Become a Leader In Your Field: Teach Yoga Nidra

Who Should Teach Yoga Nidra?

Want 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. 

Yoga Nidra Teacher Training

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. 

Please reach out with any questions. 

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. 

Teach Yoga Nidra: Specialized

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:

1. How is my program different from other Yoga Nidra training programs?

2. 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?

What are the specialized Yoga Nidra classes you want and need to teach to your students and clients?

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.

My Journey of Teaching Yoga Nidra

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.

What any experienced teacher can tell you is that good teaching doesn’t come in one-size-fits-all.

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.

Learning to Meet The Needs of Your Students

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.

Live Yoga Nidra Training Starts Tomorrow!

The best courses not only give you knowledge and teach you a new skill, they also change who you are. 

Please join me for my live Yoga Nidra Training. 2 weekends: July 31–Aug. 1; Aug. 6–8, 2021 live via Zoom. Space is limited!

Yoga Nidra Is My Greatest Teacher

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. 

What’s So Great About Yoga Nidra?

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

My Journey of Teaching Yoga Nidra

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. 

What makes this course stand out over other Yoga Nidra trainings?

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. 

This Is My Best Training

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

What’s Included In This Course

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 …  

Section1: Waking Up With The Yoga of Sleep

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.

Section 2: Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep

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. 

Part 1

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.

Part 2: Sharing Yoga Nidra with the World

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

Part 3: Finishing Up and What’s Next

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.

Resources Included in This Yoga Nidra TeacherTraining

Audio Recordings: 

• Dozens of Yoga Nidra recordings 

• Mantras

• Pranayama practices

• Mindfulness practices

Gentle Yoga Practices (Videos)

• Restore Yoga Full Practice

• Short Prep-For Nidra Gentle Practice

PDFs

• 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

I’m very proud of this Yoga Nidra teacher training, it’s my best work yet. 

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?

About Your Instructor

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.

Learning To Be A Student

I hope you’re starting off the week wonderfully.

Here’s an article I posted in Conscious Life News that I thought was worthy of reposting. Enjoy!

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“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.”

— Shunryu Suzuki

What Kind of Cup Are You?

There is an old zen story which asks, what kind of a cup are you? Are you a cup that is too full, not able to receive any more? Is your cup turned over refusing to do it any other way but your own? Or is you cup turned up, empty and ready to receive what the master has to offer?

When I lived in Korea, I often attended meditation retreats in the mountains with a dear friend Jin-Soon. Jin-Soon was a devout Buddhist and suggested that we go on a light hike up the mountain to her favorite temple. About two hours from our city was Geryangson mountain which housed several Buddhist temple.

It was late Autumn. We hiked, swimming in the warmth and light of the sun, especially after the biting cold of the morning. Eventually, We came to a small temple and quietly, we took off our shoes and stepped inside. Already sitting inside the temple were 2 female monks, both with shaved heads, sitting on mats deep in meditation. I wondered how long they had been there or planned to be there. They looked as though they may as well have been permanent fixtures in the temple. It felt so peaceful and quiet inside that little meditation temple.

Jin-Soon gathered mats for us placed near the door and we sat down and began our own meditation. The sun shone through the window of the door in a perfect rectangle that surrounded my body like a picture frame. I was warm and quiet. I don't know how much time we spent there. Time just dissolved.

Honoring Angels

Somewhere in the middle of my meditation, I began thinking about Ryan, a friend of my sister whom I had met on several occasions, who had died earlier that year along with his sister. It was a tragic event and even though I didn't know Ryan very well, and his sister not at all, I still felt a deep grief in their passing. I had made a promise to my sister to light a candle for them the next time I visited a Buddhist a temple. I had lit a candle several times for lost loved ones in cathedrals but I wasn't sure that such a ritual was even done in Buddhist temples.

Once we had finished our meditation, I asked Jin-Soon about whether or not people honored the dead in this fashion at a Buddhist temple and if so, how I might go about getting candles lit for Ryan and his sister. She kindly walked me to a small kiosk not far away and helped me buy two 14-inch candles. With candles in hand, I walked to the main temple, a large, imposing edifice, took off my shoes, and reverently entered the door.

The Rite of a Student

Yoga Nidra Training

Just inside the door was an old monk whose face was very wrinkled, the evidence of a lifetime of smiles. He saw the candles in my hand and I motioned that I wished to place them on the alter. He beckoned me to follow his lead and walking to the center shrine, three gigantic golden buddhas each 15–20 feet high, sitting performed a dramatic bow, he performed a rather elaborate bow, lowering himself to the floor then standing up again with his hands together in a prayer motion. I followed him the best I could, not quite remembering every step of the bow. Then, together, walked together to the alter and placed the candles gently on the alter. I retreated slowly backward and made motions to leave. My monk, however, had more to teach me.

He held up seven fingers and gestured to me that it was now necessary to complete seven more bows. Again, he repeated his dramatic motions and bade me to follow his precise movements to complete the ritual. In that moment, I had suddenly become his student. After many frustrating attempts, I finally learned the sequence: Standing with legs together, hands in a prayer stance, kneel down to the floor without using your hands. Cross the left foot over the right. Then, placing the palms on the floor, bend forward to touch the forehead to the floor. The butt must come down and touch your ankles in this position which was clearly easier for the the old monk than it was for me because my teacher couldn't figure out why I couldn't perform that part and corrected me repeatedly on this point. With the forehead on the ground, turn the palms up lifting the hands off the ground a few inches. Replace the hands on the ground, palms down, uncross your feet, and press yourself up to a squatting position. Then stand up, feet together. Finally, with hand pressed together in a prayer, make a deep bow toward the Buddha. With my every attempt at a bow, my monk hovered over me and corrected me (sometimes rather forcefully) where I forgot. When I completed my offering, my monk gave me a gentle bow and an enormous smile. I reciprocated in bowing and smiling my deep thanks to him.

The Grace of a Student

Despite my awkward offerings, I'm nonetheless convinced that Ryan and his sister were somehow sitting as angels in the rafters, happily laughing at my tutelage and grateful for my gesture. I'm sure of it.

According to you, what are the qualities of a good student? For me, principal among the qualities of a good student is grace, the grace of allowing yourself to be taught, to have an open cup.

As a life-long yoga teacher and practitioner, I will always consider myself first and foremost a student of yoga. Even as I am teaching, I am learning in the process. It's a beautiful paradox, learning while teaching. Whether by formal teaching of a master or from the masters degree from Knocks University (the school of hard knocks) if your eyes are open and heart humbled, there is always something to learn.

With the beginner's mind, there is always now. There is always wonder. There are always possibilities.

I invite you to embrace the beginner's mind in all of your practices, passions, and in the study of life.

---

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 Salt Lake City after living in Southern France with his family.

Heart In The Dark

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Live Yoga Nidra Training

Before we get into the story and speaking of getting to the heart of things, in about a week, I’ll be hosting my live, online Yoga Nidra immersion and teacher training by Zoom.

I’m really, really looking forward to it. I’ve got a few spots left, and would love to have you join. I’ve split it up into two weekends. The first is an immersion, designed for those interested in the transformative power of Yoga Nidra, a deep dive into this fascinating realm which quite simply is a practice that helps you wake up to realize your greatest potential and become the person you were destined to be.

Ultimately, this is an inquiry into your very nature of being to discover how beautiful and wondrous your life can be, and how much this yoga of sleep can benefit your stress, sleep, and perspective on the world and its problems. The next weekend is designed for those who might be interested in teaching Yoga Nidra and/or just really geek out on this fascinating subject. I want to show you how to facilitate lasting transformative for yourself and others through relaxing Yoga Nidra practices. I’m really proud of the robust curriculum I’ve developed and would love to have you join me.

Onto the story …

Running Into Darkness

Several years ago, some friends and I were spending an afternoon along the shores of the paradoxical desert of Great Salt Lake, the large and salinated lake that gives Salt Lake City its namesake.

If you’ve never been there, it’s a fascinating place, definitely worth the trip. Great Salt Lake exists now as the dregs of a 30,000-year-old ancient lake called Lake Bonneville which once spanned what is now half of northern Utah and eastern Nevada, a once-great lake held in a massive geological bowl known as the Great Basin. Everything’s “Great” in Utah! Even as a puddle of its former self, Great Salt Lake currently stands as the largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere.

The salinity of the water is a whopping 27%, compared to 3.5% of typical ocean water, depending on the ocean. Day-travelers of the 1920s would flock by the train-load to the briny resorts of Great Salt Lake to float in, and almost walk on (faith depending), the uncommonly salinated waters. After a long day of floating, they’d rinse off to dance the night away doing the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug in the desert days of prohibition and under the censoring eyes of Mormon church authorities.

The previous 30,000 years notwithstanding, in only the last century, the lake has receded considerably short-sighted legislation which amounts to nothing short of greed, stealing from the water inlets today so that there’s not lake tomorrow. Today, the landscape of Great Salt Lake would be utterly unrecognizable to our liquorless, Lindy Hopping great grandparents but more on that another time …

The receding lake has revealed its phenomenally flat and briny lake bottom which today attracts a new generation of tourists, not to its buoyant waters but to the lack thereof. Now, flocks of tourists come to what’s called the “Bonneville Salt Flats” to get high off a different natural resource: speed. The “Salt Flats,” (what happened to the ubiquitous “Great”?) is a several-mile-long, flat but grippy, salt-crusted terrain which acts as the perfect runway for thrill-seeking speed merchants striving to set new land speed records, the fastest being over 760 mph.

Even without the presence of an occasional rocket-propelled car, the shores of the Great Salt Lake offers a surreal landscape, even for the more pedestrian visitors: a flat, vast playa of endless white sand, crusted with salt which scintillates in the afternoon sun. To walk on this alien terrain is a sensational feast for bare feet.

