I’ve got some really exciting news!
Short back story …
So, a long time ago, I was that kind of depressed person who was afraid of emotions so I just turned them off. Consequently, for the space of about a decade, I didn’t feel happiness, sadness, grief, or loneliness. I didn’t feel anything. I remember during that time thinking that I couldn’t remember what it felt like to have fun.
After about 10 years of feeling like this, I discovered Yoga Nidra, or the yoga of sleep. This is the guided meditation where you lie down, get very relaxed, and follow the facilitator’s words as you become increasingly more aware of the different layers of your being.
During one of my very first Yoga Nidra sessions, I had a life-changing experience. I became very, very relaxed and began to experience myself as pure Awareness. I know, what does that even mean? For me, it felt myself flying through the cosmos, outside of time and space. I felt as if the Universe and I were one and the same. I felt that though this thing called “Scott” had a finite body, emotions, and thoughts, and that my true identity was something so much more immense, complete, and beautiful than any of those other parts of my being.
This one Yoga Nidra experience dropped some massive and cosmic clarity into my lap. It helped me to understand my human existence with all of its vicissitudes is nothing to avoid, but rather to live out to the fullest. And just like that, I felt safe to feel emotions again. It was like a miracle healing because that night I went home and the floodgates of emotions opened. Oh, the boxes of Kleenex that absorbed more than 10 years of emotions! From that moment forward, I’ve bravely met every emotion that has come my way. I love and have fun again!
Yoga Nidra does so much more than help you heal from emotional repression. The most common benefits of Yoga Nidra include less stress, better sleep, decreased anxiety and depression, increased self-confidence, lowered blood pressure, increased production, creativity, and learning. Mostly what Yoga Nidra does is help you wake up to your innate power and perfection and it does it in the most relaxing way imaginable. It’s seriously like napping your way to enlightenment.
In addition to my own transformation, I’ve seen countless other people who have benefitted in large and small ways through this accessible and non-dogmatic practice of deep and relaxing mindfulness. Therefore, I decided to devote much of my life to this fascinating and transformative practice. So, for the previous dozen or so years, I’ve been practicing, studying, and teaching Yoga Nidra. I’ve been featured in podcasts about Yoga Nidra, written a blog largely devoted to the subject, written countless articles, and even written a book about Yoga Nidra. I host regular Yoga Nidra classes, workshops, courses, and I’ve traveled all over the world offering Yoga Nidra trainings.
While teaching a live Yoga Nidra training, it dawned on me how much the world needs more Yoga Nidra and to do that how much it needs more qualified Yoga Nidra teachers. So I began to make the recordings of my trainings available as a digital download on my website. I was proud of this training product but it was very DIY. Before long, though, people around the world were learning my method of Yoga Nidra.
During the few years since my training went global, something thrilling started happening. Graduates of my program began sending me their original Yoga Nidra recordings in their native languages of Spanish, French, German, Chinese, or Thai. I began to see that this Yoga Nidra training is bigger than me. Truly, my training was spreading across the globe and deserved an upgrade. So, I began to revise.
After two years of growing, learning, and updating my curriculum, I still felt miles away from building the new program. Then, in July of 2020 I caught wind of a Product Creation Boot Camp hosted by Eric Edmeads and Speaker Nation. If you don’t know him, Eric Edmeads is an absolute force of nature. He is one of the world’s most successful speakers, entrepreneurs, business and health coaches and an absolutely phenomenal online product creator. He created perhaps the world’s most successful health program called Wildfit. He works in the company of powerhouses like Richard Branson of Virgin Records and Virgin Airlines, and Vishen Lakhiani of Mindvalley, and Tony Robbins of, well, Tony Robbins. I absolutely love Eric’s stuff and I really trust him as a guide and so when I heard about this Product Creation Boot Camp, I felt it was exactly what I needed to give my current online Yoga Nidra training the wings that it deserved.
A few weeks later, I holed up solo in a friend of a friend’s house in Moab, Utah for a week with little or no distractions so I could engage with this roughly 60-hour live, intensive course production training. I’m glad I did because it gave me the time and space to learn volumes, not only about how to offer my new online Yoga Nidra training in a way that it deserved, but I also had many eureka moments about the practice itself, not to mention great illumination about myself.
