by Karen Brody
•Life force is the fuel that helps increase our vitality, and this helps us give birth to anything—a baby, a book, a business.
•Your soul whispers hold clues to your level of vitality.
Phase Two
RELEASE
Whatever you meet, you can go beyond.
For the next fifteen days you’ll be clearing the second layer of exhaustion: emotional and mental exhaustion. Yoga nidra meditation does this effortlessly every time you lie down to practice, but for fifteen days we’ll be exploring these layers more deeply. This is the huge unexpected benefit of yoga nidra: you are getting deep rest and being pointed back to your internal power switch, which is like sleep and good therapy in one—and with quicker results. But before you begin day 16 of your Daring to Rest journey, I want to introduce you to a theme that captures yoga nidra’s magic: making friends with darkness.
There’s a beautiful Marianne Williamson quote that says, “Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who that person is.”1 During this second phase, I’ll be asking you to meet and greet the dark sides of yourself. Meeting your darkness is a key to feeling powerful. Practicing yoga nidra meditation encourages you to engage with difficult emotions and beliefs because darkness can help you find your way home to your internal power switch. The more you avoid meeting darkness, the harder it will be to feel calm and peaceful.
Have you ever noticed how our culture demonizes the dark, and how darkness has virtually disappeared at night? Light pollution is everywhere. The consequences of our disdain for night, and the effects of overexposure to light, are now appearing in many places on our planet. Sleep disorders are skyrocketing. Night light is confusing bird migratory patterns. The twenty-four-hour day-night cycle, known as the circadian clock, affects everything from hormone production to cell regulation. When you disrupt your circadian clock, you are at a higher risk for medical issues including depression, insomnia, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The body produces melatonin at night, but if you’re exposed to light, then melatonin levels drop. Studies are finding that decreased melatonin levels lead to an increase in your risk for cancer. In fact, night-shift workers, like nurses, who are exposed to indoor light at night are showing increased rates for breast cancer.2 Even sleeping with a night-light on has shown a small but measurable increase in the risk for breast cancer in women.
Mythology also holds clues on the importance of night. The Greek goddess of night, Nyx, had many children, and one was Hypnos, the god of sleep. Yes, in Greek mythology, sleep is the child of night. This is ironic given all the sleep problems in the world. Nyx was married to her brother, Erebus, the god of depth and darkness, and they also gave birth to Hypnos’s twin brother, Thanatos, the god of death. No wonder we fear going to sleep: night and darkness bring death. This message is ingrained in us from an early age: we should be afraid of the dark because darkness means danger. Many of us feel this in our psyche. As children, we expressed it to our parents as, “I’m afraid there are monsters in my room.” As adults, we shove this belief into a pocket of our unconscious mind, but that doesn’t extinguish it. Yoga nidra asks us to engage with these thoughts instead of distancing ourselves from them. To darkness, it would say, “Come closer.”
With yoga nidra, we begin to see the possibility of meeting darkness and, by extension, embracing the night. Nyx’s children weren’t all death and doom. She also had a daughter, Elpis, the goddess of hope. Hope is also the child of night. This is so true with any breakthrough: if you can just hang on through it, meeting all your dark emotions and thoughts, you will break through. You’ll enter midnight, the darkest moment, and it’s here you’ll welcome everything just as it is, both dark and light. This is when grace arrives. You will feel it filling you—a holy presence, a stillness in your heart, a peace that permeates your entire being. Joy arrives, ego drops away, and your fearful sense of self falls away. Every time you lie down to practice yoga nidra, you’re being safely led into this dance with your shadowy sides.
The moment you say yes to meeting your darkness, something incredible happens: you start breaking the cycle of fatigue. Why? Because often a dark emotion just wanted a little attention, and once it gets your attention, its power diffuses. You begin to feel more at ease. I know it’s hard to take the first step, but yoga nidra guides you there gently and effortlessly. It may seem counterintuitive to think that meeting a dark emotion or thought would make you feel better, but your attention to darkness is ultimately your ticket to less exhaustion.
Occasionally, there’s a woman who enrolls in one of my yoga nidra programs with the intention to meet her darkness. Deborah, who entered my Daring to Rest program having suddenly lost her partner of sixteen and a half years, fit this category: intelligent, spiritual, having years of experience guiding women through spiritual journeys, and eager to meet the darkness she felt so deeply.
When Deborah started the rest immersion program, she was shattered at the sudden loss of her beloved, a man she knew was her soul mate from the moment she met him. His death reorganized her entire world. For the first few months after his death, she had support from others, but after that, she felt that she had to put on a mask for people she couldn’t show her grief to. She tried going to a grief counselor but quickly knew that she couldn’t think or talk her way out of grief.
Yoga nidra became her “unconditional mother,” her safe space to meet herself, meet all her darkness and the light, and greet transformation. “It met me exactly where I was,” she said. During yoga nidra meditation, she could see how grief was showing up in her body and systems. Deborah shares, “It was such a mirroring of what was going on inside of me, what in the external world I had no words for yet.” Until practicing yoga nidra, she had no idea how deeply her grief was living in her cells.
