May we all celebrate every new day we get to live on this beautiful and complicated earth. And like Ram Das says, may we all help each other by taking each other by the hand as we walk each other home.
Help us [to] help us.
Read moreYour Custom Text Here
May we all celebrate every new day we get to live on this beautiful and complicated earth. And like Ram Das says, may we all help each other by taking each other by the hand as we walk each other home.
Help us [to] help us.
Read moreEverybody’s got their thing.
Julia loved to cook.
Picasso loved to paint
Houdini loved to submerge himself in water upside down, locked by his ankles with padlocks to see if he could get out alive.
Whatever.
We all gotta lean into whatever we love, right.
Me? I love teaching Yoga Nidra. I feel I was BORN for it, you know?
I love helping people not only find massive benefits in their life through practicing better rest, better sleep, and managing stress, but also with other important things. Things like aligning personal and global perspectives, about sourcing a sea of creativity within, and relaxing deep enough to finally turn off the chatter in the incessant hamster wheel of the mind. With Yoga Nidra a person can tap the part of themselves that already knows the solution to life’s biggest and smallest problems and allows those solutions to rise to the surface.
I love that you don’t need any prior experience of yoga or meditation to do Yoga Nidra and that a person can get massive benefits even from their first session. I love that it offers even the newest of practitioners—often people who roll into class in cuz their wife told them that unless they learn to chill the $%^& out they would need to find a new place to call home—an easy way to experience effortless and lasting rest.
And when you’ve spent as much time as I have practicing, teaching, thinking and writing about Yoga Nidra, the topic gets really expansive. So I love exploring the nitty-gritty of not only what Yoga Nidra is—its history, its method, its purpose—but alo why it works, the neuroscience and psychology of it.
For me, I love to connect the dots between Yoga Nidra and myths, storytelling, poetry, and my own personal life stories—YOUR life stories—to see how it’s such a powerful and available pointer that reminds us of who we truly are and how we are all truly connected.
Who knew you could get all of this from a guided nap?
In addition to teaching Yoga Nidra I also love, love, LOVE teaching OTHERS how to teach Yoga Nidra. I think what I love most about it is training other people how to facilitate massive and positive benefits in the lives of the people who are in their particular niche, those they encounter regularly whether they are clients, students, family, or members of a particular community. I love teaching about how Yoga Nidra is more than just guided meditation, more than another guided visualization. So much more. It’s more than checking out and dreaming yourself into bliss. It’s also a pathway to awakening to the truth of who you are. That’s why I call my method, Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep.
What do you love to do?
Do you love to make a difference in people’s lives?
Maybe you’re a teacher, a therapist, a coach.
Maybe you teach yoga or meditation.
Maybe you’re a school teacher.
Could Yoga Nidra be one of the tools you use regularly to help you do whatever you love to do? Could it help you stand out in your field? Could it help those you’re in contact with every day?
This weekend begins my next live Yoga Nidra training where together we will dive deep into the art and science of Yoga Nidra and explore how it can help you to facilitate positive transformation for your clients, students, family, and especially for yourself.
What is the particular niche of people you hang with regularly, whether through your job, history or situation in life? Could they benefit from Yoga Nidra offered in only the way that you can offer it?
So, whether you’re connecting with others through coq au vin, cubism, or conjuring an escape, Yoga Nidra can help you help others in massive ways.
Now’s the time for you to learn to teach Yoga Nidra for yourself and for others.
Check out the details below.
Today, I am excited to tell you about my next live Yoga Nidra teacher training, Restore Yoga workshop, as well as offer you this incredible poem …
I heard Helena Bonham Carter read this poem and it stopped me in my tracks. Granted, she could read the IRS filing instructions and it would sound inspiring and poetic.
By Danusha Lameris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
I love the notion of “these fleeting temples we make together” the container of love made by a simple gesture, a kind word, a smile.
To me, this poem epitomizes that fascinating intersection I like to play at and study, that crossroads between our humanness and our beingness. Here, we can celebrate the messiness of being human, knowing that behind the hot mess that is being human, there is a foundation of goodness, and compassion.
We are Source and Source is love.
I love practicing our ability to compassionately respond to life’s ups and downs instead of reacting to them. Practicing this essential skill through Yoga Nidra is like learning to become a ninja of life, except of course that instead of mastering nunchucks and throwing stars, you get to lie down and practice napping your way to enlightenment while drifting on clouds of bliss. When you get done, you get to go back out into the world and show up as your best, most responsive self.
To help us all practice this essential life skill, I invite you to join me for my Restore Yoga and Yoga Nidra workshop and my live, in-person and online Yoga Nidra training.
May 11–12; 18–19, Salt Lake City and via Zoom
Yoga Nidra is far more than guided visualization—it's a profound pathway to personal transformation and even spiritual awakening. In this comprehensive 30-hour training, you'll become an expert in harnessing the life-changing potential of Yoga Nidra. I’ll guide you to gain a mastery of this ancient practice. You’ll emerge with the skills to guide your students into deep states of conscious relaxation, facilitating lasting shifts in their physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Whether you're a yoga teacher, coach, or therapist, adding Yoga Nidra to your repertoire will allow you to profoundly impact the lives of those you serve.
Stand Apart as a Truly Transformative Teacher: Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep
In today's crowded wellness landscape, becoming a Yoga Nidra expert is your key to standing out. This training goes far beyond teaching you rote scripts—you'll learn the overarching principles and roadmaps that allow you to teach from the wisdom of your authentic voice. Gain the ability to dynamically craft experiences tailored to your students' unique needs. People are yearning for the powerful transformation only you can provide through the ancient art of Yoga Nidra. Seize this opportunity to become a master guide on the journey of self-discovery and radical growth.
Sunday, May 5th 12–2 pm at Be-ing Community
Normally this is held at Mosaic Yoga but there is an event at Mosaic on the 1st Sunday of May. So, on May 5th I’ll be hosting this workshop at a different venue:
Be-ing Community 355 N 300 W. Salt Lake City, Utah 84111
$39.
In this class we will dip into the timeless with resting poses, poetry, and a decadent Yoga Nidra practice. This 2-hour class will incorporate supported and resting postures using yoga props (provided if you don’t have them). I try to use minimal words to allow for a generous and open spaciousness. You can also expect poetry and music to help connect your soul with timeless presence.
Also available via Zoom. Please email me in advance to tell me you’ll be Zooming in.
May we all bend over to pick up the lemons that spill out of a stranger’s grocery bag.
May we all learn to access our highest good by exploring the depth that exists in the dance between our humanness and our beingness.
And may it begin with a simple gesture of kindness, a word like … YES!
It’s time to recommit to doing a little bit of essential self-care, the kind that helps you be at your best. Cuz we all know that it’s those little things that we do regularly for ourselves that eventually turn into the big things, the things that help us live the kind of lives we want to live and be the kind of people we need to be.
Read moreToday, I want share one of my favorite winter poems, White-Eyes by Mary Oliver.
First of all, if you haven’t already, ‘tis the season to sign up for my 31-Day Meditation Challenge. It starts January 1 and lasts all through the month. The challenge is simply to meditate any way you wish for 15 minutes a day, every day for the entire month. I’ll be supporting you every step of the way with daily emails, live group meditations sessions, and plenty of recordings, poetry, links, and stories to make the experience very rich.
Give the world a gift by practicing drawing inward, getting quiet in heart and mind, so you can present a YOU that is more mindful, less reactive, and rooted in compassion.
It costs only $31 and you can get your tuition back if you complete the challenge. Make a meditation posse and sign up!
Onto the poem!
What I love so much about Mary Oliver's poetry is that so often in her poetry she is speaking to the eternal, the Everything, God, or the Universe by simply reflecting what she sees in nature.
And like in her poem “Bone” I love how she willingly admits that she doesn't fully know what God is but is "playing at the edges of knowing" and that perhaps it’s not about knowing at all, but rather it’s about “seeing, touching, and loving.”
It’s about being present with senses and heart.
Through her poetry, Mary Oliver helps us all to create a touchpoint to the Divine that is present both in our outer and inner worlds and opens us to seeing, touching, and loving as she steers us away from trying to make it all make sense.
