation

• A full audio/video recording of the training for practice and continued learning

• Over a hundred pages of Yoga Nidra scripts to use

• Yoga Immersion PDF workbook (60+ pages)

• A certificate of completion

• Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Credit (if needed). This counts as 20 hours of non-contact hours.

Some of the topics we will cover:

• Philosophy of Yoga Nidra

• Myths and Chants

• Yoga Nidra for Healing/Trauma/Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Performance

• The Power of Visualizations

• Subtle Body Study and Practice

• The Koshas: Our Greatest Tools for Awareness

• Supportive Pranayama and Mindfulness Techniques (which you can print and give to your students)

• Incorporating Yoga Nidra into Yoga

• Effective Teaching Methods

• Role as Teacher

• Self Practice

• Group Teaching

• One-on-one Teaching

By the end of this immersion you will be ready to teach Yoga Nidra!

The scripts included with the purchase of this training are as follows:

• Yoga Nidra for Grief

• Yoga Nidra for Goals

• Yoga Nidra for Healing

• Yoga Nidra for Sleep

• Yoga Nidra for Grounding

• Yoga Nidra for Sankalpa (Intentions)

• Basic Yoga Nidra Practice: Body

• Yoga Nidra for Energy and Chakras

• Yoga Nidra for Anxiety Management

• Full Yoga Nidra Practice (all Koshas)

• Yoga Nidra for Heart Energy

• Yoga Nidra for Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Relaxed Alertness

• Yoga Nidra for your Trinity Nature

• Yoga Nidra for Compassion

• Yoga Nidra for Abundance

• Yoga Nidra to Start Your Day

• Yoga Nidra for Bliss (Anandamaya Kosha)

• Yoga Nidra for Happiness

• Yoga Nidra for Inner Wisdom

only $345!

Quraran-Town, Unique Opportunities, and The Strangest Cocktail Ever

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Here we are at yet another week of living in Quaran-town (I wish I came up with that, thanks Tara T. for that one).

I hope that you’re able to keep your spirits high. Let me remind you that we gotta dig deep in these crazy times. Our attitude about this is going to shape the outcome dramatically, both for ourselves and the world.

This morning I’m extremely grateful for:

• Morning coffee date with Seneca, my wife, co-parent, and partner-in-crime

• Another beautiful spring morning

• YOU, for opening and reading. I really appreciate your presence with me on this journey of life

More about item 3

This weird time in our history has certainly created some “unusual opportunities,” as my friend Chris S. has said. People are out of work, plans and progress are on hold, and there’s a lot of enduring fear around simply staying safe. Oh, and there’s boredom. It’s like the weirdest cocktail ever. Here’s how the recipe would read:

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The Corona Cocktail

Ingredients:

• 1 oz fear

• 2 oz liquid courage

• 2 oz whole-lotta-love

• 1 oz “Cancelled Plans” bitters

• 1 Tbsp lonely lemon juice

• Lemon wedge

• 3 oz Boredom Tonic, served flat, of course

• ½ tsp Isopropyl Alcohol

• 1 oz aloe vera

• Pinch of spring blossoms

• Margarita salt

• 2 surgical gloves

• N-95 surgical mask

• 6 ft. straw

• Thermometer

• Square of toilet paper

Instructions:

• While wearing the surgical gloves and mask, prepare a margarita glass by first rubbing it with the Isopropyl alcohol.

• Allow glass to dry completely then wet the rim with some of the aloe vera before dipping the rim of the class in the margarita salt giving the drink its “corona.”

• Place the liquid ingredients including the rest of the aloe vera (but NOT the Isopropyl alcohol) into a martini shaker and shake vigorously, either by hand or with the help of an EARTHQUAKE (Salt Lake City had an earthquake 3 weeks ago), for an indeterminate amount of time until the CDC says it’s ok to stop.

• Pour into glass.

• Using the thermometer, ensure that the liquid is below 98.6 degrees before continuing contact with the drink.

• Practice social distancing from your glass by using a 6-ft straw inserted into a small hole made in the front of your mask.

• Garnish with the pinch of spring blossoms, lemon wedge and serve on a square of toilet paper.

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But rather than digressing into day-drinking, let me offer this…

As you know, I make my living by writing, teaching yoga, hosting in-person and online yoga and meditation trainings and retreats. I feel very fortunate to have made a living doing what I love to do for almost 20 years. Yet, these times have presented me with an “unusual opportunity” to give back and offer more resources for free, by donation, or at a reduced price because we all need these valuable resources that help us practice being our best selves during these uncertain times. That and I think yoga, meditation, and some thought-provoking writing present a helluva better solution to our situation than day-drinking.

That’s why I am offering things like my free Tranquility Tool Kit that includes: 2 downloadable yoga videos, 2 Yoga Nidra practices, links to heart-lifting music from myself and friends, as well as some excerpts of my writing to help remind us of our own humanity. I’m also inviting many of my online classes to be by donation so that if you need a yoga class but times are tough financially, you can simply offer good vibes or pay it forward to someone else in some other fashion.

One of my most important missions in life is to offer ways for people to practice being their best selves through yoga and meditation. I am so fortunate to get to make my living doing this, but now I want to give back to YOU who have given me so much through attending classes, downloading my courses online, buying my book, attending my retreats, and simply opening and reading my emails. It means so much, I can’t even tell you.

Here’s the beautiful irony, as much as I try to give back, I am gifted with an increase of generosity comin’ back my way. What an incredible gift! I can’t tell you how immensely grateful I am, thank you, thank you, thank you! It is not only humbling, but reminds me that this bitter cocktail is softening our hearts and helping us to love each other. What humbles me is how despite social distancing, this Coronavirus is helping us to reach out and love each other in creative ways with support, encouragement, creativity, laughs, and resources.

I LOVE YOU! I feel your love back to me.

Thank you.

“Love you more.”

“No, I love YOU more.”

“No, I love YOU, even more”

“Impossible. Can’t love anyone as much as I love you.”

In the spirit of offering yet more love…

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Gratitude

One of the best practices we can do right now during these crazy times is to practice regular gratitude. Gratitude is an easy antidote to so many limiting states of mind including, selfishness, fear, and discontent. Gratitude is a wonderful practice that brings us into the present moment and I believe that the secrets of the Universe (including how to beat Coronavirus) can be accessed through simple and regular presence.

Around Thanksgiving time, I offered for the first time a free 14-day gratitude challenge and I’d like to offer it again.

To do the Gratitude Challenge all you do is every day, wake up and write down three things you’re grateful for. Then, choose one of those things and turn it into a small paragraph. You can also share one or all of the things you are grateful for with someone else. Simple. In fact, at the beginning of this email, I followed the exact format for the Gratitude Challenge.

