by Karen Brody
Here are some examples of other new intentions women have created in the Release phase:
I am parenting with peaceful language.
I am honest, loving, and forgiving in my relationship.
My body is strong, powerful, and energized.
I feel authentic, confident, and bold at work.
I eat foods that nourish my body and help me feel good.
Remember to phrase your intention as if it were already true, right now. When you establish a new intention, you plant a new seed. What you need to ask yourself now is “What seed do I want to plant to release what’s standing in the way of the healthiest version of my self?” A balanced mental body plants only seeds that turn on your internal power switch.
Optional: Diving Deeper
Looking to dive more deeply into warrior energy, darkness, holding opposites, or a new intention? Consider these Daring to Rest optional prompts:
•Freewrite in your journal about your soul whispers.
•Stand in what feels like a warrior position for you—your most confident, courageous self. (It could be one of the warrior poses from yoga or a superhero pose: feet apart, hands on hips, chest forward.) If the warrior in you could speak about her ideal, well-rested life, what would she say? Freewrite about this or record yourself speaking. Then read or listen back to your words.
•Pick a strong emotion you’re dealing with in your life now. Freewrite about this emotion and how you feel when you experience it. Then freewrite about the opposite emotion. And finally, freewrite about the two emotions meeting. You can also express these emotions and their meeting through movement or in a drawing.
•Sit in the dark, indoors or outdoors, for five minutes. Then freewrite about darkness. Say as much as you can about how darkness made you feel and anything else on what darkness means to you.
•If your new intention were a song, what song would it be? Your song could be real or an imagined title. Dance to your song, imagining your intention taking place.
Key Points in Chapter Seven
•Your mental body is the third of five bodies of awareness that reside in you. It does the deep cleaning of your mind.
•A balanced mental body helps you go from disconnected and numb to powerful.
•One of the most powerful yoga nidra practices is Holding Opposites. It can help you transform out of negative habits and patterns and begin to water the seed of new habits and patterns that help you turn on your internal power switch.
8
WISDOM
Becoming the Witness of Your Life
Days 21–25
What if you could take a step back and begin to see your life as if you’re watching it, not in it? This is exactly what begins to happen in the wisdom body, the fourth body of awareness accessed in yoga nidra. After clearing blocks in your mental body, your mind begins to see more clearly, ego moves aside, and you begin to access your inner knowing.
For the next five days, the goal is to tap into your intuition and awareness beyond your everyday life. The wisdom body is where the wise woman in you whispers, You’ve got this. Writing, painting, and doing math are activities that can connect us to the wisdom body. While the mental body balances your ordinary mind, the wisdom body balances your higher mind, the place where you see your real self and download new insights. When life gets difficult, a balanced wisdom body helps you take a step back and become the peaceful observer of your life. You feel everything in your life, but you no longer become undone by challenges.
Basic Instructions for Days 21 to 25
1.Practice the Phase Two: Release Meditation daily. Continue to use your most recent intention statement and hold your touchstone in your left hand when practicing, or if it feels right, place your touchstone on the space between your eyebrows or any place that needs healing.
2.Continue to listen for and track your soul whispers.
3.Practice connecting with your Council of Women and feeling their guidance, using the instructions in this chapter.
4.Optional: Use additional practices to connect with and balance your wisdom body.
5.Optional: Use the prompts to get to know your Wild Woman, explore your intuition, and dive more deeply into other concepts from this chapter.
The Power of the Wisdom Body
The wisdom body is the place of symbols, colors, visions, and dreams. During your yoga nidra meditation, when you’re introduced to images and symbols or visualization, you are balancing the wisdom body. You may notice in the Phase Two: Release Meditation that you are guided to a bonfire on a beach; in the Phase Three: Rise Meditation, you will be guided to a temple. Why? Because it’s in the wisdom body that you can take a step back from your ego, thoughts begin to recede, and all the ways you look at your thoughts as right or wrong and all the ways you see yourself as separate from others begin to fade. In the wisdom body, the mind stops lecturing you, and you drop into a soothing place in the nervous system.
