Yoga with Melissa

Yoga Nidra Meditation

This full length Yoga Nidra Meditation for Deep Body Relaxation will help you let go of anxiety and stress to experience a deep inner peace and calm. Yoga nidra is a guided meditation that you do lying down that leads you into a deeply relaxing conscious sleep.

This guided meditation is part of our attention economy series. With so much information coming from digital content, online spaces, social media and time on computers it is easy for us to become disconnected from our bodies. Our experiences are largely cerebral.

Because we are always on, always trying to improve ourselves we become disconnected from our internal cues, cues like hunger. We experience lack of sleep, we forget we are hungry. What we are actually hungry for is deep embodiment.

There will be no close out today so that you can stay deeply in your embodied experience. This guided meditation will end with 5 minutes of silence for those students who like these meditations to fall asleep to at night.

If you would like my 7 days of yoga for sleep my best yoga, ayurveda, self massage and breath practices to fall asleep go to: melissawest.com/sleep put your email in and we will deliver that right to your inbox.

I will put the direct link to the downloadable audio file for our members in the show notes and a link to become a member if you would like access to the downloadable file which is just the yoga nidra without any YouTube advertising or promotion, it starts right with the spoken guided yoga nidra that you can download onto your phones and devices to take it to bed with you so you can call right asleep.

Yoga Nidra for Anxiety Audio Download 30 mins

Yoga Nidra Audio Downloads (26 available as of today)

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Chair Yin Yoga

This yin yoga and meditation on a chair is the perfect introduction to yin yoga or chair yoga for beginners. We will go over the posture of meditation to begin and end the class as a way of centering and feeling the energy moving through our bodies. The yin yoga postures in the chair are chosen to increase the flexibility of the hips, hamstrings and relieve back pain. Throughout the class we will focus on the four principles of yin. By choosing an appropriate edge, softening, being still and staying for awhile we will be able to access the deeper connective tissues of the joints and bones that we affect in yin yoga. This class is perfect if you are unable to get on the floor or if you are practicing in a place where you do not have access to the floor.

Yin Yoga on a chair allows us to practice even when we do not have a lot of space. Chair yin yoga will allow us to continue with yin yoga practice even if we are dealing with foot or ankle injuries. Many of us spend long hours at work in a chair. Changing our perception of the chair as an object associated with work to an object that we can use for yin yoga and mindfulness meditation can allow us to bring a bit of that mindset into our work environment as well.

 

Full Body Yin Yoga

In the attention economy not only is there an overwhelming amount of information, but we are constantly bombarded with the most current information. There is a sense of continual immediacy as the contemporary media accelerates the circulation of information. Short videos and video editing are designed to capture your decreased attention spans and give us a false sense that everything is available immediately.

It is not unusual to see a week's worth of meal planning in an eight minute video on YouTube video, or renovating an entire house in a week in a 20 minute video, or changing an entire wardrobe in under ten minutes. Amazon now offers same day delivery in many major city centers. As I scroll through Instagram I can see hundreds of time lapsed yoga practices condensed down to one minute.

All of this gives us the illusion of immediacy. One thing that my meditation teacher continually says is that meditation (and what we are doing here to in yoga) is a slow and developmental process. We are given the illusion of quick transformations, but the practices of yoga and meditation take time.

When we practice yin yoga we are asked to let go of the instant access to poses and stay for awhile in the pose. In fact there are no poses to achieve, the practice is much more about the internal felt sense of the practice than the external aesthetic look of the poses. With yin yoga, we are asked to take residence in our body.

When we let go of the immediacy of the attention economy we are asked to stop trying to turn yoga into a transaction where you have instant access to everything and anything and instead become curious about the process as it unfolds. Letting go of the transactional exchange where you determine the value based on how much you can get and how fast you can get the desired results, you instead open to what your body may reveal to you over time.

With yin yoga, we soften the control of trying to be somewhere else and always trying to gain access to the next best thing. Instead we open to just being here and experiencing the sensations in our body as they are arising now. It is an open, relaxed, curious exploration. One that is willing to be curious about the shadow side of instant access.

Hatha Yoga for Strength

Over the last several weeks, we have been focusing on the attention economy in our yoga class. The theory of the attention economy is that there is an overabundance of information which means we get to be more and more selective on how we allocate our attention. The upside of the huge proliferation of information on YouTube, Instagram, Netflix, and Pinterest is that we can personalize our choices for our individual needs.

A couple of weeks ago in our restorative yoga class we focused on interoception. Attending to our internal landscape, our body´s sensations, sensing and noticing how we are feeling from the inside. When we asked ourselves how do I feel? We were then able to take specific action based on how we felt, building trust with our own body.

In this hatha yoga class, just for you, we will continue with this internal awareness, checking in with our physical, mental, emotional, and energetic needs for today, adjusting the way we practice yoga accordingly. This will be a hatha full body yoga practice, just for you, adapted and designed by you as you go along.