On this day that my friends and I visited the wide, flat shores of Great Salt Lake, we were walking barefoot along barren brine and decided to conduct our own kind of race. We felt drunk with space and our feet yearned to explore every inch of this sand, flat and unspoiled in every direction. Each person agreed to close their eyes and run, completely blind and at full speed, in any direction for exactly 100 paces before opening their eyes. Eager for simple adventure, we closed our eyes and held our breath as someone shouted, "GO!"

Eyes closed, my legs began to sprint, bolting into the darkness of the afternoon sun. I noticed that with my primary sense muted, my other senses bloomed. A pungent potpourri filled my nostrils, one of sulfurous mud, dry salt, and miles of decaying brine shrimp. The salty air lit on my tongue, drying my mouth, and burning my lungs as they groped for breath between staccatos of unfettered laughter. My arms and legs scissored in orchestrated opposition as every muscle contracted to blast my body forward through raw space. With each step, the salty crust of the sand briefly pricked my naked soles before crumbling into a carpet of soft velvet. For several paces, my ears traced a steady decrescendo of my fellow racers’ feet, breath, and laughter dwindling into the quiet distance. Soon, I was running alone in the darkness.

Once alone, I was surprised to feel a primal and powerful fear kick in, the one that said in not so many words, “You’ll get hurt if you stray from the tribe into the unknown.” A sliver of worry lodged itself into my brain. “Didn’t you see some ominous-looking spikes sticking out of the sand somewhere in the direction that you’re running?” Horrific and gruesome images of running teeth-first into a post or impaling my bare feet on a sharp stick did wonders to dampen my sensory smorgasbord and all my attention now clutched the worry of what might happen to me as I ran blindly.

Steeling my nerves, I did my best to push these images from my mind, locking my eyes shut and quickening my pace. Suddenly, a spontaneous laugh burst from my chest, some automatic expression of wonder and worry.

. . . 53, 54, 55 . . .

My paces were whizzing by but with each step I couldn’t shake the fear of stepping blindly onto something dangerous. Worry had now evolved into genuine fear. “This is stupid,” I told myself, “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

. . . 71, 72, 73 . . .

New and more graphic images of dangers began infecting my mind, reaching for some emergency brake in my nervous system.

. . . 83, 84, 85 . . .

By now, panic had spiked. I felt the same as if I were running blind and headlong at full speed toward a cliff.

Only fifteen paces to go. Raw animal instinct clawed at my eyes to open, yet an iron resolve welded them shut. In one last burst of flying into the unknown, I let out all the stops. I pushed the throttle of my legs as fast they would go and sprinted madly forward into the darkness. Laughing was now replaced with a raw, full-throated scream, equal parts exhilaration and naked terror.

… 98, 99, 100!

On exactly my 100th step, my legs froze in space, refusing to take another step as my body wobbled to maintain equilibrium on the now unfamiliar feeling of solid ground. As I stood there panting, I slowly opened up my eyes and looked down to examine my feet to see them completely unmarred except for a generous coating of salt and mud. I stood there for a moment, feeling immense gratitude for these selfless feet, willingly thrusting me through unknown space as I ran through the darkness toward fear. After a moment, my gaze lifted to search for those ominous spikes that haunted my run. Nothing. Only flat, salty sand for miles. Of course. The misperception of my mind only invented the images.

What a rush! Who needs a rocket-propelled car?

This story reminds me of an important yogic concept called the Kleshas as explained in the Yoga Sutras, an ancient book of great wisdom. The Kleshas explore the relationship between perceptions and actions. Our misperceptions are called Avidya, a Sanskrit term literally meaning misperception. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common ways of misperceiving is Dvesa, misperception due to fear. Our misperceptions often cause us to react from fear, and in my case to completely invent beliefs, invariably causing suffering for ourselves and others. If we can avoid misperceptions and learn to see with true sight, we can respond to the vicissitudes of life with compassionate responsiveness instead of fearful reactivity.

On my blind run, I knew that there were no obstacles in my path yet my brain invented them based on past experiences causing me to run with fear. And while it was all fun and games that day on the shores of The Great Salt Lake, we tend to run through life with considerably less abandon, our misperception causing fears to push on the brakes of our higher selves and limit our strides toward what our destiny calls us to do and be.

But how does one learn to see correctly? Ironically, perhaps we can only see correctly when we attune our perception with something infinitely more refined than our eyes, a fine-tuned instrument designed to perceive truth. In The Little Prince, a modern book of great wisdom, this one masquerading as a children’s novella, one of the characters, the wise fox, shares his secret with the Little Prince when he says, “One only sees rightly with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.” Until we wake up from the misperception of fear and learn to truly see with the heart, we are destined to suffer as well as cause suffering toward others.

When we do learn to see with the heart, it will likely reinvent our entire concept of the world, or at least our relationship to it. At that moment you’ll be born into the The Great Truth (another “Great”), that everything in the Universe is boiled down to one single element: love. It’s what poetry and pop songs have been telling us forever. Funny how perhaps THE most important eternal truth can sound like a platitude plastered on a meaningless Hallmark card. Nonetheless, it’s Truth with a capital T, but one that must be experienced and practiced over a lifetime and not merely repeated mindlessly as you mouth the words to your favorite Beatles song, elbow cocked out the window, cruising down the 405.

The English title of one of my all-time favorite movies is a beautiful, life-affirming film called Wings of Desire, a German film by Wim Wenders. If you haven't seen it, find it and watch it immediately, but bring a glass of milk to wash it down cuz it's richer than an entire Black Forest Cake.

In the film, an angel named Damiel, played by Bruno Ganz, lives a black-and-white existence, one of only knowing and observing but categorically void of the spectrum of the human experience, notably of doing, feeling, and loving. As an angel, Damiel feels a bitter longing, for though he can read people’s minds (he likes to hang out with his angel friends in the library to hear the thoughts of readers), his attempt to do anything other than observe others, to help or comfort, falls pitifully short, a tragic truth illustrated in a heart-breaking scene where Damiel is sitting next to a suicidal man on the high ledge of a building, hearing his desperate thoughts, but can do nothing to stop the man from jumping to his death.

Besides helping people, Damiel also yearns for the human experience of love. Damiel falls for a woman, a trapeze artist, ironically wearing false angel wings as part of her act, and resolves to cash in his actual angle wings in order to live one life—fully-human, sentient, and loving—rather than suffer an eternity of the drab, albeit safe, existence of an angel.

The price to enter a human life is his angelic armor, his protection from the inevitable pain and heartache endemic to the human experience. The cinematic effect is perfect because as he becomes human, he leaves the black and white angel world and is born into an entire cosmos of colors, the full rainbow of a human existence.

Damiel is welcomed into his new human life by one of this world’s most well-known faces—pain. Gaining consciousness after his fall from angelic grace, he inspects a small gash on his head and pulling his finger from his wound, meets both blood and color for the first time. With a child-like inquisitiveness, he stops a passerby on the street and asks, “Is this red?” to which the man simply makes a wider birth so as to avoid this obviously crazy and bleeding person on the street. Indeed, someone who sees with such purity, unjaded by previous experience, would seem crazy to the vast majority of us who are locked in our tired and unconscious ways of seeing the world.

Next, Damiel has been watching mortals enjoy coffee for hundreds of years and can’t wait to drink some himself. He finds a street vendor who gives him a cup. It’s much too hot but he doesn’t know it yet and in his lust to taste this dark, aromatic elixir, he burns his tongue quite badly.

Yet, despite being greeted into his new life with the harsh hand of pain, the gash on his head and burning his tongue, instead of being disillusioned with human life, Damiel marvels at its richness and celebrates these sensations as the immutable truth of truly living.

At one point in the movie, the newly-mortal Damiel happens upon another angel-turned-mortal who, interestingly, is Peter Falk playing Peter Falk. Falk is on set in Berlin filming an episode of Columbo. Who better than a classic, salty sleuth to play out the mystery of what it means to be human? Peter Falk can recognize those who used to be angels who are now walking the earth and reminisces what it was like to be an angel but muses over the joys of life. After a brief conversation with Damiel, Peter Falk hears the call to return to the film set and as he is walking away, Damiel desperately calls after the angel-turned-TV-celeb to tell him everything there is to know about being human. Peter Falk doesn’t break stride and turning his head slightly, calls out over his shoulder, "You have to figure it out for yourself, kid. That's the fun of it!"

Sometimes, you have to shut your eyes and run full-out into the darkness of life to understand what it means to be alive.

As I’m writing this, the ominous cloud of COVID-19 has been darkening life for more than a year. It’s caused us all a lot of pain and covered the entire world with a heavy blanket of legit fear. It’s made the future ambiguous, it’s ruined plans, and worse, it has put a wedge between this world’s most valuable resource: each other. For me, it feels like we’ve been running in the darkness for a long time and I know I’m not alone when I say … I’m tired.

Global pandemic aside, doesn’t it feel so often that life is really one long journey into the darkness? Who knows what lurks over the next horizon or hell, even into next week? Yet, can we learn to see this ambiguity as something to celebrate if only to serve us to remember that we are alive? Even in our fears and failings and dying there can simultaneously exist wonder and beauty. Poet David Ignatow points to this paradox when he says, in his an excerpt from his poem, THREE IN TRANSITION (FOR WCW),

I wish I understood the beauty

in leaves falling. To whom

are we beautiful

as we go?

His poem points to the fact that even in our failing, in our most difficult times, there is a part of the Universe that finds us astonishing in that going. Having lost my mother to cancer days after Thanksgiving in 2020, during an already crushing year blighted with COVID-19, I saw first-hand how something so tragic as my mother passing bestowed a beauty to life. My mom’s death illuminated something Universal within the entire family, even and especially in my mom. Somehow she lives and spends her nights visiting me in my dreams. My mom’s death points to life. To whom are we beautiful as we go? Or to what?

