Today I want to talk about how a live Yoga Nidra training changed my life by helping me to see that I don’t need to be afraid of emotions.
Emotionally Flatlined
A long time ago, I was the kind of depressed person that didn’t feel any emotions at all. I was going through some difficult times and had somehow learned to turn off what I considered to be “dangerous” emotions like grief, sadness, and despair. What I didn’t understand was that I couldn’t turn off certain emotions without turning them all off. During this time of being emotionally flatlined, I remember thinking that I couldn’t recall the last time I’d had fun, laughed, or had shed a tear of either sadness or joy. This emotional deadness lasted about a decade.
The Yoga of Sleep
About this time, I discovered Yoga Nidra, the so-called “yoga of sleep” where you lie down and listen to a facilitator lead you through a relaxing series of deepening layers of Awareness. There was going to be a Yoga Nidra training in town and I felt strangely pulled to do this training. I’d already been teaching yoga and meditation for about 8 years and I was interested in adding to my toolbox as an instructor. Little did I know just life-changing Yoga Nidra and this training would be.
The Cosmic Journey
I learned a great deal about Yoga Nidra during the training but as often happens with practices like this, my greatest learning came from actually doing the practice itself. One evening during the training I lay down to practice Yoga Nidra like I had done several times before, and as I was listening to the facilitator lead me through the practice, I suddenly felt myself soaring through the cosmos at an incredible speed. I felt like I had entered a different universe. I could see stars whizzing by in bright streaks and they eventually all melted into one bright light. I felt immense, larger than my body, larger than my emotions, larger than my thoughts. In fact, I felt larger than anything that I might call “Scott.” I became the entire cosmos, the universe itself. I was everything and everything was me. I stayed like this for an eternity, floating in a world of unfettered calm, peace, and joy.
Eventually, I felt something annoying pulling me back into what felt like a foreign world, one of time, tangibility, and this thing called being Scott. The facilitator had concluded the Yoga Nidra practice but I continued to lay on my cushion for many long minutes as I struggled to feel back into my body. It felt so familiar, so comfortable like a well-worn glove, yet felt strangely foreign at the same time. Certainly this was a rebirth of sorts and coming from such a place of expanded consciousness, I felt as if being human was reduced to mere game, one that is very interesting and beautiful, but a mere game in the larger scheme of the cosmos. I felt a sense of freedom and joy in my entire being and that there was nothing to try to attach to or repress about the experience of being human but that my work on this earth was to do good and simply enjoy the ride.
Open The Floodgates
That night I drove home in a daze, seeing the world as if for the first time in wide-eyed wonder and awe. When I got home, I made myself a cup of tea, donned my bathrobe, and put on a slow jazz record. I had just become viscerally aware of that eternal part of me that is eternally more expansive and complete than anything that an emotion or an event could define me as. I no longer felt afraid of emotions. I no longer felt afraid of anything. I sat heavily in my large reading chair and intended to contemplate all of this when, without warning, a decade worth of desperate tears suddenly burst from my eyes. For many long minutes I sat and wept. Then in an instant, my emotions switched from sadness to hilarity and I found myself laughing with mad abandon. After many minutes of laughing uncontrollably, I abruptly switched back to tears, then more laughter, more tears. This two-step dance between sobbing my eyes out and laughing my ass off continued for several hours. I was grateful to be living alone.
Eventually, all my tears were spent and an entire box of used tissues rested in the form of a soggy mountain on the floor. Without any further fanfare, I turned off the stereo, washed my mug, and collapsed into bed. For a second or two as I was slipping into sleep, I wondered if in my dreams I’d be able to go on that cosmic ride again. Instead, that night I slept dreamless and like the dead.
Reborn
The next day, I arose new and fresh and could tell that something was substantially different about me yet I did not have the vocabulary to describe it. I didn’t want to tell anybody about my experience flying through the cosmos and later bouncing between the two poles of tears largely because at the time I didn’t have a clue of what had happened and I worried that if I told someone about my experience, they’d think I was crazy. And they’d have been right. I was the best kind of crazy, especially if crazy means breaking away from the ordinary to have an experience completely outside of normal. For me, normal was numb and I was leagues away from normal.
Looking back at that experience, I truly see it as a veritable rebirth for me. That event marked the beginning of a new phase of my life, one where I was reborn into the great bouquet of the human experience, one that involved emotions. Now, I know emotions for what they are, just more of the beautiful objects in this world that are enticing me to wake up and pay attention to my True Self, the eternal and expansive part of me which can never be confined to a body or an emotion but which can be revealed by them, the True Self which is Awareness itself.
Yoga Nidra taught me this and myriad other essential truths about who I am and what my purpose is for being on this earth. In the 15 years that I’ve been practicing and teaching Yoga Nidra, I’ve also been a humble witness to dozens if not hundreds of other people's experiences of transformation as the result of this simple, yet profound practice.
Gratitude
I’m so grateful for my teachers who started me on my path toward Yoga Nidra and I’m also grateful for the practice itself which has all on its own taught me volumes about how to practice and teach Yoga Nidra, let alone what it’s taught me about myself. It’s an honor and a privilege to discuss, study, and facilitate this transformational practice that I love so much.
Yoga Nidra Training
While practicing Yoga Nidra may not always result in such a cosmic experience, it can almost certainly produce any of dozens of essential benefits including: deeper sleep, less stress and reactivity, the ability to create more connectedness in your relationships, more focus and productivity in your job, an enduring sense of purpose and perspective about life, and the ability to program your consciousness with positivity. When you connect to your True Self, the part of you that is fundamentally whole, your entire being will experience greater wholeness.
Yoga Nidra is very easy to practice but very difficult to teach effectively so I developed an original, inspirational, and very effective Yoga Nidra teacher training program to help people who are interested in making a difference in the world learn to become powerful facilitators of this transformational practice. I would be deeply honored to spend two weekends with you where together we will help you discover your own voice in learning to facilitate Yoga Nidra and create lasting transformation for students, clients, family, and community through this essential and ancient practice. The training spans 5 days over 2 weekends and will be hosted live and online via Zoom. Each session will be recorded for your convenience and continued learning. I only teach this live training a few times a year and registration is limited.
It’s time to make a difference in the world. It’s time for you to learn to teach Yoga Nidra.
Will you join me?
