by Karen Brody
3
THE DARING TO REST PROGRAM
Imagine spending forty days to reboot your system on physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and energetic levels and, in doing so, laying the groundwork for a well-rested life moving forward. This is the goal of the Daring to Rest program: to create an oasis for you to break the cycle of fatigue and, from a well-rested place, to gain the courage to lead a life full of purpose.
Three Phases: Rest, Release, Rise
The program is divided into three phases, reflecting the three key Daring to Rest principles. These principles, the heart of the Daring to Rest philosophy, will guide you throughout the program. I also think of them as the three layers of exhaustion women hold. Through yoga nidra meditation, and other optional practices, the Daring to Rest program helps you shine awareness and effectively clean up each layer of exhaustion.
Rest: Physical exhaustion. The first layer of exhaustion we explore is in the body and our energetic field, because exhaustion often feels physical. If you don’t get enough rest, your body will be tired. The emphasis during this phase is to deeply relax and start sleeping better. Rest is always the first step to wellness. It is essential in good health and sleep, and for women, it’s an opportunity to reconnect to our desires, regulate our cycles, and shed physical exhaustion.
Release: Emotional exhaustion. The second layer of exhaustion is emotional. Have you been holding on to feelings and thoughts that no longer serve you? You’re not alone. This is common, which is why during this phase, simply by practicing yoga nidra meditation, you will begin to release self-defeating emotions and thoughts such as the feeling of not being enough or anger that’s turned into rage. You’ll experience how yoga nidra meditation helps you release these exhausting emotions and thoughts, and you’ll unleash a wild part of your nature that’s been yearning for your attention. (Yes, major pompom shakes!)
Rise: Life-purpose exhaustion. Not following your life purpose? Don’t even know what it is? Yep, that’s exhausting. In this final phase, I show you how to take your yoga nidra meditation into the real world and be a well-rested leader. Most women don’t lead to become rich; we lead to fulfill our purpose on the planet. Our leadership may include financial abundance, but typically money is not what ultimately fuels us. If you’re not feeling full of purpose, this final phase will help clear that exhaustion. It will get you on track to a fully rebooted and well-rested life after you’ve finished the program.
Key Features of the Daring to Rest Program
Whether you have practiced yoga nidra before or not, there are some defining features of the Daring to Rest program that make this a unique yoga nidra experience. Here are a few important details you should know before getting started.
Yoga Nidra Meditations
I’ve created three custom yoga nidra meditations for the Daring to Rest program, one for each phase:
Phase One: Rest Meditation
Phase Two: Release Meditation
Phase Three: Rise Meditation
You can download my recordings of all three, free, from the Daring to Rest page on the Sounds True website: SoundsTrue.com/daringtorest/yoganidrameditations. Simply load them onto your smartphone or MP3 player, turn the meditation on, lie down, and rest.
You can also record the yoga nidra meditations on your own, using the scripts and instructions provided in appendix 1, at the back of the book.
Soul Whispers
In the Daring to Rest yoga nidra meditations, I prompt you to listen for a soul whisper every time you practice yoga nidra. Why? Because one of the biggest reasons we stay worn out is a chronic disconnection from our souls. The soul is the seat of your true power; it’s where your internal power switch resides and reminds you that you are endowed with all the resources to succeed. This program is about turning on that power switch, which is why I want you to track your soul whispers for the forty days. Soul whispers give us clues to how we’re really feeling under the “busy” coats we wear every day.
Finding your soul whisper takes only a minute or two at the end of yoga nidra meditation. You’ll breathe in through your heart, imagine your breath guiding you to an area of your body, and then see if there is a word, image, or phrase that appears. After you finish your meditation, write down what you received. If you get nothing, that’s okay; write down the word nothing. The important point is to let yourself be led to your soul whisper through feeling, not thinking.
I ask you to listen for your soul whisper at the end of yoga nidra meditation because yoga nidra takes you deep into your inner world, where you can clearly hear the voice of your soul, and this gives you a better understanding of what you are feeling and your true heart-based desires. For many of us, it’s not easy to hear a soul whisper in our everyday lives. With practice, you’ll be able to tap into your soul whisper anywhere, but the ideal place to start listening to this whisper is at the end of yoga nidra meditation because yoga nidra is a pointer back to your soul.
Power Centers
As explained in chapter two, yoga nidra meditation guides you through what are known as the five bodies: the physical body and four bodies of subtle energy that encase your soul in layers. In each of the three Daring to Rest yoga nidra meditations, I also guide you to specific power centers. In Sanskrit, these energetic power centers are known as chakras. The seven major power centers follow a path from your root (base of your spine) to the crown of your head. They are centers of transformation that turn psychophysical energy into spiritual energy, enabling you to feel whole. Focusing on these power centers gives you a way to focus on different areas of your body while you practice yoga nidra meditation. When attempting to release blocked energy from your five bodies, it’s helpful to work with the related power centers, both during yoga nidra and in your everyday life, as they help bring peace and balance.
