Daring to Rest

by Karen Brody

  •The “Discovering Your Intention” process helps you find one to three words from your soul whispers that resonate deeply with you. You can then add “I,” “I am,” or “I feel” in front of these words to form your intention. You may need to tweak your intention statement to find one that resonates for you, but always use your soul whisper words in your intention statement.

  •Soul whisper words that feel negative can be changed into positive words to create an intention by noting what the opposite word would be.

  •If you receive nothing as a soul whisper on any day, or if you don’t receive any words for your intention, that’s okay. Let your intention come to you later, or start with “I am a well-rested woman” as your intention.

  5

  BODY

  Feeling Grounded, Relaxed, and Safe

  Days 6–10

  Your best teacher is your physical body. Rarely does illness or burnout happen without warning, and normally the first clues we get are in our physical bodies. But most of us aren’t listening, right? Well, now is your time to pay attention to your body. Yoga nidra invites you to deeply relax your entire body and safely feel again.

  For the next five days, all I want you to do is practice yoga nidra, notice how relaxed you feel, and when you are not practicing yoga nidra, begin to sense when you feel grounded and when you don’t. The focus of these five days is cleaning the physical body. Of the five bodies of awareness, your physical body is the most dense and solid. The other four bodies are energy states; you can sense but not see them. Connecting to your physical body helps you surrender to rest, relax deeply, and check how grounded you feel in your life.

  Basic Instructions for Days 6 to 10

  1.Practice the Phase One: Rest Meditation daily. Use the intention you received after your first five days and hold your touchstone in your left hand or place it at the base of your spine, between your legs, near your perineum.

  2.Continue to listen for and track your soul whispers in a journal.

  3.Optional: Use additional practices to balance your physical body.

  4.Optional: Use prompts to help you dive deeper into your soul whispers and issues of safety and groundedness.

  Feeling Safe in Your Body Again

  Our physical bodies hold struggles with our existence: Do I belong on this earth? Is it safe for me to be here? Safety and fear are concerns of your first power center. If a woman doesn’t say yes to her existence, her body will express her no or her doubts as health issues or fatigue. When you have a basic trust in life and lack of fear, your physical body thrives. When you don’t, you tend to feel worn out.

  When women initially come to me, they are often feeling ungrounded in their lives. Relaxing deeply is key to feeling grounded again. When you lie down in your yoga nidra meditation for the next five days, notice how it feels to be so close to the ground. It doesn’t matter if you’re not literally on the ground but instead practicing on a bed, in a chair, or on a building’s upper floor. By guiding you to rotate your attention through your body and breathe in specific ways, yoga nidra helps you feel present in your body, relaxed, and connected to the earth.

  Whatever you feel as you practice yoga nidra, try not to judge it. For some women, it simply feels deeply nourishing to lie down and relax. But if you’ve been in survival mode for a long time, lying down and feeling your body may be initially uncomfortable. That’s okay—let yoga nidra be your umbilical cord back to feeling. Let it help you bless and then leave behind discomfort, broken feelings, or perhaps pain, and find your way back to health and safety. This is the theme of these next five days.

  Silence facilitates safety, if we allow it to, and silence is a key feature of yoga nidra. There’s so much noise in our everyday lives, but when you begin practicing yoga nidra, you enter what a woman in my rest program called “the garden of silence.” This silence is like a whisper giving you permission to feel your body again. You may not have experienced silence for a long time. I found silence to be the first thing about yoga nidra that made it feel so yummy because, as a mom, I rarely experienced silence. For others, silence may initially feel uncomfortable, but stick with it. Silence is the key to entering your inner world, where you know you are always safe and welcomed.

  But yoga nidra goes much deeper than silence. Margreet, whom you met in chapter four, felt this pretty quickly. “I didn’t know there was more than just silence,” she said. “If you miss affection from a parent, you’re always trying to keep busy, never really receiving such deep silence.” Suddenly, with yoga nidra, Margreet’s body began to release years of tension. “I realized this deep silence gave me the level of safety I needed to truly relax.”

  Rotating attention through the physical body, the first step in a yoga nidra practice, begins to guide you out of the survival spin mode. When we’re in this mode, our adrenals pump cortisol and adrenaline nonstop, which wears out the body. Margreet was stuck in this pattern for years, until she began practicing yoga nidra. As she said, “I was a dry river, and now there’s water in the riverbed.” Our yoga nidra meditation starts with sensing the physical body, because doing that opens the door to our life-sustaining river of energy, allowing it to flow again into our dry riverbeds.

  It can be challenging to fill your riverbed when you’ve been dry for many years. Aditi, who had experienced two ectopic pregnancies—one of which almost took her life—eventually gave birth to a baby girl. But during the pregnancy, she was filled with fear that the baby would be stillborn, and her birth experience was traumatic. Eventually, she went on anti-anxiety medication. Soon after, she discovered yoga nidra meditation. While she found it deeply relaxing, it was uncomfortable for her to focus on her body without judgment. After all she had been through, she distrusted her body. But she stuck with it, and very soon the body sensing was exactly what helped her trust her body again. She felt water returning to her riverbed.

