Daring to Rest

by Karen Brody

  For R., women, and humanity.

  If you close your eyes,

  you will see far.

  KENYAN PROVERB

  CONTENTS

  Dear Sister

  Introduction

  The Foundation

  1Why Rest Is So Important for Women

  2Welcome to Yoga Nidra

  3The Daring to Rest Program

  PHASE ONE Rest

  4Intention: Aligning with Your Heart’s Desires

  5Body: Feeling Grounded, Relaxed, and Safe

  6Energy: Welcoming Back Your Life Force

  PHASE TWO Release

  7Mind: Letting Go of Burdens

  8Wisdom: Becoming the Witness of Your Life

  9Bliss: Knowing Everything Is Okay

  PHASE THREE Rise

  10Lead: A New Model of Embracing All of You

  11Life: Daring to Rest Forever

  EPILOGUE Final Yoga Nidra Pompom Shake

  Gratitude

  APPENDIX 1 Scripts for Daring to Rest Yoga Nidra Meditations

  APPENDIX 2 Your Daring to Rest Toolbox

  Notes

  Recommended Reading

  About the Author

  About Sounds True

  Copyright

  Praise for Daring to Rest

  DEAR SISTER,

  Welcome. I wrote this book for you as an invitation to improve your well-being and dream big using yoga nidra, a meditative practice that can help you realize true, deep rest. Through these pages, you can discover your path back to whatever your heart desires, including better sleep, clarity of mind, loving relationships, and the courage to make a difference in the world. I wrote this book to help women get some much-needed rest, reclaim their radiant nature, and lead at home and work from a more peaceful place. I felt called to share with you a meditation technique that is both practical and life changing and that will help you give birth to anything in your life from a well-rested place.

  I could speak for days and months and years about yoga nidra meditation. Why? Because yoga nidra transformed my life, and I have seen it, again and again, in some way, change the life of every woman it touches. Yoga nidra combines what I feel are two key components women need in their lives: a well-rested body and a deep connection to one’s soul. A well-rested, healthy body helps the soul fulfill its purpose.

  This book shows you how to make peace an inside job. I am convinced that if more women (and men) practiced yoga nidra, we would create a more peaceful world because we would all be more at peace with ourselves. We would all sleep better. We would prioritize being good to ourselves. We would stop chronically burning out, and if we did burn out, we would quickly forgive ourselves, chuck “perfect,” and reboot. We would bravely tell the untold stories wanting out of our heads and finally release story lines that no longer serve us. We would lead more companies and feel more confident and creative, doing it our way instead of how it’s always been done (which isn’t working for women, by the way). We would model to our children how to not be afraid of the dark—within us or outside of us.

  My first yoga nidra teacher, Robin Carnes, always ended her yoga nidra meditation sessions with the words, “Yoga nidra is a service of love we give to ourselves and all others. It mentors us into an understanding of our true nature, and it shows us that when we serve ourselves, we serve all others; when we serve others, we serve ourselves.”

  This is the spirit from which this book is being offered to you. May this book help you be good to yourself, rest well, heal, lead, be wildly creative, and stand in your full power. May it also help you recover a deep sense of peace within and then go spread peace to others.

  The time is now to take back rest.

  Let’s do this—together.

  With love and shaking my yoga nidra pompoms,

  Karen

  INTRODUCTION

  Fifteen years ago, I was a young mom with two active boys under the age of two. My older son slept so little and cried so much that for over a year we ate every meal with the vacuum cleaner on just to keep him calm. Living with so much tension and so little sleep made me feel and act crazypants. My everyday thoughts included things like, “What day is it?” and “Oh, was that a curb I just drove over?”

  I had been a confident young woman, and I had lots of experience as a leader. But once sleep deprivation and chronic stress hit, my confidence sank to an all-time low. “Who am I again?” and “All I want to do is sleep” became my mantras. That’s when a family legacy of panic attacks kicked in unexpectedly, in my local supermarket, and I began taking anti-anxiety pills.