A Touchstone
When you start practicing yoga nidra, you begin to clear emotions and thoughts that you’ve spent a lifetime identifying with but that no longer support your well-being. As a result, you might experience “detox” symptoms similar to the physical symptoms we experience when doing an internal cleanse. Emotional and mental detox symptoms can range from crying to simply being more aware of feeling than usual because the worn-out woman often gets quite good at numbing herself to feeling.
To help you navigate such symptoms over the next forty days, I want you to find a small object, a touchstone. You can keep it beside you when you practice yoga nidra meditation, or hold it in your left hand (your feminine side). Many women use objects from nature, like a small shell they found on vacation on the beach or a stone from their favorite hiking trail. Others use touchstones that have more literal meaning, like a special ring from a deceased grandmother or a crystal. You can place your touchstone on different body parts while you practice yoga nidra meditation; I’ll tell you more about this in each chapter. You can also keep your touchstone in your pocket or purse, put it on an altar in the room where you practice yoga nidra, or put it in another special place to touch whenever you feel the worn-out woman returning. This touchstone will reconnect you to your well-rested woman and a feeling of safety in the body.
The majority of people who practice yoga nidra don’t feel intense emotions at all. In fact, they feel exactly the opposite: they feel calmer than ever. If that’s the case for you, it’s still important to use your touchstone because it reminds you, when your worn-out woman wants to come back in, that everything is going to be okay. I remember when a woman in the Daring to Rest program told me that she was on her own on an airplane with her four kids, and her youngest was screaming from the time they boarded the plane. It was horrible, but she told me that the moment she took out her touchstone, her energy shifted, and she remembered, “Oh yes, I am okay.” Your touchstone helps you hear your well-rested woman, connecting you to that calm yoga nidra voice that knows everything is going to be okay.
How Your Forty Days Will Go
Your primary instruction throughout the forty-d
ay Daring to Rest program is to practice yoga nidra meditation every day and listen for your soul whisper. Ideally, I would like you to listen to the Daring to Rest meditations I’ve created for this program because they are designed specifically to complement the content of the chapters. If you have a different yoga nidra meditation you prefer listening to, go ahead, but please be sure to spend a minute or two listening for your soul whisper on your own at the end of the meditation and then track it in a journal.
As you move through this book, here’s how the forty days will break down:
Chapters four through eleven guide you through the Daring to Rest program. Each chapter focuses on different themes, the five bodies, and each chapter offers additional, optional practices you can use to supplement the yoga nidra meditations and customize your Daring to Rest experience.
At the end of each chapter, optional prompts invite you to dive deeper into the themes of the chapter. You can respond to these prompts with freewriting (described below under “Keep a Journal”), discussing them in a group, or through movement. Choose a prompt that speaks to you. To begin your response, put your hand over your heart; take a slow, deep breath; repeat the prompt; and then begin writing, talking, moving, or responding in your own way.
I encourage you to move through your forty-day journey chapter by chapter and not jump ahead or follow instructions out of order. You can read through the entire book first if this helps motivate you, but then do the program in order without skipping any instructions. So, you’ll read one chapter, practice yoga nidra meditation for five days, and then move on. In each phase, you will increase the amount of time you listen to yoga nidra meditation.
Tips for Successfully Completing the Program
While practicing yoga nidra meditation is simple and easy to do, the reality is, we lead busy lives. The women who have the most success with the Daring to Rest program intentionally create space in their lives to make it happen. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of the program.
Schedule it. Decide when you will practice yoga nidra meditation and put it on your calendar for the next forty days. The best time to practice is when it’s the most convenient for you, but many women like to practice in either the morning, upon waking, or just before bed. Write it down. I even tell women to write “physical therapy” in their calendars if this will help them take rest more seriously. If you can, build in fifteen minutes before and after your yoga nidra practice for any complementary practices like journaling or for transition time.
Set up a designated space to rest. While you can practice yoga nidra virtually anywhere, and you don’t need any fancy props, when you are at home, it is ideal to have a specific place to rest. This is your rest cave. It’s a quiet place where you can drop the worn-out woman. It is also a fertile place where you can give birth to things—new ideas, new plans, and new yearnings. Be creative with your rest cave. Some women string lights to turn on after yoga nidra to journal. Others use a special blanket.
Create a rest altar. An altar gives you a place in your home where you can honor rest, come back to your center, and welcome your well-rested woman. This altar is where you can put meaningful items like your touchstone, any essential oils you may choose to use with your yoga nidra practice, a journal for recording your soul whispers, or any other object that sings to your heart. Your rest cave, or wherever you typically will practice yoga nidra meditation, is a great place for an altar. You can also use a beautiful tray as your altar and move it around your home.
Keep a journal. From tracking your soul whispers to responding to the optional prompts in each chapter, a journal keeps your notes from your Daring to Rest journey in one place. This is where you can do any optional freewriting. To freewrite, first choose to write for either three minutes or three pages, and then keep your hand writing the whole time. If you cannot think of anything to write, then write “nothing,” or write your current soul whisper again and again until you do have something to write. This is intuitive writing—the key is to get out of your head, let yourself be “wild,” and write anything, even if it surprises you.