  As she explained, “Each time I would sense another body part, and while it wasn’t comfortable, I would just stay very present to feeling—not just the story that my body had failed me, but what it felt like. I had to notice the darkness. I realized that all the anxiety was because of not noticing. The moment I truly noticed my body, I felt a shift at a cellular level to trusting my body again.” While the anti-anxiety pills had helped her, practicing yoga nidra showed her that she still had to do other work. She shared, “Now yoga nidra is my anti-anxiety pill. Now I don’t go down the spiraling rabbit hole of disliking my body. The simple body rotation [rotating attention through the physical body] gave me the permission to stop stuffing anything. And this was my ticket to freedom.”

  As you practice yoga nidra meditation daily, I’d like you to notice how free you feel. Maybe it’s free from tension or pain. Maybe it’s freedom from your to-do list. Freedom looks different for everyone, but freedom, safety, and a good life have an intimate bond. I often think of Harriet Tubman, the nineteenth-century civil rights leader in the United States, who led hundreds of slaves to freedom. Why was she leading them to freedom? So they could feel safe. Safety would give them better lives and the opportunity to not just survive, but also thrive. It would restore the water to their riverbeds.

  This is what turning on your internal power switch is all about, and it starts in the physical body. So for these five days, focus on noticing feelings in your body and welcoming them all during your yoga nidra practice. This is the first step to changing a paradigm. The worn-out woman pushes feelings away, going into numb mode because it feels like nonstop busy mode gives her no other choice. The well-rested woman flips this model by making a conscious decision to rest deeply and welcome feelings. This creates a sense of groundedness and safety. You can shift out of anxiety and so much more, but you’ve got to be committed to a new paradigm. Yoga nidra helps you easily lie down and do that. In addition, during the next five days, you can try any of the following practices to continue welcoming sensations and balancing your physical body outside of your yoga nidra practice. />
  Optional: Additional Practices for Your Physical Body

  While fifteen minutes of yoga nidra is all you need to do for days 6 through 10, there are additional simple ways to balance your physical body. Following are some of my favorites.

  Activate the First Power Center

  Your physical body represents safety and so does the first power center. As you already know, the Phase One: Rest Meditation guides you to activate this center. During your yoga nidra practice, you may wish to put your touchstone at your perineum, the part of your body that houses the first power center, to invite feelings of safety and security.

  In addition to practicing yoga nidra, you can activate the first power center in other ways. You can put a few drops of a calming essential oil, such as lavender or chamomile, on your clothes every day. Or after practicing yoga nidra, put a drop on the palm of your hands, rub your hands together, bring them to your nose, and then inhale four times. Note that essential oils are not recommended for use during pregnancy unless under the supervision of an experienced aromatherapist. Please check the safety of all essential oils before use and be sure they’re mixed in a neutral carrier oil like organic jojoba or almond oil before you apply them to your skin. Undiluted essential oils should not be applied directly to your skin.

  Wearing red clothing will also activate the first power center.

  Anointing Practice for the Rest Phase

  To help you slow down, come back to center, and reconnect with yourself and the earth, you may want to add this beautiful essential oil practice at the end of your yoga nidra meditations during the Rest phase (through day 15). This practice was created by master essential oil blender and energy medicine healer Deborah Sullivan for an online course we co-taught called The Power of Yoga Nidra and Essential Oils. You can read the following instructions slowly into a recording device.

  Sit or lie down in a comfortable position and focus on the breath, taking a couple of deep sighs. Place a few drops of a calming essential oil, like lavender or chamomile, on the palms of your hands. Gently massage your palms together, warming and releasing the aroma.

  Bring your palms to your nose and take four deep, full breaths. Move your head side to side to breathe through both nostrils. As you feel the scent envelop you, imagine yourself realigning, being restored, and coming into balance with the heavens and the earth. Anoint your forehead, heart, and feet with your essential oil.

  As you continue to breathe in the scent, bring your awareness to the space above you. Draw the energy from the heavens down into your crown, forehead, body, and subtle bodies. Feel the scent falling down and showering you with golden, luminous light from the heavens.

  Now bring your attention to the space below your body and feet. Feel the beautiful energy of the earth rising up into your feet, legs, and torso, blessing you as it does.

  Now feel the energy of the earth and the golden, luminous light of the heavens merging at the heart. You are drawing the heavens from above and the earth from below into your heart.

  Feel the balance between the heavens and the earth rippling out from your heart, into your energy field above your head, below your feet, to the left, to the right, behind, and in front of you. Feel cocooned in this light and surrounded by the scent anchoring you, between the heavens and the earth, in your heart.

  Move your hands and bless yourself and Mother Earth in each of the four directions (south, west, north, east) and then above, below, and within at your heart. Now bring your hands down to the earth to offer your blessings to our Mother Earth and all your relations.