The last time I did this, there were so many people who completed the challenge and wrote to tell me what a magical practice it was for them and how much they enjoyed it. In fact, about two weeks ago, I got an email from a student and friend of mine in NYC who took the gratitude challenge and loved it so much she never stopped. She emailed me to say that she was on day 124

So, I’m offering another gratitude challenge. It starts whenever you register. How about now?

The challenge is simple but will leave you feeling great during these uncertain times. Continued exposure to gratitude will begin to change your character. Plus, gratitude is even more contagious than Coronavirus. There’s really no cure for it but more gratitude.

Registration is free and will give you access to receive supportive emails from me every day of the challenge.

Register today and pass this challenge along to your nearest and dearest. Share the love and make gratitude contagious.

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Yoga Nidra: Let Go and Be

Yoga Nidra is often called the “yoga of sleep,” however Yoga Nidra is more about waking up, wakening up to your ultimate Being. In my online Yoga Nidra classes and my online Yoga Nidra trainings, I discuss how the ancient yoga principles found in the Yoga Sutras help us find a practice of waking up.

According to the Yoga Sutras, the natural challenges in life provide us with refinement or Tapas, translated as the heat necessary for our transformation into our highest beings. Tapas is the process of waking up to our True Nature.

This heat inevitably leads us toward Swadhyaya, or self-knowledge. Self knowledge is both knowing how to best handle the Tapas, as well as what the Tapas reveals, which is the infinite Being waking up to know itself in this physical form and in this life. With greater self-knowledge you qualify for deeper tapas, then deeper self-knowledge, etc.

Beyond this cycle of growth and self-knowledge is the the ultimate step called Ishvarapranidhana, which means to lay it down at the feet of God. The ultimate step is to transcend this cycle of refinement and self-knowledge by enabling our ultimate act of free will which is to completely let go of control and submit to things just as they are. To merely be. Doing so up-levels our consciousness and then allows us to move back into the cycle of refinement and self-knowledge with greater understanding about what that process is doing. It’s like rebooting your life where everything is the same and yet your relationship to it is completely different.

Yoga Nidra is a method of relaxing inquiry into Self where through deepening relaxation and layered Awareness, you practice releasing all which doesn't’ serve you to see it for exactly what it is. With this perspective, you no longer identify AS that thing and can allow it to be. Because everything in this Universe has an orbit, you’ll find that as you stop clinging or resisting certain things in your life and allow them to just BE, they find their own expression and move along their orbit.

You have a magnificent capacity to simply BE!

I made up a myth that I want to share with you that will hopefully make these teachings come alive.

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Yoga Nidra Training

Yoga Nidra is the relaxing and mystical journey deep into the inner-realms of consciousness where through a guided meditation, you get to experience your True Nature, something that feels one with all things, infinite, and whole.

Such wholeness leads naturally to profound healing, boundless equanimity, and and understanding of your life, unparalleled by every-day thinking. Stress, trauma, and scarcity seem insignificant after you've experienced the part of you that is infinitely larger than any of these smaller experiences. Truly, through Yoga Nidra you see into the vastness of the Universe that is within you.

Learn this transformative practice for your own soul evolution as well as learning how to lead others through this life-changing practice. This could be the most important work you do in a great long time.

This essential training is designed for those who wish experience the unparalleled magnificence of their True Self through Yoga Nidra, to deepen their knowledge of the practice Yoga Nidra by learning its philosophy, and learn to teach it. It’s a fascinating journey into self that gives you the tools to help others also make this deep, personal journey. This is an engaging, fun, and in-depth look at all things Yoga Nidra.

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Weekly Live Online Yoga Nidra Classes

Now 2 classes weekly: Wednesday 6 pm and Sunday 9 am MST!

All classes are recorded so you can join live or watch later. Each participant receives the recordings to build your Yoga Nidra library.

Buy a pass, 4 classes for $40 or pay a drop-in for $12. If you buy a pass, you will be automatically signed up for both Wednesday and Sunday classes unless you indicate to me that you’d prefer either one or the other.

There is immense power in practicing together. These classes allow you to join from anywhere in the world. And because they are recorded and each of the classes are emailed to you after the class, this allows you to register and watch the session later as well as build your own digital Yoga Nidra library.

Tranquility Tool Kit

Blessings to you! I sincerely hope that you and your family are doing well and coping with the reality and myriad and often strange circumstances that the COVID-19 pandemic is presenting to this world.

My family and I are doing well. This time of quarantine has made us come closer not only proximally, but emotionally as well. The other evening we made a special meal and opened one of our nice bottles of wine that we had been saving for a special occasion. After, we cranked the music and had a dance party. Truly this is love in the time of COVID-19.

I hope that you are able to find a greater love for self and others during this unique time.

I want to remind us all that we CAN do hard things. YOU can do hard things

This is it, my friend. This is the time for all of us to apply all of the lessons we’ve learned from our yoga and meditation practices, as well as our previous life lessons. This is the time to practice doing those things that help us find stillness and hope despite fear, uncertainty, and even illness.

Perhaps, through all of this, we may open up our minds and hearts to see and learn what we may become through this experience, both individually and collectively.

“It’s not about whether you win or lose. It’s about whether or not at the end of the day, you can still stand up and sing.” David Whyte

This is the time to dig deep into our tool kit and use everything we’ve got to keep our spirits high.

Tranquility Tool Kit

I’ve compiled a free tool kit that you can use any time you need to keep your spirits high. Here’s what’s in this tool kit.

Click above to download your FREE digital Tranquility Tool kit

• For stress: Yoga Nidra for Stress recording (34 minutes)

• For sleep: Yoga Nidra for Sleep recording (25 minutes)

• To help you breathe: Stress Free breathing practices

• To relax and connect to your body: Gentle Yoga Practice (60 minutes)

• To move, strengthen, and erase stress from your body: Moderate/Intermediate Yoga Practice (60 minutes)

• Feel-good music for these times:

  • “Let It Be” by Megan Peters and Scott Moore

  • Link to some incredible musicians’ Facebook and recordings of music

  • Megan Peters

  • John Louviere (find his Cabin Fever Covers on March 22, 2020)

  • Here’s a link to an amazing musician, MNEK, from Britain, who wrote and produced some absolutely STUNNING acapella songs about Coronavirus that are simultaneously hilarious and incredibly soulful.

    • “Bored”

    • “Quarantine”

    • “Selfisolation”

    • “Stay Your Ass Indoors”

• Reading pleasure: Selected posts from my blog

  • Walking Into The Fire

  • Seeing the Finger of God: New Directions in Jazz

  • On The Corner of Justice and Compassion

  • Lionel Richie is My Guru

  • Grand Theft Auto: A Study in Mindfulness

  • Part 1

  • Part 2

• Story Time

  • Here’s a recording of an evening of storytelling. (May not be suitable for children) Very personal stories in front of an intimate group about revelation, rebirth, and why heavy metal matters.
    