Yoga and meditation are simple practices that point us inward to discover and remember that portion of the Universal that exists inside of us. Being familiar with the Universal part within us is in part what it means to see with your heart. Having heart-vision grants us the capacity to see a magnificence to the most difficult of circumstances, the beauty of a textured and well-lived life.

The late, great Leonard Cohen said, “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

Also, with this sure knowledge of the heart, we are less persuaded by Dvesa's power of misperception due fear. Another tired but nonetheless true statement is that love conquers fear. Perhaps this, too, is only something we can learn by closing our eyes as we lean into the darkness and learn to trust our most reliable sense. And from this courageous place, we will face what fears remain with presence and boldness. The Latin word for heart is Cor. To be courageous doesn’t mean an absence of fear, but to be full of heart.

As we run through the dark path of life’s journey, we will undoubtedly encounter fears.

May we learn to be courageous, seeing the world and the people in it rightly, as Universal elements of love. May our practices of yoga, meditation, and love wake us up to the Universal within all of us. And while we may not know exactly when this darkness will end, may we run through this uncertainty screaming, laughing, and loving, knowing that at very the least we are alive.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

~Wendell Berry.

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Quiet The Mind

The Yoga Sutras by Patanjali is a collection of Sanskrit verses, compiled sometime between 500 BCE and 400 CE and directs someone toward how they might achieve the ultimate state of yoga called Samadhi, or Oneness with all things. The Yoga Sutras can get pretty esoteric but they start off quite straight forward by explaining very succinctly what yoga is. It says in the second verse, "Yoga chitta vrtti nirodhah," meaning Yoga is the cessation of fluctuations of the mind.Yoga Sutra 1:2. In other words, by learning to quiet the mind, you enter into the state of Samadhi.

Yoga Is More Than Poses

Often times when we think of yoga, we think of asana, or yoga postures. However, the postures are simply another tool to help practice achieving the real purpose for yoga which is to calm the mind and gain Awareness. Certainly, there are many benefits to an asana practice including health, reduction of stress, sleeping better, etc., but it should be stated that these are the fantastic byproducts of calming the mind. Whether by practicing asana, meditation, or pranayama (breath work), we are truly practicing calming the fluctuations of the mind to enter into the space of clear seeing and Awareness.

The Yoga of Good Work

Nowhere in the Yoga Sutras does it mention that a practitioner can only achieve this state of calming the mind while on a yoga mat, in the studio, or doing yoga poses. Therefore, anything that helps us to practice find focus, develop Awareness, and concentration could be considered a yoga practice. We can apply this notion of focus and concentration for any kind of work we might do and any work we might do could prepare us to arrive at Samadhi. You can see a person who enters into that state of Oneness when they lose themselves in a performance, dance, or any other work that transcends a person.

Getting quiet and drawing in to stillness is necessary for any good work to happen. It's this quietness, this stillness, that allows the busy waters of our mind and emotions to settle enough for us to see what's down in the depths our being.

When we can enter this state of Oneness, even momentarily, our work becomes effortless because we are no longer attempting to do the thing, we become the thing. Work on this level, be that our job, parenting, our passions or whatever, generates from this deep relationship with our true being. Our work, therefore is simply an extension of our deeper selves, the Self that knows everything.

Our work, our medium is, as one good friend says, the loudspeaker of the soul.

Here are a few simple practice that you might try before any work, be that yoga practice, contract law, or parenting, to practice calming the waters of the mind.

Practices that Quiet The Mind

Yoga Nidra

Yoga Nidra is by far and away one of the most effective and most relaxing ways of changing your state of consciousness, one that helps you uplevel your stage of consciousness and then… yes— change the world. Nidra is a Sanskrit word meaning sleep, and Yoga Nidra is often called “the yoga of sleep” because it is a form of guided meditation that uses relaxation and a system of organized and layered awareness to take you through a journey into a liminal state between waking and dreaming consciousness. It is here, in this liminal state, that you discover that your mind, body, and spirit together contain a pathway that leads to the gates of perfect presence, wholeness, and Oneness.

Yoga Nidra is a potent catalyst for massive personal growth, giving you the direct tools and direction to become the person you are destined to become...the greater You who is destined to change the world.

In a beautiful paradox, the yoga of sleep is actually about waking up to the powerful being that you are. Some of the most powerful forces in the world can also be the most gentle, just like a whispering wind and the soft laps of a river which carve massive and formidable stones from canyon walls.

Yoga Nidra openes your eyes and wakes you up to the very nature of your being, that of limitless power and beauty. It opens your ears to hear the ancient wisdom of sages whispering to you that your true identity is that of Awareness itself. The gentle practice of Yoga Nidra leads you down a pathway to feel your truest essence, one of boundless equanimity, pure love, and absolute clarity. This practice helps you feel yourself existing as a resounding and Universal YES!

There Is Practice

Simply sit, close your eyes, and acknowledge what you sense, all of your senses. Without value or judgment, simply state what you are experiencing. Rather than identifying with the pronoun "I" simply say in your mind, "There is the sound of traffic, there is fatigue, there is worry, there is an incredible urge to rush to Hatch Family Chocolates and eat 40 pounds of truffles." You know, whatever thought, emotion, sensation occurs. Simply state what is. Try not to identify with it. Just watch it.

Count Your Breaths

Choose a number and count your exhales down from that number to zero. When you loose your place start back at that number. If you get to zero, start back at that or a different number. Keep you mind only on your breath. This is a deceptively difficult practice, I feel.

Mantra

Mantra means to transcend through the use of your mind. Simply find a phrase that means something to you, a scripture, a poem, some tidbit of inspiration, and repeat it in your mind. Words are powerful. You are your word.

I invite you to practice stilling the waters of your mind before doing any work to see how it leads to you fulfill your purpose of becoming one with all things.

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The "E" Word

There is a new four-letter word, the "E" word. This word is "The Economy." Strangely, it's neither four letters long nor even one word. Regardless, hearing the phrase (brace yourself), "The Economy'' probably conjures worry and a knot in the stomach. Whether directly or indirectly, we are all being affected by what's happening with (here it is again) "The Economy."

Unfortunately, hard financial times often makes us feel like we need to circle the wagons, draw in our resources, and look out for our own interests. The scarcity of financial means sometimes leads to scarcity of good will toward each other.

But despite the fact that many of us are suffering a bit financially because of COVID-19, the loss of jobs, plans put on pause, etc, there is another form of abundance we can all cash in and rely upon. This abundant resource is each other. Us. You and me. Even with social distancing, instead of shielding ourselves from others, we can enrich ourselves and others during this tricky financial time by investing our sincere humanity, our love, compassion, trust, and laughter. We can invest in the coffers of the well-being and happiness of each other. We are each other's bail-out plan and support in the essential economics of human capital. We are a resource without a deficit and yes, one that is even more vital than dollars. We are each other's interest and one that will receive an immediate return on investment each time we share a little of love and care from our endless account of humanity. This is yoga's (read union) true meaning, the one-ness of all.

Tough financial times actually affords us an opportunity, the opportunity to draw together and build friendships and communities because sometimes that is all that is left. Community is what's essential. Community will get us through. Ask your grandparents who may have lived through the Great Depression. We can help each other out in myriad ways, even with the pandemic prevalent and vaccines still scarce.

A few ways we might help out could include :

• Telling your community of job opportunities you might be aware of.

• Declutter your space by sifting through unused stuff and both simplify your life by getting rid of anything you’re not using and offering it to those in your community who might need it. Take a look at the incredible work being done by my friend Courtney Carver and her book, Soulful Simplicity for excellent ways to be so much more by owning so much less.

• Do an online yoga or meditation practice. Your energy and spirit feeds each other. Be creative! Tough times move us toward fun creative solutions that we'd otherwise never have discovered.

I love my job. I love it because I am constantly fed by your generosity and spirit. One thing I treasure is connecting with you on a personal as well as group level. I am often allowed a sneak peak into many of your hearts and get to see first hand how yoga has affected your lives. Countless times, I have looked into your eyes as you've spoken volumes to me by the tender tears rolling down your cheeks and perhaps mixed in a few words to describe some of your unspeakable challenges. You've shared with me your immense peace and joy and your stunning moments of clarity. You've shared with me the ways in which yoga has been your lifesaver, an island, an oasis. I'm deeply honored to play a small part in your unfolding.

I’d love to connect! Let’s share some human capital by having a virtual coffee date! I’d love to hear about what’s going on in your life, how COVID-19 has affected you, and what you do to help you keep your spirits up. Wherever you are in the world, let’s connect and together we’ll invest in the account of human good will.
Also, reach out to others and stay connected with people via Zoom or phone. Social distancing doesn’t have to mean heart distancing.

email me to connect at scott@scottmooreyoga.com

Scott

Wind Blowing Through The Pines Part 3

The last few days, I’ve been sharing installments of my story of going to Songgwangsa, one of the principal monasteries in Korea, living with the monks for a few days, and sitting with a monk as he laid some deep wisdom on me. It’s been almost 20 years since I sat on that meditation sanctuary with the monk and my mind and spirit have been processing that experience ever since, especially that whole bit of, “What is the price of the wind blowing through the pines.”

Today, I want to tell you about the cosmic backhand I received after nearly 20 years of mulling over and meditating upon this question. I have to start with a little bit of meta, so bare with me …

To start, I have to give you a little info about my experience with Yoga Nidra. About a year or so after my experience at the monastery, I discovered Yoga Nidra and started teaching it soon thereafter. Part of my role as a teacher of Yoga Nidra is to attempt to define what it is, how it works and why it’s so transformational. Despite the fact that I’ve studied Yoga Nidra in-depth, have led literally 10s of thousands of hours of Yoga Nidra practices, have trained hundreds of other teachers to teach it and, hell, even written a book about it, I’m still chewing on exactly what it is and how to describe it. Perhaps that’s the hallmark of being a life-long student of the subject.

