Summertime Sankalpa: Yoga Nidra Meditation

The medicine that the Summer season has to offer is experienced within joy and vitality, leisure, and abundant growth. Because we are already warmed up just by nature of the temperature of the air, we have more access to tapas or our potential for transformation and sustaining new neural pathways. It’s like the peak of our transformational potential over the year where the processes and intentions we set in the depth of winter are reaching their full blooming stage.

Spiritual practice can be expanding, matching the abundance of the natural world. Intentions (Sankalpa) for transformation can be more streamlined and sustainable in the summer especially in terms of creative and artistic projects. In fact, emotional and psycho-spiritual work comes easier as well. We have more access to our heart energy and with longer, slower days, the time for processing expands so we can move through our emotions and therapy work in a leisurely way.

Yoga Nidrā is a guided practice designed to reorient one’s attention from the external world to the inner, subtle experiences within the body. In Yoga Nidrā we enter a space of non-action in order to simply be an “observer,” neutral to the contents of experience, whether occurring outside or inside of the body. By occupying a neutral, non-reactive state, we are able to be with those contents in a new way, without reinforcing our automatic, pre-programmed patterns. This practice of “witness awareness,” combined with a sequence of techniques that induce complete physical, mental and emotional relaxation, allow us to hover in the liminal space between wake and sleep where the subconscious and unconscious realms of the mind can be easily accessed. Here, the mind becomes much more receptive, impressionable and malleable, allowing the brain and body to undergo a re-wiring and reconditioning process to interrupt long-standing tensions, unhelpful behaviors, habits, misperceptions and self-limiting beliefs. The psycho-emotional limitations that have been our operational norm can be dismantled at the seed-level, in turn allowing our true potential (peace, limitlessness and freedom) to emerge.

Dress comfortably and feel free to bring any supports that may help you to feel nourished in the supine position as this entire practice is led from the form of savasana. No prior meditation practice is required. Please note that space is very limited. Students who do not show will be marked as present. Exchange is $35- military, teacher and light-worker discounts available upon request.