by Karen Brody
As a result, too many women today are leading with only masculine energy, pressured to rush and not nurture or to be busy and not calm, which puts them into the all-too-familiar worn-out woman mode. Masculine energy without feminine energy is incomplete, and as a consequence, you don’t feel whole.
Please be aware that women as well as men have both masculine and feminine energy, so this is not just about gender. It’s about how women lead, not whether we are capable of leading. It’s about being a woman who feels, not thinks, she matters.
What’s so beautiful about yoga nidra is that it teaches you to unblock all your energy, including your feminine energy, which helps you lead from a consistently balanced place. This exercise to open your feminine highway is a way to unblock your feminine energy without practicing yoga nidra meditation. You’ll feel you can take whatever comes at you in life and transform it because you have access to both your feminine and masculine energies.
When David taught this exercise in one of my yoga nidra programs, everyone loved it. It can be practiced right before or after yoga nidra meditation, or really at any time, even while you’re watching television. The results are incredible. One women told me, “All the feelings around my pain as a burden were released.” Even if you have experienced sexual trauma, this exercise is safe because putting your hands on yourself puts you in control. If you are in active trauma, you will want to check with your care provider before doing this exercise, but for most women, it is a beautiful way to help you feel safe and powerful in your body.
Here is how you open your feminine highway:
1.Think of your hands as electrodes. Place your right hand on your perineum, the space below your vagina.
2.Lay your left hand over the center of your chest, putting the center of your hand over your breast plate.
3.Hold your hands there for about five minutes. Relax and be as comfortable as you can. You don’t need to be thinking about anything special.
Optional: Diving Deeper
Looking to dive more deeply into your soul whispers and issues of safety and groundedness? Consider these Daring to Rest optional prompts:
•Freewrite about the following: Where in your body do you feel safe, and where don’t you feel safe? What does safety look like for you in your life?
•Turn on instrumental drumming music and move to the statement “I feel grounded” for one song. After you stop, describe the feeling in your body. Can you say even more about how you feel?
•Draw, paint, or freewrite your soul whispers. Is there a predominant theme? If so, what?
Key Points in Chapter Five
•The physical body is the first of the five bodies of awareness. When we are grounded in our physical bodies, we feel relaxed and safe.
•Rotating attention through the physical body, the first step in a yoga nidra practice, begins to guide you out of the survival spin mode.
•Noticing sensation in your physical body opens the door to a flow of life-sustaining energy and helps you trust your body again.
•Freedom, safety, and a good life have an intimate bond. The more you practice yoga nidra, the more safe and free you will feel.
6
ENERGY
Welcoming Back Your Life Force
Days 11–15
In a yoga nidra meditation, we start with putting our attention on the physical body, and then we bring it to the energy body, normally in the form of conscious breathing, or breath work, because this type of breathing helps move prana, or life force. If you’re worn out, you’re often starved of life force, an energy running through you that gives you vitality. When you practice breath work, you’re impacting the energy body, unblocking channels in the body where life force is stuck. The more energy flows in your body, the better your body begins to feel, and often health issues start to improve. Balancing one of the five bodies helps the others, and balancing all of the bodies of awareness can take you back to wholeness.
Many times a yoga nidra meditation makes reference to connecting to your life force or asks you to take a slow, deep breath in and out because breath helps you connect to your life force, and this begins to calm the body. For anyone suffering from anxiety, taking slow, deep breaths that shift your life force to a calmer place can be life changing. A racing heart rate will slow with conscious breathing. Palms and forehead will go back to normal temperature, and slowly, a feeling of ease in both body and mind will return. The energy body does not ask us to try very hard to achieve this feeling of ease. In fact, the opposite is true: these next five days are about continuing to rest deeply with yoga nidra and not trying to make it a perfect experience. Let conscious breath work during yoga nidra give the energy body permission to release all blocked areas and restore your life force.
Basic Instructions for Days 11 to 15
1.Practice the Phase One: Rest Meditation daily. Continue to use the intention you used for days 6 through 10, but feel free to tweak your intention if inspired during your yoga nidra meditation or through your soul whispers. Also continue to keep your touchstone with you when practicing, either in your left hand or placed in the second power center area, anywhere above the pubic bone and below the navel.
2.Continue to listen for and track your soul whispers in a journal.
3.Optional: Use additional practices to support the balance of your energy body.
4.Optional: Use prompts to dive deeper into this chapter’s concepts—vitality, slowing down, and rhythm.
Conscious Breath Work
When you breathe consciously during yoga nidra, or any intentional breath work, you are impacting the energy body and unblocking your life force.
Your nostrils are connected to your autonomic nervous system through the neuromotor system in your body. The neuromotor responses influence the brain and activate chemicals, which means whatever nostril you breathe through determines what energy is activated and what chemicals are released. Breathing in through the right nostril influences the thalamus and hypothalamus glands. Breathing in through the left nostril influences the pituitary gland and hypothalamus. Breathing through both nostrils equally activates your life force. But rarely do we breathe through both nostrils. You may think you do, but if you held a mirror close to your nostrils to see the flow of your breath, you’d find that both nostrils are hardly ever activated at the same time. The way you activate both nostrils is through conscious breath work, which is what you are guided to do every time you lie down to practice yoga nidra meditation.