    
    

There is no better time than now to employ all the tools in our tool kit This is the time that we’ve been preparing for. It’s time to dive deep into your tool belt and use everything you’ve got.

Blessings! Stay safe. Stay sane.

What To Remember When Waking

Awakening With Yoga Nidra, the “Yoga of Sleep”

I love Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra uses the “technology” of the Nidra state, that hypnotic state between waking and dreaming, to enter into an experience of being that isn’t available to us in our regular waking life. Shamanic, religious, and even psychological methods use this state as a way of discovering deeper truths about ourselves. Yoga Nidra is a beautiful and relaxing pathway toward awakening.

I love this poem by David Whyte because like many good poems it can speak to many different things at once. When read from the context of awakening through Yoga Nidra or any other meditative practice, it has a particular poignance.

Enjoy!

What to Remember When Waking

by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,

coming back to this life from the other

more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world

where everything began,

there is a small opening into the new day

which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough

for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window

toward the mountain presence of everything that can be

what urgency calls you to your one love?

What shape waits in the seed of you

to grow and spread its branches

against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?

In the trees beyond the house?

In the life you can imagine for yourself?

In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

from The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press

Walking Into The Fire

I hope you are healthy and sane during these crazy times. The COVID-19 pandemic continues and has presented new and varied challenges for everyone.

I wrote the following story years ago but have recently edited it and I think posting it may be well-timed considering how we are all experiencing a refiner's fire in this moment of global calamity.

This global pandemic is changing us. It will help us birth a new version of ourselves and humanity, one that up-levels our consciousness.

But first, the fire.

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Ever feel mired in life, like things have spun out of control or the way to move forward is lost to you? I often think in times like this we can gain immense clarity by walking straight into the fire. And by fire I mean going through something. Something intense and transformational. After being tempered by that fire, you’ll most likely find that the unessential gets burned away and what remains is something you can call Truth.

Sometimes you choose the fire and other times the fire chooses you. The fire could be a yoga class, a journey, a ceremony, an illness, a divorce, a new job, a birth, or a death. I can almost guarantee that over the course of your life, you have seen and will see this refiner’s fire in myriad forms. In part, the purpose of this fire is to make you seriously uncomfortable. That’s the point to wake you up from the numb of normal or being anesthetized by easy. Sometimes The Fatemaker makes us walk on hot coals to get us to pay attention.

In yoga philosophy the Sanskrit word tapas means the heat necessary for transformation. Since time out of mind, and through many cultures and spiritual traditions, people have used heat in sacred ceremony as a way of powerfully transforming people’s body, mind, and spirit.

Several years ago, I was in a funk— feeling very stuck with some deeply personal issues. Everything I was doing to help gain clarity in my life seemed fruitless. Then, my good friend Wendy, a wise friend and long-time student of mine who has a deep practice in Native American spirituality, invited me to attend a sweat lodge ceremony she was hosting at her house. She told me that a trusted medicine man she knew would be in town in a week or so and would be officiating the ceremony. I felt that this invitation to do this ceremony was providence, that the Universe was offering me a powerful answer to my life’s circumstances and perhaps I could gain some clarity. I said yes. I decided that what I needed was to walk into the fire.

A sweat lodge ceremony is sort of like burning down the forest to see through the trees and to illuminate the stars and see the mountains around you so you can forge a path forward.

The heat of the ceremony is a ritual, a physical action that transforms body, mind, and spirit. This ceremony allows you to sweat away all impurities on every level: physical, energetic, conscious, and spiritual. Just like yoga, the transformation may start on the physical level but since everything is inextricably connected, transformation happens on all fronts. You can’t change one thing without it changing everything.

Previously, I had attended and even conducted dozens of sweat lodge ceremonies. I almost always conduct a sweat during the yoga retreats that I host a few times a year at my uncle’s cabin in the Uinta Mountains in Utah. My uncle learned the ceremony from Lakota elders, and taught the ceremony to me. Ours are geared mostly toward beginners, so they end up being hot enough to get your sweat on, but certainly not as intense as many other sweats. They typically run about an hour, yet they can be quite transformational. Many students have told me how they attribute some deep progress, insight, or change that they’ve made in their lives to the catalytic effect of one of these sweat lodge ceremonies at my yoga retreat, so I assumed that I knew more or less what I was about to experience.

I was wrong.

The day of the ceremony came and I met Wendy at her house, sometime in the early afternoon. Joining the ceremony were the medicine man, Leonard, another officiator, and a group of 7-8 other participants, most of whom I didn’t know.

Sweat Lodge at My Uncle’s Cabin

The sweat lodge ceremony was planned to take place in Wendy’s backyard. The lodge structure itself looked sturdy, though it was clear by its appearance that it had been used many times. It resembled a small dome-tent, big enough for maybe 4 people to lie down in comfortably and was low enough that you would most likely touch your head if you were sitting up straight. It was erected by using strong branches and thick blankets that now smelled like the smoke that they had breathed from countless ceremonies.

The lodge was built upon bare ground and in the center of the lodge was a hole dug in the earth used to hold a few dozen football-sized stones that would be heated and placed into the lodge to produce the heat to make us sweat. There are no openings to the lodge except a flap on the front that serves as the only door to get in or out, and which is closed for most of the ceremony. Once inside with the flap closed, the lodge feels very intimate and dark, like a womb.

Indeed, the structure of the sweat lodge represents the womb of Mother Earth—the Great Turtle. A sweat lodge ceremony is meant to help a person symbolically climb back into the womb of the Earth to get back into right-relationship with Source, their origin, the Mother. Alignment with Source gives clarity. Clarity reveals direction. Direction produces action.

In Wendy’s backyard, 20 or so feet from the lodge, was a large fire pit with enough wood to make an imposing fire. Next to it was a mound of a few dozen football-sized stones. Wendy explained that the stones represent the bones of Mother Earth and would transform into the agent of fire during our ceremony. Inside the lodge there would be no fire, only the hot stones. We were instructed to pray to these stones. We picked up these medicine stones and held them to our hearts as we closed our eyes to whisper our prayers to them before placing them on the logs in the fire pit to burn. Then we lit the fire and stood by as the flames devoured the stones.

We tended the fire for several hours keeping the stones in the hottest part of the fire using pitchforks, rakes, and shovels, often singeing the hairs on our shins and forearms. After several hours of steady burning, the fire had been reduced to coals and had transferred its magical heat into the stones, which now glowed a pulsing, deep crimson. The stones were almost indistinguishable from the coals of the spent fire. The alchemy of the fire had turned them from bone to spirit.