Her poem White-Eyes is about seeing the Divine in something as simple yet complex as the wind dancing through the tree tops and the snow silently drifting down from the heavens. It’s an exposé about how with the “right eyes” or with attuned sight, we might be able to see the loving Divine present in all things.
I hope you enjoy it.
BY MARY OLIVER
In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird
with its white eyes
shoves and pushes
among the branches.
Like any of us
he wants to go to sleep,
but he's restless—
he has an idea,
and slowly it unfolds
from under his beating wings
as long as he stays awake.
But his big, round music, after all,
is too breathy to last.
So, it's over.
In the pine-crown
he makes his nest,
he's done all he can.
I don't know the name of this bird,
I only imagine his glittering beak
tucked in a white wing
while the clouds—
which he has summoned
from the north—
which he has taught
to be mild, and silent—
thicken, and begin to fall
into the world below
like stars, or the feathers
of some unimaginable bird
that loves us,
that is asleep now, and silent—
that has turned itself
into snow.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on what this poem says to you.
Drop me a line, I read every email I get.
May we all be our best by remember those essential phrases:
I love you.
I’m sorry.
How can I help?
Yoga For Stiffer Bodies on Saturdays at 7:30–8:30 am at Mosaic Yoga
Vinyasa Mondays at 12 pm at Mosaic Yoga
I teach a Restore Yoga and Yoga Nidra workshop on the first Sunday of every month at Mosaic Yoga
Plus, mark your calendar for January 1 because I’m hosting an in-person yoga class to begin the new year. Together we’ll plant our Sankalpa, the seed of our intentions, through ritual, movement, meditation, and breath. Mosaic Yoga.
Previously I thought that to be liked, to be appreciated, or to be successful in this life (read career) I was supposed to demonstrate some superhuman skills or talent and be like Michael Jackson or Prince or Beyonce, or something.
I thought I was supposed to be some sort of yoga Rockstar to be liked, appreciated, and successful.
Instead, what I’ve learned over the course of my career is that success is 100% reliant on my ability to connect with my heart and to learn how to share that with the world.
That’s it.
Read moreWant to stand out as a yoga or meditation teacher?
Teach Yoga Nidra.
Want to be an extraordinary therapist with a powerful resource that can access ANY client’s deepest needs?
Teach Yoga Nidra.
Want to be the kind of school teacher who can meet, welcome, then and neutralize stress and anxiety of your students?
Teach Yoga Nidra.
Want to learn how to guide a team to unheard of levels of performance?
Teach Yoga Nidra.
Want to help yourself and others resource their next-level creativity?
Teach Yoga Nidra.
Want to learn how to make lasting changes in relationships for yourself and others?
Teach Yoga Nidra.
Yoga Nidra is an efficient and effective catalyst for massive personal and group growth.
Truly, anybody can do it.
That said, learning to be a skillful facilitator, one who can speak from the power of their own voice to meet the individual needs of their clients, is rare indeed.
My passion is not only to teach you about what Yoga Nidra is and why it’s so crucial for today’s world, but more importantly how to uncover the incredible facilitator that is already inside of you, the one who knows how to make a massive and positive impact on your audience in ONLY the way you know how.
My live, in-person Yoga Nidra training runs August 17–20, 2023 in Salt Lake City. Please, walk, run, fly, or teleport to Salt Lake City and join us. It will be such an honor to work with you.
If you’re not close to SLC (or your teleport machine is in the shop), now’s the time to join my pre-recorded online Yoga Nidra teacher training program.
I’d love to have you join me in this conversation of understanding ourselves and making a powerful and positive impact on the world by learning to facilitate Yoga Nidra and learning to Wake Up with the Yoga of Sleep.
Scott Moore (E-RYT 500, YACEP, RYS) is an American-born international yoga and Yoga Nidra teacher, mentor, and author. He’s been a career yoga teacher since 2003 and has logged over 25,000 teaching and training hours. He is the founder of Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep, a method of Yoga Nidra instruction and teacher training which celebrates students and teachers in 43 countries. He is the author of three books, Practical Yoga Nidra, 5-Minute Manifesting Journal, and 20 Yoga Nidra Scripts Vol. 1. Scott teaches trainings, classes, and retreats in the US, Europe, and Asia and is currently living in Southern France. When he’s not practicing or teaching yoga, he loves to play the sax and clarinet, trail run, and travel with his family.
Are you ready to deepen your practice, discover lasting inner peace, and learn the art of guiding others to profound relaxation and deep healing? I’m thrilled to invite you to my Live Yoga Nidra Teacher Training, a transformative journey that will elevate your understanding of this ancient yogic practice and empower you to share its benefits with the world.
Read more“Are you STILL talking?!”Send an email and let’s start practicing.”
I love to teach.
I love to share with a group of students what I’m studying and practicing in that fascinating intersection between our humanness and our beingness and how we can practice being at that intersection with yoga and meditation.
I feel that teaching is an honor and a privilege.
But there was a time when rather than teaching, what I was really doing was abusing my students with information.
Read morePerhaps the greatest factor of my success has been my ability to maintain a meaningful relationship with my students. Undoubtedly, email has been the easiest and most successful method of gaining and maintaining this relationship with students and clients.
Read moreIf you’re a teacher, there’s only so many classes you can teach in a day. There’s no limit to how many people can download your stuff online. Why not do both and give yourself the freedom to reach more people around the world while maximizing your income?
Read moreI decided to take advantage of the walk and chose a slightly longer but decidedly more beautiful route home, along the Promenade Anglais, the walkway that skirts the bay here in Nice. Not to weather brag, here, but man, was it choice! The sun was shining, temp was...
Read moreIt’s not a stretch to say that just like Master Yoda was the essential teacher to unlock the power of Luke Skywalker, there are students who need your mastery to discover the Source within them. It’s absolutely true. Join my Yoga Nidra training and make a massive and positive impact with the gentle but transformational practice of Yoga Nidra
Read moreI just heard Bruce Springsteen say something that stopped me in my tracks. He said:
“… the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another. If I can’t connect to you, I can’t connect to us. Whether it’s racism, class differences, or any of myriad other social plagues, its cost is always the same: a broken and dysfunctional system that prevents us from recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart.”
Heart, brimming. Mind, blown.
No wonder they call him The Boss.
So, allow me to put this into a little bit greater context.
The essence of any practice is interpersonal work. I relate to the wise words of one of my most influential teachers Judeth Hanson Lasater who said, “All my gurus share my last name.”
In other words, there’s positively no greater laboratory than intimate and personal relationships to do the arduous but joyful work of transforming into who we are destined to become.
To that end, my wife and I love to read or listen to books that help us to stretch into the people and the couple that we are destined to be. Currently we are reading the book US by Terry Real. It’s about evolving past a you-and-me kind of mentality into a deeper relationship that builds an “US.” This has immense personal benefit as well as benefit for any couple.
I have found Terry Real’s other stuff astoundingly insightful and directly applicable and even just a few chapters in, I would recommend US to anyone interested in uncovering then working through the unconscious programming we acquire as kids and perpetuate forward into our current relationships and to our own communities, partners, and kids, often with difficult or disastrous results for ourselves and our nearest and dearest. This book is designed to help us confront, then move past, our old ghosts, break the cycle of negative coping behaviors, and finally start acting like functional and emotionally healthy adults for feck sake!
One of the reasons this idea of US impressed me so much is because, kinda what The Boss was saying in not so many words, is that as we learn to see ourselves as an “US” in our most personal relationships, by extension we simultaneously discover how humanity is an “US.”
Learning this lesson is how the world transforms from the you vs me mentality, through the you and me mentality, into the apotheosis of human relationship which is the US reality. “US” is Oneness. Doing so heals us from the natural but terminal human malady of the illusion of separateness. Doing so wakes us up to the truth of what I call our Both And Nature: I am you and me AND everything else.
Well, I love The Boss, the one and only Bruce Springsteen. So, what could be better than an incredible book like US than US with a forward written by the one and only Bruce Springsteen? That’s right. Perhaps the thing I love most about Bruce is his powerful and well-crafted lyrics. It’s no surprise, then, that his forward to this powerful book is also well-crafted and powerful.
I was recently at the gym listening to this book and Bruce’s words popped into my AirPods and completely arrested me, leaving me standing there looking vacantly into my gym locker. As people were pumping iron all around me my mind was pumping the simple thought, “This is incredible! I gotta share this with everyone I know.”