“Yoga nidra is like the alchemist’s caldron,” she explained. “It was a place that I could garden and harvest everything within me that is beautiful and not beautiful.”
Yoga nidra didn’t ask Deborah to not grieve. Her darkness was held in love, and then in that holding, she realized that she could go on without her beloved partner. She could embrace the darkness and choose not to let it consume her.
In phase two, you will have this same opportunity to work with any darkness you’re holding. Grief can come from any form of loss—losing a beloved family member, losing a job you loved, leaving a community of friends, or moving away from a location you loved. When we lose something, we often fall into a place of feeling broken. And this broken feeling disconnects us from our internal power switch. A woman disconnected from her internal power switch feels weak and unsure, and this opens her to voices that say, “I’m worthless,” or “I’m fat,” or in Deborah’s case, “I’m not strong enough to go on after this loss.” It’s a voice telling you negative or frightening things, further disconnecting you from your confidence.
This voice and its energy can make it very hard to get out of a dark place or to practice self-love, self-care, and self-compassion. This is why it’s important to practice yoga nidra often whenever we are feeling overwhelmed by darkness, whether it’s grief or some other dark feeling. When you greet dark emotions and really feel them, you are reconnected to your instinct. The voice of fear and negativity cannot penetrate this connection, and as a result, you will not blindly follow it. The moment you make this reconnection, you have begun to turn your internal power switch on. You’re effectively saying, “I know I’m not only darkness. That is just a part of me at this moment.” This is how you take back darkness, how you embrace the night, and ultimately how you shift out of a dark place to wholeness to embrace your power.
Here in phase two, yoga nidra will help you explore what emotional exhaustion you need to release to feel powerful again. As you move through the next three chapters, it’s time to dare to rest on an even deeper level. The veils are coming off, dear Sister. Fatigue is lifting. Keep lying down to wake up. You’ve got this.
7
MIND
Letting Go of Burdens
Days 16–20
The first five days of phase two focus on the third body of awareness, the mental body. The process of yoga nidra begins with balancing the physical and then the energy body, and this prepares you to enter the mental body, where you begin to loosen all the self-defeating habits you’ve been attached to for a lifetime. The promise of the mental body is big: is it possible to find peace of mind with your everyday life? The answer is yes, you can, and the yoga nidra pompom-shaking excitement is that you can do it lying down.
The mental body governs your rational, linear, and sequential thought processes. It’s the body that starts doing the deep cleaning of the mind. This is your opportunity to get out of the mental spin cycle that leaves so many of us exhausted. The mental body is the most important one to understand because it’s here where you use your mind to manipulate your world. When your mental body is well balanced, you’ll have rational and logical thoughts, which will then influence your actions and interactions with others in a more positive way. You’ll feel powerful. But if your mental body is out of balance, then you’ll disconnect from rational thought and the truest version of yourself. Not only can panic befall you if you don’t clear the conflict in the mental body, but you can also become consumed by your thoughts and feelings and, as a result, take unkind actions. When our minds are full of judgment, we separate ourselves from others and from the bigger picture of the world. Understanding the mental body and keeping it balanced is crucial to managing suffering and starting to feel powerful.
Let me be clear about what is meant by “mind” in the mental body because it might be different from what you think it is. In yoga nidra “mind” is connected with time, space, and causality. In everyday life, the gap between time, space, and causality seems long, but when you meditate, this gap closes. Sometimes when you are in yoga nidra meditation, the mind can even stop. When this gap closes, you are connected to the cosmic mind. Your individual mind has real needs, but yogic teachings and many other spiritual teachings tell us that we’re all part of one cosmic mind. When you’re practicing yoga nidra, this is the mind you tap into, and it’s where you reconnect to your power.
Basic Instructions for Days 16 to 20
1.Practice the Phase Two: Release Meditation daily for five days. Continue to use the intention you crafted in phase one or create a new intention as you’re guided to in this chapter. Your new intention can focus on a habit you’d like to break or an issue, like health, that you’d like to address. Also continue to hold your touchstone in your left hand when practicing or place it on your third power center, your gut, in your digestive area.
2.Listen for and track your soul whispers.
3.Optional: Use additional practices to balance your mental body.
4.Optional: Use prompts to dive deeper into warrior energy, darkness, and holding opposites.
From Disconnected to Powerful
To understand what a profound impact balancing the mental body can have on your life, I want you to meet Mae. When Mae arrived in my Daring to Rest immersion program, she had a history of dealing with an ex-husband who was verbally abusive during their marriage, was an alcoholic and drug addict, and had cheated on her with other women. Not surprisingly, Mae’s life read like a panic-attack script: high levels of stress for a long period of time and constant judgment on her life experiences. She told me, “I thought living under stress like this was normal.” The results? Mae felt completely disconnected from her life and had consistent anxiety and panic attacks. She managed them with medication for years, mostly antidepressants and sleeping pills. But when I met her, all of her usual medications had stopped working, and every new medication suggested by her doctor didn’t seem to work either. “I couldn’t get on an elevator,” Mae told me. “My heart would race, and I’d be sweating.” Everyday life felt like a fight-or-flight situation for Mae.
