by Karen Brody
4.Notice how you feel.
Here are some common emotions and emotion-generating states and their opposites:
Angry/loving
Sad/happy
Pessimistic/optimistic
Hopeless/hopeful
Fearful/brave
Exhausted/rested
Lonely/complete
Holding Opposites is also excellent for specific situations that often trigger strong emotions, such as these:
Menstruation: pain/comfort
Pregnancy and birth: fear/trust
Initially, the Holding Opposites practice may feel hard to do, but keep with it. Eventually, you will feel into the space between. When you practice the Phase Two: Release Meditation you are guided to hold opposites, but many people find it useful to use this technique on its own, when their system feels overwhelmed by an emotion or thought.
Pregnancy, for example, is my favorite time to practice Holding Opposites. If you have been practicing yoga nidra throughout pregnancy, then the Holding Opposites practice will be easy to do during birth. Birth is one of the ultimate moments when a woman feels both “I can’t do this” and “I can do this”—two very powerful opposites. Today, this battle between fear and trust in giving birth often ends in a woman siding with fear because, unless she has a room full of midwives or doulas believing she can do it, most hospital birthing rooms aren’t filled with “you can do it” cheering. The good news is that when practicing Holding Opposites a woman doesn’t need others to believe she can birth a baby—she just needs herself.
Clarissa, a woman having her first birth at forty-two, used the Holding Opposites practice as she neared transition in her birth. She told me, “I was so scared, so I felt that, and then I started consciously welcoming the feeling ‘I am not scared,’ and it was incredible how fast my body relaxed.” When she held both, that’s when she said she felt “a deep sense of peace.” She repeated this practice for about ten minutes, and then her baby was born. That moment a baby is born is the ultimate holding of opposites. It’s when a woman drops the either-or and says yes to both-and.
The Holding Opposites practice helped Monique, a single mom, transform her relationship with her mother. For years, Monique had been upset with her mother because of the emotional support she didn’t get as a child. She was haunted by a scary incident she’d experienced when she was five years old: two boys took her to a secluded place and made her raise her shirt. She got away, but when she told her mother, her mother thought Monique was overreacting. Over the years, Monique continued to stay angry with her mother, and eventually, after years of trying to make her mother see her side, Monique’s anger turned to rage. The moment she learned to hold opposites during yoga nidra, she could see for the first time how her mother could have her feelings and Monique could have hers. As a result, finally, the rage toward her mother began to lift.
“I used to feel [the only way] to resolve our situation [was] by me only acknowledging how my mother felt,” Monique shared. “Now there’s space for my feelings and her feelings. We can feel differently about the situation and it’s okay.” Holding opposites taught Monique that there isn’t a right or wrong way to feel. After practicing yoga nidra for a while, “the issue with my mother became a nonissue,” she said. She finally felt at peace with it. “This is why I call yoga nidra meditation magic,” Monique explained. “You can feel okay with people you’ve been in conflict with for years.”
Just to be clear, disidentifying from a charged emotion like anger does not mean you numb yourself to it. It means exactly the opposite: you’re consciously feeling the emotion and, in doing so, you’re becoming unstuck from an exhausting mental loop. You may not be ready to have your mother be a part of your life, but you can come to a more peaceful place within you. This is the first step toward feeling well rested. Monique’s mother didn’t change, but her mother’s behavior no longer consistently sends Monique into a place of emotional exhaustion. Her yoga nidra practice helped, but she also uses the Holding Opposites practice outside of yoga nidra. It’s a great tool to use to shift any challenging relationship.
The mental body is all about the element of fire. Fire can be used to destroy or to create, as fire turns matter into energy that can be used to move forward. A balanced mental body transforms “my will,” ego-driven fire, into “thy will,” a force no longer powered by ego. You do this by using the same principle of meeting anger with awareness. Anger is a low-level, reptilian-brain neural response that forms for most people before the rational mind has a chance to intervene. It does not want to hang out for long. So the moment you give awareness to your anger, you diffuse its emotional charge. The pompom-shaking beauty of yoga nidra is that you can release the fire burning you up through lying down and without tremendous effort.
Like Monique, being able to hold opposite emotions presented Mae with the opportunity to break out of anxiety. She used to feel like her heart was going to explode from every little thing in her life. “I felt so fragile,” she told me. She had pushed every feeling away. But experiencing the holding of opposites through yoga nidra showed her that, as she said, “I don’t have to stay in all these stories and the related feelings.” She also released herself from years of deep resentment the moment she met her resentment and realized the opposite also resided within her. “Everything in my life softened,” she said. “Now I’m able to get my mind quiet. Getting quiet feels like a miracle.”
Overcoming Negative Habits and Self-Defeating Mental/Emotional Patterns
How was Mae able to start feeling more powerful? She started to clear her mental body by using the power of opposites to let go of her negative emotions and move into a more positive place. When you’re holding emotions that no longer serve you, it feels as if heavy boulders have shown up in your life. You often feel numb, oversensitive, and powerless. But meeting these emotions diffuses their charge, and that’s when your power returns. Back to the riverbed analogy, balancing the mental body helps more of the free-flowing river return to your dry riverbed.