And so I am taking the liberty of sharing this with you. Here is the forward in its entirety which I found on Oprah’s website:
By my early thirties, I’d become aware enough to know, as things stood, I’d never have the things I wanted. A full life, a home, a wholeness of being, a companion, and a place in a community of neighbors and friends all seemed beyond my grasp. I didn’t have the judgment, the courage, or the skills to bring a real life to fruition. I was one of the most successful musicians on the planet, but work is work, life is life, and they are not the same. Even more frustrating, the things that made me good at my job—my easy tolerance, even hunger, for the isolation of creativity, my ability to comfortably and deeply reside within myself and put all my energy into my work for days, weeks, years at a time—doomed my personal life to failure. I lived a lonely but seemingly secure existence. Then at thirty-two I hit an emotional wall and realized I was lost in a deep dark forest, largely of my own making, without a map. So began forty years of trying to find my way through the shadowed trees, down to the river of a sustaining life.
With help I realized, in early middle age, that I was subject to a legacy that had been passed down from generations in my Italian-Irish family. A long and stubborn stream of mental illness and dysfunction manifested itself in my life as a deep, recurring depression and an emotional paralysis. I had a fear of exposing my inner life to anyone besides twenty thousand complete strangers at your nearest arena. The eye-to-eye democracy of real adult love struck fear and insecurity deep in my heart. Meanwhile I could feel my life clock ticking on the things I wanted to do and what I wanted to become.
So how do you transform that legacy? How do you break the chain of trauma and illness whose price is compounded with each successive generation? As Terry says, “Family pathology is like a fire in the woods taking down all in front of it until someone turns to face the flames.” Slowly I began to face those flames, mainly because I couldn’t stand the idea of failing my own children, my family, in the manner that I felt I’d been failed. And at the end of the day, the way we honor our parents and their efforts is by carrying on their blessings and doing our best to not pass forward their troubles, their faults, to our own children. Our children’s sins should be their own. It’s only through the hard work of transformation do those of ours who have come before cease to be the ghosts that haunt us and transform into the ancestors we need and love to walk beside us. Working even a small piece of this into my life took a long time, and I’m still a daily work in progress. My children will have plenty of work to do on their own, but we all have to learn and earn our own adulthood.
Looking more broadly, the price we pay as a society for our toxic individualism and patriarchy is our permanent estrangement from one another. If I can’t connect to you, I can’t connect to us. Whether it’s racism, class differences, or any of myriad other social plagues, its cost is always the same: a broken and dysfunctional system that prevents us from recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart. Terry’s writing is loving and kind, clever and strong, and he’s written a beautiful and important book, particularly for the moment we are in. It helps lead the way to a more powerful and noble society based on the tenets of love, justice, and respect. He has laid out a process by which we can begin to understand our place in our own families and our society. I’ve worked hard, and I’ve been lucky. Over the years I’ve found some very good guides through that dark forest and down to that river of life. For my wife, Patti, and me, Terrence Real has been one of those guides, and this book is a map through those trees.
Be safe and journey forward, Bruce Springsteen
What a Boss!
If you do decide to buy this book, and I hope you do, might I suggest buying it from your local bookseller? There’s something special about books and actual bookstores and I believe that the people running them are like literary angels. Here’s my favorite local bookseller in Salt Lake City who would love your business and no, I’m not endorsed by them in any way. I just like to celebrate awesomeness.
And just like I celebrate the awesomeness of The Boss, Terry Real, and great books like US and places that sell books, I also celebrate YOUR awesomeness. But you rising up to your potential isn’t just awesome, like let’s give each other a high five and say good job thinking our job is done so we go on our individual way thinking, “I’mna go make myself an ‘I’m Awesome’ tee shirt,” kind of awesome. It’s awesome cuz you becoming your best is what saves the world. It’s true. Regardless of whether or not we have met in person, I believe in you and the amazing potential you have inside to change the world. I know that as you continue to grow into the kind of awesome that you are meant to be, the world will be a better place for it. Changing the world starts with you inching your way toward your best self.
And yes, as humans are all fatally flawed, but like The Boss says, you learning how to accept and navigate your brokenness is the first step to “recognizing and caring for our neighbor with a flawed but full heart.”
And as soon as we transform into an “US,” we discover that just like Alice Walker said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Truly an “US” is what we’ve been waiting for.
My favorite way of practicing the “US” reality is through the transformational practice of Yoga Nidra. Please consider joining my next Yoga Nidra immersion and teacher training happening August 15–28, 2022 where we learn to master the art of facilitating this practice of our Both And Nature, this “US” reality, which is necessary for this world to survive and then to thrive.
My prayer is that we all continue being “a boss” in all that we positively benefit the world and that as we do so, we all wake up to this “US” reality that saves ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world.
A book I truly love, one that has been very influential in my life is Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth. Have you read it?
One of the things I learned from that book, something that has changed my cosmic understanding, is the idea that as human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously, we are constantly trying to figure out what it means to just be human. We explore many ways of answering that question and almost anything we encounter in this human life can be something for us to hold onto as a way of identifying ourselves. We tend to identify as our name, our bodies, our perceived personal success or failure, and even define ourselves by our problems but all of these things fall flat because they don’t explain what our true self is. Who we really are cannot be described by anything that changes.
In A New Earth, Tolle defines the ego as the misapprehension or mislearning of what we think we are, all the things that change in our life. Tolle mirrors the yogic idea that what we really are is Awareness.
The part that really got me in his book was how often we tend to identify with layers of our ego he calls our painbody. What he means is that though we may not outwardly love being in pain—feeling jealousy, bitterness, or suffering—but it does exist as something we can feel, we therefore tend to call it “real” and mislabel this object of pain as “us” and kind of walk around life defining ourselves as that thing. Can you relate to that? Everybody can to some degree or other.
Again, our true self is Awareness itself and cannot possibly be defined as an emotion, either good or bad. Identifying as anything other than this Awareness is going to be problematic because it exists unfailingly in a state of change. No sooner do you want to hang your hat on something and call it you, than that thing changes and leaves you feeling empty.
The crazy thing is that these pain bodies seem to have a life of their own. It’s like they know they aren’t real and are trying to keep themselves “alive” by begging us to keep a hold of them. We know it doesn’t serve us to be angry or sad or depressed all the time but we kinda don’t know who we’d be without that part of us. So somehow we keep it alive simply because it serves us in someway to define us. “It’s not great being sad but at least I understand it.”
That in a nutshell seems to be one of the most profound human problems.
That may sound depressing but it’s actually really hopeful and I’ll tell you why. Surely, Tolle explains what to do about this dilemma in his book, however, I’ve found the best, easiest, and most effective solution to overcoming this issue of the ego—or false identity—with Yoga Nidra.
Instead of pain bodies, Yoga Nidra calls these different bodies, Maya Kosha, or illusion bodies. They are illusions because they seem real but aren’t. What’s real is Awareness. However, what I love about Yoga Nidra is that it doesn’t suggest you try to forget about the pain bodies but instead invites you lean into them to understand them as the beautiful illusions that they are through systematized relaxation and layered awareness. Yoga Nidra shows you how to practice deep awareness of your body, of your emotions, of your thoughts—all to show you that by all the things that you can be aware of, you reveal Awareness itself. Awareness is what these all have in common.
And here’s the exciting thing…
As you practice experiencing yourself as Awareness, you remind yourself of your innate wholeness, purity, and being. You don’t need to define yourself by your ego—what you do, how much money you have or don’t have, or even (and especially) what kind of pain you may have experienced in your life. Instead, when you understand your true nature, that of Awareness itself, you realize that this entire human experience all points to the beauty of what it means to be and that every object in the world is another invitation for you to practice waking up to your true self.
Practicing and understanding yourself as Awareness really is the ultimate healer.
Knowing how to facilitate others to experience themselves as whole through Yoga Nidra is an art form in and of itself. I’ve dedicated almost 15 years of my life studying, practicing, and teaching how to do this and I have personally experienced and facilitated myriad modes of healing and wholeness through this incredible, relaxing, and accessible practice.