Now it was time to enter into the lodge. It was early evening, maybe 5 or 6 pm. We prepared to enter into the lodge by stripping down to bathing suits, though Wendy donned a ceremonial dress that was used just for sweats lodge ceremonies. Standing outside of the lodge, we commenced a sacred silence, formed a neat line, and entered the structure one-by-one, starting with Leonard, by kneeling at the door and saying, “Mitakuye Oyasin,” a Lakota word meaning, “to all my relations.” My uncle taught me that this phrase invokes the spirit of all of my relatives— past, present, and future— as well as all spiritual beings who guide me on my spiritual journey through life. By saying “Mitakuye Oyasin” I invited the congress of my entire spirit tribe to assemble, to witness, and participate in my transformation during this ceremony. I watched the 5 or six others ahead of me kneel and whisper this incantation. When it came to my turn, I kneeled to enter the lodge and I couldn’t help but think of my grandpa, who had been dead only a few years and who, in his neat and orderly way, died exactly on his 95th birthday. He was one of the sharpest and most gracious, and loving people I’ve been blessed to have in my life and If I have a guardian angel following me around, it’s probably him. A converted and devout Mormon, I wondered if he would be in the ceremony with me.

We crawled in and formed a circle inside the perimeter of the lodge, our backs hunched forward, almost touching the walls. Our circle was a counsel, no person elevated over another. It made me think of the circle of life, the circle of past, present, and future relatives joining me in spirit during this ceremony.

Once we were situated inside, an officiator began to squat-shuffle his way in and out of the lodge using deer antlers to carry each of the red-hot stones, one-by-one, from the coals to carefully arrange them in the shallow pit located in the middle of the lodge. Arranging and amassing these stones took several minutes during which I sat quiet, almost hypnotized, staring at the glowing red rocks which seemed almost to melt into liquid magma, the boiling blood of Mother Earth. As the mound of hot stones grew, I could feel their heat pressing into my legs resting crossed-legged on the bare earth a mere 18 inches away. Not all of the stones were brought into the sweat lodge. Many of them were kept burning next to the coals in the fire pit so they could stay hot and be brought into the lodge intermittently later during different stages of the ceremony to renew the heat.

After the initial round of stones were in place, the officiator closed the flap that served as the only door, and the lodge plunged into blackness except for the deep, red glow of the stones. Immediately, the medicine man began to ladle water onto the hot stones making them hiss angrily like threatening rattlesnakes. A wave of searing heat quickly smacked me in the face and I reeled feeling as though all the air inside the lodge had been suddenly sucked out.

I sat among strangers, swallowed by heat and darkness, blinking wildly as I gulped down hot air which began to boil me from the inside. Within only a minute or so, my pores had opened and my entire body shimmered with hot sweat, cascading down my back, dripping into my eyes and off the tip of my nose, hitting the earth with tapping thuds.

The medicine man began to play a drum in a fast staccato. As if on cue, my core temperature rose and my heart began pounding in my ears, almost matching his drum. Leonard sang in loud and feral syllables, a language I did not understand, one of pure spirit.

After many minutes, he stopped singing and drumming and began imploring the Great Spirit, Father Sun, Mother Earth, the souls of the living and the dead, inviting the spirits of the elements, the stars, and our ancestors to join us in this ceremony of darkness and fire. Once the medicine man had finished his long prayers, he asked each person in the circle to pray aloud in turn. One by one, timid voices began offering their desires, hopes, and sufferings to the darkness and to the patient ears of the red-hot stones. The medicine man said that all forms of prayer are accepted in this church of mud and stones. As each person prayed, the temperature rose steadily and I felt as though time itself was melting, each minute stretching into oppressively long hours. The unbearable heat moved my heart from open to merely patient to annoyed and then to straight-up angry. I felt as though each person took lifetimes to say what was in their heart, while all I could think was, “Hurry up and pray, dammit!”

But, suddenly it was my turn to pray. By this time we had been in the lodge for nearly 90 minutes and I was feeling raw. The heat had melted away my guard like wax and as I opened my mouth to pray out loud into the darkness, I was surprised to hear a desperateness in my voice. I prayed openly, my desires, hopes, sorrows, and grief. I pleaded for help to find truth and wisdom. Tears soon poured down my face becoming indistinguishable from the streams of sweat. Soon, it felt as though I was crying from every pore.

Once our prayers were spoken, Leonard ushered us into the next phase of the ceremony by ladling more water onto the rocks, each splash instantly vaporizing with a furious hiss. The steam scorched our faces and lungs, penetrating deep inside of us. The heat found then incinerated the dams in our hearts that held fast our deep reservoirs of pain, grief, and guilt. A tangible energy, the toxic shit-sludge of our souls burst forth in wave upon wave into that tiny, black space. The air turned to lead. Our collective pain formed some dark demon, blacker than pitch, and I writhed and wept under its impossible weight. It felt evil, alive, and hungrily feeding on dread, like a wolf, crouched on my heart, growling and baring its fangs as it breathed menacingly into my face.

Going into this ceremony, I knew that it would be much longer than the sweats I was used to. I thought I was prepared, but after perhaps only 90 minutes I started to panic. I’d run marathons, hours of self-imposed endurance, yet this was already by far the most physically challenging thing I'd ever experienced. I was unraveling.

The ceremony continued.

My mind reached for a lifeline. I remembered Wendy saying that we had permission to leave if it got to be too much. The thought gave me hope. Then, somehow I felt my grandpa nearby and something inside of me calmly asked me to stay and continue this biblical wrestling between my own angels and demons.

The ceremony continued.

Another hour passes, or was it a night? In desperation, I lay down on the mud and curled up into a ball, pressing my face into the cool earth which had turned to mud from sweat and steam. The air was slightly more breathable down low giving me a little respite.

The ceremony continued.

After nearly four hours of wrestling with this physical and spiritual heat, I had reached my limit. I was starting to drift into unconsciousness, causing a new wave of panic to rise within me. Thoughts of, “Oh well, I did my best” soon eroded to, “Fuck this, I am leaving!” and I sprang to flee for my life. I crawled in a haze, desperate to get out the door. I was drunk with a lust to breathe fresh air, to lay my bare skin on the cool grass, to get out of that heat. I reached the door, popped open the flap, and as my body was about half way out, Leonard placed his big, calloused hand on my back in a supportive gesture and in my weakened state, the simple weight of his hand caused my arms to buckle and I collapsed onto my belly, face-down in the mud. I was half in and half out of the lodge. Panting. Head spinning. It was now dark outside though I could not guess at the hour. I gulped in the cool, night air.