  Lie on the Ground

  One of the best ways to increase support for your physical system is to lie on the ground outside, in Mother Nature. You can do this for just five or ten minutes. If your shoulders are tight, put a small pillow underneath them to let yourself fully surrender. Or practice your fifteen minutes of yoga nidra outside. Grounding to the earth reduces inflammation in the body, which can help autoimmune and allergic responses and soothe swollen joints. It can also calm fears and boost your mood.

  Sixty-One-Point Relaxation

  There is a beautiful sixty-one-point relaxation practice that is sometimes used during yoga nidra but can also be used on its own. In fact, you’ll recognize it from the Phase One: Rest Meditation that you’ve already been using and can use the guidance in appendix 1 for reading it into a recording device. It’s a great way to quickly release tension from the body at any time during the day or when you go to bed at night.

  During the sixty-one-point relaxation, attention is rotated around the body to marma points, areas in the body where life-force energy is concentrated. These points are often located at the meeting point of two or more tissues, like muscles, bones, or joints. By rotating attention to each marma point, you are cleaning blocked energy from the body.

  Following are the sixty-one points. It’s important to rotate your attention on each point in the order listed (although, you should not say or think the numbers when bringing your attention to the point).

  1.Point between the eyebrows

  2.Hollow of the throat

  3.Right shoulder joint

  4.Right elbow joint

  5.The bend of the right wrist joint

  6.Tip of the right thumb

  7.Tip of the right index finger

  8.Tip of the right middle finger

  9.Tip of the right fourth finger (ring finger)

  10.Tip of the right small finger

  11.The bend of the right wrist joint

  12.Right elbow joint

  13.Right shoulder joint

  14.Hollow of the throat

  15.Left shoulder joint

  16.Left elbow joint

  17.The bend of the left wrist joint

  18.Tip of the left thumb

  19.Tip of the left index finger

  20.Tip of the left middle finger

  21.Tip of the left fourth finger (ring finger)

  22.Tip of the left small finger

  23.The bend of the left wrist joint

  24.Left elbow joint

  25.Left shoulder joint

  26.Hollow of the throat

  27.Heart center

  28.Right nipple

  29.Heart center

  30.Left nipple

  31.Heart center

  32.Solar plexus (just below the bottom of the chest bone)

  33.Navel center (two inches below the physical navel)

  34.Right hip joint

  35.Right knee joint

  36.Right ankle joint

  37.Tip of the right big toe

  38.Tip of the right second toe

  39.Tip of the right third toe

  40.Tip of the right fourth toe

  41.Tip of the right small toe

  42.Right ankle joint

  43.Right knee joint

  44.Right hip joint

  45.Navel center (two inches below the physical navel)

  46.Left hip joint

  47.Left knee joint

  48.Left ankle joint

  49.Tip of the left big toe

  50.Tip of the left second toe

  51.Tip of the left third toe

  52.Tip of the left fourth toe

  53.Tip of the left small toe

  54.Left ankle joint

  55.Left knee joint

  56.Left hip joint

  57.Navel center (two inches below the physical navel)

  58.Solar plexus (just below the bottom of the chest bone)

  59.Heart center

  60.Hollow of the throat

  61.Point between the eyebrows

  When rotating your attention throughout the points, you want to be sure to not visualize each part of your body, which is tempting. Body sensing is more about experiencing how that point feels, rather than seeing it clearly in your mind’s eye. It may be helpful to visualize a blue dot landing on each marma point or to imagine blocked energy releasing from that point.

  Mindful Movement

  It can be useful to prepar
e for yoga nidra by doing ten to fifteen minutes of slow, mindful movement beforehand. This type of movement activates your energy body, and you’ll more easily release tension and energy blockages as you rotate your attention through the physical body during your yoga nidra meditation. Here are a few mindful movement suggestions:

  •Practice yin yoga, a type of yoga in which you hold the poses for longer periods of time.

  •Go on a labyrinth walk.

  •Practice walking meditation. To do this, walk slowly and, as Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh says, let your feet kiss the earth.

  •Practice tai chi or qigong.

  •Move to an instrumental song that has a slow beat. The music of the late Gabrielle Roth is excellent for this purpose, but you may have other music that you like.

  Open Your Feminine Highway

  Sensing so many women’s lack of intimacy with and acceptance of their female body and feminine essence, I asked my longtime healer, David Wright, how women can become more open to radiant health and healing. His answer was simple: open the feminine highway.

  Your feminine highway begins in the physical body at the base of your spine. It’s here, for women, that the soul is anchored and drawn down into the physical realm. Without this anchor, we don’t feel safe on earth. And that’s when the not feeling worthy or loved tapes start playing, big time.

  Women have a long history of rejecting their womanhood due to cultural expectations that see feminine energy as weakness. In many ways, through models that sexualize women and girls, laws that hold women back from leadership, and childbirth practices that silence mothers’ voices, we’ve been raised to be at war with our feminine nature and, by extension, ourselves. Consequently, the more we fear our power as a woman, the harder it becomes to access our feminine energy, the part of us that is intuitive, creative, and receptive. When this feminine energy becomes blocked, we view the world only through a masculine-energy lens of logic and striving. We forget to feel, and we become angry with ourselves for showing emotion.