I’m just getting this now, literally as I’m writing this, (I know, I know, slow learner, just ask Tog-hyon, the monk at the monastery), but I’m realizing that one of the reasons that Yoga Nidra is so hard to define is because it’s a practice that attempts to give you a relationship with the ineffable, with Source itself. That Source is Awareness. Yoga Nidra reveals something that is at once everywhere, fundamental, real, and true yet completely indiscernible to the senses and any other of the typical ways of knowing something. Yet, once you become aware of it, you’ll never see your life, and the world in the same way again. So, no wonder an easy definition is hard to nail down.

Here’s a stab at a brief description of Yoga Nidra …

Yoga is the experience of Oneness in body, mind, and spirit. Nidra is a Sanskrit word meaning sleep, and Yoga Nidra is often called “the yoga of sleep” because it is a form of guided meditation that uses relaxation and a system of organized and layered awareness to take you through a journey into a liminal state between waking and dreaming consciousness. It is here, in this liminal state, that you discover that your mind, body, and spirit together contain a pathway that leads to the gates of perfect presence, wholeness, and Oneness. The presence, wholeness, and oneness you experience in this state is Source. It’s pure Awareness. It’s the experience of yoga.

We naturally tend to identify with and define ourselves by limited and changeable qualifiers—our bodies, emotions, mind, desires, opinions, etc. But according to ancient wisdom, these are all illusions. They can’t possibly define us because they are all changeable and finite. Yoga Nidra helps to illuminate the part of you that never changes, the part of you that is everywhere. That hidden part is Awareness, pure and simple. Yoga Nidra helps to shift your entire world view to realize that all the things you can be aware OF simply reveal the fact that you are aware. The illusions reveal the truth. So, in Yoga Nidra we develop focus by paying attention to all the illusory layers like body, emotions, thoughts, etc. to reveal that what you are is the thing that is aware of all those layers.

Ok, with that out of the way here’s the important part …

Two years ago, I’m sitting at my desk in my 5th story apartment in France, working on developing my curriculum for teaching Yoga Nidra. This is the fantastic apartment we rented which was perched above the most delightful boulangerie. Each morning around 5 am we would stir in our beds a little as the irresistible scent of freshly baked croissants wafted through our windows. Anyway, it was well into the post-croissant hours of the day and I’m hammering away on my keyboard, trying to describe the process of illuminating the invisible with the visible and I came up with a metaphor of a tree blowing in the wind. By seeing the movement of the tree, you come to know the wind. Though it’s invisible, it’s only by what is visible dancing with the underlying wind that you come to know the wind. Pretty soon you don’t even see the tree anymore, you only see the wind, though it’s invisible.

And then Tog-hyon’s words burst into my brain and almost knocked me out of my chair. In my stream of consciousness, on the page I wrote, “WHAT IS THE PRICE OF THE WIND BLOWING THROUGH THE F@#*-ING PINES!!!!!” After almost 20 years, I finally got it! Not only did I understand the koan, but I realized how I had developed a relationship with Source, what is otherwise unknowable. I understood that largely through my Yoga Nidra practice, I had developed a relationship with the invisible EVERYTHING.

I reeled in astonishment with this insight. As I leaned back in my chair, taking it all in I spoke out loud, “What is the price of the wind blowing through the pines?” and without hesitation I heard myself answer the question, “EVERYTHING. The price is EVERYTHING.”

Everything because to know the underlying Source of all things means to forever give up the simple notion of any object. Nevermore will I experience this desk, these words, the intoxicating smell of fresh croissants in the morning because forevermore I will only see Source in the form of this desk, these words, and the intoxicating smell of fresh croissants. Everything I can be aware of reveals Awareness itself.

Holy shit.

Then everything else Tog-hyon said to me that day started flooding my mind with significance.

"The peace we have can only come from within. Otherwise, it will always leave us. We are doomed for sadness if we base our happiness on things that are constantly changing."

“You must doubt. You must continually ask the question, and one day you will learn.”

“A message from me isn't necessary. Instead, you must find the message within your own self and share it.”

"I love Dunkin Donuts!"

And then I wondered if Tog-hyon might also like croissants.

---

Thank you for hearing or reading this story. I’d love to hear about YOU’RE moments of clarity and illumination. Drop be a line. Share a story of your own.

If you’re interested in exploring “the wind in the trees” for yourself, you can either join me tonight for my twice-a-week Yoga Nidra class (Wednesdays 6–7:15 pm MST, Sundays 9–10:15 am MST), or please consider joining me for my live, online Yoga Nidra Immersion and Teacher Training. This will be a unique opportunity to dive deep into your True Being and to learn to share Yoga Nidra with the world.

Live, Online, and Recorded

Immersion Only, February 20–21, 2021 9 am to 5 pm MST

Immersion and Teacher Training February 20–21, 2021 9 am to 5 pm MST; February 26–28 9 am to 5 pm MST

Wake up to the person you were destined to become! This course is a beautiful, fascinating, and relaxing journey deep into Self.

Learn to teach this transformational practice using the power of your OWN voice and not as a rote version of your teacher. I’ll teach you not only how to teach Yoga Nidra but how to be a successful Yoga Nidra teacher. This training will pay for itself as you learn how to create opportunities for yourself to teach the transformational practice of Yoga Nidra all over the world.

If you have ever wanted to learn more about Yoga Nidra, now’s the time!

I believe this to be the best live and online Yoga Nidra immersion and training available.

The Off Button

Where IsThe Off Button?!

In Walt Disney’s Fantasia, there’s a Mickey Mouse cartoon called the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In this cartoon, the Sorcerer is going out for the night, probably to play D&D with his pals, and decides to put his apprentice, Mickey, in charge of cleaning up the joint. Mikey’s not too happy about this until he finds the Sorcerer's magic hat and wand and puts some magic into the brooms, mops, and buckets to become animated and do all the work by themselves. In his desire to make his life easier, he replicates all the mops, brooms, and buckets until there’s a veritable army of animated cleaning tools. Soon, things start to get out of hand and Mickey realizes with horror that he doesn’t know how to turn it all off. Water from the buckets and teams of mops and brooms are flooding the place. In his desire to automate his life, he soon realizes that he’s literally drowning in a river of his own chaos. Luckily, the Sorcerer returns just in time to snatch his hat and wand back and return things to normal.

I often wonder how much we are all like Mikey. In our attempt to make our lives easier and to produce more, we often find ourselves drowning in our own machinations of being productive and we have no clue how to turn it all off. Today, I’d like to offer one way of finding your “off” button.

In a self-help world, where people are bombarded with myriad ways of improving themselves, a person can begin in earnest several different kinds of practices. These practices might range from yoga, meditation, pilates, cardio, etc. All too often, the underlying promise of these practices is that if I just do more, I’ll be happier, that it will improve my being in some way. While human beings are programmed to progress and grow, sometimes that growth can come through the least expected practices. One such practice is the practice of relaxation, the practice of not doing anything.

Just like meditation or yoga, practicing relaxation can be deeply illuminating and self-revealing. It refutes the damning notion that we are constantly bombarded with, that if we just DO more, we’ll be happier. What if we take the opposite approach? What if we practice NOT doing? I’m not talking about turning procrastination into a life-skill. I’m talking about deciding to actively relax, to regularly afford yourself the time and space to rest and to fill up the well.

The irony is that even though one might turn to a relaxation practice to purposefully step away from the insidious pull to always be doing more, by relaxing and recharging your batteries in body, mind, and spirit, you’ll naturally find yourself more alert, capable, and ready to produce in all the ways you choose to. In other words, because of your dedication to rest, you will do more.

Relaxation is Healing

One of my Ayurveda teachers told me that rest and relaxation is one of the first orders of operation for any kind of healing in body, mind, or spirit. As humans, we have an incredible capacity for renewal. If given the time to rest, muscles, skin and bones can heal, minds can become still, and even broken hearts can mend. Failure to allow injuries in body, mind, or spirit to heal can make injury or illness chronic and sometimes terminal. Practicing relaxation allows injuries of all sorts to heal.

In the realm of psychotherapy, relaxation has proven to be the catalyst for deep healing of trauma. Joseph Wolpe was a leading psychiatrist and a leading figure in behavioral therapy in the 1900s. He treated many people affected with PTSD through systematic desensitization using relaxation as a primary agent. He realized that a person cannot be relaxed and stressed at the same time. So, he used a process of systematic awareness, similar to a Yoga Nidra practice, to help people arrive in a deep state of relaxation. Then, once his patients had facility with relaxation, he would begin to present stressors in very small doses. In a state of relaxation, what would normally cause stress didn’t even phase the patient. Incrementally, he would increase a person’s tolerance to that stressor until it was no longer a stressor at all. Relaxation was a safe and effective approach to helping heal some deep wounds of trauma.

Relaxation As A Practice

Believe it or not, relaxation is a skill. Some people can become relaxed very easily and others, not so much. Come on, are YOU one of those people who just cannot relax? There’s no greater hell than not being able to to relax , especially when we need to. Sometimes, we know we need to relax but our habit of being constantly on overrides our ability to let go. We just can’t get ourselves to quiet down in body, mind, and spirit.

Learning to relax might include choosing to turn down appointments or social engagements. It might also mean turning off the television and your phone for a while. I know, many of us turn to our phones and TV to veg out and relax, though oftentimes, these avenues don’t provide the kind of deep relaxation we need, they only serve as distractions. We might also need some formalized relaxation practice to follow.

