Please feel very warmly welcome to this second Yoga Nidra talk.
In this one I'm going to focus on rest and in particular the deeply pleasurable rest that comes when we lower our attention into our heart center and even deeper as a devotional practice into the numinous heart of Source Consciousness,
Where the ground of our being,
Love itself resides.
Rest is tricky.
We know it's good for us and we know we need to do it.
I just need to rest,
We say.
You know,
You really must rest,
Other people say to us.
But most of us live in cultures where productivity,
Getting things done and ticking items off our daily to-do list is a dominant force in our lives,
Perhaps even the main one.
We often don't just have to go the extra mile,
We have to go another 10 after that.
And that's okay sometimes when we have something special we want or need to complete.
But when this kind of exertion is our constant reality and if there is no space to rest built into our ordinary lives,
Our bodies,
Minds and emotions rarely start to suffer.
We can even come to view rest as the enemy or at least something extraneous and unnecessary.
Where does rest get us?
What does it achieve?
While we are resting,
What is not getting done,
Especially if we have other people who are reliant on us?
And how do we know that if we rest the whole fragile infrastructure of all the different balls we are juggling in the air won't come crashing down around us?
One of the things that can be problematic when we do rest is that any thoughts,
Problems and worries we may have come crowding in,
Making rest time not restful at all.
Rest requires trust.
If we do take time to rest,
We have to trust that it will make us more effective and efficient rather than less so.
This is a pretty utilitarian way of viewing it,
Rather than seeing rest as something good we can do for its own sake and pleasure.
But if it's the chink of light that allows us to consider the possibility of bringing it into our lives,
Well so be it,
It's somewhere to start.
So where does Yoga Nidra and our hearts fit in with this?
Unlike other things we might choose to give ourselves me time,
Downtime or chill time,
Yoga Nidra enables us to relax effectively,
Shed stresses completely and have time off from our thoughts and worries.
It enables us to put our life down completely for a while and even if that's only for 20 minutes,
It's incredibly renewing.
Yoga Nidra is effective for bringing us to a potent state of rest and quite quickly at that.
We don't have to make this happen for ourselves,
The Yoga Nidra audio guidance does it for us.
Within about 10 or 15 minutes through a sequence of relaxation stages,
We are guided to arrive at a state of consciousness called yogic sleep or in modern terms NSDR,
Non-sleep deep rest.
This is a distinct state of consciousness where our body is effectively asleep while our mind is awake and aware and we are also highly sensitized to what is going on in our internal environment.
One of the significant things that happens when we are in this state is that we are very receptive to suggestions.
One of the most nourishing places that we can go to in this deeply relaxed state is into our heart center.
When we deliberately lower our attention into our energetic heart center through guided visualization and gentle affirming phrases,
We create a space of sacred resonance within us.
Sparks of imagination ignite,
Resistance dissolves and our innate unity with the life force love itself also reaffirms itself.
Our hearts take a lot of impact from our lives and the world generally,
So pausing to give it extra nourishment is a very beneficial thing to do.
By explicitly connecting with our energetic heart center,
We can deepen our rest and expand the nourishment we receive from it and it seems that the heart plays a more dominant role in influencing our overall state and well-being than previously thought.
According to the Heart Math Institute,
A research and training organization dedicated to understanding and applying the science of heart-brain interactions,
Our hearts generate an electromagnetic field that is significantly more powerful than our brains.
Specifically,
The heart's electrical field is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain's electrical activity.
In many faiths,
The heart has long been regarded as more than just an organ.
It is a sacred site for encounters with the divine,
A center for devotional practices that open us up to love's unconditional embrace.
In the silent dance of awareness,
Our heart is not a quiet vessel of emptiness but an energetic hub which stitches us over and over back into the universe's fundamental fabric,
Which is love itself.
In my premium library,
There is a track to accompany this talk.
It focuses on your heart center as an energetic hub whose innate nature is gratitude,
Goodness and grace.
It can be used for daytime rest or to drift into sleep.
In our next talk,
We will explore how Yoga Nidra can guide us through the five layers of consciousness mapped by yogic philosophy to awaken the bliss layer,
Ananda Maya Kosha.
We will explore how we get there and what bliss feels like.
Please do join me.
Thank you.
