Intro to Somatic Practices & Yoga Nidras

In this module, I’ve shared several somatic practices and yoga nidras. Before you start, I want to help you understand why they’re supportive. They can seem extremely simple, which can feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable if you’re used to more intense healing practices. Vitality is life force, or prana. It’s the animating impulse we share with all living things. Think of it as a river within us that flows through the subtle channels of our body. The banks of that river can expand to carry greater life force or contract to constrict our life force. In this course, I’ve been guiding you to expand your life force capacity by living in alignment with the flow of nature’s prana. The more adaptive and resilient we are, the more life force those channels can carry. Trauma is an experience our system couldn’t fully digest or complete its response to. When we repeat a nervous system pattern rooted in trauma, it’s our body’s way of trying to complete that response. When you’re stuck in this trauma response, the channels of your body—the riverbanks—narrow, and there’s less life force available to you. The goal of nervous system work is twofold: first, to digest or complete the nervous system responses that have resulted in bound-up life force; and second, to build greater capacity in our system by widening the riverbanks. This allows us to become more resilient and adaptable, to take action on what we want, and to respond to stressors without collapsing. The wider the riverbanks, the more experience is available to us in life. Traumatic events can cause our life force to get stuck in what’s called a trauma vortex—a repeated, swirling, stuck pattern of energy. This may look like a situation in your life that keeps repeating itself, chronic movement patterns, or emotional dysregulation. Just as there are areas of constriction in the river, there also exist vortices of healing. Too often, we get stuck in the trauma vortex, either unknowingly or because we believe that struggling harder will lead to solutions. True healing lies in learning to gently shift between what feels good and addressing what doesn’t. These somatic practices and yoga nidras help your body digest the experiences that are creating blockages in your life force and help you build greater capacity in your system. The somatic practices are intended not just to be practiced in isolation but to be brought into your life—used while engaging with others, during times of stress, and during times of rest. Yoga nidra brings your body into a deep parasympathetic state. One of the biggest challenges I see with women is that they’re not able to fully follow their parasympathetic rest impulse to completion. As a result, when their system moves into a parasympathetic response, it tends toward freeze or collapse rather than rest and digest. These experiences, combined with the practices and the resources supporting your four female body rhythms, can help address the root cause of much of the stress and nervous system dysregulation modern women experience. I hope you find them helpful.