I feel it a calling in my life to help you learn how to help those people in your life whom you have the privilege to influence how to remember who they truly are by helping them practice awareness through Yoga Nidra.
I guess if I were a really good teacher I could simply tell you, “Hey, you’re perfect as you are. Let’s go get a beer,” but I don’t think it’s that easy. We need a practice to help that truth land, to be taught this truth in a way that we will understand and recognize. This is why your particular voice and your particular experience with the people and population you know is so essential. Only you know the kind of specific issues they work with and can speak their language. It’s on you to help these people remember their own wholeness.
On Saturday, April 23rd I want to teach you how to facilitate specialized Yoga Nidra classes for those people in your life who need to understand who they are in a way that only you can understand.
I’ll be leading a workshop where we are going to spend 3 hours together on Zoom building your specialized Yoga Nidra classes to meet the individual needs of your clients, students, and family members. You’ll be given the tools and roadmaps to deliver the classes you need in your own voice.
If you are interested in making this kind of an impact for others, I hope you’ll join me.
If you’re not interested in facilitating this for others, perhaps you’d be interested in deepening your relationship to Self in my Yoga Nidra course called Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep.
Also, if you’re looking for your next great read, I might suggest A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. Pick it up at your local bookstore.
Have a great weekend!
I love getting emails from people who are curious about my live or online Yoga Nidra teacher training program, Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep. Usually, they ask one of two questions:
How is my program different from other Yoga Nidra training programs?
How do someone create a Yoga Nidra class for a very specific need?
Most Yoga Nidra teacher trainings leave you with only a small set of limited Yoga Nidra scripts to teach. These can be kinda nice but fall way short of fulfilling the specific needs of clients or students. My program also provides you scripts (over 100 pages of them, in fact) but they are designed to be used as guides as you are finding your own voice, templates that prepare you to design and effectively teach your own specialized Yoga Nidra classes, unique for the needs of their clients. My program is designed to first give you a personal relationship with the practice then teach you the principles and roadmaps to effectively build and teach your own classes. Even more, my program is different because it teaches you to speak from the power of your own voice, the way they would say it, and not as a version of me.
It's common for a Yoga Nidra teacher training, it’s common to learn to teach a basic Yoga Nidra class that leaves you feeling rested. But how does one tap the power of Yoga Nidra to make specific transformational change?
For example, how does one teach a Yoga Nidra class for insomnia? How is it different from a Yoga Nidra class for stress? What about designing a class to help with self-esteem, depression, or setting and accomplishing goals? What about Yoga Nidra for managing pain, clarifying your purpose, sourcing your own inner wisdom, or building your confidence? How is Yoga Nidra for kids different from Yoga Nidra for adults?
And here’s the real kicker: Because of your unique perspective on, understanding of, and experience with the needs of the people in your sphere—be that of a school, community, or certain population— you are the most qualified and effective person to serve their needs. Your people desperately NEED you to learn how to effectively meet these unique needs with essential, accessible, and transformational practices like Yoga Nidra. And, unfortunately, you can’t do that with someone else’s script. You gotta learn to do that yourself. But, luckily, I’m here to help.
I’m really excited about a workshop I’m hosting on Saturday April 23rd via Zoom that will teach you exactly how to design your own specialized Yoga Nidra classes and to deliver them in the power of your own voice. It’s called Teaching Specialized Yoga Nidra. I would love you to join me. It’s an investment into yourself and an investment in your community.
When: Saturday, April 23rd 9 am to 12 pm MDT or 5:00–8:00 pm CET via Zoom. Counts as Yoga Alliance continuing education credit. Click here for details and/or read on to hear more of the back story.
So, I completed my first Yoga Nidra teacher training in 2008. As I started teaching Yoga Nidra, I quickly became frustrated as a teacher because I knew from personal experience just how powerful Yoga Nidra could be, but it soon became clear that I wasn’t nearly as prepared to teach Yoga Nidra as I needed to be.
First, I couldn’t make the impact I wanted to because the scripts I was given in my training were far too general—they didn’t meet my clients’ specific needs, and I was never taught how to deliver customized Yoga Nidra.
Second, my Yoga Nidra training didn’t teach me how to leverage my own voice, so my teaching didn’t feel authentic and my students could tell. I knew I could make a bigger impact if I could teach from my own voice, experience, specialization, and interest, but I hadn’t a clue how to do this.
Third, though I’d had beautiful and transformational experiences with Yoga Nidra, many of my yoga students found Yoga Nidra to be, well… too boring. They may have enjoyed it the first time, but hearing the same tired script over and over again was putting people to sleep...in the wrong way.
But, my early struggles facilitating Yoga Nidra turned out to be an enormous gift, because it taught me that this ancient practice was in no way designed to be a rote experience. My struggles in teaching drove me to dive deeper in my studies and to practice more Yoga Nidra. And doing so, I learned volumes about the essential principles of this fascinating practice.
Soon, I began incorporating these principles into my Yoga Nidra classes, now with the ability to innovate, adapt, and deliver profound Yoga Nidra experiences that were customized to my clients’ needs. My teaching became fresh, authentic, engaging, and transformational. And faster than you can say “savasana on steroids,” my Yoga Nidra classes, workshops, and courses were packed. Even my clients who were previously bored by my Yoga Nidra classes came back to stay.
Since then, I have facilitated thousands of hours of Yoga Nidra for my clients, and this beautiful practice continues to reveal deeper and deeper transformation, both for my clients as well as myself, more than I ever realized was possible in those early days of teaching. I even discovered how teaching Yoga Nidra itself is a pathway to greater learning and spiritual awakening.
My approach to Yoga Nidra caught the eye of other yoga teachers and it wasn’t long before I developed a novel teacher training program, Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep where I teach that once you have a deeper understanding of what the principles and techniques of Yoga Nidra are pointing to, you can deliver them in any context for any client, using the unparalleled power of your own voice.
Your ability to customize Yoga Nidra practices for your clients is central to the design of my Yoga Nidra training.
In addition to teaching the fundamentals of this powerful yet gentle practice, I’m passionate about helping teachers learn how to use Yoga Nidra to meet the specific needs of their clients. I love the diversity of the people who take my Yoga Nidra training, all with different applications of the practice.
Check out all the ways people are using Yoga Nidra with their students, clients, and kids …
One graduate of my program uses Yoga Nidra in her family law practice to help her clients be calm and centered as they are going through often very emotional legal proceedings.
One of the teachers I mentor brilliantly uses Yoga Nidra to help her with her specialized work with the neurodiverse population, people who work with ADD, ADHD, Asperger’s, etc.
Another graduate is using this practice with her high school students to help them manage the incredible stress of placement tests, the challenges of COVID, and of course the hurricane of hormones running through their teenage bodies.
A recent graduate of my Yoga Nidra program who is a licensed therapist here in France is using Yoga Nidra to help her clients work through trauma.
A different licensed therapist, this one lives in the States and specializes as a sex therapist, uses Yoga Nidra to help her clients work through shame, body dysmorphia, and to rewire harmful programing around sexuality.
One graduate uses Yoga Nidra to help those who have lost loved ones work through grief.
Another teacher uses Yoga Nidra to help world-class artists regularly enter into a state of creative flow.
The applications are limitless! and I’m so proud to be helping people learn to help others with the accessible and powerful practice of Yoga Nidra.
Whether you're a yoga or meditation teacher, a coach, teacher, or therapist, or any role in supporting others, Yoga Nidra can be a very powerful yet accessible tool to help you make transformational change for others.
My level 1 training (50 hrs.) focuses on developing your personal relationship with Yoga Nidra then teaches you how to apply your personal knowledge of the practice to serve the needs of both yourself and your students.
I’m currently busy building the curriculum for my level 2 training which will incorporate even more specialized information and practices centered around helping you become a master facilitator at Yoga Nidra, meeting the specific and varied needs of your clients.
My Teaching Specialized Yoga Nidra Classes workshop on April 23rd draws from the curriculum of my level 2 training and I’m excited to share it with you before it’s even available in my level 2 training.
You are most welcome to this workshop whether or not you’ve already taken my Yoga Nidra training. The Teaching Specialized Yoga Nidra workshop will serve as a great preview course if you are curious about my level 1 Yoga Nidra teacher training, Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep. This workshop will also serve those who have already taken my training and would like more practice with this essential skill.
