The Practice of Gratitude

REGISTER FOR THE GRATITUDE CHALLENGE, FREE!

Pic by David Newkirk

The challenge is simply to write in your gratitude journal every day for two weeks. You may do whatever gratitude practice you wish, however I might suggest as your practice to simply write three things you're grateful for and choose one of those to extrapolate upon in a paragraph. That’s it!

If you miss a day, be grateful for a second chances and pick up where you left off or start over. No judgement.

I'll be sending regular emails with encouragement and fun things that I and other people are grateful for.

Thanks and please share this!

The US is celebrating Thanksgiving this week. Our family is living in France so we’ll be missing our families, but will be celebrating in our own way with a gratitude ritual and by going out to dinner. Maybe we’ll open a nice bottle of wine. We used to buy nice bottles of wine to open someday. Nowadays we realize that today is someday, and we open all the good wine!

This is the perfect week for a quick note about the science and spirituality of gratitude.

Your Brain on Gratitude

The amygdala is our brain’s stranger danger detector. The book The User Illusion, a great book about the brain and consciousness, reports that the brain takes in 400 BILLION bits of information each second. Our consciousness, all the stuff we are aware of, only produces 2000 bits of information. We are actually wired for negativity because any self-respecting organism prioritizes survival above everything else and this means noticing the negative and potentially dangerous stuff first. Looking for it even. Studies at Berkeley even suggest that for every positive bit of information, the amygdala picks up 6–9 bits of negative information, priming us to be on high alert all the time in a way that doesn’t even register in our consciousness.

So yeah, it seems we are wired to notice that the turkey was tougher than last year’s and that guy cousin Suzzy brought to dinner smells like moth balls.

But there’s hope! In the 90s there was a revolution in the world of psychology, changing from mostly using it to study all the ways humans are broken (read Freud), to using it to study all the ways that we might use it to make ourselves happier. Beyond the most obvious habit of self-monitoring your critical self-talk, two practices stand out above the crowd as powerful and lasting ways to change our psychology for long term happiness: gratitude and mindfulness.

Doctors and scientists are now saying what sages and saints have been saying for millennia: gratitude needs to be a daily practice and that doing so will change your happiness in profound ways. Gratitude can’t be that thing you do begrudgingly, once a year, strongarmed by your aunt Marge who insists that all 37 people around the Thanksgiving feast take turns rattling off lukewarm tokens of gratitude while the mashed potatoes are getting cold and a skin is forming on the gravy. No, gratitude needs to be a daily practice. And you gotta feel it for it to work. And it does. In longevity studies, gratitude is listed as one of the primary traits of people who live past 100!

How to Do a Daily Gratitude Practice

1. Get a notebook

2. Every day, first thing, write three things you’re honestly and sincerely grateful for

3. Choose one of those things and write a paragraph about how and why you’re grateful for that thing and try to describe as best you can how it makes you feel.

That’s it! Now make it a habit.

As you develop the habit of beginning your day with gratitude, you start to manually tilt your brain to begin to notice more of the positive things about your life and less of the negative things. As you do, you’ll begin to see yourself experience real and lasting happiness. It’s scientifically proven. Regardless of what science says, you gotta try it for yourself.

The Gratitude Challenge

So, I want to offer you a challenge: Can you do a gratitude challenge for 2 weeks straight, 14 days, pulling out your gratitude journal and listing 3 things you’re grateful for then writing a wee paragraph on one of them? Sure you can. And if you’re willing, I’d like to help.

If you like the idea and would like a little followup and accountability, click here and enter your name and email address to join my Gratitude Challenge. It’s free. All this challenge consists of is some regular emails I’ll send you to encourage you to keep going as well as some heart-felt stories about gratitude and the benefits of gratitude. I will also encourage you to send me stories or lists of things you’re grateful for. With your permission I may share your stories with the group.

If you don’t want to join this challenge, no worries. I still encourage you to begin a daily gratitude practice in your own way for you to experience this life-changing and affirming practice.

Here’s my gratitude practice for today.

I’m grateful for:

1. My loving family, especially my beautiful life and spirit-partner, Seneca

2. My wonderful, satisfying, and joyful career of teaching yoga and meditation

3. The opportunity to live in France

Expanded paragraph on point 1

Life is a wild ride and I am extremely grateful to Seneca for being on this ride with me. We’ve weathered some rough waters, changing businesses, moves, kids, etc. and we’ve navigated our way into some immensely beautiful and happy adventures as well. One of the things that I love the most about Seneca is that she helps me be a better man. Her support, love, and insight inspires me and pushes my best self to the forefront. I love Seneca’s spirit. I think of myself as a spiritual person, but she is a spiritual powerhouse. She is a goddess. Seneca has really ignited an adventurous spirit in me. She was the one with the wild idea to move to France and even though I’m the one who speaks French, she was willing to come to this country to have the adventure and to learn the language and do whatever necessary for our family to have this amazing experience. Seneca, I love you and I’m so grateful for you in my life.

What are you grateful for?

Meditation For Stress

Hey, right before I published this I realized that my friend and fellow teacher Rachel Posner wrote a great blog post about stress. I encourage you to also look at her blog. She’s a formidable teacher, very skilled and gentle and I think you’ll like it. My article is about using practices like meditation for stress relief.

Power Over Stress

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I believe that humans are often more powerful than we can imagine and that we have much more control than we think over common but debilitating emotions like stress. Part of our control over stress lies within our ability to understand and experience the most real part of ourselves, a part that we may readily access, one that is wholly unaffected by emotions, the part that many call the True Self. Learning to control stress might simply require one essential practice, a practice that is synonymous with our True Self, the practice of Awareness.

“Yeah, that’s great wisdom, Mr. Miyagi, but what does that really mean and how does being ‘aware’ help me not feel so much stress? Even this conversation is stressing me out.”

Ancient Wisdom

Well, there’s some ancient yoga wisdom that offers some pretty mind-blowing and yet direct, cut-to-the-chase ideas about this topic. And what amazes me is how often it seems that modern science, psychology, and spirituality are trying to catch up to some of what people figured out thousands of years ago. Sure, they hadn’t discovered Oreos yet but… Anyway, some of this ancient wisdom I’m talking about is found in the Vedas.

So, the Vedas are volumes of ancient texts from India. One of the Vedic teachings that I love so much is called the Gayatri Mantra and it broadly explains how to dissolve stress (and other debilitating emotions) by realizing that we all come from one, expansive Source. It explains that if we could truly understand and experience our True Self, that of Source, we wouldn’t experience ourselves as stress, but rather we would see ourselves as the very thing that we seek: peace, love, and joy. The Vedas also teach us that our true identity is that of Awareness itself, the nature of which is boundless peace, love, and joy.

Most human beings, across all time and distance, myself included, all seem to suffer from the same fundamental problem: feeling separate from Source. Truly I believe that the key message that most spiritual and religious traditions try to point to is the quintessential teaching that we all come from Source. That and perhaps the best way to describe what Source is could be summed up simply as love.

Stressed

In part, our difficulty in experiencing our True Selves, that of pure Awareness, peace, love, joy and all that, is because we too often identify with things like stress. We may not do this consciously, but when we feel stress, we often feel that stress is somehow what we are. Our language even reinforces this. We often say, “I’m so stressed, ” when it would be more inline with our True Self to say, “I’m so aware of stress.”