Visualization and holding opposites guides you to a place where you stop believing that your thoughts make things happen, and instead the wanting to make things happen comes out of the mystery of life. You’re in wonder. When yoga nidra uses visualization, it often guides you to places in nature because in nature it’s easier to wonder, to let go of our thoughts.
Then, when you wake from yoga nidra and continue with your daily life, this awareness allows you to stop taking everything so personally. You still have plenty of thoughts in your everyday life because thoughts do serve you, enabling you to do things like eat and pay taxes. But because of your yoga nidra experience, you also now begin to view life with detached awareness, like it’s a movie, and this reduces how much everyday life controls and drains you. You stop engaging in draining interactions because you stop expecting anyone, including yourself, to fix your personal story. You’re no longer the victim of your story. Instead, you can now hear any healing messages. In a yoga nidra visualization, you will often be invited to feel sensations in your body and to see if there is a healing or creative message for you. You can begin to heal when you hear this message. You begin to become the heroine of your story.
The wisdom body is a deep level of consciousness that is not easy to access in everyday life. During your yoga nidra meditation, it takes a minimum of ten minutes to enter this state. It’s the place from which composers and writers create great works of art. The more the first three bodies are in balance, the easier it is to access this peaceful space. While I’m sure there are some people who experience a balanced wisdom body naturally, few can maintain this awareness every day. Mostly, wisdom body awareness comes in waves, increasing the more you meditate or engage in other things that give rise to wonder. Then one day you find you’re not so bothered by your external world. The dramas can happen, but you don’t feel so intensely about them because you’ve created a solid foundation that is rooted in intuition, the mental body, and higher-mind consciousness, the wisdom body. It’s here that the deeper levels of emotional exhaustion drop. Is life perfect? No. You will feel sad and angry and tired some days. But a purified wisdom body will allow you to meet and feel your thoughts and go beyond them. This is deeply freeing because you’re essentially free to awaken to your most pure, authentic self. You get out of your own way. The most effective leaders, and well-rested ones, have “awakened” moments, when ego and all the thoughts that go with it are not there.
Women practicing yoga nidra have different experiences while clearing their wisdom bodies, but typically as the wisdom body balances, they feel a deep sense of peace. Deborah, whom you met in the introduction to “Phase Two: Release,” bravely traveled an imperfect path that felt like a relentless struggle to find peace as she grieved the loss of her life partner. She practiced yoga nidra meditation daily—and sometimes twice per day—for months, until finally she began to take a tiny step back from her grief, rather than let it consume her everyday life.
As the wisdom body begins to balance, we tend to receive soul whispers with powe
rful, life-changing messages, or images with such messages may come outside of our yoga nidra practice. After five months, Deborah one day received an image at the end of her yoga nidra practice. She saw herself and her beloved with a Native American blanket wrapped around them on the beach. It was like a memory—very physical. She could hear the ocean and his heartbeat. The next day after yoga nidra meditation, she had another vision: both she and her beloved were again on the beach, but this time he was invisible. When she leaned back, it was like he was a ghost. Deborah felt lots of sadness, but she could also feel things shifting. Then in her vision, she realized she had joined with him, like they were one.
On day three, after yoga nidra meditation, she saw herself looking out at the ocean. “There I was,” she told me, “I was a wise woman—and my beloved was gone.” Deborah felt relief that he was okay. And for the first time in many months, she didn’t feel scared to be alone, which had been a big theme for her after he had died. Instead, in her vision, she was carrying the Native American blanket, and she felt like she was a carrier of something really precious.
“It’s then that I realized I’m carrying the legacy of our love forward,” she shared. This was deeply powerful for her. As she notes, “The question when you lose a loved one is always, ‘Where are they?’ In this vision, I had reinforcement that my beloved is everywhere. He is the rain; he is on the sand.”