And, for anyone who takes this workshop and also decides to take my full teacher training program or who registers for my level 2 training, I’ll deduct the price of this course from either training.
Perhaps the best and most empowering thing about this workshop is that you get to bring your ideas for a Yoga Nidra class to the workshop so that we can build them together. This will be so cool!
You’ll leave this workshop with:
Confidence in knowing how to build your specialized Yoga Nidra class
Understanding of the Yoga Nidra Roadmap to guide your journey
Surety of how to build a class using the Class Building Template
Guidance from over 100 pages of scripts to use as templates as you build your own Yoga Nidra classes
Personalized attention for your projects from myself as well as your with breakout sessions with your peers
Organization in the form of a manual outlining the discussion points, maps, and resources
Ideas of new and exciting Yoga Nidra classes the world needs to hear from you
The workshop will be live, on Zoom, and recorded and sent as a replay to give you maximum flexibility in how you take this workshop.
When: Saturday, April 23rd 9 am to 12 pm MDT or 5:00–8:00 pm CET via Zoom.
I hope you'll join me.
I just landed in the States and it’s great to be back. I’m hosting my live in-person and Zoom Yoga Nidra training in Salt Lake City, March 9–13, a live in-person yoga class in Salt Lake City March 14th. Then, I’ll be heading to NYC for a Restore and Yoga Nidra workshop at Pure Yoga, March 19th, and a video project at Kula Yoga as well. It’s going to be a great visit and I’d really love to see you if you are anywhere near either Salt Lake City or NYC. You can see the details for all the events below.
Today, I want to explore an idea I came up with called Stereoscopic Consciousness and I’d love to hear your thoughts about this from you.
A few weeks ago, I shared a love story about Shiva and Shakti, two deities in the yoga pantheon that represent pure consciousness and form, respectively. They are fascinating symbols that can help us understand our own life and existence with beauty, perspective, and appreciation.
In my previous story called Love Notes and Chocolates, I shared how in the beginning, Shiva and Shakti existed as the only things in the Universe, compacted in the blissful ignorance of their seemingly perfect but vacuous world, one that only knew each other. But as their love for each other continually expanded, they invariably outgrew it like a caterpillar whose instincts are to evolve into her winged destiny. However, along their relationship’s journey toward flight, Shiva and Shakti experienced the pain and apparent separation of one another.
At first, they thought, “Man, if only we could have kept things the way they were, we wouldn’t be missing each other so much.” However, eventually through essential life lessons, they learned to perceive their situation with the correct perspective, one that changed their view from seeing their new state as a massive downgrade to was in truth the ultimate upgrade. Indeed they saw that the entire Universe was born as an evolution of their relationship and pulsed with the power of their love.
Shiva and Shakti evolved from a simple, singular, and flat relationship, to one that at first appeared fraught with divisiveness, separation, and pain, but which eventually revealed itself to be universal bliss and perfection, an expansion completely unfathomable to either of their imaginations.
This perfect and unimaginable world they evolved into is the world we live in now. It’s our reality.
Myths and religious stories like this are an enjoyable and insightful mode of understanding our own purpose for being. They help us understand how we too may change our perspective from seeing our life and world as one of separateness and strife and instead gain the vision to see our lives with vidya, or true sight, the clarity that all is One beautiful wholeness, beating with the steady heartbeat of love.
But how do we gain this perspective?
The other day, I took my son Elio to the magnificent Musée Océanographique de Monaco, the Monaco aquarium. We raced, 6-year-old-style, from exhibit to exhibit, marveling at sharks, cuttlefish, moray eels, and jellyfish. I even shared a moment with a nautilus; we looked into each other's eyes and both mused at what it means to be a creature in this wildly beautiful world.
I walked (kinda ran) from creature to creature, wide-eyed and in awe of this world’s Shakti dance of diversity, life, and beauty. Before we left, Elio told me that seeing the beauty of these oceanic creatures, “changed his life,” (all 6 years of it).
In addition to amazing sea creatures on display, there was also an exhibit showing all sorts of old gadgets, including an old-school “view-finder.” Remember those red goggle-looking things that looked something like a love child between a pair of binoculars and a Poloroid camera, with a circular disc you’d insert into the top and press a button to advance pics of the “7 Wonders of The World,” or some such thing, and with each click you’d see a new photo which looked strangely 3-D? Well, the gadget on display at the museum was the great-grandpa of those little red gadgets.
Anyhoo, Elio and I took turns staring into a big, brass double-eyepiece and turned a knob, rotating sepia photographs of salty old codgers on a boat all looking like characters of themselves, corncob pipe, scowling stoic faces, and all. When you look into the eyepiece, you see a normal sort of photo but what makes it novel, even today in the age of high-def resolution and virtual reality, (this was the original VR, mind you), is that when you look at what you know is a photograph in 2-D, it somehow magically takes on a 3-D appearance. It almost makes you wonder how they got a crew of miniature sailors on the deck of a ship to fit into that little eyepiece.
This gadget uses your brain’s ability to create stereoscopic vision to make a 2-D pic appear 3-D. This happens because both eyes each register separate images of an object to your brain, but from slightly different vantage points. Your brain blends those two images together and translates the two images into one singular image and as it does, the slight differences in each picture makes the image have depth in your perception of the object. Very cool. Yet, as cool as this phenomenon is, it’s really just the process that everyone with 2 eyes sees every day.
I like to use this principle of stereoscopic vision to explain what I call Stereoscopic Consciousness. Stereoscopic Consciousness is where in a meditation like Yoga Nidra, you focus on a singular object. An object can be anything from a thing, an emotion, a thought, or something physical—anything really. After focusing on this object for a while, you switch your attention to focus on a different object for a bit. Eventually you revert your focus back to the original object, then toggle your attention back and forth between the two.
Eventually, you loosen your tight grip of focus on either one or the other and perform the seemingly impossible task of holding both objects in your awareness at the same time. The same way your brain can merge two visual images into one and create visual depth, rather perceiving it flat like a photograph, your consciousness can blend two objects and also perceive them as one thing, or rather from the perspective of Oneness. Just like your visual faculties, this experience of being aware simultaneously of two objects also produces the perception of depth, but rather than visual depth, it’s a depth of consciousness.
This exercise of perceiving two objects simultaneously brings to the foreground the part of you that IS your inherent consciousness of Source or Oneness. This is the part of you that doesn't experience the world in a binary, the world of this and that, have and have not, good or bad. The perspective is a Universal perspective of Oneness.
So, remember how earlier I was talking about how Shiva and Shakti experienced an apparent separation which served them to eventually expand into a greater consciousness and therefore give birth to the trinity, a depth capacious enough to birth the entire Universe? Well this experience of Stereoscopic Consciousness is one of the methods of experiencing what I call one’s Both And Nature. Your Both And Nature is the blending of one thing with another not to create a third thing but to create a third dimension and in that magic of the trinity, create ALL things. It’s a quantum upgrade to our concept of Self and the Universe.
Yoga Nidra is a simple, relaxing, and enjoyable way of learning to achieve our Both And Awareness so that just like Shiva and Shakti, we too can wake up the magical truth that this entire Universe, including and especially YOU, exist as a part of a great Oneness. Experiencing your own Oneness in this way helps to remind you of your inherent wholeness, purity, and the indefatigable love that is at the center of your nature.
As you remember your own wholeness, your entire life takes on a wonderfully new perspective.
You can also use this Both And Nature to find beautiful resolution in any apparent separation, conflict, or duality. Indeed, experiencing an apparent problem from the perspective of Both And, will give you a Universal perspective over an issue and help you to compassionately respond to it from your innate source of love.
What kind of dissonance, problems, or conflict are you experiencing in your life right now? Is there a Both And perspective you might be able to take that could give you a quantum resolution far greater than “this or that?”
This is a simple yet profound technique I’ll be sharing in my Yoga Nidra teacher training that starts THIS WEDNESDAY, March 9th. You can join me for either the 2-day immersion or the 5-day teacher training.
If you’d be interested in accessing your own Both And Nature to truly live an extraordinary life, as well as helping facilitate this same magic, I invite you to consider joining me either in-person in Salt Lake City, Utah, or via Zoom from the comfort of your own house.