  “I’m fine,” I told everyone. It made sense that I would be constantly exhausted and full of panic. For a mom in this situation, there was no other way to be, right?

  Turns out I was wrong. There was another way.

  I found it by accident when I wandered into my local yoga studio. As I read through the class choices, I heard a voice echoing in the hallway. Attracted to its energy, I walked toward the voice and found twenty or so women lying on the floor with blankets over them, looking blissed out. The woman at the front desk told me it was a yoga nidra class.

  “What are they doing?” I asked her.

  “I guess you could say they’re doing nothing. It’s like taking a yogic nap.”

  She explained that yoga nidra is “the art of conscious relaxation” and said it is also known as “the sleep of the yogi.” I was already familiar with meditation, though I hadn’t meditated in years, and what she described sounded like a kind of meditation, but one I could do lying down instead of sitting up. I signed up for the class immediately.

  A week later, I stood at the classroom door, took a deep breath, walked in, and lay down. To be honest, even though I had years of experience in meditation, I wasn’t looking to meditate or even “consciously relax.” I was just desperate to lie down and get some rest.

  What I got was the best rest of my life. It also turned out to be the first step on my journey to feeling like myself again—my truest, most powerful self.

  Right away my weekly yoga nidra sessions felt deeply restorative in my physical body. My nervous system was no longer permanently on high alert, and I felt rested for the first time in a long while. But suddenly there was more. As I continued practicing yoga nidra, something began to tug at my core. A portal was opening. At times my heart would flutter, making me wonder, What is this new thing wanting to emerge? I was being nudged to take a close look at my “fine” life and make some changes.

  At the same time, there was a part of me hollering, “Curl back up to fine!” The temptation to not change a thing in my busy life, and to not rest, was looping through my mind most days for a few months or so after I began practicing yoga nidra meditation regularly. I loved it, and yet every Friday at noon, when my yoga nidra class met, I had a long list of excuses to not lie down. Shifting lifelong patterns can be a one-step-forward, one-step-back dance, but over time, the yoga nidra magic kept calling me back, and I gave myself permission to rest more, slow down, and not live in the “fine” zone.

  As I began to feel well rested, I tapped back into my own internal rhythm, something I had neglected for a long time. Every time I lay down to practice yoga nidra, I felt the weight of all I was doing, and it became clear that I was stressed. And from a deep, meditative space connected to my natural rhythm, I was led to solutions to my stress. Everything that had felt urgent began to feel less urgent. I began to clear nonessential things from my schedule, and the sense of freedom from my to-do list was intoxicating. I started unplugging from the computer before dinner and didn’t go back afterward, so I could focus on my family and myself and then wind down before bedtime and get a good night’s sleep. I didn’t call friends back during the week—only on weekends, when
I could go for a relaxing walk while talking. I said no to anything that made me feel out of rhythm, like unessential family travel or too many weekend activities.

  Soon after I made yoga nidra an ongoing priority, my panic attacks disappeared. I realized that my family history did not have to become my reality, and in that first year of practicing yoga nidra meditation, I was able to stop taking anti-anxiety medication. It wasn’t easy to stop the medication, but practicing yoga nidra showed me that I could do it—that feeling calm and free was my birthright. Slowly, as I continued practicing yoga nidra, I began to connect back to all the original dreams I’d had as a young girl, like wanting to write. I released a big story I’d been telling myself for years: that a dyslexic who wasn’t allowed to take an English class in college couldn’t write. During yoga nidra, I kept hearing a whisper from my soul to “screw that story and write a play.” So I wrote a successful play called Birth, which came straight from my soul. Yoga nidra reminded me that storytelling is in my bones, and if we don’t follow the wisdom in our bones, a part of us dies. It also showed me how deep rest and stillness could profoundly improve my health and leadership. I didn’t have to spend years as a worn-out woman, thinking this was a badge of honor or just the way you’re supposed to feel as a mother. After this, there was no turning back to just “fine.”

