Guided Yoga Nidra Meditation

So much of my own personal eating disorder recovery has been about slowing down. To try manage the energy inside of myself and the world around me, I used strategies like over-exercising as a way to purge and to run away. It lead to behaviours like restricting my food so that I could stop things from coming at and into me which oftentimes felt too fast and too much. I have come to realise over the years, one of the hardest aspects of my recovery has been to soften, open up and slow things down.

In February 2021, I was in a motorcycle accident in Nicaragua and fractured my tibia; I knew immediately in that moment that this was the way I was finally going to slow down. In fact, I intuited something like this was going to happen at some point many, many months before this specific incident. Something outside of myself had to come in to bring me to a halt - I knew I couldn’t do it all by myself.

And so I am grateful for this experience.

It showed me how I’ve used movement over the last 13 years, sometimes excessively and damaging, to suppress, neutralize or avoid overwhelming energy. When I was in the early stages of my recovery after my leg surgery, I finally got to experience the waves of energy, emotions, thoughts - the whole banquet of my human experience - without the hiding, distracting and altering. I was in all of it it and had to face all of it. I got to understand how so much of the movement I do in a day is to manage feelings of anxiety and fragmentation - but without giving myself time to really feel it, question it, or see it so that it could be transmuted.

During this potent time of healing, I found other ways to be with these feelings through breathwork, meditation, massage, sound and vocalization, painting and being in nature, allowing the winds to wash, cleanse and move through me. My understanding of how to find my center, to reground and regroup, expanded over the course of my injury recovery.

One of the ways of settling back into myself was with yoga nidra, a style of yoga that induces “non-sleep-deep-rest”, as Andrew Huberman likes to call it, where we find ourselves in a state of consciousness that is between being awake and asleep. Practicing yoga nidra induces the parasympathetic nervous system to come on and allows the sympathetic nervous system to take a chill. Our sympathetic nervous system governs our flight or flight, which many of us are in too much of the time, leading to chronic stress and subsequent health conditions. While we need this system to get out of bed, stay motivated, play and accomplish tasks, when used for extended periods of time it can cause issues with digestion, sleep and immunity. When we practice yoga nidra, we shut this system off and enter into the parasympathetic nervous system - rest and digest - thus calming the nervous system, improving immune function and deep cellular healing, supporting digestion and stress management, decreasing anxiety, blood pressure and cortisol levels, and inviting all of ourselves into the present moment.

And all you need to do is lie on your back on a mat or in bed, and allow yourself to be guided. There are many ways to be with the body, to move and transmute energy, and journey back to inner peace.

It’s now been seven months since my accident and my healing has been smooth and swift. To celebrate this little moment, I have decided to share a guided yoga nidra meditation with you which I actually created when I was still in Nicaragua in the first three months of my recovery.

Feel free to listen to this before you go to bed, in the middle of the day as a break, or before, during or after a plant medicine or psychedelic journey as preparation, support or integration .

Ground down, relax back, be transported, be transformed.

Photo by Anna Rozwadowska on Unsplash