I’d love to hear from you about your thoughts and experiences around this idea of Both And Nature.
MARCH 14TH 6–7:30 PM AT INBODY YOGA ACADEMY 1579 S. 1100 E. SLC, UT 84105
Join me for an in-person yoga class in SLC! I’ll be hosting this by-donation yoga class at InBody Yoga academy at 1597 South 1100 East, Salt Lake City, 84105.
We’ll start with a smart all-levels flow, evolve to some resting poses, and end with a lovely, relaxing Yoga Nidra.
No reservation necessary. Pay what you want at the time of the class. Just come!!
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.
Yet, the first step toward wholeness isn’t creating different actions but creating a different level 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.
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?
How are you today? I hope you’re feeling well, happy, and centered in your heart.
Yesterday was Thanksgiving for the United States. We had a truly unforgettable expat Thanksgiving with our small family of 3 and our adopted Nana. Sen and Nana Chris made a lovely free-range chicken, beautiful goat cheese and pomegranate salad, creamy mascarpone mashed potatoes, a truly mind-blowing stuffing with pecans, sausage and bread made from the world’s best baguette. Pics on IG.
This year, I didn’t personally cook anything. I was in charge of bringing the wine and some of Nice’s best pastries, including the finest macarons we’ve ever eaten, and we’ve tried dozens of macaron shops.
Though everything we ate was truly gourmet, the most pleasant surprise for me, the thing that completely took me off guard, was the cranberry sauce. Who knew, right? It was so good, it made me want to name my next child after it. Ok, if not a child, then at least a pet. We’re not having another baby, BTW. Did anybody else not know that the secret ingredient for astoundingly fabulous cranberry sauce was bourbon? Growing up, cranberry sauce was the part of the Thanksgiving meal that nobody touched, the pariah of the feast relegated to some far corner of the table. Maybe it’s because of its gelatinous appearance. Maybe it’s because of its color. Or maybe it’s because it stands unnaturally vertical sans support and retains the exact shape of the can it’s been resting in since 1989. Either way, I didn’t grow up enjoying cranberry sauce and never knew cranberry sauce could be this amazing, it paired so well with all the other dishes.
But in all seriousness, what’s difficult to swallow at Thanksgiving, more difficult than canned cranberry goo from a can, is the complicated affair of why we celebrate Thanksgiving in the first place. I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that Thanksgiving is at its core a celebration of colonialism whose damaging effects include the disenfranchisement of indigenous people. It’s a complicated issue to be sure but one that gives me heartburn. Yet, despite the sourness of this important issue, what I absolutely adore about Thanksgiving is that regardless of its origins, it is a day devoted to GRATITUDE, a powerful spiritual practice that has the power to steer ourselves as well as current and future generations toward the true Oneness of all people.
My opinions and reviews about Thanksgiving aside, today I wanted to write to you and let you know that even though I’m not offering any Black Friday deals, I do want to let you know how excited I am about a workshop I’m hosting that will help you to facilitate this Oneness of humanity. Please join me for my Yoga Nidra dyad workshop that I’m hosting online via Zoom Saturday, November 27th from 9 am to 12 pm MST. I’ll record it so you can join live, watch the replay or both. It’s going to be a very special workshop dedicated to the art of facilitating 1:1 Yoga Nidra with your clients in a way that is quite transformational. If you don’t teach Yoga Nidra, this will be a great introduction to a very powerful way of helping people become their best selves.
Do you teach Yoga Nidra or desire to? Make a bigger difference with you students by expanding your Yoga Nidra toolbox and becoming an expert Yoga Nidra Dyad facilitator.
What’s a dyad, already?
As you may know, Yoga Nidra is a unique, effective, and relaxing form of guided meditation which can facilitate a truly magnificent presence in life. It can also help with healing in body, mind and spirit, and can offer clarion insight into your purpose and the very nature of your being. In a Yoga Nidra dyad, a facilitator leads the practitioner through deepening layers of relaxed Awareness via a mindful dialogue which helps the practitioner illuminate their greatest Awareness. It’s a very powerful and beautiful process, but one that requires a bit of know-how and practice.
Typically Yoga Nidra is led by a facilitator who directs either one person or a group of people through the detailed process of layered and relaxed Awareness. However, leading a student through a 1:1 Yoga Nidra dyad can be exponentially more effective at facilitating transformation because it is personalized and tailored to specific needs of the individual student.
Typical Yoga Nidra is led by the facilitator. A dyad is led by the practitioner.
You’ll learn:
Why dyads are so effective
How to practice them safely with your clients
The Yoga Nidra Dyad Roadmap, the essential guide to dyads
How to ascertain your student’s needs in the pre-screening
How to use the koshas as tools to affect transformation
The art of Reflective Awareness
How to ground and navigate your student’s awareness
How to manage and facilitate emotions
How to help your students process and integrate the experience
Helpful professional, logistical, and tech tips.
You’ll receive:
Recordings of the entire workshop (except others’ dyad practice)
A detailed manual with discussion points and resources
The Yoga Nidra Dyad Roadmap
Partners to practice Yoga Nidra dyads with!
This will be a virtual and recorded workshop via Zoom. In this interactive workshop, you’ll have the opportunity to practice dyads with each other in breakout rooms and receive feedback about your teaching.
The world needs expert Yoga Nidra teachers. Become a masterful Yoga Nidra facilitator by learning Yoga Nidra dyads
Each person who registers will receive a recording of the workshop so even if you can’t make the time work for you, you may register and watch the training at your own convenience.
Counts as continuing education with Yoga Alliance!
Direct any questions to scott@scottmooreyoga.com
Thank you and I hope to see you tomorrow
I’m absolutely passionate about Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra has taught me more about myself, the Universe, and my purpose in the world than any other practice and I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned with you. This is why I can’t wait to tell you about my live Yoga Nidra teacher training starting this weekend.
You may be reading this because like me, you’ve experienced one of the many profound benefits that Yoga Nidra can provide: deep emotional healing, body/mind/spirit wellness, unparalleled relaxation and stress reduction, and profound insight on the forever-journey toward spiritual awakening. Plus, you may want to develop the skills to teach Yoga Nidra like an expert. Or, maybe you’ve heard other’s rave about this practice and you’re curious to learn just what it is that makes Yoga Nidra so special. Either way, I’m glad you’re here, you’ve come to the right place.
If you’ve ever thought about teaching Yoga Nidra, now is the time—the world needs it more than ever. Also, the world needs more qualified Yoga Nidra teachers, and this course is designed to teach you to become a Yoga Nidra expert, delivering this healing practice in the power of your own voice— because there’s no one who can teach like you can.
One of the things I’ve learned about Yoga Nidra is that even though practicing it is very easy and can lead to profound transformation, being an effective Yoga Nidra facilitator can be very difficult. This is why I’ve created Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep, an enlightening, engaging, and enjoyable Yoga Nidra teacher training where you will learn the art and science of teaching Yoga Nidra using the power of your own voice. You’ll also learn how to apply your expertise to acquire and create excellent teaching opportunities through live or online group classes, workshops, courses, private sessions, and even how to lead yoga retreats and other paid events. I’ll even teach you how to create digital products to sell and share your teaching gifts with the world. In short, you’ll learn how to make a massive impact while making a great living doing what you love.
Often called the “yoga of sleep,” Yoga Nidra is a several thousand years-old form of guided meditation that is uniquely designed to powerfully connect the body, mind, and spirit to wake you up to the limitless power within. Though it’s an ancient practice, Yoga Nidra couldn’t be a more relevant and potent tool to meet the complexities and demands that we face in everyday modern life.