Conscious breath work creates a link between the physical body and the mind via the energy body. By relaxing the physical body, by means of rotating attention through it, and then balancing the energy body through conscious breathing, we begin to access the third body, where we clear the mind. We’ll get to the mind in chapter seven, but for now, the point you need to know is that the breath is the key to the interaction between the body and mind. Our breath keeps our organs healthy, and the way we breathe affects their state. Just think of how a short burst of panicked breathing, like what happens during an anxiety attack, affects the physical body.
Many people don’t breathe fully; they hold back the breath and have been doing so their whole lives. I see this all the time in the women I support, and I too spent years not breathing fully. The problem with this is that despite the brain’s small size relative to the body, it needs a minimum of 20 percent of the body’s oxygen to feel nourished.1 If you’re not taking full, deep breaths and exercising regularly, it’s hard to get enough oxygen into your body, and as a consequence, your brain functions less optimally, putting your entire body under stress. Conscious breath work can reverse this stress, awaken vitality, and essentially reboot your entire system.
Conscious breath work practiced during yoga nidra can also help you tap into a deep meditative state, which clears away old patterns, thoughts, and emotions and shifts you into alignment with your most authentic self. As you work with the breath consciously, you awaken the energy body, heightening th
e potential for healing and transformation. Think of breath work as the fuel that helps your body, mind, and spirit operate with ease. The more you feed yourself with breath work, the more ease you feel. If you don’t feed yourself this fuel, you won’t run optimally.
Reclaiming Your Vitality
It’s a pretty simple equation: unblocking energy in your body activates life force, and your vitality begins to return. The problem is, most worn-out women have gotten so used to living with a lack of vitality that it has become their baseline. What happens when we live with less vitality? We get triggered easily by situations and feel uncentered, and for many women, panic attacks, depression, and sleep issues start to appear. Breath work increases life force, which impacts your level of vitality.
During these next five days, as you practice yoga nidra, notice how your vitality shifts from when you begin a yoga nidra meditation to the time you end it. Many women report feeling stressed when they begin yoga nidra, and then by the end, they feel as if they’re being cradled or as if their vitality has shifted to a better place. Breath work plays a major role in creating this sense of deep relaxation because it releases blocked life force. As a result, women feel more energetic and awake in the areas of their lives that have been starved of vitality.
Your sex life and intimacy with others is one life area that is often dramatically affected by a lack of vitality. Liz, a woman in her sixties, had felt a sense of inadequacy in her relationship for over four decades. When she began to practice yoga nidra, her first soul whisper was, “Give it up.” On the second day, it was, “I am.” On the third day, she had an unexpected surprise. Just before listening for her soul whisper, when prompted at the end of yoga nidra to send light to an area of her body that needed healing, the light went to her genitals. “This is embarrassing,” she shared, “but I had an orgasm.” While having an orgasm isn’t common in yoga nidra, it can happen, because yoga nidra activates life force, and as a result, often your vitality returns in all areas of your body.
Liz decided to write down “sex” as her soul whisper for that third day. Then on day 4, she got “contentment.” On the fifth day, when she read her soul whispers, they said, “Give it up I am sex contentment.” She couldn’t believe what she was reading. She shared with the women in our rest program, “I have held inside me for forty-five years a deep resentment toward my husband for things that happened at the beginning of our marriage having to do with sex. As a result, I have been punishing him at the detriment of my own pleasure. It is something I have held onto for so long. This string of words spelled it out for me. ‘Give it up.’ ‘I am’ worthy of pleasure. ‘Sex’ is pleasure. I will be ‘content.’” Through yoga nidra, Liz’s life force was activated, and listening to her soul whispers made this clear to her. Awareness is the first step to creating change, whether it’s a better marriage or needing to end a marriage.
Liz’s experience makes sense because yoga nidra releases the energy pools coiled up in the pelvis. In tantra philosophy, this energy is called “the sleeping snake,” or kundalini. If you’ve lost touch with your sexual self, experienced abuse, or are just not breathing deeply, then you may have a harder time accessing this sexual energy. But it’s there, and you can activate it through the practice of yoga nidra meditation. Be patient. When you combine this practice with listening to your soul whispers, there’s great potential for healing any kind of shame and activating vitality.
Life force is the fuel that helps increase our vitality and give birth to anything—a baby, a book, a business. When you’re full of vitality, you feel you can do anything. You feel fully alive. Liz’s message reminded her that she was worthy of feeling fully alive. Please don’t hold back for forty-five years like she did. Listening for your soul whispers during yoga nidra meditation, and looking closely at them afterward to discern their messages, will give you a clear indication of just how fully alive you feel. Soul whispers are like a vitality barometer. They always point out what’s not working and point us back to our most vital self. They are powerful instructions for taking your yoga nidra meditation into your everyday life.