“Brother,” Leonard said as he began to bless me… and for several minutes I lay face-down in the mud as Leonard spoke to the spirits in and around me. He blessed me with strengths and wisdom. He blessed me with a special gift to see into the future and into the past. He blessed me with the ability to see into different realms, the cosmic and the earthly, the masculine and feminine, to stand at the crossroads and translate to as well as direct others. He blessed me to heal my heart. He blessed my relationships, each a sacred ceremony in and of themselves. He blessed me to listen. He blessed me to speak.

After 10 or 15 minutes of prayers, I began to feel renewed in body and spirit. A surge of courage washed over me. My strength returned. I pushed back up to hands and knees and felt surprised as I felt myself crawling back inside the lodge. Despite it all, I was crawling back into the heat.

As I took my seat again in the circle, the officiators shut the door, closing off the cool, night air but not before bringing in an enormous, beautiful bowl of cold, fresh raspberries. Now, something you ought to know about me is that up to this point in my life, I wasn’t all that partial to raspberries. Tart pebbles in my mouth. But that night, after all that I had been through, I felt sharp, alert, and alive. This experience had blessed me with an unparalleled presence. Despite the fact that I didn’t care for raspberries, I’m here to tell you that when that bowl was passed to me, and I took three cold, fresh raspberries and placed them on my tongue, at that moment I saw the face of god! Never has anything tasted so beautiful, so sweet, so refreshing. As those berries burst open inside of my mouth, my entire spirit lit up with an ineffable joy. It was Soma, nectar of the Gods, manna from heaven. I suppose I will never taste anything as divine as those three raspberries as long as I live. And with that exquisite joy living in my mouth and with that unconquerable courage in my heart, I was again swallowed up into the darkness and heat and continued in ceremony for another 90 minutes. This time, each drop of sweat was a sacrament—my body and mind offering tears of joy.

The moment came when all the prayers had been said, all the blessings offered, our expiation accomplished, and the ceremony was over. They announced the end with, “WaHo!” and raised the door. The cold night air wafted into the lodge and one by one we crawled out into the night to be born again, the lodge exhaling a long plume of steam from its mouth. Wendy turned on her garden hose and we took turns drenching each other with that freezing water. It was utter elation. With laughter of relief and gratitude, we saw the entire world anew. I laid myself on the grass and watched the steam rise off of my body and merge with the stars above. My entire body pulsed at one with the Universe.

Photo by Alex Adams

It was well into the night, probably 11 pm. The ceremony lasted around 5 hours. As I lay there, staring up at the stars, my mind was crystal clear. All the bullshit—the pretense, the doubt, the insecurity—had been summarily burned away and what remained was a clarion vision of what was most important in my life. I saw in minute detail everything I needed to do so that my life could thrive. I had direction.

After several beautiful moments soaking up the night air, staring at the stars, I stumbled over and found my phone. My body was still steaming while I started making those essential calls to take the bold steps I now knew I needed to travel.

The clarity I received that night has clearly shaped who I am today.

Maybe it’s not a sweat lodge that transforms you into your most divine self. In fact, maybe it’s not even something that you chose for yourself but rather something that life chooses for you like an illness, a breakup, or a death. Whatever the mode, each life will invariably experience the heat of transformation. This heat acts like a kiln to fire your tabernacle of clay to become the divine vessel that you are meant to be.

If ever you are unsure about which path to take in life, one path you might choose could be to walk straight into the fire. With presence, any heat becomes a sacred ceremony to burn through the superfluous and reveal what really matters and to help you see which path is yours to take.

The Neuroscience of Fear

My friend and fellow teacher, Rachel Posner, wrote something wonderful that I really wanted to pass along about fear and the neuroscience of fear. I have a deep respect for her work. Please take a look.

Reposted with permission.

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This blog is not about influencing how you feel about the coronavirus. It’s not about giving you any facts, numbers, percentages or travel advice. And it’s not about comparing your chances of getting the virus to getting another flu, SARS, or any other disease for that matter. All I want to do is help you feel more relaxed so that you can gain perspective and approach the news with a clear head. Because the news is sensational! It’s about grabbing your attention. And what all reporters know is that nothing grabs our attention as quickly as fear. We are simply wired to pay attention to fear. Your brain spends the whole day looking for danger and then works to protect you from it. Unfortunately, your brain is not as discerning as it should be and is easily scared and prone to making up stories. Like an overprotective parent, it tries to protect you when you don’t need protecting and gets you to make decisions that aren’t always in your best interest.

If you’re feeling stressed about the coronavirus, or really anything for that matter, I recommend you check in with your nervous system. Why? Because when you’re in the fight/flight/freeze response, you can't see clearly; literally or figuratively. When you get scared or anxious, often your sympathetic nervous system turns on, narrowing or blurring your vision, sending adrenaline and cortisol into your system and readying you to act. But if you don’t “act” or you feel that there’s nothing you can “act” on, you can get stuck in the fight/flight/freeze response.

Let me give you an example:

You’re 2 hours into, “breaking news” on the television or you’ve clicked on the “coronavirus live update” for the 10th time today and you’re starting to get really worried. What started out as a natural curiosity and concern has shifted to perseverating thoughts, bodily discomfort and tension and fear for yourself and your loved ones. If you’ve made it to this stage, the likelihood is high that you have entered into the stress response. Because your limbic system is highly activated, the perspective taking and decision making networks in your brain are offline making it difficult to think and act appropriately. Your system is flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, you’ve got tunnel vision, unable to see the big picture and your immune and digestive systems (along with all the other non-emergency systems) are suppressed. You’re stuck in a chronic stress response and you are likely in a state of fear. Which brings me to the point I want to make today:

The power of fear is a greater threat than the coronavirus.

Fear suppresses your immune system, narrows your perspective, stops you from making good decisions, increases anxiety and bodily tension, causes emotional dysregulation and premature aging (just to name a few).

So if you really want to protect yourself from coronavirus, be informed without being inundated. When we act we build resilience and confidence. So in terms of the virus, follow all of the WHO’s recommended protective measures: wash hands frequently, avoid touching your face, practice respiratory hygiene, pay attention to the general advisories, and most importantly, be discerning when it comes to the information you are taking in.

You do not need to have the news on all night, or read 37 articles a day to stay informed and follow precautions.

Once you understand what you can do to act, it’s time to practice mindfulness.

Here are 5 tips to help you get a handle on fear:

1. When you’re feeling stressed, take a pause and get mindful. Acknowledge that you are stressed, and pause to notice what’s happening in your mind and body. Just name it: I’m noticing a feeling of……. You don’t have to get wrapped up in the story, you are just naming how you feel without judging it. Acknowledging thoughts and emotions can help us to become observers of those thoughts and emotions. Notice the difference between how it feels to say, “I am noticing a feeling of fear” versus, “I’m afraid”.

