Daring to Rest

by Karen Brody

  I tell women who have a hard time with the concepts of bliss and joy to start with noticing in their bodies and minds this sense that “it’s going to be okay.” What if you could give yourself permission to start here? If you’ve experienced trauma or any form of abuse, or you’ve been worn out for a long time, it may feel like a huge leap to sense that all is okay with the world. Many times you can’t go to that kind of bliss right away, but you can slowly feel into this sense that everything is okay. While not everyone with trauma will have a hard time sensing bliss, some people have a freeze response that helps them deal with the moment of trauma, and after the trauma they stay in a disassociated-reaction mode as a means of coping. Remember to lovingly meet yourself wherever you are. Once the sense that everything is going to be okay feels normal, you’ll often be able to go a little deeper to gratitude for everything, and then you’ll slowly begin to feel bliss.

  A Fourth State of Sleep

  As you practice yoga nidra meditation, eventually, in the bliss body, you enter a deep meditative state like a spiritual trance. This is a fourth state of sleep known as turiya. According to the Upanishads (among the oldest of India’s spiritual texts), there are four fundamental states that every person has access to: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and turiya. We can experience the first three through our normal waking and sleeping. We function in our waking world in the conscious mind; in the dream world, we function in the subconscious mind; and during deep sleep, we enter the unconscious mind. Turiya is a fourth state of sleep, in which you can access supreme stillness and deep healing. It is said that turiya is the seer, and the three other states are illusions because they appear and disappear. So to know your true self at its core, you must access turiya. This fourth state can be realized through yoga nidra and other forms of deep meditation, but it’s impossible to enter it through conventional sleep.

  People who consistently experience turiya are able to tap into their potential of genius because they have access to a deep state of awakening. In turiya, your thoughts stop. Your unconscious mind is completely at rest and fertile, able to absorb affirmations and intentions without judgment or fear.

  You may have noticed that many athletes go into an altered state while doing their sport, so they are able to operate with deep clarity, overcome adversity, and focus on their goals. They forget about time or being hungry or injured, and instead operate in a zone of inspiration. Writers enter this zone and create masterpieces from here. It is often said that Gandhi, who meditated and prayed every morning at 4:30 am, was liberated by turiya. In his autobiography, he described being in a meditative state throughout his day and how even in difficult times he felt inspired. People had great faith in Gandhi primarily because they knew he was operating from an absolute awakened level.

  I think of turiya as not only a delicious fourth state of consciousness and deep stillness that you can experience in your yoga nidra meditation, but also a dimension of universal love. One woman told me that she felt so at peace after practicing yoga nidra that it was as if she were “becoming one with God.” This is when I knew she had touched turiya. In our busy lives, we forget that divine energy is always there for us, and when we do, we suffer. We feel exhausted, and we experience pain. Disconnection from the divine is the ultimate form of exhaustion.

  Whether I say God or divine energy, neither is about believing in a religion. The divine is the essence of everything. In yoga nidra, after purifying all five bodies, you are now connected with the most intimate, vulnerable, tender, gentle part of the soul of a human being, unshielded by the defenses of the other four bodies. Your internal power switch is on. You are one with the divine. The reason many of us engage in religious practices, like prayer and chanting, is that they help us go inward and feel a oneness with the divine. It’s in this moment, face-to-face with your soul, the closest you can come to the essence of everything, that you know undeniably that everything will be okay.

  God Is Waiting for You (Everything Is Going to Be Okay)

  I don’t speak about the divine or God easily. I wasn’t brought up with much religion, but there’s something about life falling apart that leads us back to the divine. If you have experienced or are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or a challenging moment in your life, you understand how hard it is to have faith when you don’t feel peaceful inside and how hard it is to connect back to a universal channel of love.

  I want to tell you a story about my life that is not easy to tell. When bad things happen, there’s this wave of emotions we feel, and that wave can keep crashing over us even years later when the story of what happened to us threatens to be replayed or retold. Sometimes just thinking about the story can overwhelm our system. The beauty of yoga nidra is that when you experience oneness with the divine again and again, one day you wake up feeling braver than ever before, ready to tell the hard story and ready to release a deep layer of the pain and suffering.

  In 2007, my husband and I decided we were going to live our dream life: to return to Africa to live with our children. My husband lived in parts of Africa as a child, and we had lived in Kenya together before we had children. Now I was nearly forty, we had two kids, and we wanted to head back. We made vision boards of our dream location, a little town in Tanzania that had a nice international school and is situated right on the gateway to the Serengeti game park. West of this town is the Ngorongoro Crater, the world’s largest inactive, intact, and unfilled volcanic crater, full of wildlife—lions, wildebeests, zebras—and named “Gift of Life” by the local Masai people. Our vision board had all of this on it. We dreamed of raising our children here. My husband, who works in international development, received several job leads in other places in Africa, but since our older son had dyslexia, we had to be picky and only go to a place where he could get services. So we held out. And one day, not too long after we created our vision board, out of the blue, my husband was offered a job in the town we had envisioned living. Three months later, we sold everything, said good-bye to family and friends, and left to follow our dream.