Optional: Additional Practices for Your Energy Body
As you already know, your Phase One: Rest Meditation guides you to activate your energy body with a specific type of breathing. Here are some additional practices to help you balance your energy body.
Activate the Second Power Center
Your energy body is connected to your second power center, which represents vitality, passion, and creativity. This center also governs the area above the pubic bone and below the navel. To activate this power center, you may wish to place your Daring to Rest touchstone anywhere on this area of your body during your yoga nidra meditation during days 11 through 15.
You might also like to use a few drops of mandarin orange essential oil on your clothes or on your hands. Wearing orange clothing will also support the activation of the second power center.
Use Water
Soak in a warm bath or take a warm shower to get creative ideas flowing. Put on drumming music or any transformational dance music to listen to while in the tub or shower.
If you have menstrual cramps, use a hot water bottle in your pelvic area to release unwanted energy in the second power center.
If you live near water, go for a swim and then practice yoga nidra meditation near the water.
Cooling Breath
Also known as sheetali, the Cooling Breath relaxes the body and mind. You’ll recognize it from the Phase One: Rest Meditation, but it’s a great stand-alone breath-work technique to use when you feel anxiety or intense emotions or thoughts. I like to call it “the straw breath,” because when you exhale, you purse your lips as if you’re blowing through a straw. Here’s how to do it:
1.Lie or sit down.
2.Inhale slowly, filling the abdomen, then the chest, and then the chest cavity, all the way up to the neck.
3.Exhale even more slowly, pursing your lips as if you’re blowing through a straw.
4.Repeat four to six times—or as many times as you’d like.
5.When you stop, spend a minute tuning in to how the breath has impacted your body. Track how and where you feel this impact.
Alternate Nostril Breathing
Yogis consider alternate nostril breathing one of the best breath-work techniques for calming the mind and nervous system. It also balances the right- and left-brain functions. Start with three rounds in a session. After you feel comfortable with this technique, you can add rounds until you are comfortable doing seven rounds in a session. If you’d like to see this breath demonstrated in a video, there are lots of examples on the Internet. Here are the steps for Alternate Nostril Breathing:
1.Close the right nostril with your right thumb.
2.Inhale through the left nostril for a count of four, or about four seconds.
3.Immediately close the left nostril with your right ring finger and little finger. At the same time, remove your thumb from the right nostril.
4.Exhale through the right nostril for a count of eight, or about eight seconds.
5.Keeping your right ring and little fingers in place, inhale through the right nostril to the count of four.
6.Close the right nostril with your right thumb.
7.Exhale through the left nostril to the count of eight. This completes one full round.
Pay Attention to Rhythm
Rest and rhythm are best friends. Rest looks after rhythm, and rhythm looks after rest. The more you begin to honor rhythm in your life, the easier it will be to tap back into your vitality.
A simple way to become in sync with rhythm during these next five days is to watch the sunset in the evening or the sunrise in the early morning. Watching the sunset is a particularly good idea for people with sleep issues. It sends a message to your body to slow down and start producing melatonin for sleep. If you can’t observe the sun setting, you can honor it by turning off the lights in your home at dusk. Light some candles if you want to, o
r just sit in your home quietly and notice how your home goes from light to dark. This will help your body and mind slow down and connect to your life force.
Beyond these five days, another way to pay attention to rhythm is to chart your menstruation. Note on your calendar or in your Daring to Rest journal when your period starts, and note the blood flow and feelings that come with it. On the first day of your menstruation, look in the mirror and repeat the phrase, “I am fully alive.” Don’t menstruate? Then note the date of the full moon each month, and on that date, look in the mirror and repeat, “I am fully alive” several times that day.
Rhythm is always happening around us; the key to feeling more peaceful and full of vitality is to notice it and arrange your life to live more aligned with your cycles and rhythms.
Optional: Diving Deeper
Looking to dive more deeply into vitality, slowing down, and rhythm? Consider these Daring to Rest optional prompts:
•Review your five soul whispers from days 11 through 15. If you got an image for your soul whisper, give your image a one-word title. String the words from your soul whispers together to create one sentence. Draw a picture of this sentence or freewrite about this sentence and how it relates to your current vitality.
•What are some ways you could slow down? Freewrite about slowing down.
•If your body were a song, what would it be called and how would it move? Express the rhythm in your body through movement.
•Freewrite in a journal about your soul whispers.
•Describe your experience of yoga nidra mediation in one word. Using this word as a starting point, freewrite about your experience with yoga nidra meditation.
Key Points in Chapter Six
•Your energy body is the second of five bodies of awareness.
•During yoga nidra, breath work (conscious breathing) balances the energy body and unblocks your life force. As a result, you feel more vitality, passion, and creativity.