  What About You? Are You Just “Fine”?

  If you’re a woman in today’s high-paced modern world, there’s a good chance you feel like I did all those years ago. Maybe, like me, you’ve been listening to the conventional wisdom for a long time: All mothers are tired. All women who work are crazy busy. Being tired all the time is normal. Maybe, like me, you tell yourself and others that you’re fine, not realizing that fine is often code for “my life isn’t going well.” It’s easy to think worn out is normal because the worn-out woman model is the dominant model for women in our culture. Have you noticed how our culture loves women achievers, even if they’re exhausted every step of the way to the top?

  Maybe you’ve tinkered around with empowerment tools and the latest health advice: Exercise more. Eat leafy greens. Drink more water. Buy supplements. No, you’ve got to get the “right” supplements. Try probiotics. While these things often help when combined with rest, on their own, they typically aren’t solutions. They’re just stopgaps helping a tired body keep going a little more, and you’re sucked back into exhaustion again when confronted with the daily demands of life and not enough time.

  Maybe, like I was, you’re taking some type of medication to help you feel better or sleep better. Maybe you’re thinking, “I don’t have the time for rest” or “How can rest really make a huge difference?” Maybe you’re wondering if daring to rest is worth the risk.

  If any of this sounds familiar, I invite you take stock of your life now. Review any current physical, mental, and emotional health issues, including the red flags you may have been ignoring for years, and then ask yourself, “Am I thriving?” Not just living, not just fine, but really thriving? Are you really the woman you want to be and that you know you could be, if you were operating at full power? Do you feel healthy? If the answer is no, how could deep, nourishing rest help you thrive? Is it worth the risk?

  I wrote Daring to Rest and created the Daring to Rest program to help women give up the all-too-familiar worn-out woman paradigm and replace it with an urgently needed, well-rested one. What I’m offering you in this book is a rest program that will help you reboot your health and your life so that you can begin dreaming big and leading from a well-rested place. I will reteach you how to rest deeply and then use this as fuel to live your life from a more peaceful, authentic, and purposeful place.

  The world needs you and what you have to offer. But it needs the fully alive, well-rested you, not the exhausted you. Imagine a world where women make rest and rhythm a priority and operate more from their full power. That’s the new daring-to-rest world you’re about to enter.

  Daring to Rest: The Program

  After experiencing firsthand the profound changes yoga nidra can lead to, I became an uncharacteristically enthusiastic yoga nidra cheerleader. Years after I started practicing, I realized that yoga nidra made my heart sing, and I sought out training in two different yoga nidra methods. From there, I developed Bold Tranquility, a company dedicated to showing worn-out women their way back to deep rest and their purpose through the benefits of yoga nidra meditation.

  This book will lead you through the Daring to Rest program, in which you practice yoga nidra meditation for forty days in order to break the cycle of fatigue, feel healthy again, and reconnect to your soul’s calling—the woman you are when you’re not completely, constantly exhausted.

  The yoga nidra meditations will teach you how to step into a deeply restful, timeless state that relaxes your body and helps you feel physically rested. But physical exhaustion is just the first layer of exhaustion. If it were the only layer, then just getting more sleep or sleeping better would resolve fatigue. Yoga nidra meditation helps you clear the burnout you’re experiencing at the deeper, subtler levels of your being so that you can feel rested and whole again on not just the physical body level, but mental, emotional, and spiritual levels as well.

  Chapter one explains what real rest is (Hint: It’s not just another self-care activity) and why it is so important for modern women. Chapters two and three provide you with everything you need to know about yoga nidra meditation and how the Daring to Rest program works.

  Then the second, third, and fourth sections of the book lead you through the forty-day program’s three phases:

  “Phase One: Rest” addresses physical exhaustion.