Get your family on board. One of the biggest obstacles to success is a family that is unwilling to give you the space to rest. Before you start the program, tell them you’re making this forty-day commitment and ask for their support to protect your time to rest. If you have young kids and can’t figure out how to rest with them home, find them care outside the home or ask another mom to do a childcare swap. (For more tips for practicing yoga nidra when you have young children, see the “Frequently Asked Questions” section in chapter two.)
Chuck perfect. Women always ask me, “What if I miss a day during the forty-day program?” Do I have to go back to the beginning? No. You chuck perfect and keep going. Don’t skip the activities for the day you missed; just continue with the program right where you left off on the day you begin again. Ideally, you’ll need to miss or skip only a day or two, for special events or emergencies. So you will practice forty days of yoga nidra meditation, but it may take you forty-five days.
“Chuck perfect” is the motto this program lives by. Perfectionism has held women back and burnt us out for centuries. This program is not about doing it perfectly, but about making a deep commitment to be good to yourself. That doesn’t mean you should finish the forty days in six months—that’s not the kind of chucking perfect I mean. Chucking perfect is giving yourself permission to not rest for a day or two if you need to skip it, but then picking yourself back up soon after and getting back to a program that is designed to support your well-being.
Your Peaceful Oasis
How can this program create permanent shifts in your life? I will show you throughout this book, but very simply, yoga nidra helps you attune to your aliveness. It reminds you of what’s important and gives you the courage and energy to stand in your purpose and remember that you are whole. You are enough. Yoga nidra is like hopping on a cruise ship to wholeness.
The women who immerse themselves in the Daring to Rest program understand this in every nerve and cell of their bodies and minds, and they take their wholeness back into the world in action-oriented ways as well-rested women. The model of the worn-out woman isn’t an option anymore, or at least not for long, because after women complete this program, they know in their hearts that they don’t want to live their lives as worn-out women. Worn out is clearly unsustainable. That’s why the Daring to Rest program will affect all areas of your life, from work to home. As a mother from Montreal told me, yoga nidra is her “peaceful place,” her “oasis” to go to. I encourage you to think of yoga nidra meditation this way too, as your peaceful oasis that you will get to visit regularly over the next forty days. You deserve this, Sister.
Phase One
REST
Permission to rest is granted.
Sleep specialist Rubin Naiman, PhD, points out, “Rest is a universal and critical ingredient in virtually all approaches to healing.”1 Yet today it’s rare to meet someone who rests when they get sick, let alone when they’re simply tired. Instead of lying down and doing nothing when we’re exhausted, we try to do one more something—get more exercise, meet a friend for dinner, work late.
After just one time practicing my new yoga nidra nap, I saw this “do something” mind-set for what it truly is: bizarre. What crazy person doesn’t rest when they’re tired? I put my kids down for a nap every day to keep them from feeling exhausted. Why not me? Why was I grabbing for so many remedies, even healthy remedies like high-powered yoga workouts and green smoothies, to rescue me when rest was the most obvious remedy? Why don’t we just rest when we’re tired?
When you begin daring to rest with yoga nidra, the most immediate result you will feel is complete physical restoration of your body. The first time I practiced yoga nidra, it felt as if my body had caught up on all the sleep I’d been missing from the previous week. Lying there, under my blanket in the yoga studio, I began to deeply unwind, perhaps for the first time ever. In late
r sessions, I would be so relaxed at the end that sometimes I’d wake with a tear in my eye. Could I really feel this peaceful?
People laugh when I tell them I help women feel well rested. “Can you teach rest?” they ask, the assumption being that rest is something we all know how to do. But this is not true. Rest is something we have forgotten how to do and must relearn. Here in phase one, you have the opportunity to do just that—relearn how to rest.
My first daring-to-rest moment was the seed that blossomed into a regular yoga nidra practice, which has become a foundation in my life. I hear this echoed by women who have been in my yoga nidra programs, like Maria, who told me, “Yoga nidra meditation is now as foundational to me as drinking water, eating leafy greens, and exercising.” That’s the second thing this phase will teach you: how to start making rest a foundation in your life.
The more you rest, the better you will feel. And the better you feel, the easier it is to navigate times of transition or difficulty, like menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, motherhood, menopause, divorce, trauma, and grief.
What else can you expect to receive from regularly practicing yoga nidra meditation? Here is what women have told me:
It deepens my understanding of quiet and gives perspective to my day.
It takes my mind off the swirl, so I can go back to sleep.
It keeps my container full and radiant because life doesn’t slow down when you don’t sleep.
Now I’m so in touch with my body and the messages it sends out. . . . Taking the ritual of yoga nidra into my night routine completely shifted my sleep.
For the first five days of phase one, the focus is on setting an intention. This is important because living with intention is often the first thing to drop off our priority list when we get busy. As you’ll learn in chapter four, an intention is the seed for everything that follows, including recovering from your physical exhaustion and breaking the cycle of fatigue. With yoga nidra, you’ll get the benefit of coming into alignment with your heart’s deepest intention—while at the same time, you get to lie down and take a restful nap. What could be easier than that?