Your first fifteen days of yoga nidra has been preparing you for this moment, inviting your body to meet sensations and activate your life force. You’re now ready to stop repeating negative mental/emotional patterns and self-defeating habits. For example, if you have struggled with overeating, this habit has made an imprint on your mind. The more you repeat the habit, the stronger the imprint becomes, and the harder it is to do the opposite, which in this case would be to not overeat. When a habit pattern has a deep hold over you and alters your body chemistry, it is an addiction. If this addiction continues, it can alter your personality, and suddenly these imprints begin to feel like your destiny.
In Mae’s case, struggling with anxiety had become normal for her, and she felt it would be her life. The good news, as yoga nidra teacher and trainer John Vosler points out, is that yoga nidra is like “Mr. Clean” for all five bodies. In the mental body, by using various techniques to shine awareness on the habit pattern, like pairing of opposites, intention, visualization, and affirmations, yoga nidra helps clean up these imprints that formed. When Mae lay down to practice yoga nidra, its Mr. Clean touch trained her mind to stop supporting the imprint that said she must suffer with anxiety. After daily practice, Mae finally realized that her destiny did not have to be a life of anxiety. We think we must live in darkness when, in fact, there is always a flicker of light in the darkest situation. Yoga nidra helped Mae acknowledge the darkness and find the light.
You can work at changing your negative mental/emotional patterns and self-defeating habits by talking about them in therapy and with other methods. But addressing them during yoga nidra meditation is especially effective because in yoga nidra, you go into the deepest state of meditation, where you can work at the roots of these habits and patterns. Mae told me several times that she had spent years in therapy, deep in her personal story, but it wasn’t until yoga nidra that she felt the anxiety, and all her personal stories of hardship, finally lift.
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br /> It’s easy to think you’re a loser if you’ve got a lot of negative habits and patterns that have turned into imprints, and you keep reinforcing them. But you’re not alone—everyone is working out the imprints of their habits and patterns. The key is to not let your habits and patterns drive counterproductive behaviors, but instead to witness them in a detached manner. This is not easily done, but in yoga nidra meditation, when you invite the mind to hold opposite pairs—of emotions, thoughts, or situations—you help to remove the dominant habit and/or pattern from your mind, thus balancing the mental body.
When I met Mae, her self-defeating habits and negative patterns had become deep imprints in her mind. Here’s what she told herself over and over again: “My husband was a cheater. My parents were horrible to me. I’m a loser mother.” When we overidentify with mental imprints like this, very often we express the imbalance somewhere in our life. For Mae, it was expressed through depression and anxiety. Her mind believed her thoughts. Ego was in full control. As a result, Mae felt broken, often repeating the mantra I hear so many women say: “I am not enough.”
If this “I am not enough” mantra, or a similar self-defeating thought, is playing in your ear, instead of running from it, meet it with awareness using the power of opposites. What does this mean? Feel “I am not enough” in your body and then welcome the opposite feeling: that you are enough. It seems simple, but doing this again and again stops you from reinforcing the imprints that are causing you to suffer. It cleans your mind. Meeting emotions, thoughts, and deep imprints of the mind with awareness is yoga nidra’s superpower.
Optional: Additional Practices for Your Mental Body
Don’t be dismayed if old habits and patterns take time to clear. Most people have to balance and rebalance the mental body to keep it clear. But during these next five days, the Phase Two: Release Meditation will begin to open this portal to clearing your mind. Here are some additional practices you can use to help balance your mental body both while practicing yoga nidra and outside of your yoga nidra meditations.
Activate Your Third Power Center
A balanced mental body helps you feel powerful. It’s here you can transform anything that no longer serves you. This is warrior energy. The mental body is associated with the third power center, which is located in the space from your navel to breastbone and particularly in your solar plexus, your digestive area. If you have digestive issues or feel lots of anger, I encourage you to activate this third power center by placing your touchstone on your solar plexus during yoga nidra meditation. Blocked energy here is often due to the challenge of digesting one’s personal power. You might also like to put a few drops of lemon essential oil on your clothes, or put a drop on the palm of your hands, rub your hands together, and inhale the scent from your hands. Wearing yellow also helps activate the third power center.
Anointing Practice for the Release Phase
This is another beautiful essential oil practice created by Deborah Sullivan that you can add to your yoga nidra meditation for the entire Release phase (days 16 to 30).
Choose any essential oil that is purifying, such as citrus or cypress. Apply a drop to your heart and to any part of your body that is releasing stories, scripts, emotions, and behaviors that don’t serve who you are remembering yourself to be.
You may wish to read the following words into a recording device.
Feel the scent showering you, cleansing, opening, and creating flow in any areas where your energy feels blocked, stagnant, or stuck. Envision the scent infusing and pulsating from your heart, throughout your body, and into the energy field around your body.