  Our dream actually included another vision: we would live in Tanzania with Faith, a Kenyan friend. Have you ever had that moment when you meet someone and you know they are one of the people you will hold dear forever? This was my experience with Faith. She had been our maid when we’d lived in Kenya, but really, other than income separation and a life lived on different continents and communities, she was one of my people. She used to sweep her way toward me in our apartment in Nairobi to tell me that she was never going to marry a Kenyan man because they treat women like doormats—and she was no doormat. One day she told me that she believes men are like heads and women are like necks. “Everyone thinks the head controls everything,” she’d say, “but really the neck controls the head.”

  I loved Faith’s version of feminism, and I loved her character. She clearly knew who she was: a strong Christian woman, with a great sense of humor, who had deep faith and unfaltering hope. When we moved to Tanzania, the bonus dream was for Faith to join us. She would live in our home again—this time as family. And so it was. She took a five-hour bus from Kenya to our home in Tanzania, she met my boys for the first time, and we were reunited. Life couldn’t have been better. I was in a great place professionally. I had a very successful play that had just premiered in multiple locations around the world. We were happy.

  Then, one night after my husband had driven a friend to the airport and arrived back at our house late at night, everything changed. We were robbed. Violently. Three armed African men with guns escorted my husband into our house. First they took our wedding rings—mine a simple gold ring given to me by my husband’s mother before she died, a ring that had traveled to the women in his family for generations. Next they took me upstairs and asked me to give them all of our money. Then they asked for any guns we had in the house, but we didn’t have any. After that, they requested all my jewelry. I gave them everything I could find, remembering their words as they passed the
bedroom where my kids were sleeping: “If you do anything stupid, we’ll kill you and your motherfucking children.” Luckily, when they wanted to force me into the trunk of our car, now their getaway vehicle, my husband convinced them this would not work. They eventually brought me back inside the house and left me tied up on the floor. We were all tied up with telephone and computer cords on the floor—my husband, me, the night watchman, and Faith.

  Before the robbers left, they got Faith up from the floor and took her first into the kitchen, then into her bedroom, and finally back to the floor. Once they left, just after midnight, we managed to free ourselves. The first words Faith said to me were, “God is good, Karen. They did not harm the children.” Then we held each other in an embrace for a long time. Her next words were, “I need to see a doctor.” Faith had been raped. I couldn’t believe it. How she could hold hope (because the kids were fine) and hopelessness (having been raped) at the same time? But that was Faith, always holding opposites. I remember her whispering to me, “Everything is going to be okay, Karen. We are alive. The kids are alive. Thank God.”

  I didn’t understand this at the time, how Faith had chosen light over darkness, but I do now. My light was getting dimmer, especially after we woke the children and, under the dark night sky, escorted by dozens of security guards holding AK-47s, we left our home and traveled to a hotel, not knowing our future. The boys were told we had been robbed, but they were also told we were all asleep when it happened. Nobody was hurt. We were okay. I repeated Faith’s words to them, “Everything’s going to be okay,” in the way a mother is supposed to do to reassure them that they were safe, but the truth was, I didn’t feel everything was going to be okay. I didn’t feel at all.

  The next day, we made our way to the police precinct, and then I took Faith to a medical clinic to have a physical exam and start pills for preventing AIDS and pregnancy. It was the worst day of my life. And yet Faith wore a shirt that read, “Jesus Loves Me.” I know now that this was her freedom cry. What was mine? I had none. I only saw darkness. I remember seeing Faith’s shirt and feeling envious and angry. Outwardly, I thought it was ridiculous to mention Jesus loving you the day after you’d been raped. Inwardly, in the part of me that still had hope, I wished she had another shirt for me.

  We had been robbed on Thursday, and on Sunday Faith asked us to take her to a church. I thought of practicing yoga nidra while she was at church, but instead, I sat on the hotel bed eating a plate of french fries. I wasn’t ready to feel. In the coming weeks, I stopped practicing yoga nidra, and after a few months, and then years, I had forgotten all about yoga nidra.

  How could I forget it, my favorite rest tool for years? I forgot because I got caught in the too-busy cycle. We lived in a hotel for a month with small children, ages five and seven. They started school. I thought Faith needed me more than I needed me. So I pushed yoga nidra away for a long time. And slowly I sank into total darkness. I had post-traumatic stress for two years following Tanzania. We returned to the United States with no possessions because we had sold everything to realize our dream of living in Africa. The stock market crashed. Jobs were scarce. We had no home, little money, and no income. Our dream was over.

  Also, we had left Faith in Africa. I’d felt my heart breaking when we left her. How could we leave her? How could we stay? No choice seemed right. All roads seemed to lead to darkness.

  For two years after Tanzania, I remained in darkness. I was afraid of random people, the night. I saw the robbers’ Doc Martens boots in my sleep every night. Until one day, I remembered what I had forgotten: yoga nidra meditation. I was not trained in it yet, but I had been practicing it before Tanzania, and it had made a huge difference in my life. I began to lie down again with my old friend yoga nidra, setting the simple intention, “I feel.” Day by day, month by month, I found my way back to the light.

