Yoga Nidra: Practice for Today (March 23)

"Yoga Nidra" is a form of embodied meditation

• yoga nidra means= "yogic sleep"- 
• it is meant to produce a state which is as "relaxed" as sleeping, when one is still fully aware
• sometimes called dreamless sleep.

Today, we will practice it to illustrate how breath awareness (rather than control) can be used for a number of purposes:

• to increase awareness of our bodies
• to have a heightened experience of/in our bodies
• to understand the body's "felt sense" (Levin)
• to move toward a single point of focus (Sanskrit-eka dishti)

These are all pragmatic goals in the yoga technique. 

This will all be accomplished through the observation of and attention to our breath in our body.

Instructions I will be giving:

1. We will start with some simple controlled breathing exercises to warm up both our breath and our mind
2. We will stop controlling our breath and try to achieve this same focus with an "unconditioned" breath (natural/no control)
3. We will place our focus on one part of the body at a time, trying to "breath into" that part of the body to have a heightened experience of that part of our body
• may include
• physical sensations,
• desire for  or a sense of movement
• temperature change
• emotion
• empowerment
• etc. You tell me!
4. As we shift to each body part, we will let the previous one "relax" to a state where it "disappears" from our perception (bones fall away, muscles fall off bones, skin melts away-metaphorically).
5. challenge will be to stay awake for many of us.

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YOGA AS EMBODIMENT: What's the Body Got to Do with it Anyway?

Consider the three aspects of “embodied experience”

1)      Attending to movement

2)      Heightened sensitivity

3)      Emotion

Laban technique demonstrated (dance)
Laban Personal Practice (dance)

Delasarte Technique (3rd graders) (theater)
Rasa: Indian Dance and Theater (dance and theater)

Stanislavski and Strasberg (Method Acting)

• Mind/Body Being: The body is us. We are not simply our minds. In fact, experiences in our bodies CREATE who we "are" (mind)  (Merleau-Ponty)
• Rehabituation: how experience is changed when one learns new ways of making sense of and using their bodies
• Kinestesia: (Maxine Sheets Johnstone) Knowing where you body is in space all at once. Something that athletes possess. 
• Movement and attention to movement can produce a heightened sense of awareness and less stressed sense of identity---a less rigid sense of self. What does lack of movement do therefore? Changing one’s way of moving our bodies also has an impact on how we feel about ourselves and the environment.
                  “…Depression is often experienced in the body as a passive giving in to weight.. The slightest movement can diminish this. What is important is the indication of participation, rather than passivity”

• Embodiement: (Philip Zarelli). When we engage with our bodies we are able to have more heightened levels of experience in which we see ourselves as full human beings…the body connected to the mind in a dialectic

• Flow*:  mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does. (Mihály Csíkszentmihályi).
• flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. 
• In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. 
• The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task^. although flow is also described as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one's emotions.
• Flow has many of the same characteristics as (the positive aspects of) hyperfocus (near death experience/obsessive behavior). 
• However, hyperfocus is not always described in such universally glowing terms. For examples, some cases of spending "too much" time playing video games, or of getting side-tracked and pleasurably absorbed by one aspect of an assignment or task to the detriment of the assignment in general. 
• In some cases, hyperfocus can "grab" a person, perhaps causing him or her to appear unfocused or to start several projects, but complete few.

*Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be in the moment, present, in the zone, on a roll, wired in, in the groove, on fire, in tune, centered, or singularly focused.