What Mae experienced was an amygdala hijacking, to use the term coined by psychologist Daniel Goleman.1 Your amygdala comprises two masses of gray matter, located inside each cerebral hemisphere. It is involved with the experiencing of emotions. When you’re under extreme stress, the amygdala can hijack, or take over, your rational mind, the higher thinking centers in your neocortex that would normally slow down your responses, causing your body to go straight to a fight-or-flight response. In the short term, you want your amygdala to do this because it helps you run away from immediate danger or manage a crisis. In the long term, you don’t want your amygdala overriding these thinking centers because a constant release of adrenaline and cortisol into your system for a long period of time can trigger panic attacks, produce an ideal environment for disease, and create unhealthy assumptions based on a one-sided perception of your life.
I think of an amygdala hijacking as the mental spin cycle for women. Imagine your clothes being washed in a washing machine. In the beginning, they’re gently being swished around in the water with soap. This is your rational mind; when something gets dirty, you clean it. Then the spin cycle arrives, and this is the moment when the clothes have got to let go of all the dirt, not just the surface dirt. The mental spin cycle can be healthy, unless you resist letting go of your mental dirt. Then it’s like the washing machine that’s stuck on its spin cycle: your amygdala bypasses your rational mind, you disconnect from your power, and you’re in freak-out mode, spinning uncontrollably. He slept around, and I allowed it. I don’t know how to get out of my marriage. My ex is dating a twenty-eight-year-old. I’m too shy. I’m too heavy. I don’t want pain. I don’t want pain. I don’t want pain. Surprise: you’re in deep pain—and whether you get eight hours of sleep or not, this kind of spin cycle pain is exhausting.
A balanced mental body can stop this spin cycle from getting out of control, and during yoga nidra, your mental body is brought into balance as you are continually encouraged to feel all your thoughts and emotions. You’d think this is a recipe for disaster, that you’d feel worse. But actually you feel better because yoga nidra doesn’t just leave you feeling your misery; it also invites you to feel the opposite, which helps you disidentify with that miserable emotion or thought and brings your mental body into balance.
The Power of Holding Opposites
A key feature of yoga nidra is feeling opposites. During yoga nidra, you are often asked to hold opposite sensations, like hot and cold. This trains your body to stop identifying with only one-half of a pair of opposing sensations. I cannot emphasize enough how freeing holding opposites can be for you. For many women, like Mae, it transformed years of anxiety quite quickly—seeming like a miracle.
In the Phase Two: Release Meditation, you will notice that you are asked to hold pairs of opposite emotions. First you are invited to remember an experience of feeling disconnection, weakness, and powerlessness; then you are invited to allow opposite feelings to arise; and finally, you are invited to welcome both sets of feelings. This is training your mind to hold opposite feelings, which frees you from overidentifying with a feeling and creating the out-of-control mental spin cycle. While holding opposites is common in yoga nidra, holding opposite feelings and thoughts is a classic feature of iRest yoga nidra, developed by Richard Miller. Just imagine feeling angry and being unable to shift out of that anger—for years. Yoga nidra says that it’s okay to feel anger, and it’s okay to feel the opposite, gentleness or empathy. Both reside in you. When we only acknowledge one, we get stuck in the mental spin cycle.
In Mae’s case, holding opposite feelings meant effectively acknowledging her anxiety and then gently pointing out to herself that she had a peaceful place inside of her too. The moment your mind begins to even slightly disidentify from only thinking that you’re a panic-attack-driven mess is your ticket to a better place. It’s why I call holding opposites the golden magic of yoga nidra meditation.
We’re often so busy living our lives in either-or—either I’m powerful or I’m disconnected. Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologi
st in Vienna whose pregnant wife and parents died in the Holocaust, wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning how he consciously chose to live in the space between either-or. Frankl’s mind could have easily lived in misery after experiencing the Holocaust, and who would blame him for thinking, “I’ve lost everyone. My life has no meaning.” But Frankl noticed in the concentration camps that the people who were resilient were those who found meaning despite their horrific situation.2
I hear a gazillion times from women that the practice Holding Opposites is their breakthrough tool, both while practicing yoga nidra and in their everyday lives. Why? By holding one feeling and then another and then uniting the two feelings, you receive a visceral understanding of a universal law: that all is one. The mental body always has preferences in your everyday life; it’s programmed to have ideas about right and wrong. What we forget is that there is also a space of awareness that never changes. In the space of awareness, everything is okay. Painful and stressful memories are still mediated by the amygdala, but holding opposites helps you to not live in the unconscious habits and patterns that get triggered by pain and stress.
Holding Opposites Practice
Here’s how you do the Holding Opposites practice:
1.Feel any big emotion or thought in your body. Really engage all of your senses. You may want to think of a memory to bring the sensation forward, but then let go of the memory and stay with the sensation in your body. Take three slow breaths feeling this emotion or thought.
2.Release that sensation and call up the opposite sensation. Again, really engage your senses and use a memory to bring it forward if you need to. Take three slow breaths.
3.Now call up both sensations and feel them at the same time. This is the space between the opposites. Take three slow breaths.