In my 13 years of teaching Yoga Nidra, I’ve seen thousands of people benefit from this essential practice in both simple and profound ways, including:
Optimized performance, learning, and creativity
Diminished stress and depression
Better sleep
Lower blood pressure
Improved relationships
Pain management
Greater sense of purpose and meaning
Greater perspective over life’s problems
Improved self confidence
Powerful spiritual insight
Managing compulsions and addictions
When I completed my first Yoga Nidra teacher training in 2008 and started incorporating the practices I’d learned into my yoga classes, I quickly became frustrated as a teacher because I knew how powerful Yoga Nidra could be, but it soon became clear that I wasn’t nearly as prepared to teach it in my classes as I needed. First, I couldn’t make the impact I wanted to because the scripts I was given in my training were far too general—they didn’t meet my clients’ specific needs, and I was never taught how to deliver customized Yoga Nidra. What any experienced teacher can tell you is that just like in yoga asana, one size doesn’t fit all. Second, my training didn’t teach me how to leverage my own voice, so my teaching didn’t feel authentic and my students could tell. I knew I could make the largest impact if I could teach from my own voice, experience, specialization, and interest, but I hadn’t a clue how to do this at first. Third, as much as it pains me to say this, though I’d had transformational experiences with Yoga Nidra, many of my yoga students found Yoga Nidra to be, well… too boring. They may have enjoyed it the first time, but hearing the same tired script over and over again was putting people to sleep...in the wrong way.
But, my early struggles facilitating Yoga Nidra turned out to be an enormous gift, because it taught me that this ancient practice was in no way designed to be a rote experience. My struggles in teaching drove me to dive deeper in my studies and to practice more Yoga Nidra. And doing so, I learned volumes about the essential principles of this fascinating practice. Soon, I began incorporating these principles into my Yoga Nidra classes, now with the ability to innovate, adapt, and deliver profound Yoga Nidra experiences that were customized to my clients. My teaching became fresh, authentic, engaging, and transformational. And faster than you can say “savasana on steroids,” my Yoga Nidra classes, workshops, and courses were packed. Even my clients who were previously bored by my Yoga Nidra classes came back to stay.
Since then, I have facilitated thousands of hours of Yoga Nidra for my clients, and this beautiful practice continues to reveal deeper and deeper transformation, both for my clients as well as myself, more than I ever realized was possible in those early days of teaching. I even discovered how teaching Yoga Nidra itself is a pathway to greater learning and spiritual awakening.
My approach to Yoga Nidra caught the eye of other yoga teachers and it wasn’t long before I developed a novel teacher training program, where I taught that once you have a deeper understanding of what the principles and techniques of Yoga Nidra are pointing to, you can deliver them in any context for any client, using the unparalleled power of your own voice.
Offering my Yoga Nidra teacher training program helped me to discover another passion of mine, which is helping others reveal the expert teacher that is already inside of them and empowering them to share this essential practice with the world.
To be a transformational teacher your teaching must be based on your own very personal and powerful experiences, and not simply by repeating someone else’s information. In fact, this point is so important that I’ve created this course in two distinct parts. The first part, called Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep, exists solely to facilitate your own deep transformation through practicing Yoga Nidra. The best courses not only give you knowledge and teach you a new skill, they also change who you are. This course facilitates your own personal transformation by using Yoga Nidra to help you experience:
A deep personal inquiry to know your True Self
The Universe embraces you in the fascinating dance between form and consciousness
Mapping the beautiful illusions: Understanding the Koshas
How everything in your life is inviting you to wake up the person you’re destined to become
The secret power of Presence
Uplevelled states of consciousness leading you to uplevelled stages of consciousness
You’ll wake up to your True Self through the power of Yoga Nidra as you experience and learn about the fascinating angles of this ancient practice, such as:
Storytelling, poetry, and the mythic landscape
Philosophy and history of the practice
Mantra and mindfulness practices
Science and psychology foundations
Then, once you’ve done a deep dive into your own soul in the first section, now knowing even better what Yoga Nidra is pointing to, the next section is dedicated to teaching you how to become an expert Yoga Nidra facilitator. Not only that but how to boldly offer this practice to the world based on your own experiences and in your own voice. You’ll learn the essential tools, principles, rudiments, and techniques that will empower you to adapt any Yoga Nidra session to meet your client’s needs. You will also learn how to improvise your own Yoga Nidra classes and write your own Yoga Nidra scripts based on your personal interests and specializations.
What you’ll get in this course unlike any other is:
How to facilitate any Yoga Nidra class by following the The Yoga Nidra Roadmap and Yoga Nidra Dyad Roadmap
How to create the container and hold the role of a true teacher
The art of facilitating deep observation
15 essential tools necessary to master the art of facilitating Yoga Nidra
How to be an extraordinary teacher to your students with supportive integration
Lastly, included in the second section is the crucial but seldom-taught information about how to actually be a successful yoga or Yoga Nidra teacher because knowing what to teach and being a successful teacher are very different things. As someone who has graduated hundreds of yoga and Yoga Nidra teachers, and who has been in the industry for 20 years, I see the stark—and frankly unfair— gap between new teachers and experienced teachers in their ability to generate well-paying teaching opportunities in communities, the workplace, and online. Most yoga and Yoga Nidra teacher training courses contain little or no information about how to be a successful teacher, often because the lead trainer is a “yoga rockstar” and does not teach in the community—they simply can’t relate to most of us who are out there every day teaching in our communities. Sadly, the result is that too many new teachers never get the chance to start teaching because they were never taught how to acquire good gigs. My many years in this industry has taught me how to make an excellent living teaching yoga and Yoga Nidra (I earn 6 figures a year) and I’m here to tell you that there are many more good paying Yoga Nidra opportunities than there are good teachers to teach them. I’ve designed this training to teach you the industry secrets to help you begin to earn money right away doing what you love. Allow me to debunk the myth that you have to be a “yoga rockstar'' to be a successful teacher. You don’t.
In this course, you’ll learn exactly how to acquire and create great paying teaching opportunities, including:
Public and online classes, workshops, and courses
Private students and groups, including Yoga Nidra dyads
Yoga and meditation retreats
Teaching corporations and institutions
Paid speaking events
Creating digital products creation to earn passive income
This training is an investment in your own body/mind/spirit wellness, one that will teach you to become an expert Yoga Nidra teacher, and one that will teach you how to make this training pay for itself and then continue to pay you for many years to come.
I’ve taught dozens of Yoga Nidra teacher training courses, both in person and online. The paradox in teaching a subject is that by teaching it you actually learn that subject deeper. Each time I’ve taught a Yoga Nidra teacher training, I receive progressively deeper insight into transformational teaching with Yoga Nidra. I’ve spent three years combining, distilling, and refining the essential tools and principles, roadmaps and methods to offer what I believe is the best Yoga Nidra teacher training course on the market, one that will teach you to become an expert Yoga Nidra facilitator much quicker than it took me. While I feel that this is my best Yoga Nidra training yet, the real proof is in the teachers that have graduated it.
Here’s what others are saying …
“Scott’s training was an absolute joy. Not only does Scott possess a wealth of knowledge about the practice, he brings the teachings to life through his energetic presence, compelling storytelling, and heart-centered teaching. This offering is truly unique, and I’d highly recommend Scott’s guidance to anyone interested in going deeper with the incredible practice of Yoga Nidra.”
— Eden Orion, Yoga Nidra Graduate and Meditation Teacher
“I signed up for Scott Moore’s online Yoga Nidra teacher training course after discovering his scripts online and absolutely loving them. The course was very relaxing and easy to follow … I now feel much more confident in facilitating Yoga Nidra after completing this course. The price was very reasonable and Scott is SO generous, he gives us scripts to work with, meditations that I listen to daily, and online recordings for life. I now have a fantastic Yoga Nidra library to tap into whenever needed. The course itself really helped me to become connected to my inner Self and to become more fully aware of the power inside of us. Thank you Scott Moore for everything!”
—Amy Pople Yoga Nidra Graduate
“I have never met Scott [in person], yet I have found him to be one of the best instructors I have ever had. He is knowledgeable, interesting, and kind. He also responded to all my questions in a supportive way, and just made himself available. His teaching website was easy to navigate, and he required that some beneficial work be completed by the student. Just a great program! No wonder he was listed on the web in the top 5 Yoga Nidra Teacher Trainings.”
—Andrea Mathwich
You’ll get:
Two illuminating weekends of Yoga Nidra wisdom, relaxation, and knowledge and practice of how to teach this transformational practice, via Zoom.
Recordings of each session in case you have to miss a part or simply want to reference it later.
Full and life-time access to my online Teachable course which has all the same curriculum and more for continued and deeper study.
A 160-page manual for study and support
100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts. These scripts will also serve as a template for you as you create your own scripts and classes.
A 30-minute private consultation with me.