 

Yin Yoga

The premise of the attention economy is that a wealth of information creates a scarcity of attention. We live in a world of noise with more and more marketing, social media, emails, books, advertising, netflix series and all these things compete for our distracted attention. We have YouTube, facebook, instagram and netflix to hold our attention. Every sixty second on YouTube there are 300 new videos uploaded. Instagram users posted 14 billion heart emojis in 2018. There are over 3 million likes on facebook a minute. Netflix users are watching 165 million hours a day.

We are told that we have less attention than a goldfish. Our attention span has gone down from 12 seconds in 2002 to 8.5 seconds 2013. However, we are training in a system that is developing our attention and our capacity to stay.

When we practice yin yoga we choose to place our attention in our body and on our breath for five minutes at a time. We choose to stay for awhile. In addition to that, in this world of coming and going, pursuing, profit and loss, our success and value is dependent on others liking us. Within the philosophies of Tibetan Buddhism in which I study we believe that each person is born inherently complete and enough. We are born capable of being attentive. However, somewhere along the line, we are conditioned out of this inherent knowledge. It is a vicious cycle that stresses out our minds, our bodies and causes us to spend our precious time in pursuit of external circumstances that will not make us happy.

When we practice yin yoga, we follow the principles of yin to return to our own basic goodness and our own inherent attention.

When we choose an appropriate edge, we recognize that we, as much as anybody else deserve our own non abandoning attention. And so we pay attention to how our poses feel physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically and spiritually. Sometimes that may mean going a little more deeply into the pose and sometimes that may mean backing off from the pose. If we are constantly pushing ourselves too much that will cause us to feel broken, depleted and not good enough. If we offer ourselves too much comfort we will become complacent and fragile. When we attend to our pose with just the right edge we will find the balance between comfort and challenge.

In the attention economy technologies are designed to increase arousal states so that you continue to pay attention and when you are not paying attention you will fear missing out. In yin yoga we can be with that edge knowing that we do not need to perform or achieve or be witnessed accomplishing, simply being who we are in the moment does not let others down.

Practicing stillness allows us to take a step away from those knee jerk reactions that we may have been conditioned to respond to with our phones and social media and so we let go of fidgeting, of needing to constantly do something, of needing to intensify the experience and needing to escape thought, emotions, sensations, energy. Instead we soften and are still.

Finally we stay for awhile. In yin yoga we get to practice being with our discomfort five minutes at a time. We believe that we can somehow escape stress, anxiety, gain and loss if only we could get from here to there, if only we could become something else, if only we had. When we gather our attention on one yin yoga pose, five minutes at a time, we open to our capacity to offer ourselves non abandoning attention and our happiness becomes a function of our beingness.

Restorative Yoga for Intuition

One of the things that has captured our attention in the attention economy is wearable tech. Wearable tech can collect incredible amounts of data from our activity to our rest. Things from the number of steps that we walk, our stress, our weight, the number of calories we consume, the amount of sleep we are getting, the quality of our sleep and our sun exposure to name a few. Wearable tech can also compare our fitness ability to other people of the same age and gender.

When our attention is focused on what our wearable tech is telling us, we hand over our internal authority to the wearable tech. We believe that our wearable tech knows more about our own experience than we do. We allow the wearable tech to become the authority of our experience rather than trusting our own experience.

Instead of checking in with how we feel when we wake up in the morning, we disconnect from our felt sense and look at our wearable tech to see how many hours we slept and how well we slept according to this external source and trust the data that it is collecting. When we are on a walk we may disregard the cues of our body in order to meet our goal of 10K steps, regardless of how tired we are, where we are in our menstrual cycle or how well we are feeling that day.

Wearable tech makes us poor interoceptors. It disconnects our awareness from the internal cues of our body. We may override our own cues for hunger, thirst and fatigue in order to follow the cues of our wearable tech.

Yoga helps us to develop better interoception, internal awareness and intuition. As rest in long restorative yoga poses as we are today, we can tune into our body´s sensations and needs.

Attending to our internal landscape allows us to be deeply rooted in our own embodied experience. This is an act of self love that helps us to develop our capacity to be empathetic. This empathy allows us to foster a profound sense of belonging in community and coherence in our environments.

Episode 500

To celebrate 10 years and 500 episodes on YouTube, Melissa goes behind the camera and Tim gets on the mat to welcome beginners and those with beginner's mind to try yoga. If Tim can do yoga, anybody can do yoga with this 30 minute at home yoga video. You will be laughing your way through this fun filled class.

This class was filmed in beautiful British Columbia on Vancouver Island, on Beaver Lake where the Canadian rowing team practices their rowing.

Tim will start you out in this class with lying down to release the stress and tension from your day. The warm up postures in this yoga class include hamstring and hip releases. Tim´s go to pose in this class is child´s pose, however he does offer a modification of knee to chest pose for people with knee issues and tight ankles and feet. Downward facing dog will help you stretch out your back and hamstrings. Lunge pose will open up the fronts of your hips. When we come to standing we practice tree pose for balance. Wide legged standing forward fold helps to lengthen your hamstrings while calming your mind and nervous system. Sphinx pose is our backbend to help improve posture and build bone density in your upper back. A reclined twist helps to release tension, improve digestion and release tension along your spine. We finish this beginner yoga class with savasana or corpse pose for relaxation. Tim even has chosen a poem for you to enjoy in savasana.