Many of us have come to regard stress as a normal part of life. While stress may be common, stress is nonetheless fundamentally contrary to our True Self. The problem is that emotions like stress feel real, especially when, oh, I don’t know, it’s raining outside, you’re late getting your toddler to school, and you’re riding on a jam-packed tram filled beyond capacity without any seats left making the ideal moment for your kid to start throwing a grand mal temper tantrum which in turn elicits the icy glares from a mob with hundreds of eyes, people who are uniformly doubting your parenting skills, meanwhile Drunk Guy, reeking of booze and piss, is pressed hotly against your side and breathing in your face as he gratuitously offers you his sage and honed parenting skills.

(Let me pause to breath for a second.)

More about stress… Stress is part of our ego, the part of our being that is not our True Self. Our ego experiences all the transient parts of our being, transient things like emotions. But before we start hating on the ego, consider that the ego actually has a very important role. The ego is meant to help reveal the REAL and permanent part of our being, our Awareness. Instead of identifying as stress we can use stress as something to be aware of, something that helps us to practice Awareness, that illuminates our Awareness, not something to latch onto like it were a life raft in the ocean of existence that is drawing you down into a vortex of despair.

Meditation for Stress

Practices like yoga, meditation, and especially Yoga Nidra, help us gain a facility to actually welcome, recognize, and witness things like stress as nothing more than just another thing in this vast Universe, something to be aware of. Once we can learn to witness these parts of our ego, parts like stress, we can separate ego from our True Self and open to experience our birthright of peace, love, and joy. After all, like ancient wisdom says, these good qualities are truly what we are and identifying as them is really the most natural thing ever. So easy.

“That sounds great but after practicing this magical ‘Awareness’ I imagine that I’m still going to feel stress from time to time.”

Probably, but with practice you might not feel stress in the same way and you may not feel it as often or as fiercely. In time, stress may even become something you can merely experience with a sense of interest and curiosity instead of resistance and aversion.

When you experience your True Self as Awareness through practices like Yoga Nidra, your entire perspective of life can change, especially your perspective about what stresses you out. Stress can become just a thing, not your entire world. In truth, you may even develop a feeling of gratitude for emotions like stress because they may give you a great opportunity to practice Awareness. Through practicing and identifying as Awareness you may become unidentified with stress and can thus allow that misguided life raft to just slip away with the next wave of thought or emotion that floats by.

Yoga Nidra is one of my favorite ways of developing this skill of experiencing yourself as Awareness. It’s an excellent practice for learning to control stress because its superpower is relaxation into Awareness. Modern psychology tells us that we can’t feel relaxed and stressed at the same time. So, when I lead a Yoga Nidra practice, I deliberately lead students through a deepening Awareness practice that makes them super relaxed. Then we practice witnessing, either by my suggestions or whatever spontaneously arises, everything and anything that comes up, including emotions like stress, as simply another thing to be aware of. With a foundation of relaxed Awareness, you experience things like stress with an entirely new perspective and it breaks the Full Nelson grip that stress can sometimes have on our lives.

We may not be completely stress free after our first session, but it’s quite possible that even after one session you’ll finish even feeling much more relaxed than you were before the session and with a different perspective about not only what stresses you out, but even the idea of stress itself. Plus, then the more you practice, the more you will find that in time your entire relationship to stress has evolved to be much more manageable.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. I’ve made a free Stress Free Yoga Nidra practice that I’d like to offer to you for free. This guided meditation lasts about 36 minutes and is designed specifically to manage stress. This is one of the tracks will be on my upcoming volume of Yoga Nidra recordings that I’m busy working on and will come out in a few weeks. This volume of Yoga Nidra recordings will also include a practice on working through grief, healing, creating abundance, getting grounded, setting goals, working with depression, and much more. I thought I’d give you a free practice to see what this volume of recordings is all about and because hey, the world could be a little bit better with you operating at your best and less stressed.

Truly my mission in teaching yoga and meditation is to help people be their best selves so they can go out into the world and kick ass at whatever they do be that babysitting or brain surgery.

I’d also love to hear the other positive ways that you’ve discovered to help you manage stress. Please leave a comment below

And hey, if you choose not to listen to my completely fantastic Yoga Nidra recording, well I’m not going to stress over it.

Photo by David Newkirk

By the way, my live, online Yoga Nidra session happening this and every Sunday (9 am MST) is devoted to the theme: Breaking the Stress Cycle. Please join me for a live Yoga Nidra session devoted to managing stress. I record each session so even if you can’t make the time, register ($12) and you’ll still receive the recordings.

Also, I’m still offering everyone who preorders my new book, Practical Yoga Nidra ($12.99), one free, online class. If you haven’t already and would like to, I’d be honored if you would click the picture of my book below to preorder your copy which comes out Dec. 10th. Send me a screenshot of your purchase before 9 am on Sunday morning and I’ll add you to the class roster.

Hey, everyone, I know that stress is a real and serious thing for many of us, myself included. I know for me that I’m a much better version of myself when I’m not hamstrung by stress. I really hope that you have good ways of managing stress. If you’re game, give Yoga Nidra a shot.

Blessings!

Limitless Energy: Your Heart

Untethered Soul by Michael Singer

Several months ago, I was at lunch with my friend, Philippe. He told me about how a mutual friend turned him on to an incredible book called The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer to help guide him through some transitions in his life. Have you read this book? I can't recommend it highly enough. I’ve since read it and I gotta tell you that it's a total life-changer. Seriously. It’s a simple, non-dogmatic guide to consciousness and arriving at your happiest, most in-love, and energized self.

Philippe told me about this book at the exact time in my life when I needed to be introduced to it. Figures. I was freaking out about life and questioning life's purpose and what my role is on this big blue marble and as I read that book, it totally clarified some of life's major themes for me.

One thing that made this book so powerful for me was what Michael Singer said about how how there is limitless resources in our hearts, that we think energy is a product of the amount of rest we get or the amount of calories we consume, bla ,bla bla, but in truth, we have a resource of limitless energy within our heats if we will only access it.

My friend, Philippe, is also an Aikido Master and we've discussed at length and even done a few Yoga+Aikido workshops together, to explore the idea of approaching the limitless energy that exists within all of us, that which exists within our hearts, and can be sourced through movement, practice, and breath.

The Antidote to Exhaustion

Writer, speaker, and poet David Whyte is my homeboy. I live by his wisdom and words. He tells a story about once when he was feeling crushed by the weight of doing all "right" things in life but feeling exhausted in the process. He told a story of mentioning this dilemma to his friend, the wise Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine Monk, writer and lecturer, who told him that "The antidote to exhaustion isn't necessarily rest, but whole heartedness."

Have you ever experienced a time when you felt like you could do anything with the energy that you felt in your heart, when you really cared about something and that feeling caused you to act on something? Or have you ever felt crushed by putting all of your energy into something you didn't really care about?

Well, what if you could access that limitless resource of energy as often as you wished and what if you could direct your entire life from that energy?

This is precisely what I want to explore in my Live, Online Yoga Nidra class this week, Sunday, Nov. 17th at 9 am MST. We will discuss the topic a bit, do some powerful breathwork together, then do an incredibly relaxing and energizing Yoga Nidra practice that will access the limitless resources that already exist within you.

I've hosted two of these online Yoga Nidra sessions so far and I'm absolutely thrilled how they've gone down.

