The Daring to Rest Podcast

In our society, menopausal women are pathologized. There is little dignity around the process, and there are no instructions for how to navigate the sometimes volatile transition. But in truth, menopause is an extraordinary rite of passage. An opportunity to reevaluate who we are and awaken to our true nature. Alexandra Pope is the cofounder of Red School and the coauthor of Wild Power: Discover t...

Daring to Rest founder Karen Brody reads her recent rest rant on rest and productivity. "If we are resting to be more productive then we are feeding into the same paradigm that's making us all sick and tired."

Yoga nidra is a powerful healing practice, and many practice nidras to navigate challenging situations. But what if we don't have access to the audio for a guided meditation when we need it most? What can we do to guide ourselves through the practice (or specific parts of it) while we're on a hike, at the acupuncturist, or in the MRI scanner? Beth Dorman is training to become a Daring to Rest faci...

Today's conversation with Yoli Maya Yeh, an educator and healer working at the intersection of Indigenous Way, Healing Arts & Social Justice, is a conversation we had as part of the Daring to Rest Academy masterclass series. It felt too important a conversation to keep just for our Daring to Rest facilitators. Yoli shares with us her thoughts on the sacred destruction happening in our world today,...

When I heard that Uma Dinsmore Tuli had created a campaign to eradicate the abuse of women in the yoga world I knew I wanted to talk about this topic, and the related theme of the decolonization of sleep and yoga. This is a dark truth that has existed for a long time.  I'm a firm believer that whenever we meet the shadow the potential for change grows, and this opens a gateway for shadow exhaustio...

Women have our own inner calendar based on the menstrual cycle, and when we honor that cycle, we access our feminine power. But we simply can't unlock that power if we don't stop to rest when our body needs it. So, how might we use yoga nidra to hone our menstrual cycle awareness – and post menopause - and tap into our power as women? Barbara Dopfer is a Certified Daring to Rest Facilitator and th...

In the menstrual cycle, we experience currents of expansion and contraction, activity and rest. Yet we've been living in a cultural paradigm built exclusively around expansion and activity (the via positiva). A cultural paradigm that has avoided the via negativa entirely—until now. Now that we have pushed ourselves into a global health crisis, many of us are being forced to stay at home, and wheth...

With much of the world under quarantine, I was wondering if today's episode with bestselling author Jennifer Louden, whose new book Why Bother comes out next week, would resonate with this moment of challenge and unpredictability. Why should we be talking about desire when everyone is focused on survival? Here's why: because if you're safe, in a stable household, and feel a call to re-evaluate wha...

On today's episode, Dr. Rubin Naiman gives us a rest-perspective on COVID-19 and the current pandemic that has forced people around the world to stay in their homes to prevent the spread of the virus. Is this a "call to rest" moment? Are we in a waking dream? And what's the number one way we can build our immunity? (You may be surprised at his answer!). Dr. Rubin Naiman is a psychologist, sleep an...

How many times have women stayed silent throughout history? What if rest was a remedy to help us speak up? On today's episode, to celebrate International Women's Day, I talk about how rest helps us reclaim our voices. I also recorded a special gift of rest for you with this episode...a nice, long nourishing yoga nidra meditation called "Deep Rest for Women Speaking Up." You'll find it in the resou...

How would you describe your relationship with your body? Many of us struggle with feelings of disconnection or shame, and we only allow ourselves pleasure in the form of reward for or recovery from hard work. What if we could not just make peace with our bodies, but learn to love them and trust their wisdom? What if we made pleasure a regular practice and used it to fuel our creative work? What if...

Envision that emoji on your smart phone where the person's eyes are open wide, looking frantic. That was 71-year-old certified Daring to Rest facilitator Barbara without yoga nidra. After retirement she received a diagnosis of an auto immune disease. As a young teenager she was ill with golf-ball sized lymph glands and no one knew what the root cause was. As a child, while Barbara was given positi...

Meet certified Daring to Rest facilitator Lotus Baker, mother of three girls. When Lotus' daughter with multiple disabilities began to find her creativity, Lotus realized that she had put her own needs and desires aside for too long. "I had lost that connection to my inner voice that lit me up from within," she shares. She found Daring to Rest at a time when she was starting her own yoga studio in...