Now feel a shaft of light coming down from above. Call in that light through the crown of your head. Feel the luminous rays fill up your whole body, from the top of your head to the tips of your toes and fingers. Sense the light becoming more incandescent as it then spreads into the energy field around your body. Feel a golden egg of light encompassing and informing you.
Reach your arms and hands out in all directions—above, below, and on both sides—blessing yourself. Then send the blessings to Mother Earth and up to the cosmic canopy, the entire universe.
Afterward, just sit for a moment in the silence and stillness, feeling cleansed and renewed, being love and feeling grateful.
Clean Out Your Gut
Many people with lots of mental body impurities and imbalances experience constipation, diarrhea, or general stomach upset. They also tend to have weight issues, sleep disorders, and self-worth issues. Many studies are suggesting that gut microbes are related to mood, sleep, and weight and that improving your microbiome will help issues in these areas.3 Each person’s situation is unique, but addressing this critical area of gut health is often part of the solution to these problems.
If you’ve ever considered doing a gut cleanse, days 16 through 20 would be a wonderful time for one, including enemas and colonics. I do “rest and digest” journeys with my rest community because each of the four seasons is a great time to cleanse your system from stagnation that builds up. On a daily basis, you might want to take a good probiotic, drink lots of water, and add fiber-rich foods to your diet.
The Ha Breath
The Ha Breath is one of my favorite breathing practices to help women release strong emotions. The mental body is where you activate the warrior within you, and doing the Ha Breath can help you feel like a warrior. Sometimes I call it the scream-on-a-mountain breath. What woman doesn’t want to have a good scream?
I first discovered the Ha Breath while taking a Goddess to the Core workshop with Sierra Bender. What I love about this breath is how it helps you release everything you’re holding. It also welcomes masculine energy (step one), feminine energy (step two), and then unites the two (step three), bringing you pretty quickly into a state of oneness. If you begin to feel overwhelmed by any emotions, the Ha Breath is one way to actively release these emotions and come back to a peaceful place.
Here’s how to do it.
Step One
1.Begin in a standing position. Lift your hands straight over your head and take a deep breath in through your nose.
2.Squat down and pull your hands into your belly like you’re scooping energy from the sky (masculine energy). As you squat, shout out, “Ha!”
3.Return to standing. Repeat three times or more, until you feel complete.
4.Take one minute to feel the vibratory impact on your body and mind.
Step Two
1.Begin in a standing position. Your arms are at your sides. Take a deep breath in through your nose.
2.Squat down and pull your hands up as if you’re scooping energy from the earth (feminine energy). As you squat, shout out, “Ha!”
3.Return to standing. Repeat three times or more, until you feel complete.
4.Take one minute to feel the vibratory impact on your body and mind.
Step Three
1.Begin in a standing position. Your arms are at your sides. Take a deep breath in through your nose.
2.Squat down with your hands extended forward, and shout out, “Ha!” as you bring your hands into your belly (uniting masculine and feminine energies).
3.Return to standing. Repeat three times or more, until you feel complete.
4.Take one minute to feel the vibratory impact on your body and mind.
Create a New Intention
These five days are a great time to check in with the intention you’re using during yoga nidra meditation. If your intention still feels right, keep it. But if it doesn’t, or if your soul whispers have led you to identify an emotion or a recurring situation that you’d like to shift, think of a positive statement for a new intention. This is called a secondary intention. It’s more goal oriented but it always relates to your primary intention, which you identified in chapter four. Here are some guidelines developed by John Heister, a senior Amrit Yoga Institute teacher.
Identify a habit or pattern or an area of health, stress, worry, or tension that you’d like
to change. To create a new intention around this concern, ask yourself these questions:
What do I want to feel for myself, whether the situation changes or not?
How would I like to be in this situation?
How would it make me feel if I had what I wanted?
Freewrite your answers to these questions. Then look at those answers and notice the key words in them that could be used as a new intention.
For example, Sarah wanted to create an intention that addressed her overeating. For the first question, she wrote that whether she stopped overeating or not, she’d like to “feel more loving” toward herself. In the actual situation, she would like to “be more brave.” And then for the final question, she wrote that she would feel “more kind” toward herself. Sarah’s new intention became “I am loving, brave, and kind to myself.” Notice how her intention didn’t mention the actual habit she wanted to release. She knew what habit her intention related to, and that was enough.
Your intention statement does not have to use all the words that resonate with you; instead, make sure it evokes a feeling that resonates. Kiran was having a challenging time parenting her three children. Every day there were intense arguments, particularly with her fourteen-year-old daughter. It was hard for her to even imagine what she wanted to feel for herself, whether the situation changed or not, because she had not thought about her own feelings for a long time. But eventually her answer to question one was “to feel peaceful.” For the second question, on how she would want to be in this situation, the words loving and forgiving stood out. Finally, for the third question, she wrote that if she had what she wanted, a peaceful home with positive communication, she would feel “overjoyed and optimistic.” Kiran’s new intention became “I am peacefully parenting with love and forgiving myself and my children.” She didn’t feel the need to include words from her answer to question three because the intention statement itself made her feel optimistic.
