Thank you for joining me for this course. It has been a delight to share iRest with you.
This page, and the session videos, are available until 18 August 2021. The yoga nidra audio downloads are yours to keep (see link for Dropbox below each week).
The session videos are in a private space on YouTube (‘unlisted’), so are only accessible to this group via the links provided below.
Wishing you well with your practice and please do keep in touch. I’ll be sharing one-off practices of iRest in the future.
Week 6: Witnessing, Pure Being and Awareness
Session video link:
Session 6 Surfing the Waves. Finding Stillness. Yoga Nidra – YouTube
Yoga Nidra Audio (recorded separately)
Download here (Dropbox)
Or listen here:
Invitation – choices for the longer term:
- Simply resting and enjoying the practices of iRest: nourishing yourself, your interactions in the world and your experience of life
- To sometimes rest in noticing what you notice, during the day or in practice. How does this feel? Do you naturally find yourself in this space more and more frequently, while being fully engaged in the moment?
- Might you be open to ‘meeting’ life (welcoming) as best you can, and noticing how this feels?
- How might it be to consciously drop the mind into the heart from time to time? Staying connected to your deepest self, and resting in being?
- To spend time with your Inner Resource and your Heartfelt Desire (sankalpa)
Week 5: Joy, Wellbeing, OK-ness
Session video link:
Session 5 Surfing the Waves. Finding Stillness. Yoga Nidra – YouTube
Yoga Nidra Audio (recorded separately)
Download here (Dropbox)
Or listen here:
Invitation:
- To practise during the week
- To stay close to your spontaneous joy (relative and Absolute) in daily life and remain open to receiving it in practice. It’s interesting how joy and equanimity co-exist with e.g. sadness, contraction, pain and anger, isn’t it?
- Page 18 of the Workbook gives an explanation of joy in the practice
- If you’re interested, apparently it’s the left prefrontal cortex of the brain that lights up (electrical activity) when we experience positive states such as joy (right prefrontal cortex for distressing emotions such as sadness, anxiety or worry), even in babies
- Fun fact: the element associated with joy is space
From the Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, verse 66
There is no wisdom for a person without harmony, and without harmony there is no contemplation. Without contemplation (meditation) there cannot be peace, and without peace can there be joy?
Week 4: Opposites of Belief
Session video link:
Session 4 Surfing the Waves. Finding Stillness. Yoga Nidra – YouTube
Yoga Nidra Audio (recorded separately)
Download here (Dropbox)
Or listen here:
Invitation:
- To practise during the week, according to your needs and curiosity.
- To notice any arising of core beliefs during the day, and to explore their opposites; feeling how they express themselves in the body, moving back and forth and holding both at the same time if possible. Noticing how this affects you/your day, relationships and/or outlook. Stay close to your Inner Resource as helpful.
- Pages 15-16 of the iRest Workbook contain an explanation of this step of the practice (Cognitions: Thoughts, Beliefs, Images), examples of thoughts and their opposites, and a prompt for inquiry.
Week 3: Opposites, Feelings and Emotions
Session video link:
Session 3 Surfing the Waves. Finding Stillness. Yoga Nidra. – YouTube
Yoga Nidra Audio (recorded separately)
Download here (Dropbox)
Or listen here:
Invitation:
- To practise during the week, according to your needs e.g. whether rest is the priority (practices 1 and 2), or you’re also curious about exploring a little further, within rest (practice 3).
- To notice feelings and emotions in daily life, if that feels right for you, their opposites, and how it feels to hold both at the same time, staying close to your Inner Resource as helpful.
- Pages 12-14 of the iRest Workbook cover this part of the practice, including examples of feelings, emotions and their opposites, and prompts for personal inquiry.
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott
Week 2: Intention and Heartfelt Desire (Sankalpa), BreathSensing
Session video link:
Session 2 Surfing the Waves. Finding Stillness. Yoga Nidra. – YouTube (private space)
Yoga Nidra Audio (recorded separately)
Download here (Dropbox)
Or listen here:
Invitation:
- To practice with either Week 1 or Week 2’s recording when you can (whichever feels most natural to you).
- To remain patient and open to any insights or feelings regarding your Sankalpa (Heartfelt Desire and Intentions that could support it).
- To stay close to your Inner Resource, and the feeling of resting in being.
- You may like to see pages 6-8 of the iRest Workbook for this part of the practice.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
Week 1: Inner Resource and BodySensing
Session video link:
Session 1 Surfing the Waves. Finding Stillness. iRest Course. – YouTube (private space)
The yoga nidra practice in the session is about 15 minutes longer than the audio below.
Yoga Nidra Audio (recorded separately)
Download here (Dropbox)
Or listen here:
Invitation:
- To practice yoga nidra in the coming week, as much or as little as you wish. You could try different times of day/evening. Evening practice in particular will aid falling asleep and good quality sleep.
- To recall your Inner Resource during the day. How does it work for you: spontaneously or at a regular time e.g. after lunch/during a tea break? Once you have the image/memory, can you let that go and rest in the felt-sense of your Inner Resource – the feeling or sensations it creates in your body? It may take a while for this to arise, but over time it will become easily accessible and a natural embodiment.
- You may like to see page 9 of the iRest Workbook about the Inner Resource.
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing:
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
Galway Kinnell