  “Phase Two: Release” addresses mental and emotional exhaustion.

  “Phase Three: Rise” addresses the “life-purpose exhaustion” that typically arises when we are not operating at our full power.

  At the end of the Rise phase, I will show you how to incorporate yoga nidra meditation and other principles and practices from this book into your life, so you can continue to make rest a priority—because a well-rested lifestyle is forever.

  Please note that while the program is forty days, it takes into account real life and gives you permission to not practice some days—because chucking perfect is a much-needed skill for well-rested women too.

  In addition to the yoga nidra meditations themselves, I offer complementary practices in each chapter, from writing to movement to harnessing your power to access intuitive guidance. Women are multidimensional, so often the way into healing varies from woman to woman. Pick and choose what suits you.

  Throughout the book, I share some of my stories and the stories of women I’ve worked with in my programs, hoping they provide you with guidance, assurance, and awareness on your journey. Many of the women’s names have been changed, and some stories are composites to capture the essence of the teachings. I’m deeply grateful to every woman who bravely said yes to sharing her story. The protective mama in me asks you to deeply listen, respect their truths, and feel into (or “think with your heart”) how they relate to your truth.

  Since I’m an enthusiastic yoga nidra cheerleader, I will be shaking my yoga nidra pompoms throughout this book, not just because yoga nidra helped me go from an exhausted, worn-out woman to a more well-rested woman, and not just because I’ve seen it do the same for other women, but also because I know that on a deep, cellular level, yoga nidra heals many dimensions of ourselves and infuses us with unspeakable courage in all areas of our lives—courage to give ourselves permission to rest, and more. When you lie down with yoga nidra, you are guided into stillness, and it’s through discovering this inherent stillness in yourself that you find freedom.

  Now, my dear Sister, it’s time to lie down and begin the journey to waking up.

  THE FOUNDATION

  1

  WHY REST IS SO IMPORTANT FOR WOMEN

  You probably don’t need to be convinced how important it is to rest. You know you’re exhausted, stressed out, an
d frazzled. And you’re not alone. Consider these statistics:

  •In a 2014 report by the National Sleep Foundation, 24 percent of women said they had woken up feeling well rested for zero of the past seven days.1

  •Women have more insomnia and higher depression levels than men.2

  •The number of women aged 20–44 taking medications for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) increased 264 percent between 2001 and 2010.3

  Do you truly think that the number of women having problems with focus and attention suddenly jumped for no clear reason? Of course not. This dramatic rise in medication use is our cry for help. Add to this the high numbers of women taking medication for depression—in one survey, 23 percent of all American women between the ages of 40 and 59—and one thing is clear: women are out of rhythm.4 And how do you come back into rhythm? Rest. What if the inexpensive treatment of rest could give women their lives back?

  Sleep specialist Rubin Naiman, PhD, says, “Buddhist philosophy teaches that depression results from excessive activation that is not properly balanced by rest.”5 By “activation,” he means that nonstop doing keeps our sympathetic nervous systems on high alert all the time. This Buddhist take on depression makes sense when I think of many of the women I support: They’re very busy and rarely rest. Many are on multiple medications, and most feel significantly better—and quite a few are virtually cured of insomnia, anxiety, and depression—once they consistently practice yoga nidra meditation. You can be busy, and even occasional stress is okay and quite normal, but you must balance it with rest and relaxation—otherwise, it’s a recipe for burnout.

  What if, instead of putting women on medication or telling us to cure our health issues with a checklist of ten steps, we put them on an intense rest program first and then supported their unique needs as they began to feel whole again? What if rest could teach us the holy grail of womanhood: chucking perfect? And what if resting and restoring flow in our bodies, minds, and spirits is the key to more effective, sustainable women’s leadership? This is why I created the Daring to Rest program. I want you to try rest as a remedy. I want you to feel how deep rest can change your life. Now, with this program, any woman can easily plug in to rest for forty days and see how it begins to change her life.