2. Get Grounded. Notice the places in your body that are in contact with support (the ground, a chair, couch, bed, etc.) As you exhale, let the weight of your body drop down into that support. Cultivate a feeling of weightiness and grounding. Take a few more breaths staying focused on those contact points. Getting grounded helps your thoughts to settle and can interrupt and decrease worrying.

3. Notice the way you are breathing. Begin by lengthening your exhale. Make the exhale at least as long as your inhale - longer if it’s comfortable. Then notice if you feel most of your inhale in your chest. Try to drop the breath down and expand your belly as you inhale so that you are engaging your diaphragm. A diaphragmatic breath followed by a long exhale will activate your parasympathetic nervous system and turn on your relaxation response.

4. Notice the sensations in your body. Move from your feet to the crown of your head, one body part at a time and consciously notice any sensations that are present. Paying attention to the sensations in your body can deepen the mind/body connection, distract your mind from cyclical thoughts and help inhibit the stress response.

5. Place a hand on your heart or your cheek and bring in a feeling of self-care and self-compassion; a genuine wish to alleviate your suffering. If it feels difficult to offer yourself compassion, bring to mind someone you care for deeply and imagine that you are sending them love and compassion. You are not focusing on suffering itself, only a genuine desire to be free from suffering. Compassion inhibits the stress response and activates networks in your brain involved in perspective taking and decision making. It can also release oxytocin and dopamine, leaving your feeling happier.

If you’d like a little help, you can open this audio meditation and I’ll guide you through it.

Some of you have asked about the Costa Rica retreat. It is still on! If I can help alleviate your fears, don’t hesitate to reach out!

That said, I am on my way to a Vipassana retreat and will be completely offline from March 11-22. If you have questions about the retreat I will happily respond when I return or click here to email my retreat partner Beck.

Wishing you a calm, fear-free day, and so much love!

Rachel

https://www.rachelposner.com/blog

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Finally, an Online Yoga Nidra Training You Can Do At Home!

More than ever, the world needs you to learn to teach Yoga Nidra.

Maybe now is the perfect time to do a self-guided, home study of Yoga Nidra with my online Yoga Nidra teacher training. Plus, I can think of few practices that would be as absolutely necessary during this crazy time than this relaxing, calming, yet mind-opening mindfulness practice. You can help both yourself and others source their best selves during this precarious time.

This program is available as an instant download so you can began napping your way to enlightenment today! Also, this training comes with my latest PDF book of over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts so that you can begin immediately to help people with practices like Yoga Nidra for Stress, Yoga Nidra for Healing, and Yoga Nidra for Abundance, just to name a few.

This 50-hour Yoga Nidra intensive is designed to deepen your knowledge of Self through Yoga Nidra as you learn to guide yourself and others through effective and varied Yoga Nidra practices. It is perfect both for teachers interested in teaching Yoga Nidra as well as students who simply want to deepen their practice of Yoga Nidra.

I’ll support you every step of the way with quick email responses and/or personal Zoom calls to clarify concepts.

What’s in this Yoga Nidra Training:

• A library of Yoga Nidra training that you can access whenever you’d like

• A deeper understanding of Self through Yoga Nidra

• A course of profound relaxation

• A full audio/video recording of the training for practice and continued learning

• 20 Yoga Nidra scripts to immediately teach effective classes

• Yoga Nidra Immersion PDF workbook

• A certificate of completion

• Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Credit (if needed). This counts as 50 hours of non-contact hours

• Pranayama and mindfulness exercises that support Yoga Nidra practice and which you can print off and give to your students
  

You get a certificate of completion when you’re done and it counts for 20 hours of continuing education with Yoga Alliance (non-contact hours).

Some of the Topics You Will Learn:

• Tantric Philosophy of Yoga Nidra

• Myths and Chants

• Yoga Nidra for Healing/Trauma/Stress

• Neurobiology: Your Brain on Yoga Nidra

• Yoga Nidra for Performance

• The Power of Visualizations

• Subtle Body Study and Practice

• Koshas

• Pranayama

• Incorporating Yoga Nidra into Yoga

• Mindfulness

• Effective Teaching Methods

• Role as Teacher

• Self Practice

• Group Teaching

• One-on-one Teaching (and Dyads)
  

By the end of this immersion you will be ready to teach Yoga Nidra!

Updated with very helpful Yoga Nidra scripts as you are learning to find your own voice.

The Yoga Nidra scripts are as follows.

• Yoga Nidra for Grief

• Yoga Nidra for Goals

• Yoga Nidra for Healing

• Yoga Nidra for Sleep

• Yoga Nidra for Grounding

• Yoga Nidra for Sankalpa (Intentions)

• Basic Yoga Nidra Practice: Body

• Yoga Nidra for Energy and Chakras

• Yoga Nidra for Anxiety Management

• Full Yoga Nidra Practice (all Koshas)

• Yoga Nidra for Heart Energy

• Yoga Nidra for Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Relaxed Alertness

• Yoga Nidra for your Trinity Nature

• Yoga Nidra for Compassion

• Yoga Nidra for Abundance

• Yoga Nidra to Start Your Day

• Yoga Nidra for Bliss (Anandamaya Kosha)

• Yoga Nidra for Happiness

• Yoga Nidra for Inner Wisdom

You can start to use these scripts immediately to begin to teach effective Yoga Nidra classes while you’re also learning the philosophy and principles of Yoga Nidra so that you can begin to use your own intuition, voice, and experience to affect your students in only the way that you can.

I believe that this time more than ever the world needs Yoga Nidra. it also needs good Yoga Nidra teachers. I believe that if you are reading this that there’s a good chance that you might feel called to do this incredible work.

You get:

• 50 hours of audio and video instruction

• A 60+ page PDF Manual

• Access to a virtual library (dozens) of Yoga Nidra recordings

• Over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts you can start using today

• A certificate of completion

• A beautiful, relaxing, and expansive spiritual journey into Self

all for only $589

Money-back guarantee!

Thank you for your interest in this training. I loved putting it together and I hope you love it as much as I do.

Scott Moore (E-RYT 500, YACEP, RYS) has been teaching yoga since 2003 and Yoga Nidra since 2008. He is the author of Practical Yoga Nidra: A 10-Step Method to Reduce Stress, Improve Sleep, and Restore Spirit. His online Yoga Nidra teacher training has gained global attention and over 30,000 people have enjoyed his Yoga Nidra recordings on the Insight Meditation app. Scott was a professor of an accredited class, Yoga for Wellness, at Westminster College for 9 years and has also created programming and curriculum which incorporates Yoga Nidra for many hospitals and treatment facilities. Scott has also worked with many world-renowned performers and athletes to achieve optimal performance using Yoga Nidra. Scott writes for and has been featured in Yoga Journal, Mantra Magazine, Origin Magazine, Medium, Conscious Life News, Sivana East, and his own blog at scottmooreyoga.com/blog. Scott loves to travel to offer retreats, trainings, and workshops. Scott just moved back to Salt Lake City after living with his wife and son in Southern France.