To do a relaxation practice, might I suggest arranging a time in the middle of the day when you can have 20–30 minutes alone. Let those who share space with you (including pets) that you’ll be unavailable for 20–30 minutes. Try lying down on the bed, couch, or floor (hammocks work nicely, too). Cover your eyes with an eye mask. This reduction in light, quiets the nervous system and tells your brain that it’s time to relax.

During your relaxation practice, you might try counting your breaths down from 100. Begin by simply noticing your breath. On the exhale count the number 100, inhale and count 99, exhale, 98, etc. If your mind wanders, there’s no judgement good or bad. It happens to everyone, just start back at 100. If you get all the way to zero, there’s no judgement good or bad. It happens to everyone, just start back at 100. The difficulty is to let go of the achievement in the practice. Sometimes for this reason, I’ll start at a number like 1000 with no hope of getting to zero before my practice is over. This helps me to simply rest in the practice of focusing on the numbers without achievement.

You may also practice doing a relaxing body scan. You can do this by spending a few seconds by noticing each body part from head to toe in succession as you watch yourself become more relaxed. Take a few seconds to rest your attention on each body part. When you get down to your toes, just start back at your head and consider that you’re taking yourself deeper and deeper into relaxation with each pass of the body. Our most natural state of being is one of relaxed alertness so as you begin to practice simply being Aware of your body, you’ll naturally find yourself relaxing your body deeper and deeper.

It’s likely that your mind will want to process something during your relaxation practice. It might be frustrating to try to turn your brain off, especially if it’s in the habit of being turned up to 11. In truth, our job in a relaxation practice isn’t to deny our brains from doing what they are programmed to do. Instead of trying to prevent your mind from doing what it’s designed to do, give your mind a job. Allow it to focus on something simple and singular like your breath or your body. I find this to be a valuable pointing.

If you think your mind might be too worried about time to relax, set a timer for 20–30 minutes so you know that there will be a definitive ending time, allowing you to relax into the experience.

No matter what other practices you do in your life, few other practices will help you to be your best like a regular practice of relaxation. A regular relaxation practice will help you heal in body, mind, and spirit, you’ll be more pleasant to be around, and it will ironically even make you more productive. You’ll find yourself being less reactive to life’s events and more responsive to them. In truth, this could be the “off” button you need to prevent you from drowning in the river of your own chaos.

Start a relaxation practice and tell me how it goes!

A Life-Changing Practice

One of my most impactful teachers, Dr. Judith Hanson Lasater, suggested I do a particular practice once a year, during the days between Christmas and New Years: Savasana.

Savasana or corpse pose is the resting pose you get at the end of asana practice, which hopefully lasts for more than 2 seconds if your teacher has any love in their heart. Judith suggests a week of practicing JUST Savasana.That’s it. No other pose. She promises, “It will change your life!”

Louis Armstrong said, “What we play is life,” and it seems fitting that after the year we’ve “played,” fraught with difficulty, strain, and shakiness, we need a good, solid, lengthy savasana … and then maybe a stiff drink (click here for the original recipe of my CORONA Cocktail).

And so, may I suggest this practice to you. Take a rest. Do a week of Savasana.

Close the door and put a “Do not disturb” sign outside. Set yourself up on a yoga mat, couch, or bed. Put a cushion under your knees and head and an eye pillow over your eyes. Incidentally, if you don’t have an eye-pillow, a COVID mask doubles nicely as an eye mask. Perhaps a blanket might feel nice on top of you. Set a timer for 30–90 minutes, so you’re not worried about time. Then lay down and rest. Don’t worry about poses. Don’t fret about burning off all the cookies that Santa didn’t bother to take with him. Just relax.

If you like, download this wonderful, end of the year Yoga Nidra practice (relaxing guided meditation) and let it lead you through past, present, and future as you create what you’d like to see for yourself moving forward into 2021 and beyond.

You’ll emerge from each practice feeling clear-headed, energized, and rested.

“God REST ye merry gentlemen (and women and non-binary folks, thank ye very much)”

Let me know how it goes!

You're Our Only Hope

photo by alex adams

Yesterday, I wrote about how much of the pain that we are seeing in the world this year is the result of things dying, and how other pain we are experiencing is often the birthing pains of what’s coming.

One thing that is being born in this moment is a global movement of individuals and institutions becoming more conscious. Despite how broken the world seems to be, we are more capable than we can imagine to make things right. This global movement of consciousness is about learning how to set things right by setting yourself right.

But I’m only one person, how can I make a difference?

This summer we were practicing some extreme social distancing by going on a secluded river trip with a very small group down the down San Juan River in Southern Utah. As we floated downstream, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream …,” beers nestled in hand, we spent long hours simply staring up at the breathtaking landscape of the canyon walls. I couldn’t take my eyes off the canyon walls, specifically the patterns of erosion: enormous, almost perfect squares the size of elephants, and rectangles the size of semi-truck trailers, all with very straight lines, that had sometime in the last several thousand years detached themselves from the canyon wall and were now being washed in the lazy current of the San Juan. It looked as if some giant was playing with the canyon walls, carving each perfect shape out, and plopped it into the river.

A couple on our trip were environmental scientists with a passion for geology and I asked them how these large rocks could be shaped so perfectly with what looked like chiseled corners and almost perfect lines. One of the scientists offered her best SWAG, (scientific-based wild-ass guess) and proffered that perhaps the microscopic, individual particles of the principal mineral in the rock were shaped in squares and rectangles so the larger stones merely reflected the composite of the smallest possible elements. Fascinating!

This SWAG resembles the old hermetic saying, “As above, so below,” and vice versa. In other words, 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 from within. You must change yourself, and when you are whole the world becomes whole.

There’s a critical mass of those who are waking up to their highest beings. This critical mass, along with the winds of change, has eroded the old and weathered facade and those who are waking up are breaking from the old. We are rolling toward the living waters of a more just, prosperous, and sustainable existence.

We are the epitome of rock and roll.

Yes, there’s a movement that is underway and it’s begging you to join. It's calling to you to wake up from the illusion of being a limited, powerless being and wake up to the unimaginable power that is already inside of you, to fertilize the seed of your birthright and majesty, so you can be a crucial cell in this organism of consciousness that is changing the world.

We cannot wait for someone else to save us. Our purpose is to save ourselves.We must be the change of the world because the solutions to the world’s problems only lie within.

Like Alice Walker said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Tomorrow, I can’t wait to share with you a very powerful resource that I’ve created that will help you realize your innate wholeness and will help you to make the world whole.

The Reckoning

This has been a really, really, really tough year. It’s been Covid-19 with 1.42 million deaths around the globe, also causing world-wide financial disruption and disaster. It’s been George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and scores of others fueling Black Lives Matter and sending millions to streets to march against oppression. It’s been a bitter and divisive fight between Trump vs. Biden, right vs. left. It’s been natural disasters ravaging the US with massive hurricanes, wildfires, and earthquakes. And all of the global disasters have felt like gasoline poured on the fires of our regularly-scheduled personal crises. I am feeling the toll of a very difficult year stacked on top of the recent passing of my sweet mother after a 3-year fight with cancer. It was an honor to be with her as she died. I know I’m not alone, we have all felt the oppressive pain and pressure of a truly unforgettable year.

But as we are getting ready to tell 2020 to shove off (a nicer word than I’d normally use considering the year we’ve had), it’s important to remember that just like many forest fires, we will grow back after these personal and global disasters. And when we do, we will be much stronger because of it. In fact, some trees actually require the inferno of a wildfire to break open their cones and seed a new generation. Some of the pain we are feeling this year is the necessary fire we need to seed a brighter future. Other pain we’re feeling this year is the pressure of new things now being born. One of these things is a global movement of consciousness. We can no longer stand by and watch to see what happens for our future. There is a reckoning happening. There is a global movement being born and the world is calling on you to join this movement, to wake up to your potential, to step up your Awareness or to step out of the way. The world needs you to seed the future.

As a world, we are waking up to our potential and purpose, causing many old paradigms and institutions to disintegrate under the strain of this change in global consciousness. Right before our eyes, we are watching armies demobilize, countries working together more than ever before, and institutionalized racism, bigotry, sexism, and disregard for the environment begin to crack and crumble. As a world, we are recognizing those things which are fundamentally opposite of our highest potential, and in the immortal words of Twisted Sister, “We’re not gonna take it … anymore!” You can be sure that at many of the funerals for some of the old ways of the world, you will see me dancing on the pews, and singing this refrain.

But despite the joy in the passing of some old and broken institutions, we are nonetheless in the dying process of old ways of being and we all feel the pain of that revolution. We feel it in the form of collective rage, disgust, and an uneasiness or confusion of what the future will bring.

All this death reminds me of the Hindu goddess, Kali. In representations of her, she looks like she could be the lovechild between Gene Simmons and a pirate. She has wild eyes, a skirt made of severed arms and heads, a threatening sword raised above her head, and blood dripping off her long, serpentine tongue. Yet, Kali is regarded as a compassionate deity. That’s right. She’s the one who says, “Enough, already!” and severs what needs to die. In truth, what she represents is killing our unconsciousness, putting asunder our old self so that we can be resurrected as our most conscious beings. Still, blood is blood and even though some things do need to die, this year has shown us that even necessary deaths can still hurt.

While some of the pain we feel this year is from things changing and dying, it’s also true that some of the pain we are experiencing is actually birthing pains. Whether we asked for it or not, we are being born into something new. After the death of what didn’t serve us any longer, it’s normal to feel the pressure of confusion about how to reinvent ourselves. We have identified as that old and broken thing for so long, we don’t know who we’d be as something else. Though we are being born into something new, we may experience the pressure that comes with that newness.

Yet, in truth, there are powerful resources that can be a tremendous asset in times like these, such as a robust internal sense of empathy, a broad perspective over life’s purpose and problems, and a ready capacity to be present with what is. When we can draw upon our ability to be compassionate, responsive and not reactive, empathetic, and loving to self, we can better access the greater love that is available outside the chaos or trigger.