Dynamic, easy-to-follow lessons, practices, and assignments
Specialized pranayama, mindfulness, and mantra practices to help prep your for each lesson
Specialized Yoga Nidra practices that optimize your learning (this is incredible!)
Resources to help you plan and organize yoga and meditation retreats
Fascinating myths and stories to illuminate the teachings
The science and psychology of Yoga Nidra to explain why it works
A suite of resources with dozens of supplementary Yoga Nidra recordings, PDFs, links, books, poetry, myths, articles, and more.
Check out the course modules to see everything that you will learn …
The first weekend will be an organized curriculum of 10 modules complete with specially-designed and relaxing Yoga Nidra practices, fascinating lectures full of interesting stories, science, psychology and philosophy, as well as breathing and other mindfulness exercises.
This section is about taking care of YOU and will help you wake up from the illusion of being a limited being and as you experience your life as beautiful and miraculous. This section will help you feel as if all the colors in your life have been turned up to 11.
Module 1: Begin The Journey
Start along your path as I show you the map and trails you’ll follow on the course of your Yoga Nidra adventure.
Module 2: What Is Yoga Nidra? Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep
What is this ancient practice and how does it help you wake up?
Module 3: Yoga Nidra: An Inquiry to “Know Thyself”
Socrates will be your guide on this inner odyssey to hear the Oracle’s special message just for you.
Module 4: The Greatest Love Story of All Time: Shiva, Shakti, and YOU
You are the lovechild of consciousness and form. See how the world exists as a love note to you.
Module 5: The Koshas: Mapping the Beautiful Illusions
See the world dancing before your eyes, evoking your consciousness to wake up.
Module 6: Non-Dualism and Your Both / And Nature
Ancient myth illuminates the higher dimension of your True Being.
Module 7: The Secret to the Universe is HERE: Presence
The secret to the Universe is literally at your fingertips as you learn to practice presence.
Module 8: Stages and States of Consciousness
Upleveling your state of consciousness uplevels your stage of consciousness.
Module 9: Why Yoga Nidra Works: Science and Psychology
Take a look under the hood and learn how spirit and philosophy is supported by science and psychology.
Module 10: The Big Message & FAQ
The simple and profound truth, how Yoga Nidra applies to every-day life, and listen to me answer some common questions.
The second weekend will take what we’ve learned in the first weekend to apply it to learn how to facilitate this incredible practice for others. In this section you will learn how to teach Yoga Nidra like an expert in the power of your own voice using the specific tools and techniques unique to my method, how to be a successful Yoga Nidra teacher, and how to make a positive impact on the world while also making a living.
This course has three parts, each with several modules. Each part has practices and assignments including Yoga Nidra practices, teaching assignments, and class-building assignments.
Module 1: Introduction and Overview
Familiarize yourself with the tools to find your voice in this practice.
Module 2: The Yoga Nidra Roadmap
Learn to read the map of an effective Yoga Nidra experience to facilitate transformation for yourself and your students.
Module 3: Creating the Container & The Role of the Teacher
Learn the subtle and essential art of set and setting for a transformational Yoga Nidra experience and understand your primary roles as a teacher.
Module 4: Facilitating Observation & the Three Heavies
Facilitate Transformation by effectively pointing to presence with 3 key objectives.
Module 5: Essential Tools Part 1
Master the tools that will help you facilitate transformation in a Yoga Nidra practice.
Module 6: Essential Tools Part 2
Master the tools that will help you facilitate transformation in a Yoga Nidra practice.
Module 7: Essential Tools Part 3
Master the tools that will help you facilitate transformation in a Yoga Nidra practice.
Module 8: 2 “Yoga Ninja” Tactics
Uncover the 2 GAME-CHANGER tactics that completely revolutionize the practice of teaching Yoga Nidra and will help you to teach like an expert almost immediately.
Module 9: Connecting The Dots—Building an Effective Yoga Nidra Class
Together we’ll work through the step-by-step process of building specialized Yoga Nidra classes for yourself and your clients.
Module 10: Yoga Nidra Dyads and Self Practice
Turn facilitating Yoga Nidra on its head and the transformational power of allowing the practitioner to direct the Yoga Nidra experience as you learn the Yoga Nidra Roadmap and the art of Facilitated Awareness.
Module 11: Accessibility and Healing with Yoga Nidra
Reveal how to make this beautiful practice available for all by eliminating discriminating language, marketing, and practices from your teaching. Discover the role of Yoga Nidra toward healing.
Module 12: Integration
Provide the essential integration tools for your student to learn to apply Yoga Nidra in their every-day life and discover the miracle of their own life.
Module 13 FAQ
Clarify any questions you may have about teaching Yoga Nidra.
This section is dedicated to learning how to become a successful teacher. I’ll share with you the industry secrets to acquire and create well-paying online and in-person yoga opportunities, how to build interest for your classes as well as format classes, workshops, courses, and even retreats. You’ll learn how to support your students and maintain a positive teacher/student relationship. I teach you how to make an impact while also making a living.
Module 1: Introduction
The world needs you to share this practice in only the way that YOU can.
Module 2: Developing Interest
Make your skills available to those who need it.
Module 3: Formatting Classes, Workshops, and Courses
Presentation is everything. Create an offering that will give your students what they need and keep them coming back for more.
Module 4: Virtual Offerings & Supportive Tech.
Broadcast Yoga Nidra to the world with simple and effective tools. Use the “minimum viable product” and learn to scale your offerings.
Module 5: Private Sessions
Tailor a Yoga Nidra experience to the specific needs of an individual. Intake, format, and support for private individuals and groups.
Module 6: Retreats
Learn the insider’s tips to leading retreats and provide life-time memories and transformation for your students while giving yourself a “paid vacation.”
Module 7: Supporting Your Students
Establish the learning trajectory for your students to support them along their journey.
Module 8: FAQ
Questions and insights about the course
Module 1: Resources and Recap Progress
This broad recap will cement the knowledge and experience into your soul to ensure your confidence in teaching right away.
Module 2: Resources Reminder
Re-familiarize yourself with the vast array of supportive resources that come with the course.
Module 3 Finish Line
The big fat message. What it all means. What’s possible.
Module 4: Graduation Requirements
Prepare for your graduation: assignments, requirements, and certification.
Part 4: Building Your Mechanism of Influence
Module 1: Make and Impact and Make a Living
5 simple, actionable tools to help you make an Impact and also make a living doing what you love to do.
Dozens of Yoga Nidra recordings
Mantras
Pranayama practices
Mindfulness practices
Restore Yoga Full Practice
Short Prep-For Nidra Gentle Practice
160-page manual
100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts
Yoga Nidra Class Building Worksheet
The Yoga Nidra and Yoga Nidra Dyad Roadmaps
Prop Setup
Yoga Retreat Locations
List of Koshas
Yoga Nidra Prop Set UP
Yoga Nidra Door Hanger
Pranayama Practices
Mindfulness Practices
Chakras
List of poems used in the training
Essential links to books, websites, articles, podcasts, and interviews
There is nobody like you and your skills, talents, and personality have the power to impact certain students in only the way that you can. The world is waking up and in the process, we all desperately need effective Yoga Nidra teachers to transform us into what we may become.
People are waiting for you to step up to your higher Self, to become an expert Yoga Nidra teacher, and to facilitate transformation in only the way you can. This is the course to help you find your voice and share this transformational practice with the world.
Space is limited so that I can offer the best and most supportive environment for each student. Plus, this is the last live course that I’ll offer this year.
Will you join me?
Scott Moore is a senior teacher of yoga and mindfulness in the US. He’s taught classes, trainings and workshops in New York, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and L.A. as well as in Europe and Asia. Scott is the author of Practical Yoga Nidra: The 10-Step Method to Reduce Stress, Improve Sleep, and Restore Your Spirit. When he's not teaching or conducting retreats, he loves to write for print and online publications such as Yogi Times, Conscious Life News, Elephant Journal, Mantra Magazine, Medium, and his own blog at scottmooreyoga.com. Scott also loves to run, play the saxophone, and travel with his wife and son. Check out his yoga retreats and trainings in places like Tuscany, France, and Hong Kong , his online Yoga Nidra Course and his Yoga Teacher Mentor Program. Scott is currently living in Barcelona, Spain with his family.