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Let It Be

I heard a story about many Italians who are isolated in their homes because of the pandemic and as a way of connecting to those around them, they are opening their windows and literally singing to each other.

During my meditation practice a few nights ago, the words to “Let It Be” drifted into my mind. After my meditation, I texted my friend, Meg, singer/songwriter extraordinaire and owner of Acoustic Music in Salt Lake City, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind recording it for me to share with you. She was already tucked into bed with the pups and ready to call it a night but when she got my text she became so excited by the idea that she got up, cracked a beer, and recorded it on her phone. One take. I took the track and layered some sweet clarinet behind her sultry voice.

So, from my window to yours, here’s a little music to bring us together in times of trouble.

LYRICS

When I find myself in times of trouble

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

And in my hour of darkness

She is standing right in front of me

Photo source: NYT

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be.

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

And when the broken hearted people

Living in the world agree,

There will be an answer, let it be.

For though they may be parted there is

Still a chance that they will see

There will be an answer, let it be

Let it be, let it be. Yeah

There will be an answer, let it be.

And when the night is cloudy,

There is still a light that shines on me,

Shine on until tomorrow, let it be.

I wake up to the sound of music

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be.

There will be an answer, let it be.

Let it be, let it be,

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

There Will Be An Answer, Let It Be

Crazy times, my friend. Crazy times. None of us have any immediate answers to this global health crisis. It’s real and serious. Still, I know that we have the power to beat this on every level. We really do. We are resourceful, creative, and resilient beings. The crisis has ratcheted up our response level to the utmost and this means stepping up to be smart, precautionary, AND compassionate.

While the world’s best and brightest are working hard on figuring out how to fight the actual virus, I believe we all have a different and equally important job: to fight the fear of this virus with a weapon-grade love that has the power to annihilate selfishness, worry, and scarcity. Let’s pull together in these difficult times and fight fear with an increase of love and compassion for each other. By being smart AND compassionate, this thing will level off, and in the end our collective heart will be stronger because of it.

In the Spirit of Social Distancing

If you’re in Salt Lake City, classes at 21st Yoga are being suspended and many are switching to live, virtual classes. Stay tuned for more information on those.

Community is important, especially in these crazy times! Even if you are holed up at home it’s still nice to connect with each other. I’ve been teaching a live, virtual Yoga Nidra class each Sunday at 9 am MST. Join me! This is an excellent way of staying grounded, connecting with others, and also sourcing your highest Self. Each session allows us to talk and interact with each other while also enjoying our own space. Our next session is about responding rather than reacting during times of calamity.

I’m available for private individual and group sessions via Zoom or FaceTime. Please reach out to me to schedule a session if you’re interested. This could actually be a lot of fun and we could turn a crisis into something really cool together.

Lastly, I wanted to share something really special with you…

I heard a story about many Italians who are isolated in their homes because of the pandemic and as a way of connecting to those around them, they are opening their windows and literally singing to each other.

During my meditation practice a few nights ago, the words to “Let It Be” drifted into my mind. After my meditation, I texted my friend, Meg, singer/songwriter extraordinaire and owner of Acoustic Music in Salt Lake City, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind recording it for me to share with you. She was already tucked into bed with the pups and ready to call it a night but when she got my text she became so excited by the idea that she got up, cracked a beer, and recorded it on her phone. One take. I took the track and layered some sweet clarinet behind her sultry voice.

So, from my window to yours, here’s a little music to bring us together in times of trouble. You gotta hear this!

When I find myself in times of trouble

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

And in my hour of darkness

She is standing right in front of me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be.

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

And when the broken hearted people

Living in the world agree,

There will be an answer, let it be.

For though they may be parted there is

Still a chance that they will see

There will be an answer, let it be

Let it be, let it be. Yeah

There will be an answer, let it be.

And when the night is cloudy,

There is still a light that shines on me,

Shine on until tomorrow, let it be.

I wake up to the sound of music

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be.

There will be an answer, let it be.

Let it be, let it be,

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

Live Online Yoga Nidra Class

Live Virtual Yoga Nidra Class

It’s getting crazy out there with the worries over the COVID-19 and the one sure thing we can do to help change the world is to first change ourselves. Let’s tune into our best selves and allow that to lead us forward into helping ourselves and everyone through these difficult times. Yoga Nidra is perhaps the best way I can think of to change your state in the immediate to affect BEING the change you wish to see in the world. So, if you’re being cautious and would like to both practice public spacing AND experience community, please register for my live, online Yoga Nidra class, every Sunday at 9 am MST.

What Is Yoga Nidra?

Yoga is the practice of arriving to Oneness. Nidra means sleep, or that liminal state between waking and dreaming that acts like a bridge between many seemingly disparate parts of our being. Yoga Nidra employs relaxation as a special tool to not only help you travel that bridge between these different parts of your being into Oneness but also, on a practical level, help you to regularly achieve deep and nourishing rest. They say that 30 minutes of Yoga Nidra is like giving yourself a 2 hour nap! Join me for our next session, Sunday, March 15th at 9 am MST where we practice experiencing ourselves in our True Nature while also becoming very relaxed.

Once you register, you will be able to join me at the appointed time from your computer or smartphone, in the comfort of your own home, where the only virus you have to worry about is whatever computer virus already lurks on your machine. Seriously though, it’s really nice. Plus, you can register even if the time doesn’t work because each person who registered gets a full audio and audio/video recording of the event to review whenever you wish. That and it’s totally affordable.

Click Below to Register and Check Out My Online Training.

Be The Peace

I’m sure that even if you live in a cave somewhere you’ve still been inundated with information and worries about the Coronavirus.

What to do?

Of course we all want to stay informed so we can act responsibly and there’s some real-life consequences to what’s going on: people are working from home, kids can’t go to school, and there’s no goddam toilet paper at the grocery store! Yet there’s a point where news turns into worry-mongering which ironically spreads the most contagious and damaging virus in the history of humankind— the virus of fear.

I heard one of my teachers, Judith Lasater, once say, “What is worrying but praying for what you don’t want.” There’s so much energy in whatever you place your attention upon that it’s hard not to give energy to the very thing that you’re trying to avoid. How can we instead put our energy toward a solution rather than fueling what could possibly go wrong?

I believe that this current global health crisis is serious and that we should be responsible by doing whatever we can to avoid spreading it such as practicing good hygiene among other things. My wife started as a nurse before getting her PhD in nursing informatics and is no stranger to how easily germs can spread. She’s the most pleasant germaphobe imaginable and keeps our family healthy by reminding us to wash hands before and after going into public, to cough or sneeze into a tissue or elbow (then still wash hands), and not to eat anything before washing hands (. . . and wash hands again just for good measure). As we are moving forward with efforts to cut Coronavirus off at the pass, I keep reminding myself, “WWSD, (what would Seneca do)?” After that, I believe that we need to live our lives as normally as possible so that we don’t make an already bad situation 10X worse by running for the hills and stockpiling weapons and Snickers bars.

