The Art Of Everyday Enlightenment

Welcome to the course and the beginning of the next part of your Yoga Nidra journey! This first session gives an introduction to some Yoga philosophy around Yoga Nidra, and prepares you for the coming days. We'll practice an extended version of the last practice from 'The Art of Conscious Napping' as a refresher and to pick up where we left off.

The Inner Resource is a felt sense of safety and wellbeing that we can create at the beginning of the practice and which helps us to feel safe to enter into deeper levels of relaxation. In this session, we'll take a look at how to approach cultivating your own inner resource and how the benefits of it can extend out into your daily life. In the practice, you're given plenty of time to explore what you need to feel safe, and we work with the opposite qualities safety and fear.

In this session, we'll explore the Annamaya Kosha, or the layer that is made up of food - our physical body. We relax into the Annamaya Kosha when we rotate the awareness around different body parts. We'll look at how relaxing the physical body can help us to release and heal on all levels, and our practice focuses on a long body scan with plenty of time to rest into and relax the body.

The Pranamaya Kosha, or the layer that is made up of breath, is also known as the energy body. In this session, we'll explore the concept of prana, or subtle life force energy, the nadis (energy pathways) and marma points (energy centres). We'll look at how Yoga Nidra techniques can help us to release energetic blockages and encourage a smooth flow of prana, and our practice focuses on moving the awareness through the major marma points, and breathing through alternate nostrils to balance the major nadis.

The Manomaya Kosha, or the layer that is made up of the mind, is where our everyday thoughts, opinions and judgements are stored. We'll take a look at how important the health of the mind is considered to be in Yogic thought, and at how working with opposite qualities in our practice can encourage mental calmness and equinimity. During the practice, we work with the opposites movement and stillness, hot and cold, and clarity and confusion.

The Vijnanamaya Kosha, or the layer that is made up of the intellect, is where we store our deeper concepts, perception, knowledge and deeper wisdom. At the level of the Vijnanamaya Kosha, we can tap into our deeper wisdom for insight, and here our Yoga Nidra techniques can help us to find our deeper truths. The practice includes a long visualisation of rapid images and a journey to sit and meditate with a wise figure, with time and space to be open to receive wisdom and insight.

The Anandamaya Kosha, or the layer that is made up of bliss, is our most subtle layer and is where we can experience the joy of simply being. We'll look at some of the theory around how the Anandamaya Kosha connects us to the Universal layers of consciousness, and at how resting at this layer can help us to feel more at ease in our daily lives. The practice includes plenty of quiet space for you to simply be.

The Sankalpa is a deep resolve or prayer from the heart for something that you wish to attain or achieve. In this session, we'll look at some perspectives around the Sankalpa and some things to consider when making yours. The practice includes plenty of time to rest at the heart and invite a Sankalpa to arise, along with exploration of the opposites desire and contentment, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and abundance and lack.

This long practice puts together aspects of all of the previous sessions. You'll have time to create your inner resource, there's a long body rotation, breathing through alternate nostrils and alternate sides of the body, exploration of opposites movement/stillness, heavy/light and clarity/confusion, the rapid visualisations from session six, the journey to meditate with a wise figure, the journey into the heart centre, several mintutes to rest in silence, and a space for your Sankalpa.