Five years ago, her daughters almost all off to college, on the eve of being an empty nester, certified Daring to Rest facilitator Sheri Parr realized that she had so much unprocessed grief and she went on a quest to change her life. That's when she found yoga nidra and was immediately hooked. But how would she stick with it?  Through Daring to Rest, she found the answer.  In this episode, hear ho...

How do you make yoga nidra permanent part of your life when you have been tired for as long as you can remember? That's what certified Daring to Rest facilitator Gerda van der Lecq – Postma has done, despite raising children and a busy career. Bringing yoga nidra into her personal and professional life changed everything. The Daring to Rest Academy helped her to put into the world what she had wan...

After significant people died in a three-year span, this is when certified Daring to Rest facilitator Marcela Iglesias found yoga, trained in it, and through yoga she found yoga nidra. "Resting on the ground, at the end of the nidra I started sobbing and didn't know where it came from - I didn't realize I needed to do that," Marcela says. From then on, she made the yoga nidra recordings part of he...

Today be prepared to have your heart open wider. In this 6-minute episode, certified Daring to Rest facilitator and magical mama, Jo Blackman, shares how yoga nidra has touched her life and why she now teaches it in New Zealand to mothers. Jo's poignant story speaks to one of my favorite benefits of practicing yoga nidra regularly: the power of planting an intention. After the birth of her second...

On this month's Daring to Rest Podcast's Rest Stories  series , certified Daring to Rest facilitator Michelle Wilson is in conversation with her husband, Jay, talking yoga nidra and her journey from worn out non-profit manager to a courageous woman Daring to Rest in a world, and especially her midwestern roots, that primarily applauds "hard workers" and believes that "if you're not doing something...

Ever feel like for as long as you can remember you've been tired? That's Claire Garin's story - tired her whole adult life. Three years ago, she completely changed her life from work in the mental health field that she thought was the root of her exhaustion. After experiencing a serious earthquake in Nepal, she returned home to France and quit her job, left her boyfriend, and became nomadic. She a...

Meet Jaimee Roncone – certified Daring to Rest facilitator and owner of a Healing Tree Health and Wellness Center in Northampton, Massachusetts. Jaimee is a woman who wears many hats and spent a lifetime helping people live their best lives – but not herself. Ironically, she trained for years in many modalities to help others with a cancer diagnosis, but when she was diagnosed with cancer she thou...

Meet Barbara Dopfer – a yoga teacher and almost-certified Daring to Rest facilitator in the south of Germany. In this eleven-minute episode, you'll learn about Barbara's love story with yoga nidra and why she now teaches it.  Before teaching yoga and yoga nidra, Barbara was always in male-dominated professions: a landscape architect and even a stone mason. But by 2014 she began to "feel like an al...

In this first episode of our Rest Stories Series, Daring to Rest founder Karen Brody tells her worn out woman to well-rested woman story and why she decided she must teach the transformational sleep practice known as yoga nidra. It may seem ridiculous to teach people how to rest, but today more than ever - with inflammation causing physical illness in so many people and inflammation of the world t...

It's much easier to ignore the darker parts of ourselves—the wounds, the fears, the biases, the anxieties. Sloshing around in our inner territory is scary, but there is freedom in the truth. And the more we can talk about our shadows without getting defensive, the more we can accept our humanness and start to heal ourselves and the world around us. Only then we can go deep AND go home to ourselves...

Do you struggle with the creative process? Get stuck in self-doubt? Or have trouble finding time to practice your craft? Writer Nicole Gulotta contends that the life of a creative is lived in seasons, and she believes that we can use these natural rhythms to enhance our creative work. And Nicole uses yoga nidra as a tool to bring ease to the writing process! Nicole is the author of Wild Words: Rit...

My son Jacob had his first psychoeducational evaluation in the second grade. He scored in the 110th percentile in critical thinking, but his reading score was in the 2nd percentile. Jacob was diagnosed with dyslexia, a condition that makes it difficult for people to read quickly and automatically—but has no connection to their overall intelligence. In fact, dyslexics are typically fast creative th...