Richard miller irest yoga nidra
The comfort, and the discomfort – both true. Feeling grounded, I might also be able to feel into this anger too, into this thing that presses my buttons, and let it be here as part of truly meeting life as it is. Coming into this felt sense of safety can provide a way to allow a whole host of other possibilities into our lived experience. Learning how we are actually safe/ok in the world might be the first ‘opposite’ we acquaint ourselves with when all we’ve been previously oriented to is some form of ill-at-ease-ness.
Orienting to this basic inner resource of okayness, or even the vibrant Beingness of the body, for many can feel like first contact with a sense of true Home.Īnd for me, this is at the heart of working with opposites. That there’s more to the story than just this that seems to have cleverly ensnared me – there is a reliable ground here too.
With iRest we re-learn that the self-doubt or anxiety we’ve been velcroed to is not the only possibility here. If you’ve experienced trauma or live with depression and anxiety, safety can feel like an alien landscape as out of reach as Mars itself. One of the first stages of the practice is to cultivate a felt sense of safety in the body – to arrive at a knowing that there actually is an essential okayness within that we can turn to as well. (take your pick, we each have our own), iRest allows us to navigate life with all these visitors here. Whether it’s avoidance that’s your constant companion, anger, doubt, self-hatred or, or, or…. To practice feeling into both this and that, so life becomes an experience of ‘AND THIS’ too.Īs human beings we all get caught in recursive patterns of thinking, emoting and behaving. When stuck in the one-way highway – in ‘either/or’ thinking looking for perfection, we’re invited to open to another point of view. So the question becomes: Can I make friends with discomfort? Can I learn to be comfortable with what makes me squirm – build up antibodies to the “discomfort virus”, so to speak, and learn to be ok with it as just another sensation arising within me? Can I learn to accept life unquestioningly, no matter what it brings? Here’s where iRest® Yoga Nidra and the practice of opposites ( Patanjali’s Pratipaksha Bhavanam) is a powerful ally. Avoidance doesn’t work – but certainly not for lack of trying.Įverything we deny, run away from or despise comes back to bite us in the end. As hard as I try to make depression leave, or wish the world would be at peace, the world is not at peace and depression is still here. I might want to take their pain or sadness away because I don’t like how this discomfort expresses within me. So we try to make our own or another’s anger, fear, grief, depression or discomfort go away. But life continually shows us that this doesn’t work. It may all seem twisted, but it’s also all a normal part of being human.Īt the heart of the matter, isn’t this at least partly because we’re uncomfortable with sensations of discomfort? Ultimately I don’t like how another’s anger makes me feel. We want to take away our own hurt, another’s hurt, or sometimes project onto our nearest and dearest so that we don’t have to feel it ourselves. We might even want that guy at the office to fail for once so we can feel better about ourselves. We want our friends to be happy if they’re depressed. And the normal human reaction to all that’s unsettling is to make it go away. Maybe it’s their grief, their hurt, their anxiety. It could even be someone’s success or happiness that makes you feel uncomfortable in some way. It might not be anger that presses your buttons, but another’s sadness, depression or negativity. And after bottling it all up, I might even find myself getting mad at the person expressing their anger because I didn’t like how it all felt. I’d go out of my way to make sure all was well in the world just to sidestep the discomfort of being with another’s anger. This made me at best a peacemaker, and at worst an avoider. I didn’t like it when someone raised their voice or showed displeasure. And that beef was simply this: I really didn’t like it. I used to be a perfectionist living life in black and white, ‘either/or’. My understanding of the depression I experienced, for instance, was to find a way to be happy. By Una Hubbard, Meditation and Yoga with Una