Karen Brody - Daring to Rest: Reclaim Your Power with Yoga Nidra Rest Meditation

For R., women, and humanity.

If you close your eyes,

you will see far.

KENYAN PROVERB

CONTENTS

DEAR SISTER,

W elcome. I wrote this book for you as an invitation to improve your well-being and dream big using yoga nidra, a meditative practice that can help you realize true, deep rest. Through these pages, you can discover your path back to whatever your heart desires, including better sleep, clarity of mind, loving relationships, and the courage to make a difference in the world. I wrote this book to help women get some much-needed rest, reclaim their radiant nature, and lead at home and work from a more peaceful place. I felt called to share with you a meditation technique that is both practical and life changing and that will help you give birth to anything in your life from a well-rested place.

I could speak for days and months and years about yoga nidra meditation. Why? Because yoga nidra transformed my life, and I have seen it, again and again, in some way, change the life of every woman it touches. Yoga nidra combines what I feel are two key components women need in their lives: a well-rested body and a deep connection to ones soul. A well-rested, healthy body helps the soul fulfill its purpose.

This book shows you how to make peace an inside job. I am convinced that if more women (and men) practiced yoga nidra, we would create a more peaceful world because we would all be more at peace with ourselves. We would all sleep better. We would prioritize being good to ourselves. We would stop chronically burning out, and if we did burn out, we would quickly forgive ourselves, chuck perfect, and reboot. We would bravely tell the untold stories wanting out of our heads and finally release story lines that no longer serve us. We would lead more companies and feel more confident and creative, doing it our way instead of how its always been done (which isnt working for women, by the way). We would model to our children how to not be afraid of the darkwithin us or outside of us.

My first yoga nidra teacher, Robin Carnes, always ended her yoga nidra meditation sessions with the words, Yoga nidra is a service of love we give to ourselves and all others. It mentors us into an understanding of our true nature, and it shows us that when we serve ourselves, we serve all others; when we serve others, we serve ourselves.

This is the spirit from which this book is being offered to you. May this book help you be good to yourself, rest well, heal, lead, be wildly creative, and stand in your full power. May it also help you recover a deep sense of peace within and then go spread peace to others.

The time is now to take back rest.

Lets do thistogether.

With love and shaking my yoga nidra pompoms,

Karen

INTRODUCTION

F ifteen years ago, I was a young mom with two active boys under the age of two. My older son slept so little and cried so much that for over a year we ate every meal with the vacuum cleaner on just to keep him calm. Living with so much tension and so little sleep made me feel and act crazypants. My everyday thoughts included things like, What day is it? and Oh, was that a curb I just drove over?

I had been a confident young woman, and I had lots of experience as a leader. But once sleep deprivation and chronic stress hit, my confidence sank to an all-time low. Who am I again? and All I want to do is sleep became my mantras. Thats when a family legacy of panic attacks kicked in unexpectedly, in my local supermarket, and I began taking anti-anxiety pills.

Im fine, I told everyone. It made sense that I would be constantly exhausted and full of panic. For a mom in this situation, there was no other way to be, right?

Turns out I was wrong. There was another way.

I found it by accident when I wandered into my local yoga studio. As I read through the class choices, I heard a voice echoing in the hallway. Attracted to its energy, I walked toward the voice and found twenty or so women lying on the floor with blankets over them, looking blissed out. The woman at the front desk told me it was a yoga nidra class.

What are they doing? I asked her.

I guess you could say theyre doing nothing. Its like taking a yogic nap.

She explained that yoga nidra is the art of conscious relaxation and said it is also known as the sleep of the yogi. I was already familiar with meditation, though I hadnt meditated in years, and what she described sounded like a kind of meditation, but one I could do lying down instead of sitting up. I signed up for the class immediately.

A week later, I stood at the classroom door, took a deep breath, walked in, and lay down. To be honest, even though I had years of experience in meditation, I wasnt looking to meditate or even consciously relax. I was just desperate to lie down and get some rest.

What I got was the best rest of my life. It also turned out to be the first step on my journey to feeling like myself againmy truest, most powerful self.

Right away my weekly yoga nidra sessions felt deeply restorative in my physical body. My nervous system was no longer permanently on high alert, and I felt rested for the first time in a long while. But suddenly there was more. As I continued practicing yoga nidra, something began to tug at my core. A portal was opening. At times my heart would flutter, making me wonder, What is this new thing wanting to emerge? I was being nudged to take a close look at my fine life and make some changes.

At the same time, there was a part of me hollering, Curl back up to fine! The temptation to not change a thing in my busy life, and to not rest, was looping through my mind most days for a few months or so after I began practicing yoga nidra meditation regularly. I loved it, and yet every Friday at noon, when my yoga nidra class met, I had a long list of excuses to not lie down. Shifting lifelong patterns can be a one-step-forward, one-step-back dance, but over time, the yoga nidra magic kept calling me back, and I gave myself permission to rest more, slow down, and not live in the fine zone.

As I began to feel well rested, I tapped back into my own internal rhythm, something I had neglected for a long time. Every time I lay down to practice yoga nidra, I felt the weight of all I was doing, and it became clear that I was stressed. And from a deep, meditative space connected to my natural rhythm, I was led to solutions to my stress. Everything that had felt urgent began to feel less urgent. I began to clear nonessential things from my schedule, and the sense of freedom from my to-do list was intoxicating. I started unplugging from the computer before dinner and didnt go back afterward, so I could focus on my family and myself and then wind down before bedtime and get a good nights sleep. I didnt call friends back during the weekonly on weekends, when I could go for a relaxing walk while talking. I said no to anything that made me feel out of rhythm, like unessential family travel or too many weekend activities.

Soon after I made yoga nidra an ongoing priority, my panic attacks disappeared. I realized that my family history did not have to become my reality, and in that first year of practicing yoga nidra meditation, I was able to stop taking anti-anxiety medication. It wasnt easy to stop the medication, but practicing yoga nidra showed me that I could do itthat feeling calm and free was my birthright. Slowly, as I continued practicing yoga nidra, I began to connect back to all the original dreams Id had as a young girl, like wanting to write. I released a big story Id been telling myself for years: that a dyslexic who wasnt allowed to take an English class in college couldnt write. During yoga nidra, I kept hearing a whisper from my soul to screw that story and write a play. So I wrote a successful play called