  That’s when I knew: everything is going to be okay. In Faith’s words, “Jesus loves me.” I now see that being able to remember “Jesus loves me” is the moment in yoga nidra, in the bliss body, when the spark of your life force and the flame of your soul come closest. Out of this moment comes bliss, a time to integrate what we experience. Some call this grace. When you practice yoga nidra regularly after a difficult time or trauma, this is what happens. You integrate what you experience instead of letting it consume you. You feel all the darkness, and you also feel the light. You open to grace. Yoga nidra leads you back to your internal power switch, where there is no longer an either-or option. You begin to live in the both-and mode. Yes, I was robbed, and I am now safe. The moment I felt this viscerally through yoga nidra, the post-traumatic stress and night fears went away. Gone. Vanished.

  After Tanzania, I became trained in iRest yoga nidra meditation and certified in the Amrit Method of yoga nidra. During the Amrit training, our instructor, Yogi Amrit Desai, gave a beautiful talk about yoga nidra, and at the end he said that yoga nidra gives you God’s email and phone number. I smiled and thought of Faith, picturing her “Jesus Loves Me” T-shirt. Faith had God’s email and phone number. Now I did too.

  In your yoga nidra practice, while you may not always enter turiya, the divine is always whispering to you. This is why you listen to your soul whisper every time you practice yoga nidra—to get the message. Yogi Desai also said, “Anything you create outside can be sold. If you create it inside, nobody can sell it.” This is what I want for you.

  Before Tanzania, I had been practicing yoga nidra for rest, because I was so sleep deprived, and it helped me feel well rested in my life. As a consequence, I was nicer to my children, husband, and so many others. I also had greater focus. But when I came back to yoga nidra after Tanzania, it was no longer just for rest. All those years ago, when I discovered yoga nidra at my local yoga studio, I thought that the twenty-five women I saw lying down were getting the best sleep of their lives—and they were. But I had no idea that the blissed-out looks on their faces also came from this deeper sense that everything in their lives was going to be okay. I may have experienced that sense because of yoga nidra before Tanzania, but after Tanzania, I had lost it. Difficult times in your life might do this, disrupt your connection with the divine. What I learned—and what you can learn too—is that if you are going through post-traumatic stress or any situation where you have lost hope, where you feel abandoned by the divine, that you can get it back. Yoga nidra helps you find your way back.

  Knowing everything will be okay, and having God on speed dial, does not protect you from life falling apart. Instead, it provides a foundation for you to use to come back to that inner knowing and higher consciousness during difficult times. I hope for you, now, that foundation can be built with yoga nidra. It takes effort to rebuild your life from places that are broken, but when you succeed, the new structure you’ve built is much stronger and cannot easily be rebroken.

  Optional: More Practices for Your Bliss Body

  Here are a few practices to help balance your bliss body and complement your yoga nidra practice.

  Activate Your Fourth Power Center

  A balanced bliss body increases your ability to feel compassion and love for everything in your life. It is connected to the fourth power center, which is located in the center of the chest just above the heart. Don’t get caught up in the bliss body being some fictitious place of perfection where you only feel huge amounts of joy. For many of us, feeling that everything will be okay is the first step to activating joy. To increase this vibration in your life, during days 26 through 30, consider putting your touchstone on your heart when you practice yoga nidra meditation. You might also like to use neroli essential oil on your clothing or rub it into your hands and inhale. An excellent color to wear to increase heart energy is pink or green.

  Inhale Joy

  Inhaling joy is a great practice to do when you’re feeling a sense of alienation and lack of compassion for yourself and others. This is based on a beautiful part of the iRest yoga nidra meditation protocol. You can also do this prac
tice at the end of yoga nidra meditation. Here’s how you do it:

  1.Remember a time when you felt joyful. It could be a very brief moment, like a memory of being with a favorite grandparent or seeing your child graduate.

  2.Let your body feel that feeling of joy.

  3.Let the memory fade and the feeling of joy remain. Take at least three or more slow breaths feeling joy.

  4.Visualize joy spreading throughout your body. You might want to envision a smile starting in your heart and spreading through every nerve and cell of your body. Or see joy as a color and watch the color spread from your toes to the crown of your head. The point is to be absorbed in the feeling of joy.

  5.Ask yourself: If joy could speak, what would it say? Ask for an image, word, or phrase.

  6.Be curious about what you receive, but don’t assign a story to it. Let it be.

  Laugh

  At the first yoga nidra meditation training I took, the class returned from lunch, and Richard Miller, the founder of iRest yoga nidra, began the next session by laughing. We all sat there looking at him—many of us smiling, waiting for him to stop—but he kept on laughing, straight from his belly, the sound carrying quite far. A minute or two later, others began laughing too. It took me a while, but after about five minutes, I could no longer resist, and I too started to laugh. At first it was a fake laugh, but soon, as if I caught the virus, I was laughing with full gusto. And while it was fun to laugh, here’s the point: laughter can open your heart. Laughter helps you step out of your individuality and merge with the whole.