But we all know that learning and doing are very different things. One of the things that makes Eric Edmeads such a remarkable facilitator of online courses is his ability to inspire people to follow through and finish the damn thing! This Product Creation Boot Camp course was no different. He promised that for anyone who could finish their project by October 15th, they would be entered into a contest to win 1 of three spots on an Instagram Live event to help bring a broader audience to their project.
I wanted one of those spots badly, so I immediately came home from Moab and got to work. I spent weeks completing and fine-tuning my 120-page outline and working on the course details. I soon realized that it was waaaaaay more work than I had anticipated.
About 10 days before the October 15th deadline, my wife and I were sitting outside early one morning during our daily coffee date when my wife asked, “Are you going to make your deadline?” With a pang of disappointment I told her that I thought it would be too difficult to complete in time: I had to film, edit, and compress about 35 hours of lectures, record 25 Yoga Nidra recordings, create multiple PDFs—oh and build a site and upload all of my content on Teachable, a site for online courses which I had never used before. So, no. This project was too big. I could finish in a month or two maybe, just not in time for the deadline.
She looked at me in the eyes and in not so many words essentially told me to get my ass inside and get to work. So I did.
Something you need to know about me is that I’m stupidly optimistic. Despite my unrealistic hope for the impossible, completing this project seemed beyond even my warped conception of possible. Regardless, for the next 10 days I put my head down and cranked out 12 to 18-hour days working on this project. During the process, I’d get a momentary glimpse of hope, that maybe, just MAYBE, I might be able to finish. Then, that hope would fade as new issues or problems arose. I’d continue to work through those issues and hope would return, then fade, and return … all the way to the date of the deadline. I was a wreck!
To qualify for the chance to have an IG Live spot with Eric I needed to submit my completed project by 10pm on October 14th. At EXACTLY 10pm on the 14th, I pushed send and submitted my project. Done. It was a fucking miracle, the product of raw, stubborn, and dumb persistence. Thanks to my wife who could see something inside of me that I couldn’t see myself.
I took a day or so to rest and be a dad again.
Then, a few days later, to my complete astonishment and surprise I was informed that I was one of the three chosen to be featured in Eric’s Instagram Live feed!!! I did the happy dance until my legs were exhausted. I’m still doing the happy dance. Mostly, I am thrilled to have been pushed by something to finish what I feel is a worthy and much-needed project, one that ended up being much bigger than I had expected but which I feel is to the scope that it deserves.
So, what’s in this new course?
There’s something for everyone, regardless if you want to teach Yoga Nidra. One of the things that Eric taught me to offer in all courses was to answer the questions, “what,” “why,” and “what if,” as well as “how.” I believe that to be a good teacher of any subject, you need to deliver the message from your own assimilated experience and not as a rote version of your teacher. I believe that you gotta learn for yourself the “what” and “why” before you learn the “how.” That way, you’ll eventually find your own way to do it and when you do you’ll be more impactful.
By addressing the “what” and “why” of Yoga Nidra separate from the “how” to teach it, I realized that I actually have not one but TWO courses— one for those who are interested in receiving the vast array of benefits from the practice including healing from stress, sleeplessness, and self-limiting beliefs as well as learning about Yoga Nidra’s power to help you to source the power that is already inside of you to live an extraordinary life, and another vast course for those who wish to take the information of the first course and leverage it to learn how to expertly share it with the world.
The first course is called Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep. This go-at-your-own-pace course is about waking up to who you really are. It uses Yoga Nidra to help you remember and experience your birthright of infinite power. Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep helps you to deeply relax while you gain a universal perspective about your life to experience it as miraculous, extraordinary, and rich. In this course, you will learn about waking up from the beautiful and necessary illusions of body, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and circumstantial happiness. It guides you to wake up to an eternal joy that is fundamental to your being and helps you arrive at a cosmic perspective of life’s problems. This course helps you to truly experience yourself as Oneness. In addition, you’ll also be receptive to the vast other possible benefits of the practice including but not limited to less stress, better sleep, decreased anxiety and depression, increased self-confidence, lowered blood pressure, increased production, creativity, and learning. This course is about creating some YOU time for yourself. It is relaxing, illuminating, empowering, and fun.