In yoga philosophy there's a concept called Indra’s Web, a jeweled net covering the entire Universe where every facet of every jewel reflects every other facet of the entire Universe. It’s one way of illustrating the idea that somehow everything is connected to everything else and therefore the greatest tool to change the outside world is actually to change yourself.

Whether you are infected with the actual Coronavirus, infected by the fear of it, or simply plagued by the fact that there’s a run on toilet paper at Costco, there is one thing that will undoubtedly help any situation and that is practicing grounded presence. Practice being the peace you wish to see in the world.

To that end, I’ve made a Yoga Nidra recording (guided meditation) which is about 20 minutes long and which I think you’ll love. It uses deepening layers of Awareness and relaxation as a gateway into practicing being the change you wish to see in the world. At very least, it will help you relax while the world is getting increasingly more agitated around you. Maybe it will help to affect some real change in the world. While you and your kids are on house arrest due to the Coronavirus, maybe try giving yourself some Yoga Nidra homework and do this practice a few times in the next few days as your way of changing the world from within yourself.

And if you feel like you need some good vibes in your life, now more than ever, you’d love to go to yoga but are freaked out to be within 100 feet of another person for fear of getting sneezed on, consider joining my weekly, live, online Yoga Nidra class which happens every Sunday at 9 am MST. Join me from your computer or smartphone, in the comfort of your own home, where the only virus you have to worry about is whatever computer virus already lurks on your machine. Seriously though, it’s really nice. This week we are exploring the super power of relaxation and how it enables us to reach altered states of consciousness in order to expand our stages of consciousness. Plus, you can register even if the time doesn’t work because each person who registered gets a full audio and audio/video recording of the event to review whenever you wish. That and it’s totally affordable . . . payable in toilet paper squares.

CLICK BELOW TO REGISTER

Yoga Nidra Scripts are Finally Available!!

Available as an instant download!

Instant downloadable PDF

These Yoga Nidra scripts empower you to teach like an expert today!

20 Yoga Nidra Scripts Vol. 1!

This is a compilation of some of my favorite Yoga Nidra scripts I’ve created to teach my Yoga Nidra classes, teachings, and recordings.

Instantly download these scripts onto your computer or smart device, or print them off.

The Scripts Included in This PDF Book

• Yoga Nidra For Grief

• Yoga Nidra for Goals

• Yoga Nidra for Healing

• Yoga Nidra for Sleep

• Yoga Nidra for Grounding

• Yoga Nidra for Sankalpa (Intentions)

• Basic Yoga Nidra Practice: Body

• Yoga Nidra for Energy and Chakras

• Yoga Nidra for Anxiety Management

• Full Yoga Nidra Practice (all Koshas)

• Yoga Nidra for Heart Energy

• Yoga Nidra for Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Relaxed Alertness

• Yoga Nidra for your Trinity Nature

• Yoga Nidra for Compassion

• Yoga Nidra for Abundance

• Yoga Nidra to Start Your Day

• Yoga Nidra for Bliss (Anandamaya Kosha)

• Yoga Nidra for Happiness

• Yoga Nidra for Inner Wisdom

I wanted to compile these scripts because while practicing Yoga Nidra may be easy and relaxing, teaching it effectively can be difficult. I’ve spent many years learning how to teach Yoga Nidra effectively. I’ve logged many thousands of hours teaching Yoga Nidra and have learned through trial-and-error what best to do and NOT to do in order to hopefully facilitate an effective Yoga Nidra experience for myself and for students. This compilation of scripts is designed to put the words of effective, and what I hope are skillful, Yoga Nidra practices in your hands so that you and your students can also benefit from these practices.

How to Use These Scripts and Best Practices

These scripts are designed to be used for yourself or to facilitate Yoga Nidra practices for individual clients or classes. Feel free to record these scripts for non-commercial purposes. Please understand that everything in this book is copyrighted, thank you very much.

I highly encourage you to make it a regular practice to record yourself reading these scripts, which could be your intention for purchasing this compilation in the first place, but especially if you are going to be facilitating others. Doing so allows you essential information about the way you are offering the practice. I know, I know, I know: everyone hates to hear their own voice but I can tell you from personal experience that doing so is perhaps the greatest tool you have to refine your teaching.

Thank YOU!

Lastly, Thank you!

I’d love to hear from you! Please drop me a line and let me know how your teaching is going, if you have any questions in particular, and what insight you have discovered through this fascinating practice. Let’s keep the conversation going about Yoga Nidra.

Also, stay in touch so I can keep you in the loop with information from level 1 and advanced trainings, retreats, recordings, and other resources.

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I love facilitating Yoga Nidra and I’m also passionate about teaching others to facilitate Yoga Nidra. I love to teach live Yoga Nidra teacher trainings because I love to see how people are using this practice. I see so many different kinds of people in my trainings including, yoga and meditation teachers, reiki and other energy workers, geriatric health professionals, high-performance coaches, high school teachers and counselors, mental health therapists, parents, and even family and divorce lawyers, because each person understands how this transformative practice can help the part of the world that they are blessed to work with. I’m also really happy to offer an an online Yoga Nidra teacher training so that people all over the world can learn the principles of effectively leading a Yoga Nidra class along a timeline and location that works best for them.

My trainings explore the principles and fundamentals of Yoga Nidra to first outline the “what and why” of Yoga Nidra in order to then understand the “how” of Yoga Nidra. I find that organizing the trainings in this way enables teachers to facilitate this transformational practice with the power of doing so in their own voice to match their own specific needs as well as those of their students. Also, I strongly believe that once you know what you are aiming for, you will likely find your own pathway to get there, one that feels perfect for you. Eventually, you’ll be able to create your own scripts and improvise a practice that is powerful and necessary to yourself and your students. If you are passionate (or even curious) about facilitating Yoga Nidra and learning to move beyond these scripts to create your own as well as conduct 1:1 Yoga Nidra Dyads, a completely improvised experience based on the real-time awareness of your student, I invite you to explore either my online Yoga Nidra teacher training or my live Yoga Nidra teacher trainings.

You may also wish to check out my book, Practical Yoga Nidra: a 10-Step Method to Reducing Stress, Improving Sleep, and Restoring Your Spirit, which hit the shelves in December of 2019. I’m thrilled at the global response that it has received so far.

My sincere desire is that these scripts will help you facilitate your own journey through Yoga Nidra as well as help you facilitate others’ journey as well.

Namaste,