But even with the world waking up to Awareness, who’s going to clean up this messy world?

What have you discovered about yourself during this year and what has helped you to resource your best self to manage this difficult year?

I want to keep this conversation going so over the next few days, I'll be sending you information about a new offering you can use to help you step up to the challenges of the world as the person that you were destined to be.

Be safe. Be well. Talk Soon.

The Many Paths of Yoga Nidra

People often inquire about my Yoga Nidra Teacher Training and wonder why I don’t teach in this way or that way and I remind them that just like there are many ways to teach asana, there are many ways to teach Yoga Nidra. Instead of being dogmatic about one particular style, I train teachers to understand the essentials of the practice, what it’s pointing to so that they can eventually teach powerfully from their own assimilated experience and not as a rote version of their teachers.

It reminds me of the beginning of my yoga journey, as I was just discovering this incredible practice. I used to be fundamentalist about the way I thought that yoga “aught” to be taught. If I went to a yoga class and it didn’t have certain poses or wasn’t conducted in a certain way, I would leave complaining, “That wasn’t yoga!” Have you ever done this? It’s natural. I think that this mind set is common when we are learning a new discipline—we want to try to understand it so we narrow its definition to distinguish it from other practices. But very often, with any subject, once you try to analyze it in depth, the definition of it tends to open up to be exponentially more expansive than you can imagine. One of my earliest yoga teachers said, “If you understand one thing all the way down to its root, you will understand everything.” What he meant was that everything is pointing to the same thing, Source. This conversation inspired me to write an article posted in Conscious Life News.

Just like in yoga asana schools, in Yoga Nidra there are many different approaches to practice setting the same condition for the same end. I approach my trainings with this essential principle: if you understand the big picture of Yoga Nidra—what it is, how it facilitates your own relationship to understanding Self, know some of its history, and the essential elements of why it works—then I believe you will use the principles, tools, and tactics that suit your teaching style the best to be the most effective for the individual needs of your students. That way, you will powerfully impact your students through the power of your own experience and voice and not a rote version of your teacher. As I'm sure you agree, there's no one "right" way to teach Yoga Nidra. That's why I think it's important to understand Yoga Nidra at its root to understand how each principle (like the using the koshas, for example) may effectively lead students to experience the benefits of Yoga Nidra.

What is Yoga Nidra?

I define Yoga Nidra like this: Yoga Nidra is the yoga of sleep: its goal is samadhi, experiencing yourself as Oneness and achieves this through a method of entering the Nidra mind state, the hypnagogic, in-between state, of waking and dreaming, through systematized relaxation and layered Awareness. Yoga Nidra is the meditative process of learning to identify yourself as Awareness itself. By layering your Awareness systematically through the maya koshas, or layers of illusion— what we typically identify as “us” such as body, emotions etc.— we come to experience our infinite Self, our True Self, that of Awareness itself.

Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training

There are many ways that a teacher could facilitate Awareness through Yoga Nidra. My Yoga Nidra training approach is to leverage the koshas heavily as perhaps the most effective way to disidentify as ego and identify as Awareness itself. I teach myriad approaches to bring awareness to each kosha. For example, in the Anamaya kosha, one could use the 61-points of awareness in the body, or explore Awareness through the body by following the pattern of the homunculus, the parts of the body which have a ready access to the brain or in other words which those spots which are the most accessible for Awareness. After all, the Anamaya kosha is but one of the filters through which to practice experiencing yourself as Awareness. Also, I understand that the body is a powerful conduit for Awareness and can help to anchor other things like thoughts or emotions in a way that makes the information you may be aware of more salient and available. For example, one might inquire into an emotion and become curious to it in Awareness by also exploring which part of the body seems to resonate with that emotion.

As for the application of the body scan, in the beach paradise meditation I used a basic body scan to help relax the body while bringing awareness to the Anamaya Kosha. As you pointed out, this is a meditation that uses the Anamaya kosha and Vijnanamaya kosha (both implicitly rather than explicitly) to gain a great sense of relaxed alertness. It's not a typical Yoga Nidra practice that I might teach in a class.

Yoga Nidra in Your Voice

I am confident that even if you don't think your voice is all that awesome, YOU have a special knowledge and approach to Yoga Nidra that people need to hear. There's only ONE of you and the world needs your approach to this vital practice. You will impact students in a very unique way that only you can, with whatever voice the Universe has given you. I'm sure your voice is awesome but in my training, I do go into depth how to use your voice as a tool to facilitate Awareness, you know avoiding serial gerunds, upturns, and sounding like the hold music at the bank 🙂. Yes, you can certainly work on your voice in my training there's a module that assigns you some voice work to practice. Also, one tip to help you cultivate your voice, starting with simply recording yourself teach (even reading a script) and listen to the tone of your voice.

Below is a Yoga Nidra which I think you might enjoy. While not all Yoga Nidra practices need to explore each kosha to facilitate Awareness, this practice is a little more indicative of my regular way of teaching, one that employs using all the kosha. I hope you enjoy it. You can listen directly or download it to your computer or smart device.

Brand New Yoga Nidra Trainings!

I’ve got some really exciting news!

Short back story …

So, a long time ago, I was that kind of depressed person who was afraid of emotions so I just turned them off. Consequently, for the space of about a decade, I didn’t feel happiness, sadness, grief, or loneliness. I didn’t feel anything. I remember during that time thinking that I couldn’t remember what it felt like to have fun.  

After about 10 years of feeling like this, I discovered Yoga Nidra, or the yoga of sleep. This is the guided meditation where you lie down, get very relaxed, and follow the facilitator’s words as you become increasingly more aware of the different layers of your being. 

During one of my very first Yoga Nidra sessions, I had a life-changing experience. I became very, very relaxed and began to experience myself as pure Awareness. I know, what does that even mean? For me, it felt myself flying through the cosmos, outside of time and space. I felt as if the Universe and I were one and the same. I felt that though this thing called “Scott” had a finite body, emotions, and thoughts, and that my true identity was something so much more immense, complete, and beautiful than any of those other parts of my being. 

This one Yoga Nidra experience dropped some massive and cosmic clarity into my lap. It helped me to understand my human existence with all of its vicissitudes is nothing to avoid, but rather to live out to the fullest. And just like that, I felt safe to feel emotions again. It was like a miracle healing because that night I went home and the floodgates of emotions opened. Oh, the boxes of Kleenex that absorbed more than 10 years of emotions! From that moment forward, I’ve bravely met every emotion that has come my way. I love and have fun again! 

Yoga Nidra does so much more than help you heal from emotional repression. The most common benefits of Yoga Nidra include less stress, better sleep, decreased anxiety and depression, increased self-confidence, lowered blood pressure, increased production, creativity, and learning. Mostly what Yoga Nidra does is help you wake up to your innate power and perfection and it does it in the most relaxing way imaginable. It’s seriously like napping your way to enlightenment. 

In addition to my own transformation, I’ve seen countless other people who have benefitted in large and small ways through this accessible and non-dogmatic practice of deep and relaxing mindfulness. Therefore, I decided to devote much of my life to this fascinating and transformative practice. So, for the previous dozen or so years, I’ve been practicing, studying, and teaching Yoga Nidra. I’ve been featured in podcasts about Yoga Nidra, written a blog largely devoted to the subject, written countless articles, and even written a book about Yoga Nidra. I host regular Yoga Nidra classes, workshops, courses, and I’ve traveled all over the world offering Yoga Nidra trainings.

While teaching a live Yoga Nidra training, it dawned on me how much the world needs more Yoga Nidra and to do that how much it needs more qualified Yoga Nidra teachers. So I began to make the recordings of my trainings available as a digital download on my website. I was proud of this training product but it was very DIY. Before long, though, people around the world were learning my method of Yoga Nidra. 

During the few years since my training went global, something thrilling started happening. Graduates of my program began sending me their original Yoga Nidra recordings in their native languages of Spanish, French, German, Chinese, or Thai. I began to see that this Yoga Nidra training is bigger than me. Truly, my training was spreading across the globe and deserved an upgrade. So, I began to revise. 

After two years of growing, learning, and updating my curriculum, I still felt miles away from building the new program. Then, in July of 2020 I caught wind of a Product Creation Boot Camp hosted by Eric Edmeads and Speaker Nation. If you don’t know him, Eric Edmeads is an absolute force of nature. He is one of the world’s most successful speakers, entrepreneurs, business and health coaches and an absolutely phenomenal online product creator. He created perhaps the world’s most successful health program called Wildfit. He works in the company of powerhouses like Richard Branson of Virgin Records and Virgin Airlines, and Vishen Lakhiani of Mindvalley, and Tony Robbins of, well, Tony Robbins. I absolutely love Eric’s stuff and I really trust him as a guide and so when I heard about this Product Creation Boot Camp, I felt it was exactly what I needed to give my current online Yoga Nidra training the wings that it deserved. 

A few weeks later, I holed up solo in a friend of a friend’s house in Moab, Utah for a week with little or no distractions so I could engage with this roughly 60-hour live, intensive course production training. I’m glad I did because it gave me the time and space to learn volumes, not only about how to offer my new online Yoga Nidra training in a way that it deserved, but I also had many eureka moments about the practice itself, not to mention great illumination about myself. 

But we all know that learning and doing are very different things. One of the things that makes Eric Edmeads such a remarkable facilitator of online courses is his ability to inspire people to follow through and finish the damn thing! This Product Creation Boot Camp course was no different. He promised that for anyone who could finish their project by October 15th, they would be entered into a contest to win 1 of three spots on an Instagram Live event to help bring a broader audience to their project. 