Contained in Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep is a curriculum of relaxing Yoga Nidra practices, energizing breathing practices, and focusing mindfulness practices before and after fun and engaging teaching lectures. You get a copious library of resources to support your journey including: Yoga Nidra recordings, breathing practices, mindfulness practices, gentle yoga videos, links, PDFs, podcasts, blog posts, and more.
The second course expands greatly on the first and is called Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep. This follows up the foundational “what” and “why” of the first course with essential information with the “how” of to teach it. This course uses Yoga Nidra, pranayama and mindfulness practices, PDFs and detailed lectures to lead you step-by-step toward not only how to create your own effective Yoga Nidra classes and scripts, but how to so with your OWN voice to truly facilitate Yoga Nidra as an expert in only the way that YOU can.
In this course, I share the essential tools, tactics, and roadmaps to guide you to being a truly effective teacher, not as a rote version of me but with your own voice. In this course, I teach:
The role of the teacher and how to create an effective teaching container.
The Yoga Nidra Roadmap: how to create an engaging, relaxing experience that meets the specific needs of your students.
15 essential tools and tactics to teach effective Yoga Nidra classes and write Yoga Nidra scripts.
How to connect the dots to build a Yoga Nidra class or write scripts using your own voice.
Onboard and leading 1:1 led and dyad practices and even teach you how to self-practice.
The science and magic behind how Yoga Nidra facilitates healing so you can benefit the needs of yourself and your students.
But it doesn’t stop there… Most yoga and Yoga Nidra courses only instruct you how to teach a class. Not this one. As a career yoga and Yoga Nidra instructor with almost 20 years of experience, a former yoga studio owner, and the owner of a registered Yoga School that has taught graduated hundreds of yoga and Yoga Nidra students, I recognize the unfair gap between someone who is new or newer to the industry and someone who has 2 decades of experience. I want to share what’s taken me thousands of dollars of personal and business coaching and the blood, sweat, and tears of almost 2 decades of trial and error in this industry to help you catch your stride in a fraction of the time it took me. This course gives you the actionable, practical, and real-life information about how to really go out and share Yoga Nidra with the world like a boss.
This is why after learning how to teach Yoga Nidra effectively, I also offer and several additional modules about how to:
Generate interest for Yoga Nidra in the yoga studio, community, and online.
Format and price classes, workshops, courses.
Teach online with easy, effective and inexpensive tech, Zoom classes and workshops, audio recordings, etc.
Conduct private 1:1 and group sessions and courses.
Organize and execute fun and engaging yoga retreats. Give yourself a paid vacation and make a huge impact for your students
Make Yoga Nidra accessible to your students with non-racist non-sexist language, in teaching and marketing
Support your students with added value of recordings, follow up, and integration tips.
I even provide a video series with 5 career-building tools that you can start using today to build your own “Mechanism of Influence” that allows you to make a global impact while also making a great living. These are tips that I usually reserve for my 1:1 mentor students which have helped make my career. In truth, the tuition for the course is worth just this module alone!
In both courses, I feature something really remarkable. While taking Eric Edmead’s course, I realized something extraordinary about the way that I teach Yoga Nidra. It was so intuitive and behind-the-scenes to my own experience that I didn’t even recognize that it was happening. Through a mental exercise, I realized that I get the same calming and cosmically-illuminating experience whether I’m practicing, writing about, or teaching Yoga Nidra. I realize that after putting in the more than 10k hours to become an expert in this subject, I have developed a unique ability to teach Yoga Nidra while in the very state I’m facilitating for my students. I’ve had some incredibly beautiful and illuminating revelations while teaching. This is huge!
So, in both of these courses, I teach you how to use the Yoga Nidra state of mind to facilitate your learning of the subject. In the teachers course, I even teach you how to get yourself into state while teaching Yoga Nidra so that you can lead the experience from the place you’re inviting your students to experience. In such a state, you cannot teach a bad class. This technique is revolutionary and I can’t wait to share it with you!
My stuff is going live and I can’t wait for you to check it out. Regardless if you are interested in these courses, I’d be honored if you would please tune in to watch my interview with Eric Edmeads on Thursday, November 12th at 8:30 am MST (10:30 am EST).
I hope you’ll also check out my two courses which I am so so so so excited about. I’m confident that you will love them while also gaining much needed relaxation and learning volumes about yourself and the Universe in the process.