The visions Deborah received after yoga nidra for those three days were a progression from “he’s here” to “he’s everywhere.” She knows he is okay, but the truth is, she doesn’t know where he is. Instead, she now knows the place where she holds him. This is the life-changing magic that can come when your wisdom body begins to balance. Ego, finally, begins to fall away.
The End of Ego and Rise of the True Self
Ego is the voice within that says “I,” “me,” and “mine.” It is the voice that tells us we are separate from others. We need ego to survive, but separation is what we must transcend to feel peaceful and whole. The ultimate goal of a spiritual path is to open the door to the oneness of all. When you are lying down practicing yoga nidra meditation, this is the tune-up you’re getting. You’re being guided to a timeless state of being where ego falls away. You could see this in Deborah’s story. For many months, she felt separate from others. This was ego at work. But the moment her wisdom body began to come into balance, she began to feel whole again.
The slippery slope with ego is that it causes you to beat up on yourself: I’m not pretty. I’m not enough. I’m not worthy. If you’re grieving and you feel you’re not doing it right, that’s ego. When a friend gets a great job and you hate your job and you’re jealous, that’s ego. Comparing yourself to others is a destructive form of ego. I can sometimes get myself in this loop, and so does every other woman who comes into my yoga nidra programs. We all say, “It feels icky.” This is because when we feel separate, we have a feeling of isolation. Many spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism, say ego is an illusion, a false way we identify ourselves. It’s really hard to comprehend this when we’re in the comparison loop or when we have had a bad experience, like getting up in front of a crowd and doing a bad job and then living in that criticism of ourselves and never going on a stage again. Ego can and does stop us from being brave. I see it all the time.
Compare this ego loop to how you feel after you practice yoga nidra meditation. Most women tell me they feel “completely open,” “honest,” “all love,” and “dreamy.” This is ego falling away. Every time you lie down to practice yoga nidra and are guided to the wisdom body, your mind is trained to become a witness. It also helps to melt—at least temporarily, when you first practice—the feeling of separateness from others. This is the beginning of freedom from the isolation and fear that ego fosters.
Once ego loosens its grip, our true, authentic self rises. We’re then able to use our wisdom to determine when ego is serving us and when it’s not serving us. Training your mind to become the witness of your life allows you to be objective about what the mind and ego tell you. Many of the reasons you thought “I can’t” fall away, and you begin to feel limitless.
I love this moment when a woman feels she can do anything. For years, Margreet, whom you read about in chapters four and five, was stuck in a mental loop of anger over her childhood, particularly her relationship with her mother. The moment she dropped her anger, and the thoughts associated with it, she could take a step back and become the witness of her life. This loosened ego’s hold, which propelled her to express exactly who she was—her real self. She had practiced yoga nidra meditation for seven months, and then one day, she emailed me to say, “I am taking steps to start my own business, to live my passion, to go out there and help everybody—with my energy.” She was taking these steps after receiving a clear message during her yoga nidra meditation to start her own business. “And yoga nidra is such a big part of the trust I feel to take these steps,” she said.
I commonly see women who have been playing small gain the courage to play big the moment they become the witness. It’s a beautiful transformation and not an unusual one to experience when you are practicing yoga nidra meditation. The limitless feeling that results from becoming the witness releases many women from the fear of playing big. I also see these women using this limitless feeling as fuel to be successful on a new set of terms—one that honors all of themselves, not just their ego-driven desires. For example, a woman who was pushed into being a lawyer might decide to open an art gallery because that’s what sings to her true self. A consistent yoga nidra practice makes it almost impossible to not open to life’s options in ways you never imagined.
Let me be clear: ego isn’t bad. A healthy ego doesn’t bound itself in your personality or in thoughts and emotions. Instead, it knows that the “me” who you are when you are called by your name is a small fraction of the “me” living inside you. It doesn’t get attached to your daily wins and losses. Your healthy ego knows that it lives and functions in your body, but it’s free from the need to become anything. A consistently balanced wisdom body gives us access to this healthy ego, so it’s possible to sense a deeper presence in the body and mind, a connection to the universal law that all is one. The moment you sense this, another layer of exhaustion lifts, and a familiar part of you, a part you had turned your back on, shows up.