I wanted one of those spots badly, so I immediately came home from Moab and got to work. I spent weeks completing and fine-tuning my 120-page outline and working on the course details. I soon realized that it was waaaaaay more work than I had anticipated. 

About 10 days before the October 15th deadline, my wife and I were sitting outside early one morning during our daily coffee date when my wife asked, “Are you going to make your deadline?” With a pang of disappointment I told her that I thought it would be too difficult to complete in time: I had to film, edit, and compress about 35 hours of lectures, record 25 Yoga Nidra recordings, create multiple PDFs—oh and build a site and upload all of my content on Teachable, a site for online courses which I had never used before. So, no. This project was too big. I could finish in a month or two maybe, just not in time for the deadline. 

She looked at me in the eyes and in not so many words essentially told me to get my ass inside and get to work. So I did. 

Something you need to know about me is that I’m stupidly optimistic. Despite my unrealistic hope for the impossible, completing this project seemed beyond even my warped conception of possible. Regardless, for the next 10 days I put my head down and cranked out 12 to 18-hour days working on this project. During the process, I’d get a momentary glimpse of hope, that maybe, just MAYBE, I might be able to finish. Then, that hope would fade as new issues or problems arose. I’d continue to work through those issues and hope would return, then fade, and return … all the way to the date of the deadline. I was a wreck!

To qualify for the chance to have an IG Live spot with Eric I needed to submit my completed project by 10pm on October 14th. At EXACTLY 10pm on the 14th, I pushed send and submitted my project. Done. It was a fucking miracle, the product of raw, stubborn, and dumb persistence. Thanks to my wife who could see something inside of me that I couldn’t see myself. 

I took a day or so to rest and be a dad again. 

Then, a few days later, to my complete astonishment and surprise I was informed that I was one of the three chosen to be featured in Eric’s Instagram Live feed!!! I did the happy dance until my legs were exhausted. I’m still doing the happy dance. Mostly, I am thrilled to have been pushed by something to finish what I feel is a worthy and much-needed project, one that ended up being much bigger than I had expected but which I feel is to the scope that it deserves. 

So, what’s in this new course? 

There’s something for everyone, regardless if you want to teach Yoga Nidra. One of the things that Eric taught me to offer in all courses was to answer the questions, “what,” “why,” and “what if,” as well as “how.” I believe that to be a good teacher of any subject, you need to deliver the message from your own assimilated experience and not as a rote version of your teacher. I believe that you gotta learn for yourself the “what” and “why” before you learn the “how.” That way, you’ll eventually find your own way to do it and when you do you’ll be more impactful. 

By addressing the “what” and “why” of Yoga Nidra separate from the “how” to teach it, I realized that I actually have not one but TWO courses— one for those who are interested in receiving the vast array of benefits from the practice including healing from stress, sleeplessness, and self-limiting beliefs as well as learning about Yoga Nidra’s power to help you to source the power that is already inside of you to live an extraordinary life, and another vast course for those who wish to take the information of the first course and leverage it to learn how to expertly share it with the world. 

The first course is called Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep. This go-at-your-own-pace course is about waking up to who you really are. It uses Yoga Nidra to help you remember and experience your birthright of infinite power. Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep helps you to deeply relax while you gain a universal perspective about your life to experience it as miraculous, extraordinary, and rich. In this course, you will learn about waking up from the beautiful and necessary illusions of body, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and circumstantial happiness. It guides you to wake up to an eternal joy that is fundamental to your being and helps you arrive at a cosmic perspective of life’s problems. This course helps you to truly experience yourself as Oneness. In addition, you’ll also be receptive to the vast other possible benefits of the practice including but not limited to less stress, better sleep, decreased anxiety and depression, increased self-confidence, lowered blood pressure, increased production, creativity, and learning. This course is about creating some YOU time for yourself. It is relaxing, illuminating, empowering, and fun.

Contained in Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep is a curriculum of relaxing Yoga Nidra practices, energizing breathing practices, and focusing mindfulness practices before and after fun and engaging teaching lectures. You get a copious library of resources to support your journey including: Yoga Nidra recordings, breathing practices, mindfulness practices, gentle yoga videos, links, PDFs, podcasts, blog posts, and more. 

The second course expands greatly on the first and is called Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep. This follows up the foundational “what” and “why” of the first course with essential information with the “how” of to teach it. This course uses Yoga Nidra, pranayama and mindfulness practices, PDFs and detailed lectures to lead you step-by-step toward not only how to create your own effective Yoga Nidra classes and scripts, but how to so with your OWN voice to truly facilitate Yoga Nidra as an expert in only the way that YOU can. 

In this course, I share the essential tools, tactics, and roadmaps to guide you to being a truly effective teacher, not as a rote version of me but with your own voice. In this course, I teach:

• The role of the teacher and how to create an effective teaching container.

• The Yoga Nidra Roadmap: how to create an engaging, relaxing experience that meets the specific needs of your students. 

• 15 essential tools and tactics to teach effective Yoga Nidra classes and write Yoga Nidra scripts.

• How to connect the dots to build a Yoga Nidra class or write scripts using your own voice.

• Onboard and leading 1:1 led and dyad practices and even teach you how to self-practice. 

• The science and magic behind how Yoga Nidra facilitates healing so you can benefit the needs of yourself and your students.

But it doesn’t stop there… Most yoga and Yoga Nidra courses only instruct you how to teach a class. Not this one. As a career yoga and Yoga Nidra instructor with almost 20 years of experience, a former yoga studio owner, and the owner of a registered Yoga School that has taught graduated hundreds of yoga and Yoga Nidra students, I recognize the unfair gap between someone who is new or newer to the industry and someone who has 2 decades of experience. I want to share what’s taken me thousands of dollars of personal and business coaching and the blood, sweat, and tears of almost 2 decades of trial and error in this industry to help you catch your stride in a fraction of the time it took me. This course gives you the actionable, practical, and real-life information about how to really go out and share Yoga Nidra with the world like a boss. 

This is why after learning how to teach Yoga Nidra effectively, I also offer and several additional modules about how to: 

• Generate interest for Yoga Nidra in the yoga studio, community, and online. 

• Format and price classes, workshops, courses.

• Teach online with easy, effective and inexpensive tech, Zoom classes and workshops, audio recordings, etc. 

• Conduct private 1:1 and group sessions and courses.

• Organize and execute fun and engaging yoga retreats. Give yourself a paid vacation and make a huge impact for your students

• Make Yoga Nidra accessible to your students with non-racist non-sexist language, in teaching and marketing

• Support your students with added value of recordings, follow up, and integration tips. 

I even provide a video series with 5 career-building tools that you can start using today to build your own “Mechanism of Influence” that allows you to make a global impact while also making a great living. These are tips that I usually reserve for my 1:1 mentor students which have helped make my career. In truth, the tuition for the course is worth just this module alone!

In both courses, I feature something really remarkable. While taking Eric Edmead’s course, I realized something extraordinary about the way that I teach Yoga Nidra. It was so intuitive and behind-the-scenes to my own experience that I didn’t even recognize that it was happening. Through a mental exercise, I realized that I get the same calming and cosmically-illuminating  experience whether I’m practicing, writing about, or teaching Yoga Nidra. I realize that after putting in the more than 10k hours to become an expert in this subject, I have developed a unique ability to teach Yoga Nidra while in the very state I’m facilitating for my students. I’ve had some incredibly beautiful and illuminating revelations while teaching. This is huge! 

So, in both of these courses, I teach you how to use the Yoga Nidra state of mind to facilitate your learning of the subject. In the teachers course, I even teach you how to get yourself into state while teaching Yoga Nidra so that you can lead the experience from the place you’re inviting your students to experience. In such a state, you cannot teach a bad class. This technique is revolutionary and I can’t wait to share it with you!

My stuff is going live and I can’t wait for you to check it out. Regardless if you are interested in these courses, I’d be honored if you would please tune in to watch my interview with Eric Edmeads on Thursday, November 12th at 8:30 am MST (10:30 am EST). 

I hope you’ll also check out my two courses which I am so so so so excited about. I’m confident that you will love them while also gaining much needed relaxation and learning volumes about yourself and the Universe in the process. 

Yoga Nidra: What and Why, Training and Scripts

What Is Yoga Nidra and Why Practice It?

Yoga Nidra is the yoga of sleep. It’s goal is samadhi, experiencing yourself as Oneness and achieves this through a method of entering the Nidra mind state, the in-between state of waking and dreaming, through systematized relaxation and layered Awareness. I offer online Yoga Nidra trainings to help people learn to write their own Yoga Nidra Scripts and make a powerful impact in the world through this transformational practice.

What Is The Goal of Yoga Nidra?

Yoga Nidra is the meditative process of learning to identify yourself as Awareness itself. By layering your Awareness systematically through the maya koshas, or layers of illusion— what we typically identify as “us” such as body, emotions etc.— we come to experience our infinite Self, our True Self, that of Awareness itself.

Source is Awareness— the fundamental Grand Singularity of the Universe. It’s what’s all around us, it’s in everything, it’s our origin. It’s where we came from before we were born and where we go after we die. Yoga Nidra is a relaxing method of exploring all the things we might be aware of, to feel them pointing us to experience our innate purity and consciousness, to Awareness itself.

Since Source, Awareness itself, is omnipotent (can do anything), omnipresent (all present), and omniscient (all knowing), with practices such as Yoga Nidra, when you align with your True Self, that of Awareness itself, you experience your birthright of your own fundamental and innate wholeness, the wholeness of Source. This wholeness is not dependent on time, events, circumstances, or conditions. It just is. Therefore, the byproduct of experiencing your fundamental wholeness through Awareness practices like Yoga Nidra, is healing in body, mind, and spirit After all, wholeness is synonymous with healed. Mostly importantly, what heals inside of us is the fundamental human malady—one which transcends all civilizations, time, and technology— which is the false notion of being separate from Source.