Please consider joining me for my next, live and online Yoga Nidra session happening this Sunday, November 17th at 9 am MST. If you're interested but can't make it work in your schedule, please register and you'll receive the recording after it's done.

Whatever you do this week, consider doing it with a wholeness of heart.

Yoga Nidra and the Trinity: Your Both/And Nature

About a year ago, I hosted a special evening of Yoga Nidra exploring the theme of the sacred trinity of Self. We gathered at a friend’s house and discussed the idea of expanding your consciousness to its fullest by understanding the concept of your own sacred trinity.

During this event, I recounted some Hindu stories about Shiva, Shakti, and their marriage and subsequent creation of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. We talked about other symbols of the Trinity, like in Christianity, eastern and Pagan spiritual traditions, etc.

We discussed the practical elements of this concept like experiencing different cycles in your life of birth, life, death, and rebirth, for the opening up of your eyes to the beauty of life and being born anew as something else entirely. We even discussed the dark night of the soul that accompanies some deep experiences of awakening. I told several very personal stories that illustrated the concepts as well.

Photo by Scott Moore—Hindu Monastery Kauai

The discussion was interesting and heart-felt. I recorded the entire event and I’ve been re-listening to the recordings of this evening. Doing so has been very inspiring for me and has taught me so much more about the subject the second go around. I believe we often learn in cycles instead of linearly and each revolution around a lesson helps me to learn it better and deeper. Maybe this is why some lessons in my life feel like they are on repeat. Can you relate? Groundhog’s Day, anyone?!

Anyway, I really want to share these recordings with you so I’m offering them to you for free. Treat it kind of like a podcast with a Yoga Nidra practice attached. We even do some yoga poses together, so wear your stretchy pants. Keep in mind that in the discussion I mention some breathing exercises that we did but they ended up being pretty intense so I would feel better sharing those with you only with some in-person guidance therefore I did not include these. Click the button on top to listen to entire discussion (1h 32 min) then check out the Yoga Nidra practice which is like another 30 minutes. Invite your bestie over and make it a date. Better than Netflix!

I love this idea of the Trinity so much that I’ll be expanding upon this theme THIS WEEK in my live, online Yoga Nidra class. This is a new class happening every Sunday at 9 am MST. I’d love for you to join me. It's live but since it's online, you can do it from the comfort of your own home using your smartphone, tablet, or computer. I will also record each of these classes, both audio/video and audio only, so you can either catch the recording of class later if you can’t make the live version and/or keep the recording for your Yoga Nidra library for future use and for your own cyclical learning and personal evolution.

This past Sunday was the first of these classes and it went smashingly well! I am giddy with the outcome of this past class and can’t wait to do it again this week. Please join me. Class costs $12. Register and I'll send you the link to join the class on Sunday.

Photo by David Newkirk

So many of you responded about the news of my book. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Your support really means so much to me. If you haven't already and have the mind to, please preorder my book from amazon. These early sales make a big difference to the success of any writer. I'm really proud of the book and I think you'll love it. I can't wait to share it with you. Click the picture of the book below to preorder your copy. Remember that if you send me a screenshot of your purchase, I’ll say thank you with a free online YN class that you can either access live, or get the recording after or both.

I'm in the process of making Yoga Nidra with Scott Moore Volume 1. I'll let you know when that's done. Plus, I’ve had some orders for private Yoga Nidra recordings so if you’d like me to make YOU your private Yoga Nidra recording based on something you’re working on in your life, or if you’d prefer to have a private live session online, please reach out to me at scott@scottmooreyoga.com to arrange a time.

Luxury Bordeaux Yoga Retreat

June 13–19, 2019. Just a few spots left!

Last but not least I’ve got just a few spots left for my luxury retreat in Bordeaux June 13–19, 2020. I’d really love to share France with you and do yoga and Yoga Nidra with you for 6 days, not to mention visiting some world-renowned vineyards for some wine tastings. The theme for these 6 days will be learning to savor your life with presence.

Synopsis of Yoga Nidra and the Trinity: Your Both/And Nature

Click the link at the top of this post to hear the entire discussion and Yoga Nidra practice.

History is replete with different forms of sacred trinities. How many different forms of the trinity can you think of? Off hand a few that come to mind are: body, mind, and spirit; earth, wind, and fire; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva; Shiva, Shakti, and Ganesh; Buddha, Sangha, Dharma; peanut butter, jelly, and bread . . . the list is eternal.

The concept of the Trinity speaks to understanding our True Nature. A singular object in the Universe is in isolation, adding a second creates a binary, but when you can understand or experience these in what I call their Both/And Nature, your eyes open up to experience a truer, more expanded concept of beingness. I believe this is what is meant by seeing with your 3rd eye. In fact, by expanding beyond the singularity or duality of your own nature brings you into the full knowing of your truest Self.

Stay with me…

We come from Source, that which is everything. We are born into a human experience and our conscious is one of simple singularity—everything that exists in this form of consciousness is what can see or feel and that’s all I know. Then an infant experiences the entire world as an extension of herself. Natural differentiation happens between 6–18 months old and suddenly a duality is created. Now, the consciousness experiences a “this” and “that” which exist as two separate things. Many of us will live the rest of our lives in this sense of duality. Many different philosophies, including Yoga Nidra philosophy—rooted in Tantra, a school of eastern thought—suggest that to truly understand the essence of the Universe and ultimately your own essence, you must see beyond this dualist thinking into an expanded view, that of the Both/And nature, the trinity.

The Hindu god Ganesh is a perfect example of a trinity: He is the child of Shakti who represents form, and Shiva who represents consciousness. Half spirit, half physical being, he exists as something entirely new and completely necessary than his parents. It’s only through creating this new thing, that the trinity is born and through it all things can come into being. Otherwise all things in the Universe would have been locked into a state of duality or simple singularity. But as the symbol of Ganesh suggests, the entire world opens up to something bigger and more expansive thanks to the marriage of two things and the creation of another. Many people celebrate Ganesh for his hybrid nature which lends itself to great compassion, understanding, and direction.

Both/And Nature and the Trinity

Many practices such as yoga, meditation, and Yoga Nidra, expand the practitioner’s consciousness beyond a binary and help them to come to know themselves as part of a larger Singularity, Source, built as the Both/And consciousness. Through a lifetime (or lifetimes, I don’t know) of practice you might come back to experience yourself as Singularity, but not in any innocent way like the infant but rather one of wisdom and expansiveness. You are now birthed as a new being. This is what it means to open to the sacred trinity within you to reveal your True Nature.

Exploring the Trinity with Yoga Nidra

My favorite way to explore, and even better to experience, this unity of the Trinity, and allow it to open our consciousness into a unity of all things, is through Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra is a form of relaxing guided meditation, or guided awareness, where the practitioner is lead through deepening layers of awareness to come to know themselves as Awareness itself. One does this through practicing recognizing then letting go of objects of the ego, like the body, energy, mind, thoughts, etc.

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I Wrote a Book! Practical Yoga Nidra: A 10-Step Method to Reduce Stress, Improve Sleep, and Restore Your Spirit

Photo by Alex Adams

I’ve been so tight-lipped about some exciting news that I’ve almost given myself TMJ. Fortunately I’ve now been given the green light to open my mouth and tell you all about it.

Drum roll please…

I’ve written a book!

This spring, I was contacted by a publishing company who was curious if I might be the right person to write a book for them about Yoga Nidra. After a few phone interviews and me sending them a writing sample, we decided that we were a good fit for each other and we decided to push go on this project: Practical Yoga Nidra: A 10-Step Method to Reduce Stress, Improve Sleep, and Restore Your Spirit

What it’s about

Pre-order or Purchase your copy by clicking the above

This book is an easy-to-follow guide that gives you 10 steps to help you find wellness in body, mind, and spirit by developing an effective personal Yoga Nidra practice which you can start practicing from day 1. It’s written for both the total newbie as well as those in the know. In it, I break down each step, how it’s useful, and how to build a Yoga Nidra practice. I offer more than 20 Yoga Nidra meditation scripts that are each tailored to one of the 10 steps. You can read, record, and play back your own recordings for a relaxing and transformative Yoga Nidra meditation experience. At the end of the book, I put all the 10 steps together and give you a deeper, more integrated Yoga Nidra practice script to record. When all is said and done, you’ll have an impressive library of Yoga Nidra recordings.

I also share my own stories and experiences about life, Yoga Nidra, and mindfulness. Hopefully you will feel my nerdy personality come out through my writing. I wrote this book to put a very human face to an important but sometimes esoteric subject in order to help you create a simple practice that can transform your life. My deep desire is that this book teaches you more about yourself and through the process of reading about and practicing Yoga Nidra, you feel more alive, at peace, and excited about your life.

More about writing the book

Once my publisher and I ironed out the details, I had just about a month to write the thing, roughly three chapters a week. I spent many hours in outdoor cafes, holed up at the library, or at the kitchen table late at night pounding it out. For some authors, the writing process is easy—words flow from their minds onto the page in nice, coherent, and organized lines. Not me. For me, writing is hard work. I just don’t write good. But this book was different. It seemed to slide right out of my fingers onto the page. I felt a magical sense of flow while writing it.

Some mind-blowing things happened for me during my process of writing. Ignoring the fact that I wrote the entire thing in little over a month, one of the most profound things that happened was that I received some seriously prophetic and profound cosmic downloads about Yoga Nidra and the purpose of life during my writing process. I’m thrilled that those bolts of insight made their way into this book. I also often found myself writing this book in sense of timelessness. It’s very common to feel time dissolve during Awareness practices like Yoga Nidra, and writing this book was itself another deep practice of Awareness. It wasn’t so surprising that it had the same effect. It wasn’t until I was done writing that I realized the song I’d been listening to on repeat to put me into my writing trance was a jazz song called Timeless, by John Abercrombie. Obvious.That song must have repeated a thousand times and I’m sure I’ll always think of this book when I hear it.

It was a great pleasure to work with several editors and designers throughout this project. They were pleasant and professional and truly did stellar work with my book. I got misty-eyed the day that the graphic department sent me a visual copy of the book. They did a SMASH job and I feel that they made this book look as beautiful on the outside as the ideas and concepts within. I’m copiously proud of it and I hope you’ll love it, too.

Can I ask for your support?

So, I’m asking for your support. Pre-orders, early sales, and reviews make or break the success of a book in a publishers eyes. A physical book will be available December 10th, just in time for the holidays, BUT my book is available NOW to pre-order through Amazon. It only costs $12.99 and will look great in your library. Well worth it, in my humble opinion.

Would you mind showing me your support by taking a few seconds to click here and pre-purchase your copy of my book on Amazon? Maybe consider buying some as gifts for anybody you can think of who could use a dose of calm for the holidays.

As a way of saying thank you, if you send me a copy or screenshot of your purchase(s), I’ll give you a giant hug AND one free session to a live, virtual Yoga Nidra class. I’ll be starting these classes this Sunday, November 3rd at 9 am MST and they will be held online via Zoom at the same time each week. If it’s not this Sunday, let me know which one works for you. I’ll send you the nitty-gritty details when you let me know if you want to join. I’ll be recording each session so if the timing doesn’t work for you, I can still send you the recording of the class. These live, online classes will be a great opportunity to have a live Yoga Nidra practice with me. You can even ask questions about the book, if you want. This Sunday in class we’re exploring the theme Relaxed Alertness.

Thank You

Also, thank you for the great responses from the last email about which topics you’d like to see in the forthcoming volume of Yoga Nidra recordings. This is a completely different project than my book. Expect to see that available soon as a digital download.

Seriously, thank you for your unyielding support. Thank you for showing up for me as students, peers, and friends during my career of teaching yoga and mindfulness. It has truly been an illuminating and humbling process of coming to know myself and the Universe. One of the greatest things I’ve learned in this process is that we are all in this together.

Thank you and I love you.

And, I’ve already started writing my next book!

Online Yoga Nidra: The Practice That Makes You Whole

More than a decade ago, I took a Yoga Nidra training. If you’ve never done it, Yoga Nidra acts like a guided meditation where you lay down, become very relaxed, and listen to a facilitator guide you through deepening layers of Awareness. During my training, though I hadn’t done very much Yoga Nidra at all, I nonetheless experienced a session that led me through one of the most profound experiences of my life. It was cosmic. It was expansive. It was healing. It was pure happiness. The effect was like someone pulling back the curtain in Oz to reveal... ME. The TRUE me.

This was one of the experiences that told me that I’d be practicing, studying, and teaching Yoga Nidra for the rest of my life. Yoga Nidra has become a veritable passion of mine.

One of the things I love about Yoga Nidra is that you don’t need to “earn” you way to having a profound experience. Not that a dedicated practice of Yoga Nidra or any discipline isn’t very beneficial. It’s just that Yoga Nidra, maybe even on your first session ever, has the power to to remind you, by way of first-hand experience, of who you are.

Like it says over the gates at the Oracle of Delphi, “KNOW THYSELF.” Yoga Nidra acts like an oracle who tells you who you really are, whispers to you your destiny. Knowing who you are makes you whole. It puts you into a right perspective of your world, your problems, and your priorities. It shows you your heart’s gift to the world.

Yoga Nidra is an ancient practice that has found a renaissance today. It’s just as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago because no matter when you live on this planet, one of humanity’s biggest problems has always been the simple but pervasive misapprehension that you are anything other than what you came from. In other words, Yoga Nidra’s superpower is to show you by direct experience that what you are is Source—call that whatever you want, a child of the Universe, a child of God, a child of Krusty The Clown—whatever.
With this sure knowledge of your True Being, you see your purpose and your life with immense clarity, beauty, and gratitude. With this sure knowledge, your entire life feels different. You don’t react to problems in the same way. You see a connectedness in everything. You begin to see everything as love.

And while not every person emerges from every Yoga Nidra session with a “hallelujah” on their lips, it’s nonetheless quite often a profound experience.

Yoga is defined classically as the “yoking” of all things to Oneness. Nidra literally means sleep but Yoga Nidra is more about waking up to your True Self than it is falling into a stupor. Nidra more appropriately means that hypnagogic state between dreaming and consciousness. When you are led into this relaxed state, you open yourself into a keener state of Awareness. Indeed you arrive to a place of deeply relaxed Awareness, the natural state of your True Self. In this state you can gain clarity, and find peace. You can heal physically, spiritually, mentally. Yoga Nidra is one practice that can help you feel yourself as Source, and as Source there’s nothing you can’t do, be, or love.

I’ve seen hundreds of people receive profound benefits from Yoga Nidra. Most of the time when I conduct a Yoga Nidra class, instead of telling students the benefits of Yoga Nidra, I ask those who have done it in the past to share what they’ve experienced by practicing it. My students have told me that Yoga Nidra has helped them with:

• Stress

• Sleep

• Productivity

• Relaxation

• Anger

• High blood pressure

• Depression

• Creativity

• Spirituality (whatever denomination or non-denomination you are)

• Performance

• Confidence

• Self-worth

• Trauma

• Happiness

• Love

• Forgiveness
  

So how does it work? How does lying down, getting relaxed, and listening to someone talk you through a meditation help you achieve these things? In Yoga Nidra, you practice heightened Awareness. This aligns you with your True Self because according to its ancient philosophy, at the end of the day, what you are is Awareness. Yoga Nidra differs from other forms of meditation in part because of its emphasis to identify the practitioner as Awareness itself. It can work these wonderful benefits through your life because when you experience yourself as Source, there’s nothing you lack. You can know that you are whole. Whole is another way of saying healed.

Practicing Yoga Nidra is easy. You simply lie down, become relaxed, and listen to a facilitator lead you into deepening layers of Awareness. It sounds crazy but it still works even if you fall asleep. The part of you that I’m speaking to in a Yoga Nidra meditation is still paying attention, even if your waking mind is sleeping. You don’t need to have ever practiced yoga or meditation to practice Yoga Nidra.

While practicing it is easy, teaching it effectively can be quite complicated. That’s why I’ve spent the last decade learning to teach this practice well, and have taught thousands of hours of Yoga Nidra in the process. I’ve even created an Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training that has trained people around the world to teach this practice in their own voice to benefit the lives of their students.

One thing that my students have asked for regularly is to curate a Yoga Nidra experience that focuses on a particular benefit, like stress, forgiveness, or sleep. I’ve taught many private sessions to individuals where we go into depth on a personal issue and use Yoga Nidra to help them find their own solace, calm, and peace. Yoga Nidra helps people heal themselves.

With the idea that there are many people who need something particular from a Yoga Nidra experience, I’ve decided to create a volume of Yoga Nidra recordings that can be accessed anytime. These recordings will vary in length from 15–35 minutes, and will be curated around an intent or goal. One session for managing anxiety, another to manage anger, another to practice compassion, etc.

This will be a volume of around 15 Yoga Nidra recordings that can be downloaded to a phone, computer, or tablet. It will also come with a nice and neat booklet that gives information and helpful tips on getting the most out of your Yoga Nidra practice, and some supplemental breathing and mindfulness practices.

I’m currently building this project and I’m taking suggestions for subjects. If there’s a Yoga Nidra practice you’d like to have access to regularly, please let me know what you want. Say you want a Yoga Nidra practice to help you relax at the end of the day. Maybe you want a Yoga Nidra practice to help you have focus and clarity at the beginning of the day. Maybe you work with insomnia and would love something to help you sleep better. I’m open to suggestions, so please let me know what you’d like.

I’m also going to start holding a regular, live Yoga Nidra class online at the same time each week. This is open to anyone, no matter where you live in the world, and will start with each person registering for each class as a drop-in. Class will cost $12. This online Yoga Nidra class will be starting Sunday, November 3rd at 9 am MST. You can do this class from the comfort of your own home, wherever you live in the world. Each class will have a brief discussion about Yoga Nidra, will be centered on a theme, and will include some mindfulness and breathwork practices. There will be a 30–40 minute Yoga Nidra practice with each online session. The entire session will last 60–75 minutes. These live sessions will give you the chance to share your experiences with Yoga Nidra with others and ask any questions.

I will be recording these classes so if you love the topic of the class but can’t make it, you can still register and have the recording after. Everyone who purchases the class will have access to the recording.

Also, if you think you could benefit from a private, one-one-one Yoga Nidra session with me, we can arrange a live, virtual session. Or maybe you have a very specific need for a Yoga Nidra recording. I can make you your own personal Yoga Nidra recording tailored to meet your specific needs.

If you love Yoga Nidra or are interested in any of these offerings please:

Email me at scott@scottmooreyoga.com and let me know if there’s a practice you’d like to see on this first volume of recordings.

Register for the live Yoga Nidra class on Sunday, November 3rd at 9:00 am MST

Contact me to book your own private Yoga Nidra session.

Fill out this form to request your own private Yoga Nidra recording tailored to your specific needs ($100)

Please enjoy this Free Yoga Nidra recording I made about connecting to the heart. This is powerful

The Poison That Makes Us Holy

Happy Monday! I hope your week is starting off marvelously.

This morning I dropped Elio off from school and then decided to walk around a bit to record the audio of this post. Ultimately, I decided not to use that recording because there was too much traffic and it was too distracting so I re-recorded this and I think that is better.

Elio is getting used to his new school and is still having a little bit of a problem using the bathroom by himself so some mornings, like this morning, I drop him off at school, go to the gym or do some work at a cafe, then head back to school to encourage him to use the bathroom.

As I was walking around this morning, not far from Elio’s school, there is a beautiful, modern cathedral here in Nice. It’s got a very unique, rounded architecture and it’s gleaming while. This cathedral is dedicated to the Saint of Joan of Arc.

If you don’t remember the story of Joan of Arc, she was a peasant girl in the 1400s who as a teenager received a revelation from God that she was supposed to lead the French army against the English and the Burgundians, a French dynasty who were at the time in league with the English and who today produce lovely wines— but that’s neither here nor there.

So against all rationale, the prince Charles of Valois agreed to allow Joan of Arc to lead the army. She did. They won. She was lauded and revered. Unfortunately, about a year later, she was captured by the English and the Burgundians and was burned at the stake as a heretic. She’s been held as someone very special to the spirit of France and it wasn’t until the 1920s that she was actually canonized and considered a saint and this church is dedicated to her.

I’m so happy that I walked by this church because it relates to the myth I want to tell today:

Today, I want to tell my rendition of the ancient Hindu myth about the Asuras and the Devas.

Long ago, in time out of mind, there were two groups of beings, the Asuras and the Devas. There couldn’t be a different sort of people. The asuras were earthly people, thought mostly of themselves, were a bit selfish. They probably loved Nascar, ate pork rinds, and didn’t recycle. The Devas on the other hand were beings that were very heavenly and always thinking of their inner divine nature. I imagine them dressed in gossamer white clothing, subsisting on tofu and vegetable broth, meditating for several hours a day, and leaving behind a faint smell of patchouli or incense whenever they left a room.

Well, those two kinds of being were about as opposite as you could imagine but they both wanted one thing and that was Soma. Soma was the elixur of eternal life. The Asuras wanted it because it felt so good to be eternal and the Devas wanted it so they could further devote themselves to the Divine. Now, the only way to get Soma was to ask Vishnu and if on the off chance that he granted you to have it, he would allow Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune and gifts to bestow it upon you.

So united in this common desire, the Asuras and the Devas got together and timidly asked Vishnu if they could have some Soma. He agreed but told them what they must do to get it. He was going to lend them his Sesha, Vishnu’s giant snake. They were to wrap this snake around a mountain which was to rest atop the giant tortoise Korma. If you’ve ever done Kormasana in yoga class, this is where that gets its name. Once the snake was wrapped around the mountain and placed on top of the Korma’s shell, they were to pull back and forth and oscillate it enough that they should somehow get the Soma. Grateful, the Asuras and the Devas agreed and began their task.

The Devas being smarter than the Asuras opted to take the relatively benign tail of the snake, which had but four ends which some Sanskrit scholars say relate to the 4 bases of DNA structure, something that the ancients discovered long before Watson, Crick, both of whom studied the work of their colleague Franklin. The Asuras therefore received the head end of the sesha and were blasted by countless heads of a snake, each one shooting fiery blasts like a dragon.

The Asuras and the Devas began to pull on the sesha with all of their might and in their lust for Soma, they started to pull so hard that the sesha, as strong and divine as a character as he may be, became nonetheless very ill and began to vomit venomous bile which started to cover and poison the entire earth. Seeing the problem, the Asuras and Devas stopped their movement and decided that something must be done before the entire earth is engulfed with this poison.

They weren’t about to go back to Vishnu. He was kind enough to let them have the chance to get Soma in the first place. They didn’t want to return to Vishnu and tell him how in their blind lust for Soma, they made his snake sick and now the entire earth was starting to be covered in poisonous puke. Instead, they importuned Shiva. They asked him if he could help them out.

Siva surveyed the situation and gathered up all of the bile and drank it, neither swallowing it to digest it nor spitting it back up. Siva held it in his throat and sanctified it, turning his throat blue.

Saved, the Asuras and the Devas continued their task, this time taking great care to have a balance between steadiness and ease. After they developed a good rhythm, eventually the sea began to boil and riches started popping up out of the ocean. Soma was about to come at any minute.

Vishnu decided to give them one last temptation to see if they were worthy of the Soma and he sent a temptations out to see if the Asuras and Devas really had purity in their hearts to receive the Soma. I imagine Vishnu sending onto the beach a bunch of speedo and bikini-clad partiers, barbecues wafting the smell of rib-eye steaks, not to mention volleyball nets, beers, and music. To the Devas he sent over all the unicorn amulets, treasure troves of yoga pants, sensible shoes, and all organic produce that a healthy, spiritual person could ever want.

Well, despite all of their efforts to get to that moment, the Asuras caved and headed to the beach for beers and babes. The Devas stayed and soon Lakshmi gave them each a single drop of Soma which turned them into immortal beings like angels.

I love myths like that because we can interpret them in many ways. They speak to a truth that is large enough mean something different fo whomever hears it, regardless of spiritual orientation, practice, discipline, or period of life.

I love the idea in this myth about the balance of steadiness and ease. In the Yoga Sutras, the book where we get a lot of the philosophy of yoga from, there are really very few instructions for how we are to practice yoga, the physical practice. It does say, however that no matter what, you’ve got to find the balance between steadiness and ease. Whatever your physical, spiritual, and I would even say political practice might be, this story illustrations the value of balance. What’s more is how when you’re trying to improve your situation but approach your improvement with a fundamental lack of balance, how that can make things worse off than they were before.

And when things are bad, and even when they seem like they are going to poison the entire world, like the snake’s venomous puke, that somehow the Divine can help you hold that in such a way as to sanctify it

You’ve probably heard me mention this more times than you can count but it is a truth that has become imperative to my own personal spiritual evolution, and that is Leonard Cohen’s lyric from his song Anthem that says, Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in. This says that just like the poison of whatever may befall us, we become sanctified, the light gets in, when we learn to hold our imperfections. That it’s because of these faults, this brokenness, this poison, that we are rendered holy.

CLICK ABOVE TO LEARN ABOUT MY LUXURY RETREAT AT A BORDEAUX CHATEAU 2020

It makes me think of our situation with Elio, learning to use the bathroom by himself at school. How he is struggling being the only kid at school who doesn’t speak French and how he is learning to have more independence and things and how we are the unique family at school because we don’t quite understand exactly how things work yet, at least not like the other French families. But how me going back to school is strengthening him and teaching him and how it gives me an opportunity to build a rapport with the directorice of the school and talk with his teachers regularly. This is building a special relationship between our family and the school.

It also makes me think about Joan of Arc and how she was killed for fundamentally backward, misogynist, and in my mind evil reasons, but how her spirit has endured and how she’s given hope and courage to countless French people and how she was like the original Wonder Woman in some ways and that she’s become a divine symbol which celebrates a woman’s power, intuition, and spirit and which is so strong that it’s still celebrated 600 years later.

I hope you enjoyed the myth. I’d love to hear about what you heard in this myth.

I hope that you can find ways in your life to celebrate balance in all of your practices. I hope that you’ll be able to find the divinity in the challenges that beset you and see how that all of our challenges are making us into the greater angels of our True Nature.

I hope you have a great week. Please stay tuned for some Yoga Nidra offerings I am going to announce coming up.

---

Whatever You Believe In, Practice It Every Day.

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So, you may have heard me tell this story before but several years ago, I was leading myself through a deep Yoga Nidra meditation. My aim for this meditation was to channel the wise person that resides within my own heart to see what kind of message my own inner wise person would give me. I got very relaxed and went deep. Really deep.

I tried to think of the wisest person I knew immediately an image of one of my favorite professors from college jumped into my mind. In this vision, completely of my own imagination, I was sitting in his office and asking him for some guidance. In my mind, I could see the tawny grain of the wood of his desk. I could hear the soft buzz of the fluorescent lights above muted slightly by the plaintive squeak of his office chair as leaned back to think to survey the ceiling. He stroked his beard as he thought about what to say to me. Then, he looked at me slyly with a sideways glance and said something I’ll never forget. He said, “Whatever you believe in, practice it every day,” and then simply nodded.

“Whatever you believe in, practice it every day!” That revelation hit me like a ton of Norton Anthology of Poetry books. It was my own inner-wisdom reminding me of the importance of a daily practice

30-Day Meditation Challenge

If the wise person inside of you also values a daily practice, if meditation is something you believe in or are at least curious about, and if you want to explore what happens when you make meditation a daily practice, I invite you to register for my 30-Day Meditation challenge. It begins September 1st and runs for 30 days. It’s going to be fun and easy. All you do is meditate for 15 minutes a day, every day for 30 days. You’ll start to notice right away how you become more mindful, more calm, less provoked, and less reactive. Everyone you live with and work with will wonder what has happened to you.

Once you register for the challenge, you’ll start to receive emails that will support you with information, guidance, and encouragement about making meditation a regular practice for the month of September. You can do this challenge wherever you live in the world. You can meditate at any time of day that works best for you, and choose any style of meditation that suits you. I’ll give you several options that you can choose from if you’re newer to meditation

This costs $30 and if you complete all 30 days you can even have the option to receive your tuition back.

Tell your friends that you’ll be doing this to help keep you accountable and even invite them to join you because there’s nothing like mindfulness to bind a friendship together.

This thing starts Sunday, September 1st so sign up now and start your meditation practice now.

If you’re in NYC, I’ll be coming to town the first week of September and offering two amazing workshops. The first will be a Yoga Nidra for Happiness workshop at Pure Yoga West on Wednesday, September 4th from 6:30–9 pm. We will explore through poses, discussion, and Yoga Nidra the happiness that exists always within you despite events and circumstances. I’m really excited to offering a workshop at my old studio and hope you join me if you live in NYC. Also, I’ll be co-hosting a Yoga Nidra and Freeing breathwork workshop with an amazing teacher Tiffany Curren at Nirvana Yoga and Wellness in Wayne, New Jersey the next day on Thursday, September 5th from 6:30–9 pm. I’m really excited to work with Tiffany and this will be an incredible offering. If you live in the area, I’d love to see you at one or both of these events. I’m not sure when I’ll be back to this area.

Thanks for considering all of these offerings. Please forward this email by pressing the share link either below in the email or the Facebook share and like button near the top of the page if you’re listening to this email via my blog.

Hey, thanks again for being you and everything you do

And most of all, thanks for pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down.

My Heart Was Full

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Yoga Nidra

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Yoga Nidra is better than drugs. If you don’t know, it’s a guided meditation where you lie down and get extremely relaxed, and drift into that in-between state of consciousness to actually become very aware. As you listen to me lead you through the practice, you gain a beautiful and broad perspective about life, problems, and the simple joy of being awake to the beauties of this world. I’ve been studying and practicing Yoga Nidra for over a decade and anymore when I do Yoga Nidra I am led through the very same process of keen awareness as I am facilitating for my students.

So, one evening when I lived in New York, I had just finished a particularly beautiful and heart opening Yoga Nidra practice. I was teaching at Pure Yoga in Manhattan and as I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue to go and catch the red line back home to Brooklyn. And because of this Yoga Nidra practice that I’d just taught and simultaneously experienced, my entire being felt an absolute surge of well-being and love— I was absolutely brimming with joy. At that moment, it felt as if my eyes suddenly had a super-human focus, like I could see more than 77 blocks down Amsterdam Ave, all the way to the Hudson and that they could see every detail, from the birds landing on the light posts to the dirt in the gutter and all of it felt somehow like an expression of love. I floated down the street with a smile on my face feeling like nothing could ever be so perfect. As I passed people on the street, everyone from the homeless guy to the stressed out business guy, it felt like I could feel into everyone’s heart and could feel everyone’s inherent goodness. Experiences like this are not rare in Yoga Nidra and they are one of the simple reasons that I love this practice so much.

My Heart Was Full

It reminds me of a story that one of my favorite profs in college told me. His name was Leslie Norris and he was an old, wise, and brilliant poet. He knew the Romantic poets so well he could talk about them like they were his neighbors. By the way, if you’re curious what an English major does for a living, this is it. So, in this real-life story, poet William Wordsworth is feeling a lot of pressure from his guardians. His parents have died, as he is emerging into adulthood, he will soon be in charge of taking care of himself and his sister. All he wants to do in life is to write poetry but that doesn’t pay the bills so he’s receiving a lot of pressure to join the clergy instead. Well, one morning he’s walking home in the early twilight through the hills and grasslands near the sea. The landscape is blowing his mind, totally gorgeous, and his senses are completely alive. He’s about ready to burst from joy. And in that moment of intense beauty he gets a revelation from the powers that be that poetry was what he is meant to do in life. He clearly understood that the Universe was telling him loud and clear that poetry was his path. And from that moment forward never looked back. He went on to be, well, William Wordsworth, the Michael Jordan of the Romantic poets. The poem goes like this, it’s from his magnum opus The Prelude.

Leslie Norris

Magnificent

The morning was, a memorable pomp,

More glorious than I ever had beheld.

The sea was laughing at a distance; all

The solid mountains were as bright as clouds,

Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;

And in the meadows and the lower grounds

Was all sweetness of a common dawn –

Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,

And labourers going forth into the fields.

Ah, need I say, dear friend, that to the brim

My heart was full? I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me: bond unknown to me

Was given, that I should be – else sinning greatly –

A dedicated spirit. On I walked

In blessedness, which even yet remains.

Expert from Prelude by William Wordsworth

All that to say, that on that day after teaching Yoga Nidra, as I was walking down Amsterdam Ave totally brimming with life’s fullness, I had a Wordsworth moment. I felt that this practice of sharing Yoga Nidra with the world is the way in which the Universe has blessed me to feel Universal love and the way in which I get to share it back to the Universe and that it was a responsibility to share it lest I be “sinning greatly.”

Yoga Nidra Training

So I have the privilege, and frankly the responsibility, to share Yoga Nidra. It’s totally my jam and I love it. I’ll be sharing it tonight at a Yoga Nidra class at 21st Yoga and for those who want to really go deep, I’m so thrilled to be spending 20 hours teaching Yoga Nidra in a teacher training/immersion—This. Weekend.

About the training, if you’re a yoga teacher, awesome—Yoga Nidra is an essential tool to add to your teaching tool belt. If you’re just interested in the practice, there’s no better way to understand it than diving deep. If you’re a parent, teacher, or therapist, this could be an essential tool to help you help the people you are privileged to guide and nurture. The last time I did this training someone joined so they could learn to help their therapy clients better deal with stress. Someone else joined because they wanted to lower the teen-suicide rates in their school district. Another person joined because she was a family law attorney and wanted something to help her clients meet the challenge of divorce as mindfully as possible.

So how does it work, how does this relaxing guided meditation have such a powerful effect on people? It’s so powerful because this practice very skillfully leads you experience your True Nature, the part of you that feels wholeness and Universal love. When you are in conversation with the part of you that is fundamentally whole, everything heals.

This weekend is going to be life-changing. I’m not over selling this. There will be a lot of Yoga Nidra practice, chances to practice teaching to each other. You’ll learn how to lead yourself through this practice. You’ll receive a really solid PDF manual with Yoga Nidra scripts that you can start using on day 1 and which will serve as a foundation from which you can learn to personalize and build your own practices. Also, I’m offering this either virtually or in-person if you’re in Salt Lake City. People from all over the world will be joining us. I’ll be recording the entire thing, both audio and video, so if the timing doesn’t work you can always watch it later. This recording will also give you an incredible Yoga Nidra library.

I really hope you can make it this weekend. Regardless, I’d love to offer this Yoga Nidra practice as a chance to experience Yoga Nidra’s power to open your heart, cuz hey all the love songs are right and all you need is love.

So as I’m wrapping this up, I want to let you know that Aug. 29–Sept.1 I’m hosting a Writing + Yoga + Nature Retreat in Harriman State Park with the one and only Nan Seymour. We’ve invited special guest, poet Maya Stein to blow our socks off with her incredible poetry. We are going to explore what happens when we open to deep awareness through Yoga Nidra and then put pen to paper and see what comes out. This is the 4th year we’ve done it and it’s been amazing every year. We have only 1 spot left and we’d love for that spot to be filled by you.

There’s no better way to practice Yoga Nidra or any other form of mindfulness than with my 30-Day Meditation challenge. It’s happening the entire month of September. The challenge is to simply meditate every day for 15 minutes or more using this great app called Insight Timer. All month I’ll be sending you instructions and encouragement. The challenge costs $30 and if you complete the challenge you can choose to either receive a full refund of your tuition or roll that into other cool meditation products that I have.

No matter what you do or don’t do with mindfulness, I just want to say thank you for picking up what I’m puttin’ down. I love doing this and it’s so nice to be on this journey with you.

May the Source be with you.

Namaste.

Please Listen to this heart-centered Yoga Nidra practice

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The Art of Yoga

What is the marriage between inner and outer beauty? What is the Art of Yoga

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Yoga is many things. It’s a science, a philosophy, a mode of spirituality, and a method of therapy to name a few. Sometimes I forget that yoga is also an art. Yoga is an art, beautiful, pure and simple. It’s beautiful to watch and to experience. Yoga, like many other disciplines, explores and celebrates what it means to be human. Through the form of our poses we understand our inner-realm and celebrate being alive. We celebrate being.

It’s true that it’s not what’s on the outside that counts; you don’t win when you’ve accomplished a pose. Yet, there is something sublimely beautiful in the simplest form, the humblest yoga posture. When I teach yoga, I am privileged to witness the beauty of all different body types, ages, and walks of life practice being human. I see lines, curves, and angles come alive and flow. I see the magical bleed between effort and ease dancing before me. I see the embodiment of bliss and understanding as well as struggle and frustration. I can feel what’s happening on the inside of my students because it’s manifesting on the outside right before me like a living poem, like sculpture that moves, like a painting that comes alive, or a boisterous Rock Opera turned up to 11. Sure, it’s not about how the pose looks but rather how it feels that is important. Regardless, your inner beauty manifests outwardly. It is still true that the poses are beautiful. We are living art.

And yet this being human, this living art, is like a sand painting that even as we speak is withering to its demise to become part of the elements from whence we came. This notion reminds me that art (human or otherwise) is just as much if not more expressed in its becoming than in its arrival. It shows me that the entire process of our lives is like one long, beautiful play full of tragedies, joys, doldrums, and loves.

Understanding the art of becoming rather than arriving emphasizes presence, the sublime of right now. And perhaps that is the intersection between inner and outer beauty, the place where inner presence and outer form meet. In this sacred marriage, our form helps us to understand that numinous realm within and our presence helps us to live outwardly with heath, clarity, and yes, beauty.

You are an artist whether you think of yourself as an artist or not. An artist, whether dancer, painter, musician, sculptor, or liver of life, must practice presence to honestly and bravely witness this world. The unconscious or the busy mind would pass by such beauty. The artist doesn’t only celebrate sunrises and rainbows. The artist finds beauty also in dark lines and shadow. Landscapes that don’t make sense or that paint a picture that is tragic, disturbing, and poignant, are nonetheless beautifully human. Indeed, that’s why we love tragedies and the dark side because this beautiful tapestry of life isn’t limited by only sunrises and rainbows. With presence, we can truly see the beauty in all things, especially ourselves.

Live and Online Yoga Nidra Training

I invite you to celebrate the full beauty of your life this week through yoga and mindfulness. Celebrate what it means to be human.

You are beautiful.

You are art.

Poem of the One World

This morning

the beautiful white heron

was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this

the one world

we all belong to

where everything

sooner or later

is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel

for a little while

quite, beautiful, myself.

~Mary Oliver

THREE IN TRANSITION

(FOR WCW)

I wish I understood the beauty

in leaves falling. To whom

are we beautiful

as we go?

I lie in the field

still, absorbing the stars

and silently throwing off

their presence. Silently

I breathe and die

by turns.

He was ripe

and fell to the ground

from a bough

out where the wind

is free

of the branches

~David Ignatow

Human Doing vs. Human Being

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Your identity is your foundation of existence. Too often we tend to identify with things that don’t support the truth of what we are, our beingness. Too often we get caught up as human doings rather than human beings. Too often we equate our value on what we can do rather than the fact that we simply are. 

Tantra is a school of eastern thought. One of the many facets to Tantra is its emphasis on non-dualism or all things belonging to a larger whole. When you can expand your Awareness from being either this or that, you tap into what I call your Both And Nature. This Both And Nature speaks to your higher beingness and embraces all the elements of you for optimal expression. 

Ironically, the person who doesn’t know their Both And Nature, identifies only as body or with their actions, equates their existence with only what they can do. Ability and doing is by nature volatile and changeable so their sense of identity lacks a real foundation. This lack of existential foundation invariably affects performance because each act becomes a desperate grope for identity when there’s none to be had merely by performing an action. 

During my career, I’ve taught yoga and meditation to dozens of world-class athletes and performers. Often when these performers retire, still quite young, they sometimes go into an existential crisis if their entire identity was wrapped up in solely what they could do. Now that they can no longer perform at the level they felt defined them, they have no idea who they are. 

By contrast, the person who is identified as a Being rather than a doer knows their Both And Nature and can act invincibly from that place because they realize that they and each of their actions are an expression of their Being, of Source. The person connected to their Being through practices like the Yoga Nidra, graduate from a level of merely doing an action to Being it. 

Yoga Nidra is a form of Tantric guided meditation that is both relaxing and very useful to reinforce your sense of your own Being. The aim in Yoga Nidra is to disidentify from anything in the realm of the changeable, like body or thoughts, and learn to identify as Awareness itself. Typically, a Yoga Nidra session will last anywhere from 15–40 minutes where you simply lie down, close your eyes, and listen to a facilitator (or recording) lead you through paying attention to things like your body, your breath, energy, thoughts, etc. This process leads you deeper and deeper both into relaxation as well as into Awareness. 

Since it’s also true that while you cannot identify solely as body, your body is an important (though changeable) part of who you are. It also exists as one of the greatest tools you possess to open yourself to the experience of Awareness. As you learn to inhabit your body with deeper Awareness, you tune into your Both And Nature and from that place of embodied Awareness, you can go out and perform at your best. 

Click here to hear a free Yoga Nidra recording and experience for yourself the transformative of your own Both And Nature.

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Be The Shit

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“What does the mighty oak care if the warthog scratches its rump against its bark?

Right before I moved from Salt Lake City, I had my last session with a wonderful private client, and friend. She began our session with a comment about how difficult she found it to be around people who are constantly bragging about who they are or what they own. This comment sparked a wonderful discussion and subsequent Yoga Nidra practice dedicated to the differences between a human being and a human doing. We discussed the idea of aiming to be so secure in our being that we didn’t need to try to prove anything to anyone else. We could just be.

I said to her, “When you’re The Shit, you don’t have to go around town bragging about it. You just go be The Shit.”

It reminds me of something I heard poet and writer David Whyte say, “Constantly explaining who you are is a gospel of despair.” Why does it seem that when we are the least secure in who we are, we tend to brag about ourselves the most? Probably because when we equate our value based on what we can do rather than a sure sense of our own beingness, we’re constantly trying to affirm something that really doesn’t exist. By contrast, we as human beings are valuable simply because we exist. We don’t need to prove anything because we simply are. If we're identified as something as fragile as our action or a title, then we're constantly fearing not being that thing anymore, we fear annihilation.

It’s also true that when we can be secure in our own being, other people don’t ruffle our feathers. The best antidote in response to the braggart is to be so solid in our own beingness that another person could say or do whatever they wish and it wouldn’t bend us one way or the other. Like the fantastic German quote, “What does the mighty oak care if the warthog scratches its rump against its bark?”

This is what we are doing in our yoga and meditation practices: we are affirming our beingness, and steeling ourselves against anything that could arise in our lives by simply learning to pay attention, to have Awareness. Here’s the kicker: our beingness is somehow wrapped around our ability to pay attention to the world, to listen and be. Not to do. The doing comes as the response to the being. The ancient teaching says that consciousness precedes form.

That day, my client and I had a great session. I led her through a personalized Yoga Nidra practice that helped her to feel solid in her own being to go out and be the mighty oak so that others could say or do whatever and she didn’t have to worry about it one way or the other. I recorded the practice and left it with her so she could continue to practice this concept.

After the session, as I was rushing out to go home and pack for France, I was half-way out the door, when I heard her shout after me, “Hey Scott!” I turned back to see her with a wide smile on her face. “Be The Shit,” she said as wise parting advice.

So, may I also extend this invitation to you: Be The Shit.