Thank you so much to all of you who have supported us over the last ten years. We know that each one of the 50K subscribers represents a real person doing yoga on their yoga mat. We appreciate your dedication to the teachings that we offer here. We are so excited that this is what we get to do: live on Vancouver Island and film yoga for you every week. We look forward to sharing the teachings of yoga with you for many years to come.

Yin Yoga

The Chinese character for busyness translates as heart killing. In the attention economy where everybody is vying for our attention, it is hard not to be affected by the noise of others. In the attention economy, there is a lot of noise that comes from outside in. We are estranged from ourselves. When we take the time to nourish ourselves with practices like yin yoga, we are guided from the inside out. We treat each moment as an opportunity to open towards wholeness and to show up fully for ourselves.

I think a lot of times in the attention economy, it feels like we are busy, when in reality we are simply sorting through the stimulus of the external world. This kind of sorting often takes place hunched over computers and smartphones and offers little physical and emotional nourishment. Dealing with mental overwhelm takes a lot of energetic resources that dip into our energetic reserves and then our bodies, minds and spirits need bailouts.

Yoga practices like yin yoga offer us a deeper connection with ourselves, our bodies and our own feminine nature. They allow us to feel our bodies from the inside and trust our own experience rather than rely on what experts are telling us from the outside. Yoga practices like yin yoga open a doorway into our own insight, nourishment and inspiration.

Yin Yang Yoga

In the attention economy brands and individuals, that is living and breathing human beings compete for continual growth of likes and followers on different platforms from YouTube to podcasts on ITunes, Facebook, Instagram to Snapchat. Our self worth is tied to the number of followers and likes we have. Each of us, whether we are an individual human being or a company is vying for the same amount of limited attention. Each of us has the same opportunity to connect with anyone, anywhere. There is this myth that we can all experience continual growth of popularity, likability, and social capital.

However the truth is, the idea of continual, never-ending growth is a lie. We know this from our experience of yin yoga, theories of yin and yang and Taoism. The sun comes up in the morning, but it does not stay up at that highest point in the sky forever. Just past noon it begins its descent into afternoon and in the evening it becomes dark again and we (hopefully rest). The tide comes in and then it goes out. The moon waxes and then it wanes. Our lives and experience of the world we live in are in constant flux.

In this yin yang yoga class we will explore the constantly changing qualities of yin and yang. Yin is constantly changing into yang and yang is constantly changing into yin. This may be more yin for a time and then more yang for a time in relationship to something else.

While yin qualities are quiet, receptive, tolerant, reflective passive, non manipulative, and still.

Yang qualities are manipulative, directing, improving, achieving, controlling, and becoming. Neither is better than the other, both are essential for balance and harmony.

When we practice yin yoga we develop receptivity and reflection. We allow the practice to be and we do not try to control the practice. The experience will unfold as it will. I love how Yin Yoga teacher Josh Summers describes it as asking our inner control freak to take a break. When we practice yin yoga we may experience relaxation, or we may experience what I call a filling of the well, nourishment and a gathering of our qi. You may come away from your yin yoga practice feeling more energized.

On the other hand, when you practice a more yang style of yoga, appropriately, this can lead to a yin experience of calm, stillness and quietude. A yang output can potentially be transformed into a yin experience.

Resource: Yin vs. Yang Meditation Episode 9 Everyday Sublime - LINK

The Attention Economy is Dying What is Next: LINK

Restorative Yoga

Over the last few weeks, we have been focusing on the attention economy and how this affects our physical, mental, emotional, energetic and spiritual bodies.The idea that the explosion of information available to us has led to a battle for our attention. Advertisers fight for our attention with distracting and over the top content, social media goes to extremes with both uplifting and depressing content that keeps you psychologically engaged and every marketer out there is trying to convince you that their product or service will solve your problem, problems that you might not have even known existed.

In short, the demands of others are dominating our lives. The attention economy means that our lives are often guided from the outside in, rather than the inside out. It generates a frenetic pace and busy-ness that leads to a disconnection and estrangement from ourselves.

The Chinese character for busy-ness translates as heart killing. When we our attention is turned outwards toward the agenda of the consumer culture, we lose touch with a deeper connection with ourselves. Practices like restorative yoga, allow us to slow down and restore our trust in our bodies. They allow us to open up to our experience, to show up for ourselves fully and listen to our bodies.

Restorative yoga allows us to meet ourselves where we are and how we are. With the props and the support of the ground, we can create a cocoon around our embodied self. It is impossible to self-regulate from the attention economy if we are constantly placing our attention on somebody else’s agenda. Restorative yoga allows us to open the doorway inwards to nourishment and inspiration that comes deep from within.

The direction of the attention economy is to do too much while receiving very little physical and emotional nourishment. This is the heart killing of busy-ness that the Chinese character speaks of. Restorative yoga gives us the chance to stop running, pushing and over achieving. Time to stop overspending our reserves. When we slow down in this way, we connect with the inner confidence that we can indeed slow down even more.