Here Comes Your Wild Woman
Who is this familiar part of you? She is robust, brave, and intuitive. You often sense her while spending time in nature. When you connect back to her, you feel something stirring in you, like you’ve touched the essence of who you are. This is your Wild Woman.
I began to notice that women, after practicing yoga nidra meditation for a few weeks, often said it felt “like I’ve stepped into a new world that’s more real to me—a deeper truth of who I am,” and “like I’m strengthening muscle memory of who I really am.” They often told me that they now take time each month during their menstruation to cry or journal. Older women often said they feel unafraid to be honest with people or to finally finish the novel they have mapped out in their mind. I’d hear in a pregnant woman’s voice a confidence about giving birth that wasn’t initially there. The Wild Woman had arisen in each of these women.
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés made the Wild Woman archetype well known through her book Women Who Run With the Wolves. According to Pinkola Estés, the Wild Woman often rises when you begin to tune in to your intuition and tell your stories truthfully. The Wild Woman is completely in touch with her natural rhythms and cycles. She is unafraid to show her healer and spiritual self. She usually comes forth when a woman can access a higher level of consciousness, which is exactly what happens when your wisdom body is consistently balanced.
When you first lay down to practice yoga nidra meditation, especially if you felt like the worn-out woman, you were most likely disconnected from your Wild Woman. Our busy world, both the pace and the lack of connection to nature, can cause our intuition, our wise self, to go into hidin
g. We begin to question our decisions. We let ourselves be preyed on because we aren’t in touch with our Wild Woman instinct, which would tell us an absolute no or yes. In yoga nidra, balancing the first and second bodies of awareness—the physical body and energy body—begins to wake up your Wild Woman, and listening for your soul whispers does too. But to truly reunite with your Wild Woman, you need to continue going inward.
In the mental body, you meet and greet the dark sides of you, so you can then see the light. Once you begin to see the light, your internal world opens, you have access to the wisdom body, where ego falls away and your Wild Woman is given permission to flourish because the Wild Woman sees a world without separation. She doesn’t need anything to change. She knows that the ground underneath us never goes away, so there is no need to be afraid of falling; you can close your eyes and feel safe.
Most women meet some version of their Wild Woman in the wisdom body. I like to imagine it like this: while you are in the wisdom body, your Wild Woman takes your worn-out woman clothes away from you, and she hands you a clean, well-rested woman outfit. Then, as Pinkola Estés puts it, you begin to listen to everything in life with “soul-hearing.”1
Your Wild Woman is the original rebel, the original revolutionary. She is feared by patriarchy and any establishment doctrine because she simply won’t put up with being put down. Worn-out women wear that legacy like a badge, but the Wild Woman simply won’t. She is connected to her deep inner knowing. The reason she surfaces now is because in the wisdom body you finally understand the duality of life: that life is not about either-or—either I’m happy or I’m sad. Rather, it is often both-and—that you can be both happy and sad. Your Wild Woman gets this because she is the personification of duality. She has an outer life that’s practical, and she also has an inner life that is about feeling and deeper knowing.
To the outside world, this duality can seem confusing and irritating, and women get judged for being too emotional or sensitive. But when you touch your wisdom body more and more, you begin to see that this sensitive side has an opposite, so referring to you as “too sensitive” doesn’t tell the whole story. As Pinkola Estés explains, this “twin nature” of women, this “two-women-who-are-one,” may baffle others.2 It might baffle us as well, but much of our struggle as women has been to understand this wildish nature ourselves, to not push it away, and to have others understand it. We rebel precisely because we feel our essential nature is misunderstood, and constantly struggling with this misunderstanding is exhausting.