What’s happening in the Ukraine right now is nothing short of horrific. Yet, as individuals, how much can we change these tragic events? Spiritually side-stepping will not save us— we can’t just sit on our meditation cushions praying for peace, hoping that someone else will do the work to make lasting global change.We must learn to be the change in the world and we must learn to do so by fundamentally changing our hearts and minds.
Creating lasting global change is up to us as individuals and relies fundamentally on our ability to stay connected to love. Lasting global change is a Trojan horse that must conquer us from the inside. First it must take our hearts, then it will take our entire lives. It won’t stop until it takes the world.
“But I’m only one person, how can I make a difference?”
The old hermetic saying, “As above, so below,” illustrates the truth that the whole is represented in each of its parts. Since the world is the composite of individuals, the best and only way to change the world is starting from one of its smallest parts: YOU. Your destiny is to be the cell of humanity that thrives with such vibrant wholeness that you become viral, contagious enough to heal everything around you and eventually heal the entire being of humanity.
While we can’t meditate the world’s problems away, I would assert getting centered is of the first order. Regular deep presence illuminates your own innate goodness as well as your connection to and as Source, a connection which is synonymous with love.
Regularly connecting to your own goodness and love through meditation, you’ll naturally recognize it in others. World peace begins with you smiling at your neighbor, practicing patience in traffic, and leaning in to meet a stranger. It continues as you practice compassion and love for people who don’t believe the same things you do. It gets really solid as you learn to even hang out with your own family and decide not to make them wrong, even when they push every button you possess.
As you do these truly simple but honestly world-changing actions, you’ll do so rooted in the power of your highest being, pure presence and love. You will be part of spreading a hyper-contagious condition that will eradicate the global pandemic of tit-for-tat.
To love without condition is the most radical protest of all.
Yet, the first step toward wholeness isn’t creating different actions but creating a different level of consciousness.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
So, to save our planet and ourselves, we must change our fundamental state of consciousness.
We must learn to change our mind, then we can learn to change our hearts. Then, we can change the world.
By far, I feel that the most effective and enjoyable method of changing our mind for lasting personal and global change is Yoga Nidra, the so-called “yoga of sleep.” It starts by a relaxing change to your state of consciousness and with regular practice eventually helps you uplevel your stage of consciousness.
Yoga Nidra is like getting a regular update to your mental and spiritual operating systems.
Indeed among the most spiritual moments of my life, when I’ve been overcome with powerful and enduring love for all of humanity, have come as the result of sourcing the limitless and loving consciousness within myself during a Yoga Nidra practice.
Yoga is the practice of arriving at Oneness or wholeness by connecting all seemingly disparate parts. Nidra is the hypnagogic mental state between waking and dreaming. Therefore, the practice of Yoga Nidra is like a guided meditation that helps you to arrive at the experience of Oneness through the method of altering your mental state through systematized relaxation and layered awareness.
Yoga Nidra is a gentle, relaxing, and very effective way of altering your mental state to escape your otherwise rigid and outdated definitions of the world to help experience your true nature, that of living love.
The true gift of Yoga Nidra is that once you have reacquainted yourself with your most natural way of being, that of loving consciousness, your true work is then to marry this loving consciousness to the beautiful and textured work of art that is your life and our world.
And even though it’s called the yoga of sleep, Yoga Nidra is really about waking up. It’s inviting you to wake up from the illusion of being separate from each other and separate from Source. It’s inviting you to wake up from the illusion that you are limited and powerless. It’s inviting you to wake up to the unimaginable power that is already inside of you, to fertilize the seed of your birthright and majesty, and act as a crucial and vibrant cell in this organism of humanity.
Instead of using practices like meditation, yoga, and Yoga Nidra only to source our inner peace and cope with the pains and stress of the outer world, we must also use them to regularly access our birthright of peace so that we may learn to live our life from this place. We must learn to live as a testament to peace. Then, your very life turns into a protest against the very systems that are fueled by fear, hate, and control.
We cannot wait for someone else to save our world. This is our purpose, to save ourselves. As we do, we will realize that power for personal and global change has always been within.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Will you change your mind and change the world? Will you make your life a living and loving protest of division, hate, and otherness?
I invite you to learn to change your mind and the world through the relaxing, illuminating, and life-affirming practice of Yoga Nidra.
Help yourself and others make this fundamental shift to impact the world for good by learning to facilitate the transformational power of Yoga Nidra by becoming an expert Yoga Nidra teacher. Please consider joining my next live, online and in-person Yoga Nidra training, March 9–13, 2022, in Salt Lake City or via Zoom.
So make your life a peaceful protest. Learn how to source the best parts of yourself through the transformational practice of Yoga Nidra and serve the world by facilitating this same transformation for others. Will you join me?