Gayatri Mantra suggests that if we were to understand that everything comes from Source, we’d understand that we are no different than the very thing we seek.

Up-leveling Your Consciousness: Waking Up with The Yoga of Sleep

Yoga Nidra is a process of leveraging your mind state and to evolve your stages of consciousness to achieve this understanding as mentioned in the Gayatri Mantra. Its systematic relaxation and method of layered Awareness helps to down-regulate your nervous system providing deep rest while simultaneously accessing certain brainwave states which can put practitioners into a flow state. Mostly, Yoga Nidra puts people into the Nidra state (low alpha, high theta) which acts like a secret doorway to experience the part of you that exists beyond your rational, linear thinking. It’s the doorway into your infinite Self.

Though Nidra means sleep, it’s more about learning to wake up. Yoga Nidra helps us wake up from the illusions of our false identities, and helps us wake up to the truth, that we are Source itself that what we are fundamentally is Awareness.

Unlike other forms of meditation, Yoga Nidra encourages relaxation—indeed it’s the driver for this expansive state of consciousness. Unlike other forms of meditation, practitioners are not trying to focus the mind at the exclusion of other stimuli. Instead, in Yoga Nidra one learns to welcome each object that arises into one’s field of Awareness, recognize it for what it is, and merely be the witness of it. These objects could arise either by the facilitator’s suggestion or may occur spontaneously. Objects can be internal or external, physical, mental, or emotional, and each exists as another yet beautiful pointer, constantly pointing to this moment, enticing Awareness to know itself through all that it can be aware of.

Ultimately, we have the pleasure and responsibility to apply the Awareness we reveal during practices like Yoga Nidra into the day-to-day reality of our human lives. With this greater Awareness it feels as if the colors have been turned up in our life. With this greater Awareness we become more present to the miraculousness of even the mundane. With this greater Awareness, we see everyone and everything around us as a constant reminder to wake up to the truth: that we exist inside the eternal pocket of perfection.

One of the great things about Yoga Nidra is that you gain the benefits of this profound and transformation practice regardless of whether or not you’re seeking to “wake up.” Yoga Nidra is such a powerful practice because its benefits are so readily available, even if you’ve never experienced meditation, mindfulness, or yoga. All one has to do is lie down, close their eyes, relax, and practice witnessing whatever arises into one’s field of attention. You don’t even need to call it yoga or Nidra or anything. Call it guided napping!

Benefits of Yoga Nidra

Both empirical studies as well as countless anecdotal stories point to the benefits of Yoga Nidra. The benefits of regularly experiencing Yoga Nidra and the systematized and prolonged state of Awareness, include but are not limited to:

• Better sleep

• Concentrated rest: for all of us but especially the chronically under-rested

• Managing emotions—stress, depression/anxiety

• Eliminating compulsions & addictions

• Healing self-limiting beliefs

• Reprogramming the unconscious mind

• Lowering blood pressure

• Calming the mind

• Building confidence

• Improving your mood

• Healing trauma

• Managing grief

• Clarity and perspective over problems

• Massively increased learning, creativity, and productivity

• Spiritual advancement

• Healing physical, energetic, emotional, and spiritual maladies

As facilitators of Yoga Nidra, we have a great opportunity by sharing this practice: we get the chance to wake up to our own innate perfection while helping others do likewise. Through many years of practice and teaching, I realize that facilitating the practice is itself a deep practice of Awareness, replete with all the same benefits. Again, regardless if enlightenment is on your radar or not, the world desperately needs the aforementioned benefits of the practice…and whether practitioners are looking for it or not, they’ll get the enlightenment part too.

While practicing YN is easy, learning to teach it effectively and skillfully is difficult. I’ve dedicated the last 12 years of my life to exploring this fascinating and crucial mode of self-discovery. I’ve written and published a book, I offer regular trainings, classes, and workshops around the world as well as online, I write about Yoga Nidra in online journals, magazines, and my blog. I practice Yoga Nidra regularly and I’m thinking about Yoga Nidra ALL. THE. TIME.

Yoga Nidra has taught me more about myself and the Universe than any other practice and I’m thrilled for the opportunity to sharing some of my experience and knowledge with you.

Yoga Nidra Training: Learn to Make Your Own Yoga Nidra Scripts

Over the years I’ve learned a few things about Yoga Nidra and today, I’d like to explore some of the key elements to this fascinating practice to help give you some of the tools to create your own transformational practices in the form of Yoga Nidra scripts, both for yourself and others.

My intention for doing Yoga Nidra trainings to help you find YOUR voice as you facilitate powerful transformation for yourself and the world through Yoga Nidra classes and scripts.

Reading someone else's script can be good, sometimes even great. I’ve created a book of Yoga Nidra scripts. But your true power lies within your ability to facilitate this practice with your own voice. I want to teach you some of the tools and tips to access your true power of transformation through the fascinating practice of writing Yoga Nidra scripts.

I can tell you from experience that by crafting well thought out scripts, you’ll find yourself also transforming in the process.

Yoga Nidra for Stress

Want to find an easy, effective, and enduring solution to stress? Perhaps you’re even interested in helping others reduce the stress in their lives? Well, tonight, I’m offering a live online Yoga Nidra class devoted to stress and this weekend, I’m hosting a workshop on how to write your own Yoga Nidra scripts to help people with stress, sleeplessness, grief, or any other topic.

Stress. We all have it. What to do about it … that doesn’t involve avoidance techniques such as binge watching Netflix, drinking, and eating Ben and Jerry’s by the truckload?

Yoga Nidra, the yoga of sleep, is a great alternative to mind-numbing dumbness and, potentially, Type 2 diabetes. Yoga Nidra is a form of guided meditation that uses layered Awareness and systematic relaxation to put you into a mind state called Nidra, the space between waking and dreaming consciousness.

Yoga Nidra for Stress

What world-renowned psychologists like Joseph Wolpe discovered is that you cannot be stressed and relaxed at the same time. Furthermore, getting comfortable with the ability to regularly enter the Nidra state, helps to strengthen your ability to practice merely witnessing what would otherwise be a stressor. Over time, such practices help you become increasingly less triggered by the same stimulus that would otherwise send you straight for Netflix and diabetes.

It’s easy to do. All you have to do is show up, close your eyes, and I’ll take it from there. Practicing it doesn’t require any previous experience. In truth, you don’t even need to stay awake for it to be effective. Besides, I always make a recording so you can practice at home and perhaps catch anything you missed on your subsequent meditations.

It’s nice to have a resource like Yoga Nidra recordings on your phone that you can tune into whenever you wish.

Please join me tonight for Yoga Nidra for Stress Zoom 6–7:15 pm MDT. Even if the time doesn’t work for you to join live, you can still watch/listen to the recordings later.

Yoga Nidra Training

While practicing Yoga Nidra is super relaxing and easy, guiding others through this transformative practice can be difficult. That’s why I offer a Yoga Nidra online training, and am also offering a LIVE YOGA NIDRA SCRIPT WRITING WORKSHOP this Saturday, 9–11 am MDT on Zoom. Again, I’ll be recording it so you can watch it later if you can’t make it live. Learn to write your own scripts! Click here for details.

I hope to see you tonight and/or this weekend for some great Yoga Nidra instruction!

Yoga Nidra Script Writing Workshop

Santosha and Valuing Perplexity

Everybody has problems. We all struggle with what we don’t know about our own complicated lives. Of course, we want solutions to our problems tout suite, and if we could gain those solutions as painlessly as possible, that would be great. Consider, though, that our problems actually help us to become the people we are meant to be. So, how do problems, the yogic concept of Santosha, Yoga Nidra and learning to sit in the darkness sometimes, help us to do this essential growth?

Problems Can Give A Push

Sometimes, it is only by questioning, wondering, or struggling, that we are driven to understand an otherwise hidden part of ourselves and our potential. Our questions and problems fuel us to open our hearts, to seek for inspiration, to perform the necessary work, and more profoundly, to abandon our will to the grander wisdom of the divine. The Divine knows how easy it is to be anesthetized by easy and numbed out by normal. Comfortable can sometimes get in the way of us becoming the greatest version of ourselves.

Light Creeping In

Like the late, great Leonard Cohen says in his song, "Anthem":

“Ring the bells that still can ring;
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything;
That’s how the light gets in.”

— Leonard Cohen

Even the rhyme is broken! He's pointing to the idea that it's through our brokenness, through our problems that we find the avenue toward the light.

Yoga Nidra and Observing Problems

When faced with problems, we must at once be willing to seek and do, and also we must sometimes learn to simply sit comfortably and be with what we don't know or with what doesn't feel comfortable-happily resolved with the phrase, "I don't know." And sometimes to get real answers we must be willing to sit in our own darkness for a while. One way to learn to do this is through Yoga Nidra, the yoga of sleep. Yoga Nidra is a practice of guided meditation that leads you through layered awareness and deep relaxation to practice learning to simply witness whatever is presented to your attention, be that emotions, problems, physical sensations or whatever. It helps you to practice experiencing yourself as Awareness itself, as Source, which has no needs, problems, or issues. Then, when this awareness is married back to you every-day life, the part of you that feels like it does have problems, you have such an incredible perspective over your life’s problems. Yoga Nidra is one of the ways that you can cultivate the power to be able to sit with your problems without allowing them to feel like they control your life.

This human tendency for control occurs regularly in our yoga practice as many of us strive to either know everything there is to know about yoga or try to perfect our poses; we usually eagerly fill in whatever blanks present themselves in our life's scripts.

Instead, let us practice the yoga principle of Santosha, or contentment, by learning to sit with and even value perplexity, knowing that it's molding us into our highest being.

Sitting in the Dark

The following poem by David Whyte seems to speak directly to learning from the darkness, instead of running from it.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:

the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte ~