Learning to Fail

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Some of the greatest lessons in my life have been due to my failures. You? What are some of your BEST failures, I’m talking business, school, relationships, the whole gamut? I guarantee they have also been some of your best teachers, even if we can’t see that . . . yet.

Photo by Alex Adams

Freaked to Fail

In high school I remember being so incredibly afraid to one day open my own business because…. what if I FAILED! Of course I had an extremely limited idea of what success looked like and what it took to find success.

Well, fast forward a few decades and I’ve opened and failed businesses. I've learned not to be afraid of failure. Sure, it's hard and nobody want's to fail but I’ve picked myself up from some very hard places and moved on. It's was because of some of these failures in many aspects of life that I’ve learned what I need to do in order to enjoy some great success in so many avenues of life, including making a living doing what I absolutely LOVE which is teaching yoga and meditation. Making a living doing what I love= one big, fat success.

I think about all kinds of things I've failed at from relationships to jobs to ideas. Each one has taught me an invaluable lessons. I’ve since learned not to be afraid of failures. They are powerful lessons that have shaped me into who I am today.

One of My Favorite Failures

When I was 19 I needed to earn some money for college so I was determined to do whatever it took, no matter how unpleasant the job was. Well, I got a temp job working on a construction site. I was utterly horrible at construction but was too damn proud to quit. Eventually the foreman fired me for my ineptitude. At the time I was incensed but I later realized how much of a favor he did for me. I wasn't serving ANYONE at that job, least of all myself. He freed me to go and look for my next job, one that I did so well that in a matter of months, the owner of the small company actually asked me if I wanted to become partners.

My Yoga Nidra Teacher Teaching Taught Me to Fail

I used to own a few yoga studios. They both failed. One of the highlights of owning these studios was when I was able to proudly host one of my greatest Yoga Nidra teachers, Dr. Richard Miller, for a weekend of workshops. Ironically, despite the great success of the workshops, he was the last big event we hosted before we had to announce that we were closing our doors. Concluding the weekend of workshops was an intimate dinner with a few teachers and Richard Miller. I came a few minutes late because I had to have a meeting with my entire staff letting them know that we were going to be closing our doors. When I told this unfortunate truth to Richard Miller, he leaned in close to me and without hesitation said, “congratulations!”

At the time I was taken aback, but with reflection the lessons I’ve learned from that experience are like gold in my hand. Not being weighed down by trying to make a brick-and-mortar business stay afloat has freed me up to concentrate on projects like my Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training, Yoga Teacher Mentor Program, and projects like my Yoga Nidra Scripts booklet.

When I look back at owning the studios, I met my wife at that yoga studio and I often tell her that if I went through all that stress, heartache, and trouble only to have met here then it would have been worthing it. That’s true but the incredible gifts I’ve learned extend beyond just finding the love of my life. Ironically, I’ve learned so much about owning and running a business by all the ways that my previous business didn’t work. Both studios I opened are STILL running, but with different owners. I suppose I should be proud to have helped created such beautiful places to practice yoga. When I roll by those studios, I think, “Good on ya! I hope you’re doing well,” and “MAN! I’m happy not to own those anymore.”

Failures are perhaps some of our biggest teachers so maybe we don’t have to be so afraid of them. Maybe we can even have fun with them and dare I say, even be grateful for them. Inevitably, they help us evolve into into our highest being.

What are the failures you’re grateful for?

Yoga Nidra Scripts and Yoga Nidra Trainings

Why Yoga Nidra Scripts?

I’ve been creating Yoga Nidra scripts and Yoga Nidra Trainings for years and would love to share a little about what Yoga Nidra is, how it can heal, the value of a script, and how to move beyond the script to truly meet the needs of yourself and your students.

Yoga Nidra is the transformational so-called “yoga of sleep,” a very approachable yet effective way of experiencing the Oneness of your being through the process of a relaxing journey through deepening layers of Awareness. The fact that Yoga Nidra is so easy to practice and often leaves practitioners feeling rested, illuminated, and calm, makes it a popular, simple, and effective way of exploring one’s higher Self. Yoga Nidra is like napping your way to enlightenment!

Yoga Nidra may be easy and relaxing to practice but teaching it effectively can be difficult. I’ve spent many years, and countless hours learning how to teach Yoga Nidra effectively. I’ve logged many thousands of hours teaching Yoga Nidra and have learned through trial-and-error what best to do and NOT to do in order to hopefully facilitate an effective Yoga Nidra experience for myself and for students. In the spirit of helping others learn to teach Yoga Nidra quicker than it took me, I recently took 20 Yoga Nidra practices that I thought could be helpful on a broad variety of subjects and compiled 20 scripts is designed to put the words of effective, and what I hope are skillful, Yoga Nidra practices in your hands so that you and your students can also benefit from these practices.

The Healing Power of Yoga Nidra

Yoga Nidra is but one practice that leads people to experience their highest Selves and to come to the ultimate state of Oneness with all things. The explicit purpose for Yoga Nidra is to layer your attention through the illusions of the ego (the mayakoshas) in order to dis-identify as the ego and instead identify as Awareness itself. Doing so heals what I feel is the fundamental human problem which is feeling separate from Source.

I believe that wellness is the byproduct of Awareness and as such, the Awareness a practitioner may experience through Yoga Nidra can catalyze myriad other kinds of transformations in many practical and useful ways such as help with stress, grief, setting goals, starting your day, getting great sleep, achieving a state of relaxed alertness, and even creating abundance in your life. These are just a few of the many topics you’ll find in this volume of Yoga Nidra scripts.

These Yoga Nidra scripts are valuable because a Yoga Nidra facilitator works hard to create the right conditions for relaxation and the layered Awareness to occur. Plus, once that state is successfully achieved, a facilitator can then use their knowledge of the mayakoshas (layers of the ego) to effectively work on whatever needs attention, be that something physical, energetic, mental, or even spiritual or unconscious. I’ve organized these scripts in a way that hopefully makes that process automatic and easy.

Yoga Nidra Training

Perhaps you’d like to learn how to create your own scripts or learn to improvise a Yoga Nidra class to meet particular needs and learn how to lead yourself through a Yoga Nidra practice without using a script. Reading a script might be perfect for you as you learn to find your own voice teaching Yoga Nidra. I truly believe that each teacher has a unique quality about them and a special ability to benefit the lives of the students they come in contact with. There’s really nobody else who can teach like you do. While a Yoga Nidra facilitator can be skillful or not skillful about leading the practice, there’s no “right” way to teach. There are certain important principles about what Yoga Nidra is and what the practice is pointing to. Once you understand that, you’ll find your own way to arrive there and will be able to lead your students there effectively using your own voice. This is why I’ve developed in-person and online Yoga Nidra trainings.

I love to teach live Yoga Nidra teacher trainings because I love to see how people are using this practice. I see so many different kinds of people in my trainings including, yoga and meditation teachers, reiki and other energy workers, geriatric health professionals, high-performance coaches, high school teachers and counselors, mental health therapists, parents, and even family and divorce lawyers, because each person understands how this transformative practice can help the part of the world that they are blessed to work with. I’m also really happy to offer my online Yoga Nidra teacher training so that people all over the world can learn the principles of effectively leading a Yoga Nidra class along a timeline and location that works best for them.

My trainings explore the principles and fundamentals of Yoga Nidra to first outline the “what and why” of Yoga Nidra in order to then understand the “how” of Yoga Nidra. I find that organizing the trainings in this way enables teachers to facilitate this transformational practice with the power of doing so in their own voice to match their own specific needs as well as those of their students. Also, I strongly believe that once you know what you are aiming for, you will likely find your own pathway to get there, one that feels perfect for you. Eventually, you’ll be able to create your own scripts and improvise a practice that is powerful and necessary to yourself and your students. The aim for my trainings is to help those who are passionate (or even curious) about facilitating Yoga Nidra and learning to move beyond these scripts and create their own scripts as well as conduct 1:1 Yoga Nidra Dyads, a completely improvised experience based on the real-time awareness of their students.

In my latest edition of my online Yoga Nidra training, I’ve included a PDF of over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts to the training to help teachers begin to lead effective Yoga Nidra classes right away while they are learning to find their own voice.

Online Yoga Nidra Training: Now's The Time

Online Yoga Nidra Training

I hope you are safe and not bored to insanity given this global pandemic.

Perhaps now is the time to finally learn how to become an incredible Yoga Nidra teacher. Yoga Nidra is the process of understanding the beautiful innate wholeness that is inside of you that IS you in a way that also promotes deep relaxation, calm, and nourishing rest. It’s truly like napping your way to enlightenment!

Plus, the world needs Yoga Nidra now more than ever to help us all be at our best during these crazy unstable times.

I’ve developed an online Yoga Nidra training that prepares you to understand not only how to lead effective and powerful Yoga Nidra experiences for yourself and others, but also teaches you the fundamental principles of the practice so that you can learn to customize the experience to meet the needs of whomever you’re teaching.

While you’re learning to develop your own voice, I’ve included a PDF booklet of over 100 pages of great Yoga Nidra scripts.

My training is the audio and audio/video recordings of a live training so you will have the benefit of hearing many of the same questions and comments from other participants. You are always welcome to send me questions and comments along the way.

This training is an instant download and you can accomplish it on your own timeline. You can start teaching Yoga Nidra right away with the scripts as you’re learning how to develop your own scripts.

With This Training You Can Offer Online Yoga Nidra Classes

This training will pay for itself in no time! Personally, while I’m quarantined at home I’m earning more than $400 USD a week offering Yoga Nidra classes virtually via Zoom. Plus, I’m going to be offering a “how to” workshop about offering virtual classes very soon.

Training Costs Only $345

I know that the Wellness Industry has been hit hard with this pandemic. My sincere desire is that you learn how to lead this practice effectively so you can begin to work with your own clients and students and share this incredible practice in a way that also supports you spiritually, emotionally, and even financially during these crazy times. I am also offering to split the payments into three monthly payments if that would help you to make this investment. That and I stand by my work so if you don’t love it, I also offer a no-questions money-back guarantee.

“I just wanted to mail to say that I completed the training at the end of last week - wow, just wow, I really enjoyed each element of the training (especially the talk between everyone about their own experiences). The training was a very timely purchase and study time during this weird time we find ourselves in....it’s definitely helped me in staying aligned and in the vibration I need right now.”

— Bev R.

“I just completed your on-line Yoga Nidra TT. It was truly a wonderful, enlightening experience. Very grateful to have had the opportunity.”

— Chrissy W.

This 20-hour Yoga Nidra intensive is designed to deepen your knowledge of Self through Yoga Nidra as you learn to guide yourself and others through effective and varied Yoga Nidra practices. It is perfect both for teachers interested in teaching Yoga Nidra as well as students who simply want to deepen their practice of Yoga Nidra.

This intensive will be available through audio/video recordings and through a manual in the form of a PDF.

What’s in this course:

• A library of Yoga Nidra training that you can access whenever you’d like

• A deeper understanding of Self through Yoga Nidra

• A course of profound relaxation

• A full audio/video recording of the training for practice and continued learning

• Over a hundred pages of Yoga Nidra scripts to use

• Yoga Immersion PDF workbook (60+ pages)

• A certificate of completion

• Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Credit (if needed). This counts as 20 hours of non-contact hours.

Some of the topics we will cover:

• Philosophy of Yoga Nidra

• Myths and Chants

• Yoga Nidra for Healing/Trauma/Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Performance

• The Power of Visualizations

• Subtle Body Study and Practice

• The Koshas: Our Greatest Tools for Awareness

• Supportive Pranayama and Mindfulness Techniques (which you can print and give to your students)

• Incorporating Yoga Nidra into Yoga

• Effective Teaching Methods

• Role as Teacher

• Self Practice

• Group Teaching

• One-on-one Teaching

By the end of this immersion you will be ready to teach Yoga Nidra!

The scripts included with the purchase of this training are as follows:

• Yoga Nidra for Grief

• Yoga Nidra for Goals

• Yoga Nidra for Healing

• Yoga Nidra for Sleep

• Yoga Nidra for Grounding

• Yoga Nidra for Sankalpa (Intentions)

• Basic Yoga Nidra Practice: Body

• Yoga Nidra for Energy and Chakras

• Yoga Nidra for Anxiety Management

• Full Yoga Nidra Practice (all Koshas)

• Yoga Nidra for Heart Energy

• Yoga Nidra for Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Relaxed Alertness

• Yoga Nidra for your Trinity Nature

• Yoga Nidra for Compassion

• Yoga Nidra for Abundance

• Yoga Nidra to Start Your Day

• Yoga Nidra for Bliss (Anandamaya Kosha)

• Yoga Nidra for Happiness

• Yoga Nidra for Inner Wisdom

only $345!

Quraran-Town, Unique Opportunities, and The Strangest Cocktail Ever

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Here we are at yet another week of living in Quaran-town (I wish I came up with that, thanks Tara T. for that one).

I hope that you’re able to keep your spirits high. Let me remind you that we gotta dig deep in these crazy times. Our attitude about this is going to shape the outcome dramatically, both for ourselves and the world.

This morning I’m extremely grateful for:

• Morning coffee date with Seneca, my wife, co-parent, and partner-in-crime

• Another beautiful spring morning

• YOU, for opening and reading. I really appreciate your presence with me on this journey of life

More about item 3

This weird time in our history has certainly created some “unusual opportunities,” as my friend Chris S. has said. People are out of work, plans and progress are on hold, and there’s a lot of enduring fear around simply staying safe. Oh, and there’s boredom. It’s like the weirdest cocktail ever. Here’s how the recipe would read:

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The Corona Cocktail

Ingredients:

• 1 oz fear

• 2 oz liquid courage

• 2 oz whole-lotta-love

• 1 oz “Cancelled Plans” bitters

• 1 Tbsp lonely lemon juice

• Lemon wedge

• 3 oz Boredom Tonic, served flat, of course

• ½ tsp Isopropyl Alcohol

• 1 oz aloe vera

• Pinch of spring blossoms

• Margarita salt

• 2 surgical gloves

• N-95 surgical mask

• 6 ft. straw

• Thermometer

• Square of toilet paper

Instructions:

• While wearing the surgical gloves and mask, prepare a margarita glass by first rubbing it with the Isopropyl alcohol.

• Allow glass to dry completely then wet the rim with some of the aloe vera before dipping the rim of the class in the margarita salt giving the drink its “corona.”

• Place the liquid ingredients including the rest of the aloe vera (but NOT the Isopropyl alcohol) into a martini shaker and shake vigorously, either by hand or with the help of an EARTHQUAKE (Salt Lake City had an earthquake 3 weeks ago), for an indeterminate amount of time until the CDC says it’s ok to stop.

• Pour into glass.

• Using the thermometer, ensure that the liquid is below 98.6 degrees before continuing contact with the drink.

• Practice social distancing from your glass by using a 6-ft straw inserted into a small hole made in the front of your mask.

• Garnish with the pinch of spring blossoms, lemon wedge and serve on a square of toilet paper.

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But rather than digressing into day-drinking, let me offer this…

As you know, I make my living by writing, teaching yoga, hosting in-person and online yoga and meditation trainings and retreats. I feel very fortunate to have made a living doing what I love to do for almost 20 years. Yet, these times have presented me with an “unusual opportunity” to give back and offer more resources for free, by donation, or at a reduced price because we all need these valuable resources that help us practice being our best selves during these uncertain times. That and I think yoga, meditation, and some thought-provoking writing present a helluva better solution to our situation than day-drinking.

That’s why I am offering things like my free Tranquility Tool Kit that includes: 2 downloadable yoga videos, 2 Yoga Nidra practices, links to heart-lifting music from myself and friends, as well as some excerpts of my writing to help remind us of our own humanity. I’m also inviting many of my online classes to be by donation so that if you need a yoga class but times are tough financially, you can simply offer good vibes or pay it forward to someone else in some other fashion.

One of my most important missions in life is to offer ways for people to practice being their best selves through yoga and meditation. I am so fortunate to get to make my living doing this, but now I want to give back to YOU who have given me so much through attending classes, downloading my courses online, buying my book, attending my retreats, and simply opening and reading my emails. It means so much, I can’t even tell you.

Here’s the beautiful irony, as much as I try to give back, I am gifted with an increase of generosity comin’ back my way. What an incredible gift! I can’t tell you how immensely grateful I am, thank you, thank you, thank you! It is not only humbling, but reminds me that this bitter cocktail is softening our hearts and helping us to love each other. What humbles me is how despite social distancing, this Coronavirus is helping us to reach out and love each other in creative ways with support, encouragement, creativity, laughs, and resources.

I LOVE YOU! I feel your love back to me.

Thank you.

“Love you more.”

“No, I love YOU more.”

“No, I love YOU, even more”

“Impossible. Can’t love anyone as much as I love you.”

In the spirit of offering yet more love…

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Gratitude

One of the best practices we can do right now during these crazy times is to practice regular gratitude. Gratitude is an easy antidote to so many limiting states of mind including, selfishness, fear, and discontent. Gratitude is a wonderful practice that brings us into the present moment and I believe that the secrets of the Universe (including how to beat Coronavirus) can be accessed through simple and regular presence.

Around Thanksgiving time, I offered for the first time a free 14-day gratitude challenge and I’d like to offer it again.

To do the Gratitude Challenge all you do is every day, wake up and write down three things you’re grateful for. Then, choose one of those things and turn it into a small paragraph. You can also share one or all of the things you are grateful for with someone else. Simple. In fact, at the beginning of this email, I followed the exact format for the Gratitude Challenge.

The last time I did this, there were so many people who completed the challenge and wrote to tell me what a magical practice it was for them and how much they enjoyed it. In fact, about two weeks ago, I got an email from a student and friend of mine in NYC who took the gratitude challenge and loved it so much she never stopped. She emailed me to say that she was on day 124

So, I’m offering another gratitude challenge. It starts whenever you register. How about now?

The challenge is simple but will leave you feeling great during these uncertain times. Continued exposure to gratitude will begin to change your character. Plus, gratitude is even more contagious than Coronavirus. There’s really no cure for it but more gratitude.

Registration is free and will give you access to receive supportive emails from me every day of the challenge.

Register today and pass this challenge along to your nearest and dearest. Share the love and make gratitude contagious.

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Yoga Nidra: Let Go and Be

Yoga Nidra is often called the “yoga of sleep,” however Yoga Nidra is more about waking up, wakening up to your ultimate Being. In my online Yoga Nidra classes and my online Yoga Nidra trainings, I discuss how the ancient yoga principles found in the Yoga Sutras help us find a practice of waking up.

According to the Yoga Sutras, the natural challenges in life provide us with refinement or Tapas, translated as the heat necessary for our transformation into our highest beings. Tapas is the process of waking up to our True Nature.

This heat inevitably leads us toward Swadhyaya, or self-knowledge. Self knowledge is both knowing how to best handle the Tapas, as well as what the Tapas reveals, which is the infinite Being waking up to know itself in this physical form and in this life. With greater self-knowledge you qualify for deeper tapas, then deeper self-knowledge, etc.

Beyond this cycle of growth and self-knowledge is the the ultimate step called Ishvarapranidhana, which means to lay it down at the feet of God. The ultimate step is to transcend this cycle of refinement and self-knowledge by enabling our ultimate act of free will which is to completely let go of control and submit to things just as they are. To merely be. Doing so up-levels our consciousness and then allows us to move back into the cycle of refinement and self-knowledge with greater understanding about what that process is doing. It’s like rebooting your life where everything is the same and yet your relationship to it is completely different.

Yoga Nidra is a method of relaxing inquiry into Self where through deepening relaxation and layered Awareness, you practice releasing all which doesn't’ serve you to see it for exactly what it is. With this perspective, you no longer identify AS that thing and can allow it to be. Because everything in this Universe has an orbit, you’ll find that as you stop clinging or resisting certain things in your life and allow them to just BE, they find their own expression and move along their orbit.

You have a magnificent capacity to simply BE!

I made up a myth that I want to share with you that will hopefully make these teachings come alive.

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Yoga Nidra Training

Yoga Nidra is the relaxing and mystical journey deep into the inner-realms of consciousness where through a guided meditation, you get to experience your True Nature, something that feels one with all things, infinite, and whole.

Such wholeness leads naturally to profound healing, boundless equanimity, and and understanding of your life, unparalleled by every-day thinking. Stress, trauma, and scarcity seem insignificant after you've experienced the part of you that is infinitely larger than any of these smaller experiences. Truly, through Yoga Nidra you see into the vastness of the Universe that is within you.

Learn this transformative practice for your own soul evolution as well as learning how to lead others through this life-changing practice. This could be the most important work you do in a great long time.

This essential training is designed for those who wish experience the unparalleled magnificence of their True Self through Yoga Nidra, to deepen their knowledge of the practice Yoga Nidra by learning its philosophy, and learn to teach it. It’s a fascinating journey into self that gives you the tools to help others also make this deep, personal journey. This is an engaging, fun, and in-depth look at all things Yoga Nidra.

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Weekly Live Online Yoga Nidra Classes

Now 2 classes weekly: Wednesday 6 pm and Sunday 9 am MST!

All classes are recorded so you can join live or watch later. Each participant receives the recordings to build your Yoga Nidra library.

Buy a pass, 4 classes for $40 or pay a drop-in for $12. If you buy a pass, you will be automatically signed up for both Wednesday and Sunday classes unless you indicate to me that you’d prefer either one or the other.

There is immense power in practicing together. These classes allow you to join from anywhere in the world. And because they are recorded and each of the classes are emailed to you after the class, this allows you to register and watch the session later as well as build your own digital Yoga Nidra library.

Tranquility Tool Kit

Blessings to you! I sincerely hope that you and your family are doing well and coping with the reality and myriad and often strange circumstances that the COVID-19 pandemic is presenting to this world.

My family and I are doing well. This time of quarantine has made us come closer not only proximally, but emotionally as well. The other evening we made a special meal and opened one of our nice bottles of wine that we had been saving for a special occasion. After, we cranked the music and had a dance party. Truly this is love in the time of COVID-19.

I hope that you are able to find a greater love for self and others during this unique time.

I want to remind us all that we CAN do hard things. YOU can do hard things

This is it, my friend. This is the time for all of us to apply all of the lessons we’ve learned from our yoga and meditation practices, as well as our previous life lessons. This is the time to practice doing those things that help us find stillness and hope despite fear, uncertainty, and even illness.

Perhaps, through all of this, we may open up our minds and hearts to see and learn what we may become through this experience, both individually and collectively.

“It’s not about whether you win or lose. It’s about whether or not at the end of the day, you can still stand up and sing.” David Whyte

This is the time to dig deep into our tool kit and use everything we’ve got to keep our spirits high.

Tranquility Tool Kit

I’ve compiled a free tool kit that you can use any time you need to keep your spirits high. Here’s what’s in this tool kit.

Click above to download your FREE digital Tranquility Tool kit

• For stress: Yoga Nidra for Stress recording (34 minutes)

• For sleep: Yoga Nidra for Sleep recording (25 minutes)

• To help you breathe: Stress Free breathing practices

• To relax and connect to your body: Gentle Yoga Practice (60 minutes)

• To move, strengthen, and erase stress from your body: Moderate/Intermediate Yoga Practice (60 minutes)

• Feel-good music for these times:

  • “Let It Be” by Megan Peters and Scott Moore

  • Link to some incredible musicians’ Facebook and recordings of music

  • Megan Peters

  • John Louviere (find his Cabin Fever Covers on March 22, 2020)

  • Here’s a link to an amazing musician, MNEK, from Britain, who wrote and produced some absolutely STUNNING acapella songs about Coronavirus that are simultaneously hilarious and incredibly soulful.

    • “Bored”

    • “Quarantine”

    • “Selfisolation”

    • “Stay Your Ass Indoors”

• Reading pleasure: Selected posts from my blog

  • Walking Into The Fire

  • Seeing the Finger of God: New Directions in Jazz

  • On The Corner of Justice and Compassion

  • Lionel Richie is My Guru

  • Grand Theft Auto: A Study in Mindfulness

  • Part 1

  • Part 2

• Story Time

  • Here’s a recording of an evening of storytelling. (May not be suitable for children) Very personal stories in front of an intimate group about revelation, rebirth, and why heavy metal matters.
    
    
    

There is no better time than now to employ all the tools in our tool kit This is the time that we’ve been preparing for. It’s time to dive deep into your tool belt and use everything you’ve got.

Blessings! Stay safe. Stay sane.

What To Remember When Waking

Awakening With Yoga Nidra, the “Yoga of Sleep”

I love Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra uses the “technology” of the Nidra state, that hypnotic state between waking and dreaming, to enter into an experience of being that isn’t available to us in our regular waking life. Shamanic, religious, and even psychological methods use this state as a way of discovering deeper truths about ourselves. Yoga Nidra is a beautiful and relaxing pathway toward awakening.

I love this poem by David Whyte because like many good poems it can speak to many different things at once. When read from the context of awakening through Yoga Nidra or any other meditative practice, it has a particular poignance.

Enjoy!

What to Remember When Waking

by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,

coming back to this life from the other

more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world

where everything began,

there is a small opening into the new day

which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough

for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window

toward the mountain presence of everything that can be

what urgency calls you to your one love?

What shape waits in the seed of you

to grow and spread its branches

against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?

In the trees beyond the house?

In the life you can imagine for yourself?

In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

from The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press

Finally, an Online Yoga Nidra Training You Can Do At Home!

More than ever, the world needs you to learn to teach Yoga Nidra.

Maybe now is the perfect time to do a self-guided, home study of Yoga Nidra with my online Yoga Nidra teacher training. Plus, I can think of few practices that would be as absolutely necessary during this crazy time than this relaxing, calming, yet mind-opening mindfulness practice. You can help both yourself and others source their best selves during this precarious time.

This program is available as an instant download so you can began napping your way to enlightenment today! Also, this training comes with my latest PDF book of over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts so that you can begin immediately to help people with practices like Yoga Nidra for Stress, Yoga Nidra for Healing, and Yoga Nidra for Abundance, just to name a few.

This 50-hour Yoga Nidra intensive is designed to deepen your knowledge of Self through Yoga Nidra as you learn to guide yourself and others through effective and varied Yoga Nidra practices. It is perfect both for teachers interested in teaching Yoga Nidra as well as students who simply want to deepen their practice of Yoga Nidra.

I’ll support you every step of the way with quick email responses and/or personal Zoom calls to clarify concepts.

What’s in this Yoga Nidra Training:

• A library of Yoga Nidra training that you can access whenever you’d like

• A deeper understanding of Self through Yoga Nidra

• A course of profound relaxation

• A full audio/video recording of the training for practice and continued learning

• 20 Yoga Nidra scripts to immediately teach effective classes

• Yoga Nidra Immersion PDF workbook

• A certificate of completion

• Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Credit (if needed). This counts as 50 hours of non-contact hours

• Pranayama and mindfulness exercises that support Yoga Nidra practice and which you can print off and give to your students
  

You get a certificate of completion when you’re done and it counts for 20 hours of continuing education with Yoga Alliance (non-contact hours).

Some of the Topics You Will Learn:

• Tantric Philosophy of Yoga Nidra

• Myths and Chants

• Yoga Nidra for Healing/Trauma/Stress

• Neurobiology: Your Brain on Yoga Nidra

• Yoga Nidra for Performance

• The Power of Visualizations

• Subtle Body Study and Practice

• Koshas

• Pranayama

• Incorporating Yoga Nidra into Yoga

• Mindfulness

• Effective Teaching Methods

• Role as Teacher

• Self Practice

• Group Teaching

• One-on-one Teaching (and Dyads)
  

By the end of this immersion you will be ready to teach Yoga Nidra!

Updated with very helpful Yoga Nidra scripts as you are learning to find your own voice.

The Yoga Nidra scripts are as follows.

• Yoga Nidra for Grief

• Yoga Nidra for Goals

• Yoga Nidra for Healing

• Yoga Nidra for Sleep

• Yoga Nidra for Grounding

• Yoga Nidra for Sankalpa (Intentions)

• Basic Yoga Nidra Practice: Body

• Yoga Nidra for Energy and Chakras

• Yoga Nidra for Anxiety Management

• Full Yoga Nidra Practice (all Koshas)

• Yoga Nidra for Heart Energy

• Yoga Nidra for Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Relaxed Alertness

• Yoga Nidra for your Trinity Nature

• Yoga Nidra for Compassion

• Yoga Nidra for Abundance

• Yoga Nidra to Start Your Day

• Yoga Nidra for Bliss (Anandamaya Kosha)

• Yoga Nidra for Happiness

• Yoga Nidra for Inner Wisdom

You can start to use these scripts immediately to begin to teach effective Yoga Nidra classes while you’re also learning the philosophy and principles of Yoga Nidra so that you can begin to use your own intuition, voice, and experience to affect your students in only the way that you can.

I believe that this time more than ever the world needs Yoga Nidra. it also needs good Yoga Nidra teachers. I believe that if you are reading this that there’s a good chance that you might feel called to do this incredible work.

You get:

• 50 hours of audio and video instruction

• A 60+ page PDF Manual

• Access to a virtual library (dozens) of Yoga Nidra recordings

• Over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts you can start using today

• A certificate of completion

• A beautiful, relaxing, and expansive spiritual journey into Self

all for only $589

Money-back guarantee!

Thank you for your interest in this training. I loved putting it together and I hope you love it as much as I do.

Scott Moore (E-RYT 500, YACEP, RYS) has been teaching yoga since 2003 and Yoga Nidra since 2008. He is the author of Practical Yoga Nidra: A 10-Step Method to Reduce Stress, Improve Sleep, and Restore Spirit. His online Yoga Nidra teacher training has gained global attention and over 30,000 people have enjoyed his Yoga Nidra recordings on the Insight Meditation app. Scott was a professor of an accredited class, Yoga for Wellness, at Westminster College for 9 years and has also created programming and curriculum which incorporates Yoga Nidra for many hospitals and treatment facilities. Scott has also worked with many world-renowned performers and athletes to achieve optimal performance using Yoga Nidra. Scott writes for and has been featured in Yoga Journal, Mantra Magazine, Origin Magazine, Medium, Conscious Life News, Sivana East, and his own blog at scottmooreyoga.com/blog. Scott loves to travel to offer retreats, trainings, and workshops. Scott just moved back to Salt Lake City after living with his wife and son in Southern France.

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There Will Be An Answer, Let It Be

Crazy times, my friend. Crazy times. None of us have any immediate answers to this global health crisis. It’s real and serious. Still, I know that we have the power to beat this on every level. We really do. We are resourceful, creative, and resilient beings. The crisis has ratcheted up our response level to the utmost and this means stepping up to be smart, precautionary, AND compassionate.

While the world’s best and brightest are working hard on figuring out how to fight the actual virus, I believe we all have a different and equally important job: to fight the fear of this virus with a weapon-grade love that has the power to annihilate selfishness, worry, and scarcity. Let’s pull together in these difficult times and fight fear with an increase of love and compassion for each other. By being smart AND compassionate, this thing will level off, and in the end our collective heart will be stronger because of it.

In the Spirit of Social Distancing

If you’re in Salt Lake City, classes at 21st Yoga are being suspended and many are switching to live, virtual classes. Stay tuned for more information on those.

Community is important, especially in these crazy times! Even if you are holed up at home it’s still nice to connect with each other. I’ve been teaching a live, virtual Yoga Nidra class each Sunday at 9 am MST. Join me! This is an excellent way of staying grounded, connecting with others, and also sourcing your highest Self. Each session allows us to talk and interact with each other while also enjoying our own space. Our next session is about responding rather than reacting during times of calamity.

I’m available for private individual and group sessions via Zoom or FaceTime. Please reach out to me to schedule a session if you’re interested. This could actually be a lot of fun and we could turn a crisis into something really cool together.

Lastly, I wanted to share something really special with you…

I heard a story about many Italians who are isolated in their homes because of the pandemic and as a way of connecting to those around them, they are opening their windows and literally singing to each other.

During my meditation practice a few nights ago, the words to “Let It Be” drifted into my mind. After my meditation, I texted my friend, Meg, singer/songwriter extraordinaire and owner of Acoustic Music in Salt Lake City, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind recording it for me to share with you. She was already tucked into bed with the pups and ready to call it a night but when she got my text she became so excited by the idea that she got up, cracked a beer, and recorded it on her phone. One take. I took the track and layered some sweet clarinet behind her sultry voice.

So, from my window to yours, here’s a little music to bring us together in times of trouble. You gotta hear this!

When I find myself in times of trouble

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

And in my hour of darkness

She is standing right in front of me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be.

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

And when the broken hearted people

Living in the world agree,

There will be an answer, let it be.

For though they may be parted there is

Still a chance that they will see

There will be an answer, let it be

Let it be, let it be. Yeah

There will be an answer, let it be.

And when the night is cloudy,

There is still a light that shines on me,

Shine on until tomorrow, let it be.

I wake up to the sound of music

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be.

There will be an answer, let it be.

Let it be, let it be,

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

Live Online Yoga Nidra Class

Live Virtual Yoga Nidra Class

It’s getting crazy out there with the worries over the COVID-19 and the one sure thing we can do to help change the world is to first change ourselves. Let’s tune into our best selves and allow that to lead us forward into helping ourselves and everyone through these difficult times. Yoga Nidra is perhaps the best way I can think of to change your state in the immediate to affect BEING the change you wish to see in the world. So, if you’re being cautious and would like to both practice public spacing AND experience community, please register for my live, online Yoga Nidra class, every Sunday at 9 am MST.

What Is Yoga Nidra?

Yoga is the practice of arriving to Oneness. Nidra means sleep, or that liminal state between waking and dreaming that acts like a bridge between many seemingly disparate parts of our being. Yoga Nidra employs relaxation as a special tool to not only help you travel that bridge between these different parts of your being into Oneness but also, on a practical level, help you to regularly achieve deep and nourishing rest. They say that 30 minutes of Yoga Nidra is like giving yourself a 2 hour nap! Join me for our next session, Sunday, March 15th at 9 am MST where we practice experiencing ourselves in our True Nature while also becoming very relaxed.

Once you register, you will be able to join me at the appointed time from your computer or smartphone, in the comfort of your own home, where the only virus you have to worry about is whatever computer virus already lurks on your machine. Seriously though, it’s really nice. Plus, you can register even if the time doesn’t work because each person who registered gets a full audio and audio/video recording of the event to review whenever you wish. That and it’s totally affordable.

Click Below to Register and Check Out My Online Training.

Yoga Nidra Scripts are Finally Available!!

Available as an instant download!

Instant downloadable PDF

These Yoga Nidra scripts empower you to teach like an expert today!

20 Yoga Nidra Scripts Vol. 1!

This is a compilation of some of my favorite Yoga Nidra scripts I’ve created to teach my Yoga Nidra classes, teachings, and recordings.

Instantly download these scripts onto your computer or smart device, or print them off.

The Scripts Included in This PDF Book

• Yoga Nidra For Grief

• Yoga Nidra for Goals

• Yoga Nidra for Healing

• Yoga Nidra for Sleep

• Yoga Nidra for Grounding

• Yoga Nidra for Sankalpa (Intentions)

• Basic Yoga Nidra Practice: Body

• Yoga Nidra for Energy and Chakras

• Yoga Nidra for Anxiety Management

• Full Yoga Nidra Practice (all Koshas)

• Yoga Nidra for Heart Energy

• Yoga Nidra for Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Relaxed Alertness

• Yoga Nidra for your Trinity Nature

• Yoga Nidra for Compassion

• Yoga Nidra for Abundance

• Yoga Nidra to Start Your Day

• Yoga Nidra for Bliss (Anandamaya Kosha)

• Yoga Nidra for Happiness

• Yoga Nidra for Inner Wisdom

I wanted to compile these scripts because while practicing Yoga Nidra may be easy and relaxing, teaching it effectively can be difficult. I’ve spent many years learning how to teach Yoga Nidra effectively. I’ve logged many thousands of hours teaching Yoga Nidra and have learned through trial-and-error what best to do and NOT to do in order to hopefully facilitate an effective Yoga Nidra experience for myself and for students. This compilation of scripts is designed to put the words of effective, and what I hope are skillful, Yoga Nidra practices in your hands so that you and your students can also benefit from these practices.

How to Use These Scripts and Best Practices

These scripts are designed to be used for yourself or to facilitate Yoga Nidra practices for individual clients or classes. Feel free to record these scripts for non-commercial purposes. Please understand that everything in this book is copyrighted, thank you very much.

I highly encourage you to make it a regular practice to record yourself reading these scripts, which could be your intention for purchasing this compilation in the first place, but especially if you are going to be facilitating others. Doing so allows you essential information about the way you are offering the practice. I know, I know, I know: everyone hates to hear their own voice but I can tell you from personal experience that doing so is perhaps the greatest tool you have to refine your teaching.

Thank YOU!

Lastly, Thank you!

I’d love to hear from you! Please drop me a line and let me know how your teaching is going, if you have any questions in particular, and what insight you have discovered through this fascinating practice. Let’s keep the conversation going about Yoga Nidra.

Also, stay in touch so I can keep you in the loop with information from level 1 and advanced trainings, retreats, recordings, and other resources.

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I love facilitating Yoga Nidra and I’m also passionate about teaching others to facilitate Yoga Nidra. I love to teach live Yoga Nidra teacher trainings because I love to see how people are using this practice. I see so many different kinds of people in my trainings including, yoga and meditation teachers, reiki and other energy workers, geriatric health professionals, high-performance coaches, high school teachers and counselors, mental health therapists, parents, and even family and divorce lawyers, because each person understands how this transformative practice can help the part of the world that they are blessed to work with. I’m also really happy to offer an an online Yoga Nidra teacher training so that people all over the world can learn the principles of effectively leading a Yoga Nidra class along a timeline and location that works best for them.

My trainings explore the principles and fundamentals of Yoga Nidra to first outline the “what and why” of Yoga Nidra in order to then understand the “how” of Yoga Nidra. I find that organizing the trainings in this way enables teachers to facilitate this transformational practice with the power of doing so in their own voice to match their own specific needs as well as those of their students. Also, I strongly believe that once you know what you are aiming for, you will likely find your own pathway to get there, one that feels perfect for you. Eventually, you’ll be able to create your own scripts and improvise a practice that is powerful and necessary to yourself and your students. If you are passionate (or even curious) about facilitating Yoga Nidra and learning to move beyond these scripts to create your own as well as conduct 1:1 Yoga Nidra Dyads, a completely improvised experience based on the real-time awareness of your student, I invite you to explore either my online Yoga Nidra teacher training or my live Yoga Nidra teacher trainings.

You may also wish to check out my book, Practical Yoga Nidra: a 10-Step Method to Reducing Stress, Improving Sleep, and Restoring Your Spirit, which hit the shelves in December of 2019. I’m thrilled at the global response that it has received so far.

My sincere desire is that these scripts will help you facilitate your own journey through Yoga Nidra as well as help you facilitate others’ journey as well.

Namaste,

Yoga Nidra: A Bridge to Inner-Wisdom

Yoga Nidra is a fascinating form of meditation. It’s different than many other forms of meditation in part because it’s a guided, practitioners are encouraged to lie down on the floor and close their eyes, and because it uses relaxation—not the effort of focus—to help practitioners arrive to the state of being identified as Awareness itself, rather that what you’re aware of.

One of the most fascinating things about Yoga Nidra is that it acts like a bridge, connecting seemingly separate parts of our being so that we can experience the non-dual part of us, that which eternal, the grand Singularity of the Universe, Awareness itself. Stay with me…

Yoga Nidra bridges the waking and dreaming mind. In fact, Yoga Nidra means the practice of coming into Oneness (Yoga) by using the Nidra (sleeping) state of mind. While Nidra is often translated as sleep, in actuality it means something closer to daydream, specifically that hypnagogic, liminal state between waking and dreaming consciousness.

Yoga Nidra acts like a bridge between your infinite and finite parts of being so you can experience the transcendent feeling of being BOTH an infinite being, Source, the Everything of the Universe AND a finite expression of Source that has a body, opinions, and has to wake up early on Tuesdays cuz it’s your turn to carpool the kids to school.

Using this in-between state of consciousness, Yoga Nidra also helps to bridge your conscious and unconscious mind. Sometimes when you build the bridge between these two states of your consciousness, the two sides can have a conversation together and your conscious mind can sometimes hear your own deep inner wisdom speaking from deep within your unconscious mind.

Yoga Nidra has taught me volumes about myself. It’s help me to bridge the gap between my practical and spiritual self, helped me to bridge the gap between feeling separate from and one with the Universe, and because of the bridge it’s given my conscious and unconscious mind to converse, I’ve learned some fascinating things about myself taught to me from my own deeper inner-wisdom.

Lastly, one of the coolest things about Yoga and Yoga Nidra is that it’s not giving you anything that you don’t already possess. These practices merely uncover the blinders from you seeing your True Self.

May we always be searching for our most true, infinite, and wise self. If you’re interested, above is a free Yoga Nidra recording that leads you to hear the wise inner teacher inside of you.

Enjoy and please tell me what you think.

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Manifesting with Yoga Nidra

Click here to access Yoga Nidra for Manifesting

(about 30 minutes)

I used to be so skeptical about the notion of “manifesting.” This of course was coming from the mind set that I had no control over the Universe, that I was merely a pawn in the game of something much bigger than I could possibly imagine. But the more I practice Yoga Nidra, known as the so-called yoga of sleep, the more I connect with a felt sense of Source and therefore understand myself as Source. The more I understand myself as Source the more I experience myself as the Universe and not just controlled by it. Suddenly manifesting doesn’t seem like so much of a fantasy and more of my mission as the Universe itself.

Understanding Myself as Source

The Gayatri Mantra is an ancient text, thousands of years old, contained in the Rig Veda—an old, old, text— and basically states that everything comes from Source and if I were to really understand that, I’d see that I’m basically no different than anything else in the Universe and therefore, I would BE the very thing that I otherwise felt like I lacked. This is one thing to understand philosophically or intellectually, but quite another thing to truly come to know this truth. Essentially, this is the end-game of Yoga—Samadhi, the experience of Oneness, to enter into the grand Singularity of all things. What we practice when we do yoga asana (poses) or practices like Yoga Nidra, is to create the conditions necessary for the EXPERIENCE of yoga to occur, to truly experience ourselves like the Gayatri Mantra says, as Source.

I’d argue that we’ve all at one time or other felt what it’s like to be Source. It’s that feeling when you touch the eternal when someone is born or dies or you brush up somehow with that other world in nature, for example. Source is our origin so we all seem to be reaching for it over the next horizon. When we practice yoga and Yoga Nidra we touch upon Source as we come to experience ourselves as Awareness through deep presence. In those moments we get the feeling that we are both the infinite Source and a finite individual expression of Source waking up to know itself as Source. We experience the paradox of these two realities simultaneously. With this feeling of being everything, Source, there is nothing we need, nothing we aren’t already, and nothing we can’t do.

Sankalpa: The Door To Wholeness

The Universe and everything in it exists as a giant YES. Yoga and meditation practitioners can leverage this Universal yes through their Sankalpa to manifest what they’d like to see in their life. Sankalpa is a Sanskrit word meaning your seed of intention and often yoga and meditation practitioners state their Sankalpa as a positive statement of truth at the beginning of their practice to dedicate their practice and to open to the possibility of greater clarity by using the mechanism of practice to find illumination. By stating something that is true about where you are now in relationship to where you would like to be, gives the Universe a clear bulls-eye to help manifest the thing you desire and to show you that somehow you already have what you desire. Some great examples of Sankalpas are, “I have everything inside of me that I need for ________,” or “I am on the road to ___________,” or “The Universe wants to bless me with ________.” These are both optimistic and yet realistic, our eternal mind and conscious mind can both get onboard with this statement. Plus, the part of us that is Source within us only understands yes and now so to speak to the Source within you, it’s helpful to formulate your Sankalpa in this way. Your Sankalpa is a way of knowing yourself as Source and as you do, you will find yourself more and more at one with the thing you desire. On more practical terms, you tend to lean toward whatever you focus on. If you’re constantly thinking of what’s positive about what you desire, you’ll most often make great strides along that path. Truly, you’ll look back and see that it was through your apparent lack that you came to know yourself as already complete and whole.

Seeing The Stars

A few months ago, my wife and I decided to put this manifesting business to the test. We were living in France and relying 100% on my monthly online sales for our financial subsistence. For some reason, I’d experienced a sharp decline in sales from the previous months and we decided to try manifest what we felt we needed. So we got really basic and made a simple poster with the numbers 1–10 on it. We divided the amount of money we felt we needed into 10 segments and bought some gold stars so that every time we made 1/10 of what we needed, we could simply put a star on the poster. Basic but effective. Knowing that seeing is believing, together we had a visualization ritual where we visualized exactly what it feels like to succeed in our goal. We envisioned ourselves celebrating having reached our goal with a bottle of champagne on the beach. We visualized our success by using all of our senses, how the champagne would taste, the sound of the waves, the feeling of holding hands on the beach, etc. At the time, I was thinking to myself that while this goal was kinda shooting for the stars, it was nonetheless possible. To cut to the chase, with only 2 weeks to meet our goal, on the last day of the month we had posted not only all 10 stars but had acquired an additional 3 stars on the poster! We succeeded with 33% more than we had even hoped for.

As you engage in the practice of yoga, meditation, and of life, I encourage you to remember that you are Source and as such there’s nothing you can’t do. Leverage the Universal YES to power your intention to show yourself in very practical and real ways all the ways that you are already whole and to help you Universe bless you with what you feel you need in your life.

Please enjoy this free Yoga Nidra recording above (guided meditation), dedicated to manifesting whatever you feel you need in your life.

Blessings!

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Luxury Château Yoga Retreat

Bordeaux, France June 13–19, 2020

Yoga Nidra Script

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Yoga Nidra Scripts

Over 100 pages! Only $39

ownCLICK THE GRAPHIC FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE SCRIPTS

We all know that practicing Yoga Nidra is easy but facilitating a great class that doesn’t put your students to sleep (in the wrong way) is very difficult. This is why I’ve made this booklet of specialized, powerful, and unique Yoga Nidra scripts for you to use right away.

Teach Expert Yoga Nidra Classes, Today!

The Yoga Nidra Scripts in This Book:

Practices runs between 15–35 minutes long.

• Yoga Nidra for Grief

• Yoga Nidra for Goals

• Yoga Nidra for Healing

• Yoga Nidra for Sleep

• Yoga Nidra for Grounding

• Yoga Nidra for Sankalpa (Intentions)

• Basic Yoga Nidra Practice: Body

• Yoga Nidra for Energy and Chakras

• Yoga Nidra for Anxiety Management

• Full Yoga Nidra Practice (all Koshas)

• Yoga Nidra for Heart Energy

• Yoga Nidra for Stress

• Yoga Nidra for Relaxed Alertness

• Yoga Nidra for your Trinity Nature

• Yoga Nidra for Compassion

• Yoga Nidra for Abundance

• Yoga Nidra to Start Your Day

• Yoga Nidra for Bliss (Anandamaya Kosha)

• Yoga Nidra for Happiness

• Yoga Nidra for Inner Wisdom

Supplement your Yoga Nidra teaching with these effective and engaging Yoga Nidra scripts.

Hi! I’m thrilled that found me. I am absolutely passionate about Yoga Nidra. Making these scripts was a labor of love and I can’t wait to share them with you. Whether you’re a Yoga Nidra expert, novice, or just curious, I am grateful to be on this journey with you.

I’ve been teaching Yoga Nidra for almost 15 years and I’ve taken some of my best scripts and put them together in this booklet for you. It’s taken me years and years to learn the subtle art of teaching Yoga Nidra and I’d love to share some of what I’ve learned with these scripts.

A few things to remember …

When you’re reading the script, remember to slow down and allow for pauses between sentences. Give your students enough time to become aware of what you’re inviting them to be aware of. With that in mind, each script runs an average of 30–35 minutes long. There are a few shorter ones included as well.

As you know, practicing Yoga Nidra is soooooo relaxing and easy but facilitating effective Yoga Nidra classes can be really challenging. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes to teach an effective Yoga Nidra experience. Having a good Yoga Nidra script and taking a Yoga Nidra training could be very helpful.

First, to offer an effective Yoga Nidra experience you gotta know the essential principles of Yoga Nidra—what the entire practice is pointing to. A Yoga Nidra facilitator also needs to understand the Yoga Nidra Roadmap to understand how to put the pieces together in a cohesive way to help with transformation. Plus, a facilitator needs to understand the principles of Yoga Nidra well enough to be able to tailor the practice of Awareness to help someone with specific needs.

This is why I made a TON of Yoga Nidra scripts for you, including a booklet of over 100 pages of scripts as well as a free script and audio recording (below) so you can use effective scripts to help teach yourself and other, today.

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Online YOGA NIDRA TRAININGS!

Learn to write your own scripts AND teach Yoga Nidra from the power of your own voice and experience to meet the unique needs of your students. Receive over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts and the in-depth knowledge of how this incredible practice can be used to transform lives.

Make Your Own Yoga Nidra Scripts

I would love to teach you how to make your OWN scripts that help you make an impact for the world as well as making a living doing what you love, teaching Yoga Nidra. Are you interested in teaching Yoga Nidra?

I regularly hear from teachers who want to learn to teach Yoga Nidra but don’t want to be a rote version of their teachers. Also, teachers complain that that in order to learn how to write their own Yoga Nidra scripts that they have to wait for and PAY for the level 2 version of a Yoga Nidra training after they’ve already spent thousands on their initial training. That’s why I’ve created both a fantastic book of scripts as well as an online Yoga Nidra training to help you learn to write your own.

I believe that you will be most impactful to your students if you can teach from your own experience and voice, not as a rote version of your teacher. Having said that, reading someone else’s scripts can be very helpful, especially as you’re learning to find your own voice as a teacher.

Teaching Yoga Nidra

Learning to teach Yoga Nidra effectively from your own voice and learning to create your own scripts to meet the needs of your students does require understanding the basics principles of Yoga Nidra. When you understand the what and why of Yoga Nidra you’ll know how to use your practice, teaching, and life experience to be not only an effective teacher but and EXTRAORDINARY teacher, able to connect with students in ways that ONLY you can. Once you’ve been to the top of the mountain, you’ll know how to lead others there as well. Plus, I’ll teach you the industry secrets to actually make a living doing what you love.

Yoga Nidra Scripts Included in the Training!

“I thoroughly enjoyed your teaching and loved listening to all the deep teaching. The content was so thorough, and I have a much better understanding of the koshas now. I have learned so much-it is clear that you are very knowledgeable but also very passionate about what you do. So thank you for putting this training together. I wasn’t sure what to expect from an online training but I can safely say it was brilliant! I would recommend this to anyone wanting to learn Yoga Nidra. It was full of depth and sincerity which is what I liked most about it.”

— Sarah—Yoga Nidra Teacher Graduate

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Yoga Nidra Script: Basic Practice

Anamaya Kosha

by Scott Moore

10-15 minutes

Welcome to Yoga Nidra. Please lie down, close your eyes and prepare to relax. Give yourself a few breaths out your mouth and tell your body, mind, and heart to let go. If there is any way that you can prepare to relax deeper or more effectively, please do that now.

As we go through the process of Yoga Nidra, I invite you to welcome anything and everything that comes into your Awareness. From this point on, and through the duration of our Yoga Nidra practice, abandon all assessment of things and become the observer only.

Consider your intention or purpose for practicing Yoga Nidra. In your own mind, repeat, “My intention for practicing Yoga Nidra is . . .” and fill in the blank in your own head. Again, what is your intention for practicing Yoga Nidra? Repeat that to yourself in your own mind one more time

Now I invite you to relax 10% more than you’re currently relaxed. Relax your face. Relax your entire head. Relax your arms, your chest, belly, and back. Relax your pelvis and your legs. As we go through this process, don’t try to control your experience. Simply pay attention to my words and welcome, recognize, and witness everything that comes into your awareness without the need to change or fix anything.

Today we are going to explore sensations and feelings in our body to practice experiencing ourselves as Awareness.

Begin by noticing everything you are aware of in this moment. Notice sounds, smells, the temperature, etc. Notice also emotions, thoughts, and internal sensations. Simply welcome, recognize, and witness everything in your awareness, without any judgement, just awareness. Begin to identify as Awareness itself, Awareness manifesting itself in the form of body, thoughts, emotions, sounds, or anything you are aware of in this moment. Simply allow yourself to welcome, recognize, and witness all things as a way of experiencing yourself as Awareness.

Remember that sensations will come and go and will reveal your underlying Awareness. Be Awareness itself.

As Awareness, experience yourself as sensation. Follow my words as you become more aware of your body and as Awareness, allow yourself to become increasingly more relaxed. Bring your Awareness to the sensation of your mouth. Simply notice its presence. Welcome, recognize, and witness, the sensation of your mouth. Eyes. Ears. Entire face. Entire head.

Now feel the sensation of your neck and throat. Your shoulders. Arms. Feel your left arm as sensation, top to bottom. Feel your right arm, top to bottom. Left arm. Right arm. Feel both arms as sensation. Feel both arms at the same time.

Bring Awareness to the sensation of your trunk, your chest . . . feel your breathing . . . your belly, your back. Simply welcome, recognize and witness the sensation of your trunk. Simply notice its presence as Awareness.

Now bring Awareness to the sensations of your pelvis, the front, back and sides of your pelvis. Simply notice it as sensation. Simply welcome, recognize, and witness anything that arises spontaneously such as thought, emotion, or sensation.

Bring Awareness to the sensation of your legs. Feel your left leg, hip to toes. Feel your right leg, hip to toes. Left leg. Right leg. Left. Right. Now feel both legs, both legs as sensation.

Now feel the entire left side of your body, head to toe. Feel the entire right side of your body, head to toe. Left side. Right side. Now feel both sides. Feel your entire body.

Begin to feel as if your entire body is very large. Now adopt the feeling of being very small. Very large, again. Now small. Now adopt the feeling of being both large and small simultaneously. This does not need to make sense. Simply feel both large and small simultaneously.

What are you aware of in this moment? Sensations will come and go. In one moment, you may feel small and another large. What is the part of you that can be both small and large? Sensations reveal your unchanging, underlying, awareness.

Be Awareness itself. Become extremely aware of all things in this moment as Awareness itself. Simply welcome, recognize and witness all things in this moment as Awareness itself.

(optional additional Kosha exploration)

As Awareness, I invite you to begin to feel your body lying on the floor. Feel the sensations of your legs, feet, pelvis, trunk, arms, and head. As Awareness become acutely aware of the sensations in your hands and feet.

Now I invite you to remember your stated intention for practicing Yoga Nidra.

In a moment, we will be ending our Yoga Nidra practice. Because we have practiced experiencing ourselves as deep Awareness, you will find yourself moving back into your every-day life with clarity, purpose, and focus. You will find answers to your questions, and presence in your relationships. You’ll be more compassionate. You will feel less stress in your life and less reactive to stress. Through our practice of experiencing ourselves as Awareness, your life will feel richer and more vibrant.

In a moment, I will ring a bell (or count down from 5) and that will signal the end of our Yoga Nidra Practice. (Ring, or count). Yoga Nidra is over.

Yoga Nidra Workshop and Book-Signing Event

Yoga Nidra Book

In case you didn’t know, I wrote a book called Practical Yoga Nidra: A 10-Step Method to Reduce Stress, Improve Sleep, and Restore Your Spirit. and it just dropped in December. Coming back to the States after living in France, I was able to see my actual book for the first time only last week. I’m really proud of it and would love to celebrate with you. What better way to celebrate than with a 2.5-hr. Yoga Nidra experience. After we’ll pop the cork and celebrate. I’d love for you to come. Please contact 21st Yoga to register. Space is limited.

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Photo at The First Step House by Chris Noble

For over a year I volunteered to teach a yoga class once a week to a group of men at a place called The First Step House. This was an institution established for men who had just come out of jail and who needed a positive first step into managing a new life outside of prison. At the First Step House, these guys, many of whom were court-ordered to be there, would receive group therapy and courses about things like anger management, personal finances, and how to get a job. The director of this facility was a student of mine and felt yoga could be a great skill that these men could use. So she required everyone going though this program to receive at least 4 sessions of group yoga.

Uneasy Beginnings

I remember showing up on my first morning, sometime in the late spring or early summer. I left my wallet locked in my car not knowing how cautious I should be about people who had just left the Big House. I walked into the large red-bricked building, an old renovated church, past a fat calico cat who looked at me like he owned the place. Inside, it smelled like bleach, bacon grease, and coffee. There was a scruffy man wearing a camo jacket and heavy boots standing at a kitchen window placing an order to a uniformed cook for some eggs and pancakes. I mingled around until I found the director; she was debriefing the staff for the day’s events in her office. “Oh Scott!” she said enthusiastically. “Everyone, I’d like you to meet our new yoga instructor. He’s going to be teaching every Wednesday morning.” I was greeted with several polite hellos.

After the meeting, the director showed me around the class rooms, therapy rooms, the grounds, and the kitchen and even invited me to order food there whenever I wanted. Finally she led me to a group of about 20 men in a large meeting room, all shuffling and slouching, consumed in the practiced art of killing time before some institutionalized activity.

“Gentlemen!” Sabrina said in a loud and cheery voice that both commanded attention and simultaneously demanded and conveyed respect. “This is Scott, our new yoga instructor.”

There was a long moment of uneasy quiet as this group of men shifted their eyes skeptically between Sabrina and me, processing the bomb that had just been dropped on them: they were now going to be required to practice yoga. A few less-than-subtle curses skittered around the room to which Sabrina paid no attention and instead marched out of the room leading me and the curmudgeonly group in tow.

She led us to a large shed-like structure behind the main building. Inside, there was industrial carpet on the floor, a few small windows, some fluorescent lights, and several chairs arranged a circle. We all began stacking chairs, some still complaining loudly at the fact that they had to do “@#$%ing YO-GA!” Everyone was instructed to grab a mat and sit on the floor which they did, noticeably uncomfortable with tight hips, curved backs, and stiff knees, vestiges of long years of bodily neglect and abuse.

I looked around and saw that many of these men with their military tattoos, dog-tags, and post-Vietnam-era chic apparel were veterans. A pang of bitter realization washed through me. It was a feeling that in some ways this country had forgotten and neglected these people and that blindness resulted in one way or other processing these people into our prisons. Yes, these men had made their own decisions but I wondered how many of these choices had been made as the result of a broken soul, horrific memories, and an impossible sacrifice for a country that all but shunned them when they came back from the living nightmare of Vietnam or the Middle East. I saw men almost void of consciousness, desperately trying to just make it for one more day.

Not all of them were veterans. Some of these men had been drug dealers, woman beaters, thieves, cheats, deserters, liars, and addicts. I stood there and looked around the room at these cut-throat, busted sons of America. This was their next step. This was their second chance, or their third or fourth. It didn’t matter. They were there and so was I. And what we all shared in common was that we were going to do yoga together in some shed with industrial carpet and stacked chairs, under garish fluorescent lighting and try to see what could come of it.

I stood at the front of the class and introduced myself. I explained who I was, why I think yoga is cool, and that I also like jazz and running and reading. I told them that I didn’t like yoga that much at first and that it took me a while to understand it enough to really love it. I shared how much I love the way it makes my body feel and how valuable it is to me to keep my body healthy in order to be a good vehicle of my mind and heart. I shared how well I’ve come to know my inner-self through this practice. My definition of yoga was very simple: understanding Self through listening; a union of body, mind, and heart.

Fixing The Broken

My introduction over, I asked if anybody had any injuries that I could be aware of and spent the next 10 minutes listening to almost every person in the room explain something like an injured back, a shattered elbow, or broken foot. Yoga suggests that everything is connected and in my mind I wondered if these broken bodies were perhaps scars of deeper wounds.

I think something happened to me as I stood there and listened to them describe their injuries. My fears and prejudices melted away and I didn’t see ex-cons anymore, I saw hurt people. Aren’t we all just bodies with hearts and minds doing our best to know ourselves and this world? Aren’t we all just trying to mend and move forward? My nervousness subsided a bit and suddenly I found myself caught up with an excitement to be there, to offer something that we all could share, a way to connect, a way to heal, a way to simply feel good in our bodies and maybe find some inner peace. I shared a few jokes and anecdotes. This lightened the mood and greased the resistance a little.

Then we started the practice with a simple focus on our breath and some easy breathing techniques which caused a sputtering of coughs and gasps. We moved our bodies in cat-cow position on hands and knees and mobilized the spine. Together, we moved the body through some slow and gentle sun salutations. We mobilized shoulders, wrists, hips, neck, knees, and ankles. When we did supine pigeon pose to loosen up tight hips, you’d have thought it was a dungeon of hell with all the groans and curses through clenched teeth. But they were doing it. And whether they realized it or not, the intensity of stretching such tight muscles entered them into a very deep practice of mindfulness.

I believe that there is scarcely anything in the world that hones one’s attention like pigeon pose, any of its incarnations, applied to tight hips. Pigeon: the fast-track to enlightenment! We finished our session with a rest as I led them through a guided meditation. After, I taught them the meaning of Namaste, an honoring salutation that acknowledges the common goodness in all of us. I bowed to them, offered a Namaste, and even received a few timid Namastes in return.

Shared Light

That started my year-plus stint at The First Step House. There were several different groups of men at the First Step House. I would meet with the same group each Wednesday for four weeks then change groups. Invariably the first session of each new group started with the same curses and objections but just as predicable came the subsequent sessions marked more and more acceptance, even happy anticipation about the practice. Yoga was helping their bodies to feel better, helping their minds to be more focused, and their hearts to be more calm.

We grew to trust each other. I cherished their demonstrative respect for me, a respect that came easily once they got to know me. I stopped leaving my wallet locked in the car. I would come in to the center on Wednesday mornings and on my way back to the yoga shed, several of the men who had been in my previous groups would enthusiastically greet me with a hello and handshake or high-five. They followed my instructions and asked some great questions. Some admitted it, some didn’t, but almost everyone grew to really love the practice. I’ll never forget the sight and sound of these gruff dudes, sitting the best they could cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed in a squint and hands to heart, chanting the most gravely OOOOmmmm ever heard on this side of steel bars and razor wire.

Thanks to the First Step House, I learned a lot about yoga and teaching yoga. I learned that yoga can touch anybody. I learned that more than being a fantastic teacher, yoga itself is the teacher. I learned that the power of yoga lies in its current application to the situation and time at hand. I learned to offer this practice to people in a way that meets them where they are.

My classes at The First Step House were the only classes I’ve taught where I instituted a 10-minute smoke break in the middle of class; perfectly appropriate. I learned that no matter how broken you might be this practice puts you on a pathway toward wholeness

Thank you, First Step House for all that you taught me. Though I wasn’t paid money, The First Step House gave me deep riches of yogic knowledge, insight to teaching, and a profound personal connection.

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LUXURY YOGA RETREAT IN BORDEAUX, FRANCE

JUNE 13–19, 2020

Visualizing How To Do The Impossible

If you read my email yesterday, you’re aware that I’m getting ready for the new year and new decade that is going to start in about a week and that I'm kicking it off with my 31-Day Meditation Challenge.

We are in a very unique and crucial time: it’s the time to prepare to create what we want to see in the next year and decade. Have you ever heard the saying, “If you’re not sure where you want to go, any path will take you there.” Knowing what you want and what’s possible are some of the keys to our happiness and fulfillment. Visualization is a key way of manifesting what we want in our lives.

Meditation, particularly Yoga Nidra, is a great way to practice visualizing what you’d like to see manifest in your life. If you are like I was, you might be a little skeptical about the idea of visualizations to manifest what you’d like to see in the world. But after practicing visualizing regularly, I can tell you that there’s some incredible mojo in visualization. That shit works!

In part, visualization works because for your brain and beliefs, seeing is believing. Even your most straight-laced neuroscientist will tell you that our brains don’t discern reality, they merely interpret it. Much of what we accomplish happens because we believe it can. Here’s a great example...

31-Day Meditation Challenge

Starts January 1, 2020. Start your decade off right.

For a long time, nobody believed that a human being could run a mile 4-minute mile. Impossible, they said. Then on May 6th 1954 Roger Bannister proved them wrong. What’s crazy is that as soon as Bannister showed people that it could be done, people started doing it right and left. Countless other high-performers from movie stars to CEOs to world-class athletes use visualization as their not-so-secret power for stellar performance. Each one of them, from Oprah to Muhammad Ali, will tell you that seeing is believing.

What do you believe is possible for your future? Are there any self-limiting beliefs that might be sabotaging you from accomplishing your potential? Yoga Nidra is an excellent way tapping what's possible for you.

Live, Online Yoga Nidra

Join us! Sundays at 9 am MST

Below, you'll see a button where I’m offering a free visualization for the New Year Yoga Nidra, guided meditation practice, that you can use to help set you up for what’s sure to be your best year and decade to come. And consider joining me this Sunday for my live, online Yoga NIdra class where this week we will be doing a live session as I offer visualizations for the new year.

I also invite you to join my 31-Day Meditation Challenge, starting January 1, where you will get the opportunity to use this and other visualizations regularly to set the trajectory for what’s to come. See what possibilities can happen when you start your year off with a simple, daily meditation for 15 minutes or more.

We’ve got a new year and a new decade ahead of us. What do you want to see arrive in your future? Are you willing to try visualizing what is possible? Please consider joining my 31-Day Meditation Challenge and invite your nearest and dearest to join too.

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I also wanted to share with you an excerpt from my new book, Practical Yoga Nidra, about the importance of Visualizations. I wrote an entire chapter on the topic.

Visualizations are scenes you evoke in your mind by using your senses. Your Inner Sanctuary is a good example of a visualization. Visualizations work with your unconscious mind to adjust ideas of what’s possible and help you live a more fulfilled life with deeper Awareness. The truth is, many of our actions are the product of our unconscious mind, and as you learned earlier, our unconscious mind could even be responsible for 95 percent of the actions we take. Therefore, visualization is a powerful way to understand, decode, and even rewire your unconscious mind.

For most of us, seeing is believing. Remember how your brain doesn’t differentiate very well between what you’re visualizing and what’s happening in real life? If you can see yourself succeeding, you can remove the unconscious blocks that prevent you from meeting your potential. Trust me, you are much more capable than you realize. But while visualizations can give you this deep personal insight, that’s really not their function in our Yoga Nidra practice.

The purpose of visualization in this step of the 10-step method is to practice seeing all parts of yourself to gain Awareness. If in your Awareness through visualization you see that you could respond to some stimuli a bit better in your life, then great. That’s a wonderful by-product of Awareness. Revealing something about your unconscious or gaining a message from your wise inner teacher could, in fact, be that tool that helps you become more aware.

Not all teachers use visualizations in Yoga Nidra, and those who do have their own takes—some simply invite the conscious mind to notice how it responds to concepts and phrases. For example, if you were to ask 10 people what their immediate response to the word “businessman” is, there would be 10 different responses. This kind of visualization reveals what kind of associations you may have and perhaps show how they affect your waking life. Other types of visualizations in Yoga Nidra include graduated exposure to emotional triggers, connecting to spirit guides, noticing and rewiring beliefs around money, and visualizing optimal performance. I personally find visualizations effective in creating powerful action in a person’s life through the practice of Awareness.

What This Practice Does for You

Visualizations in a Yoga Nidra practice help create a conversation between your conscious and unconscious mind. Like your conscious, or thinking, mind, your unconscious mind rests in the Vijnanamaya kosha. A good question might be how the conscious mind can be aware of the unconscious—isn’t that the point, that it’s unconscious? In Yoga Nidra, we go beyond the thinking mind to gain an Awareness that is broad enough to hold both conscious and unconscious mind alike. Yoga Nidra is like a handy bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind so there can be understanding and commerce between the two.

So much of what you believe about what’s possible or what you deserve in the world comes from your unconscious. As you relax and graduate into deepening layers of Awareness through Yoga Nidra, you can reveal some of the unconscious programming that’s running your life. This can be very illuminating to help to decode some of your unconscious actions and decisions like, for example, why you can never take a day off work even if you’re sick or why you keep losing at Scrabble with your best friend even though you can spell the pants off them. I can’t tell you why you don’t think you deserve a day off or why you take a nosedive at Scrabble, but with continued Yoga Nidra practice, including visualization, you can gain some insight and put some positive programming into your unconscious mind.

Aiming for a seven-letter word on the triple-word score square? Have an important presentation to give at work? Want to nail your next job interview? Wondering if you could ever find the love of your life? Using visualizations is an easy and effective way to access or program your unconscious mind to bring your best self forward into conscious action. A lot of famous people have used visualization to bring their best selves forward, including Muhammad Ali, Will Smith, Jim Carrey, Billie Jean King, Oprah Winfrey, and Carli Lloyd, to name just a few. In an interview recorded in the Harvard Business Review, Greg Louganis chalks up his ability for success and focus during competition to his practice of visualization.

Maybe Olympic diving isn’t your focus in life and what you’d love more than a gold medal is to learn to sleep well. Visualization through Yoga Nidra is a very powerful and effective way to help you achieve incredible sleep. One day a student came into Yoga Nidra class with desperation in her bloodshot eyes. “I haven’t slept well in over six months and I’m going crazy. Can Yoga Nidra help that?” she pleaded. “You’re in the right place,” I assured her.

During practice, we visualized getting very relaxed and achieving deep, peaceful, and nourishing sleep. After class she told me that she did not fall asleep during the practice but was the most relaxed she had been in months. She came back to class a few days later and reported that on the night of that Yoga Nidra class, she’d been able to achieve the first good night of sleep in six months. This student is not alone. Unfortunately, inadequate sleep is very common, and something as simple as a visualization through Yoga Nidra is a natural and effective way to help

One you understand the principles of why visualizations work and how to use them, you can guide yourself through your own visualizations independent of your Yoga Nidra practice

Remember, all parts of your visualization are parts of yourself speaking to your conscious mind. During your visualization, you may encounter an archetype. An archetype is a character or general model for something. Archetypes exist in your unconscious as symbols. For example, often when I tap into the wise person inside of me, it takes the form of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. Gandalf is the archetype of my wise person and helps put a face to something otherwise abstract. I understand that when I visualize Gandalf offering me advice, I’m merely tapping my own deep inner wisdom, which is speaking to my conscious mind. All parts of the vision are parts of myself.

Once during a Yoga Nidra practice, I wanted to hear a message from my wise inner teacher. After fostering a deepening Awareness by going through the steps of my Yoga Nidra practice, like my Sankalpa, Inner Sanctuary, body scan, and so on, to connect to the teacher that resides in my deeper unconscious, I visualized one of my favorite professors from college. We were sitting in his office having a warm chat. I could clearly see all the elements—from the lamp in the corner to the wood grain of his desk. I could hear the chair squeak as he leaned back in thought and stroked his beard. Then he looked at me, almost mischievously out of the corner of his eye, and said, “Whatever you believe in, practice it every day.” For me, that visualization was my wise inner teacher reminding me of the importance of practice.

A Radical Start to 2020

Will You Do Something Radical With Me?

Once I was on my way to a yoga class, stressed out because life had totally thrown me a curveball and I was completely unprepared for class. I was traveling to class with a friend and complained out loud, “Life has been so crazy this week that I have done exactly zero planning for this class and I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to say to these people!” She turned to me and told me something life-changing. She said, “ I don’t know why you haven’t figured this out yet but people don’t come to your classes because of what you say. They come because of who you are.” I sat quietly absorbing her words for a moment before blurting out, “Well, who the hell am I?!”

Since that moment, through practice and deepening life events, I’ve started to discover a thing or two about myself, a journey that I’m sure will never end. So far, along the way, I’ve discovered something crucial about myself that might be obvious to you. I’ve discovered that, and I’m not overselling it when I say it, the secrets of the Universe lie not outside of us but inside of us and we all must learn to go inside to discover who we are to uncover them. In fact, one could sum up most practices like meditation and yoga as simply practices that un-layer all the things that obfuscate what’s already inside of us. They are practices that help us to come to know ourselves, and that when we know Self, we know the Universe.

To this end, each one of us is on a hero’s journey. Our destiny, similar to heroes like Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, is to ultimately discover that the secret to our power already exists inside of us, albeit perhaps in some latent, unrealized form. For us, we don’t need to fight Darth Vader or Lord Voldemort in order to discover who we truly are. Actually, what we must do to discover the truth is even more radical, more daring. We must be willing to sit, close our eyes, and journey inside. We must come to know ourselves through practices like meditation. I know, I know. For some of us, it would seem easier just to fight Lord Voldemort.

The world doesn’t need another Luke Skywalker or a Harry Potter. What the world desperately needs is for you to be your best self, totally alive and in love with the world.

Philosopher and theologian Howard Thurman said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Howard Thurman

We come alive when we come to know ourselves and share whoever that is with the world. Above the temple gates at the Oracle of Delphi is inscribed the immortal words: “Know thyself.” I can think of no better way to know yourself and come alive than through a regular, simple meditation practice.

This is the reason I’m hosting my 31-Day Meditation Challenge, starting January 1, 2020. It’s meant to join a group of people together to help all of us start this next year decade from a place of grounded Self-knowledge and to share in global responsiveness, to empower ourselves with visions of what’s possible in our lives for the coming year and decade, and ultimately to source and share our eternal essence: love. This challenge helps and encourages you to start a simple, daily meditation practice of 15 minutes or more, using any style of meditation you like. If you've done this challenge in the past, I'm offer all new materials!

When you join, I’ll give you plenty of styles you can choose from including many of my recorded Yoga Nidra practices where all you have to do is lie down, close your eyes, and learn to wake up. We’ll even have some live, group meditations. All month long, I’ll support you with emails and with encouragement and information.

This challenge is perfect both for the novice as well as the experienced meditator. The challenge costs $31 and as an incentive to complete the challenge, if you meditate every day for 15 minutes or more, you have the option to get a 100% refund of your tuition. This will be fun, engaging, and necessary.

Consider inviting other people who you’d like to be in your meditation tribe to join because hey, this is going to be a party and it’s nice to have a team for accountability and added encouragement.

Over the next 7 days, I’m going to be sending a few more emails that offer thoughts and ideas about the importance and some stunning statistics about meditation, all to hopefully encourage you to continue or start a regular and simple meditation practice.

Please join this radical meditation movement. Start this new year and decade with some grounded mindfulness. Please join my 31-Day Meditation Challenge.

Yoga Nidra for Sleep

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Yoga Nidra means the yoga of sleep. More appropriately, it’s about waking up than going to sleep. Here are some ways Yoga Nidra can help you sleep.

Let me elaborate…

Yoga Nidra for Sleep

Yoga is the yoking of all things into Oneness. NIdra actually refers to the hypnogogic state BETWEEN dreaming and wakefullness. It’s a bridge that connects consciousness, and unconsciousness, dreaming and waking, form and sprit. But appropriately named, its super power is relaxation which helps to guide practitioners into deepening layers of awareness to arrive a the beautiful marriage of form and spirit. True, Yoga Nidra is very relaxing and can even cause people to fall asleep during the process. If that happens, I always tell my students not to worry because the part that I’m speaking to is still paying attention.

While practicing Yoga Nidra, you may fall asleep, you may stay awake, but Yoga Nidra can be a great way to develop regular deep, natural, and nourishing sleep. One of the ways it does this is through simply bringing practitioners into a great sense of Awareness. Tantra philosophy (the school of thought where Yoga Nidra comes from) states that our True Nature is that of Awareness. If you can experience your True Nature through practices like Yoga Nidra, you’ll find yourself more whole. As you experience your True Self, that of Awareness, you find yourself experiencing the part of you that is synonymous with Source. There’s nothing you lack or need in this state. Therefore, when you approach yourself to Source (your True Self) then any apparent lack goes away. Yoga Nidra is perhaps my favorite (and most relaxing) way of connecting to Source. If sleep is something that is troubling you, getting clear with Source is a great way to get back on track.

I’ve always said that wellness is the byproduct of Awareness.

Since Yoga Nidra is about deepening your Awareness, it’s also true that your nature state is that of relaxed Awareness. This is a very common state of mind during Yoga Nidra. The relaxation part of Yoga Nidra is very useful to practice. It trains you to deepen your relaxation when you really need it, especially during times when you’re trying to sleep.

Often times, not getting good or regular sleep, or bouts of insomnia, are symptoms of other things such as imbalance in body, mind, or spirit. Your energy could be off. Your diet could be skewed. Your stress could be through the roof. Either way, if your sleep is lacking, it’s an invitation to look at your life. Yoga Nidra is a great way to do just this. The practice invites us to simply be the observer of things as they are and see our lives with as much objectivity as possible. Though practicing Yoga Nidra, you might discover an imbalance or a faulty belief that is preventing you from thriving in your life and which might manifest as sleeplessness.

Resting is a skill. Like all skills, you can be good at it or bad at it. Yoga Nidra is a way of practicing the skill of relaxing. It does this in part by deepening your layers of Awareness through the different layers of your ego called Koshas. You’ll experience paying keen attention to body, energy, mind, beliefs and archetypes, and even you layers of joy and bliss—all as ways of learning to misidentify with them and see how they point yo–––u to your True Self, that of pure Awareness. The process is very relaxing. Truly, you’ll experience your Both And nature, the part of you that is married as both consciousness and physicality combined. As you experience your Both And nature, you’ll find yourself simultaneously relaxing deeper and deeper while also becoming more aware.

Yoga Nidra helps you to simply welcome, recognize and witness without opinions. Often times we get worked up when we can’t sleep. We find ourselves not sleeping and then get stressed about not sleeping, increasing our anxiety and making it even harder to sleep. Yoga Nidra helps you practice allowing things to be just as they are, neither good nor bad, but witnessing whatever is as mere information. Even sleeplessness. You can rest blissfully in a sleepless state simply being curious about sleeplessness rather than getting worked up over the fact that you’ve got a big day tomorrow and it’s 2 am and you still haven’t fallen asleep. Also, it’s said that Yoga Nidra is the rest equivalent of 4x sleep, so 30 minutes of Yoga Nidra is like a solid 2-hour nap. Even if you’re not sleeping, you can rest assured that you’re still getting some great rest.

Some things to consider regarding sleep

Your mind is a processing machine. It’s a computer. The brain isn’t very good about distinguishing between real events, scenes it sees on a screen like a moving, and things it pictures as images in your mind. If you’re laying there in bed, replaying the horrible things that could happen tomorrow over and over again in your mind, your brain is releasing the same fight or flight chemicals it would if you were literally in that situation. Instead, you can use one of the tools I often use in Yoga Nidra to help people tap into the rest and digest part of the nervous system. Because our mind isn’t great about differentiating scenes in the mind vs. scenes in reality, you can visualize peaceful scenes and release the same rest and digest chemicals in your brain as if you were literally in that scene, experiencing all that bliss. You get to make your own bliss. You simply tap into your senses and visualize as if seeing through your own eyes, smelling with your own nose, hearing with your own ears, all the things you’d see in your oasis of peace. This will help you to begin to relax and stop sending cortisol (stress hormone) through your system when you should be going to sleep.

To help your mind wind down before bed, you can also simply find a focus. Because the brain is meant to process, give your mind something simple and singular to process before going to bed rather than defaulting to process the worst-case-scenario of could happen tomorrow. Start counting your breaths down from 100. Exhale and think 100, inhale think 99, exhale 98, etc. It’s incredible how easily your mind will relax when it can focus on something simple. This works miracles.

Good Sleep Hygiene

You may consider a few tips to help you train your body to receive regular, deep, and nourishing sleep.

• Develop a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Plan on a full 7–9 hours of sleep, even if you think you can get away with less.

• Have a bed-time ritual. Plan on winding down before bed and that means avoiding screens, big emotions, and drama before bed. Do some light reading with dim lights and some camomile tea.

• Avoid blue lights, fluorescents, and LED lights. All of these kinds of lights emit the kind of light that your body recognizes in sunlight and it messes up your circadian rhythm.

• Monitor your caffeine. You may think that caffeine is not causing you any problems but it can stay in your system for up to 48 hours and even if it doesn’t prevent you from falling asleep, it can prevent you from going into deep sleep, or staying asleep.

Please enjoy a free Yoga Nidra recording designed to help you practice getting relaxed and practice deep, peaceful and nourishing sleep.

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My Book Drops Today!!!!!

Today’s the day! I’m so thrilled. My publisher said that if everything goes as planned then my book would be published on December 10th. Well, everything has gone as planned and I’m so pleased to say that my book is LIVE!

So I’ve been talking about this for a while now but in case you have no clue what I’m talking about, I wrote a book called Practical Yoga Nidra: A 10-Step Method to Reducing Stress, Improving Sleep, and Restoring Your Spirit.

The publisher did a bang-up job on making it beautiful. I’m just so proud, I can’t even stand it! I really want to share it with you, and I’m even going to share with you an excerpt from the book, including a story about my dear, dear friend Kim Dastrup and her wonderful father and an unforgettable lesson he taught me about joy.

If you haven’t pre-ordered you book and are curious, you can get your copy on Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and other places fine books are sold. My publisher says that there might even be a chance that Audible will want to do an audio version of this book, which makes sense cuz it has over 20 scripts for guided Yoga Nidra meditations. The book only costs $12.99

If you want to give the gift of bliss for the holidays, perhaps consider buying a few of these and handing them out to your nearest and dearest and everyone in between. And hey, a great way to become a NYT Bestseller is to have every one of my friends go to every book store they know and simply purchase all my books (individually) you see on the shelves. Think of all the people you could make happy over the holidays with a CASE of these books.

Also, if you’re looking for ways to de-stress over the holidays, I’m so excited to announce that I’ve teamed up with the inimitable Rachel Posner, a teacher that I revere to co-teach a live, online class that will feature discussion, breathwork, poses, meditations, and journaling. This will be live and online on Tuesday, December 17th at 9 am MST. It costs $20 and we will be recording it so if you can’t make the time, you can watch the recording later. You can register for this at my website, scottmooreyoga.com. If you belong to my email list, I’ll be sending an email specifically about this workshop with more deets, or like I said run over to my website.

Thanks everyone for your wonderful support. I’ll finish by reading this excerpt from my book about one of the crucial steps in our Yoga Nidra practice which is to tap into joy.

Tap Into Joy

Tapping into your joy means practicing daily happiness and pleasure. It’s about learning to see the myriad things around you all the time that can cause you joy. However, your joy is not actually dependent on events and circumstances, and it’s accessible whenever you wish. In Yoga Nidra, joy is found beyond the mind. When you have the know-how, there is little or no effort to connect to this part of your being. Eventually, with practice, you won’t need a trigger to feel this joy. You’ll simply be joy. This limitless joy is your True Nature.

Despite whatever pain you may have experienced or whatever scars are on your heart, you have unfettered joy waiting to be dusted off. This joy is your essence. It has always existed the same way you have always existed. Learning to tap into the joy that is always with you opens your heart to inexhaustible prana, or energy. For example, in his audio program Clear Mind, Wild Heart, writer and poet David Whyte shares a story about a time when he felt utterly exhausted by his work for a nonprofit. He asked his friend Brother David Steindl-Rast (a Catholic Benedictine monk) half-jokingly, “What’s the antidote to exhaustion?” His friend looked at him for a moment and then responded with something Whyte found life-changing: “The antidote to exhaustion isn’t necessarily rest. It’s wholeheartedness.”

Whyte realized that, at that moment in his life, his heart was yearning for him to devote himself to poetry instead of the work he was doing for the nonprofit. From that moment forward, he started letting go of what didn’t tap into his joy so that he could put all of his energies into what did. Whyte has since become a world-renowned poet, speaker, and author. That’s not to say you need to give up the work you do, of course; you can begin tapping into joy by simply noticing when you smile or laugh, remembering what you love, doing the things you enjoy wholeheartedly, and of course practicing Yoga Nidra.

Learning to tap into your limitless joy can be fun and easy. It’s the momentary joys in life that reveal your unchanging joy, the feeling of your True Self. Make it a regular practice to notice the things you love about life. You have an immense power to create or interpret your reality, and focusing on what brings you joy and what you want to see in your life is key to feeling in love with life.

If you adopt a Hobbesian approach to life, that it is “nasty, brutish, and short,” you’ll find endless proof to support that view. But if you adopt an It’s a Wonderful Life approach, you’ll find just as

much proof.

If you get to create your reality, why not make it as beautiful as possible by noticing all of its joy, love, and sensuality? As you allow joy, love, and sensuality to become regular features in your life, you’ll soon find that your entire life becomes an expression of this joy. Doing this regularly will also prime you to invite these elements into your Yoga Nidra practice.

What This Practice Does for You

Your complete happiness and sensuality lie within the subtle layer of your being called the Anandamaya kosha (the bliss body). This kind of joy isn’t momentary happiness that comes and goes; rather, it is the unlimited bliss you experience as your True Self. However, learning to witness life’s momentary joys helps prepare you to feel your True Self’s natural state of limitless joy. As I mentioned in chapter 3, the mind makes little distinction between what plays out on a screen, in your mind, or in real life. Your brain doesn’t differentiate between what’s real and imagined, so visualizing what makes you happy can have the same effect as actually experiencing it.

While our True Nature is joy, ironically, we have been programmed to be pretty negative. In fact, humanity’s survival may very well have depended on it. Think about it: You’re less likely to jump into a shallow lake if you think you might hit jagged rocks at the bottom. Therefore, finding your joy through Yoga Nidra and similar practices is a process that essentially rewires the brain from its negative default to inhabiting our birthright to be unfailingly happy. It’s the kind of happiness you don’t have to wait around for. No one’s going to give it to you, and it’s not tied to any event. Like it or not, no one and nothing is responsible for your happiness. You must decide to see what is joyful around you and make it a regular practice to invite joy into your life.

Several years ago, my friend Kim’s dad, Warren, suffered a serious spinal cord injury. He’s confined to a wheelchair, has very limited movement in his arms and legs, and requires daily help from nurses, especially after his wife and caretaker passed away. A while back, Kim and I were staying at Warren’s house along with Kim’s sister and two daughters. Warren and I were sharing a room, and as we were tucking into our beds, he began to muse about how many of his friends enjoy luxuries like big houses, boats, and cars. With tears in his eyes, he said, “You know, when I see my daughters and my granddaughters, I can’t help but feel like I’ve won in life. I’ve won!” Warren sat there in the dark with a wide grin on his face. He didn’t say a thing about any of the challenges that beset his life and chose only to see the joy.