Sense of Soul - Yoga Nidra and Meditation Connecting with The Luminous Self

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

Today we have on Sense of Soul Podcast, Yoga Nidra teacher and author, Tracee Stanley. Inspired by 28 years of deep practice and study in yoga and tantra, Tracee shares practices that will inspire you to remember who you really are and tap into that which is eternal, powerful, wise, and worthy. She creates space for sacred containers that inspire clarity, self-devotion, and momentum to help us transition away from unhealthy patterns and to live in alignment with the whispers of our soul. Tracee is the author of the bestselling book Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation and Awakened Clarity and the forthcoming The Luminous Self: Sacred Yogic Practices & Rituals to Remember Who You Are (Oct 2023 by Shambhala Publications). Tracee is the host of the podcast, Radiant Rest and is the founder of Empowered Life Circle, a sacred community and portal of practices, rituals, and Tantric teachings inspired by more than 25 years of studentship in Sri Vidya Tantra and the teachings of the Himalayan Masters. As a post-lineage teacher, Tracee is devoted to sharing the wisdom of yoga nidra, rest, meditation, self-inquiry, nature as a teacher, and ancestor reverence. Tracee is gifted in illuminating the magic and power found in liminal space and weaving devotion and practice into daily life. http://www.traceestanley.com Learn more about Sense of Soul Podcast: https://www.senseofsoulpodcast.com Follow and join Sense of Soul on Patreon, and join to get ad free episodes, circles, mini series and more! https://www.patreon.com/senseofsoul

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul podcast, enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today we have with us Tracy Stanley. She is a yoga nidra teacher, best-selling author, and she's the host of the Radiant Rest podcast.

Tracy has received praise from leading figures such as Arianna Huffington and Oprah. Tracy is making an empowered living accessible for wide audiences and does so by guiding individuals and connecting through yoga, nidra, meditation, tantra, nature, self-inquiry, and ancestral healing. She's joining us today to tell us about her new book, The Luminous Self, where Tracy guides individuals to self-remembrance with practices, meditations, and self-inquiry to help them connect with their inner wisdom. And it's my honor to have her with us here today. So please welcome Tracy Stanley. Hello, Ms. Tracy. Hello.

How are you, Shana? How's it going? Where are you in the world? I'm in Colorado. What about you? I am in northern New Mexico, just a little bit north of Santa Fe. Okay. So you're like a neighbor.

Yeah, pretty much. We're sharing the same mountain range. Yeah. Oh, I'm so excited. I was, you know, looking through some of your stuff and it's so funny how universe just brings us exactly what we need. Isn't it when we're open and when we're listening? Yes. I'm super excited to have you on and just thank you so much for coming into my space. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for the invitation. I appreciate it. So tell us about your luminous self. It's something I read about before I ever contemplated or knew that it was a place that existed. I read a translation many, many years ago of the yoga sutras, Patanjali's yoga sutras,

and the yoga sutras are basically 196 aphorisms that are woven together to kind of lead you to a place of freedom and peace. And one of the yoga sutras said that there was a place inside each of us that was eternal, effulgent, and beyond all sorrow. So that meant that it was beyond all conditioning and all things that had ever happened to us. And that really intrigued me. And up until that time, I had been practicing a lot of yoga asana, but not reading about a lot of yoga philosophy that was really and is really the underpinning of all yoga practice. And that just caught me and took me deeper and deeper into my journey of discovering what is that place inside of me? Where is that place? I want to know about that. And the interesting thing is, is that I think that I had had a taste of it years before when I kind of fell into this place of spontaneous meditation and peace, just not trying. I wasn't meditating. I was just sitting on a balcony watching the sunrise, but I had no context for it.

I had nothing to support or hold me in that experience and no one really. It wasn't until I met someone who I told my situation to, told them what happened. He said, oh, I know what happened to you. And he started giving me all these different books to read. And that gave context to this idea of there is a place inside of each of us that is luminous. I do think it's part of our purpose in life to be able to know that place. Yes, yes. And following that inner compass to discovering it, that freedom, that sovereignty is found within, but we're chasing it outside of us? Well, that's the way the over culture is set up, right? Is that if you are constantly focused externally, then you're never looking inside. You're constantly being sold the idea that everything that is going to make you valuable, worthy is outside of you and you have

to grasp for it. You have to work really hard for it, you have to attain it, then there's never time really for stillness. There's never time for looking inward. And I think that that is one of the things that we really need in this day and age to be able to release. And it's not saying that we don't want to have success, but there's such a thing as being externally successful and internally poor. Oh, I love that. That is so true. And we try so hard on the outside and it's so simple almost, but yet we complicate everything because we have this monkey mind that's just going every direction and trying to keep up with all of these conditions that really truly are weighing us down, keeping us from that luminous light. Yeah. I mean, you talk about the monkey mind and the monkey mind is this

mind that jumps from one place to another and we all have it to be able to calm that monkey mind. And when we have tools, then we can see kind of the origin of our thoughts. We can see how our thoughts run in cycles and circles and why we have to keep learning the same lessons over and over again, because we keep thinking the same thoughts and having the same reactions. So to me, nothing wrong with the monkey mind. It's a good thing to look at to be able to understand who we are more deeply, but we want to be able to calm that mind every once in a while to be in a place of stillness and deep peace. Yeah. And you said the tools. And I think that for the majority of my life, that's what I was missing. I look at someone like my dad, who was such a hard worker,

and he ended up dying so young because he had no tools. And I really do believe it was the stress and the overworking. I mean, this man would work from morning till night and never, ever even would breathe. I mean, just breath. I thought about that in watching him struggle because in the end, he needed a new heart, you know, because he had just so much stress on that heart. And I thought, I need to find some new tools. I'm much like this man. I'm a workhorse too. And I have four kids and I push myself.

And even now I do, you know, and I have to make myself, you know, slow down. Yeah. I mean, I think that this is where it's really helpful to look into our ancestry and our epigenetics because we inherit a lot of these patterns from people who came here a lot of times from other places, people who were relocated, quote unquote, people who were stolen and brought here, and their lives depended on working because they were enslaved or they needed to survive. And so a lot of times it's hard to put that down

when the conditions have changed and then we inherit that same quote unquote work ethic. Right? Yeah, you're speaking to my soul now. That's a huge part of my journey. So I come from the French Creole people of New Orleans, also the Cajuns. And I've done so much work and I have so much knowledge about my ancestors. And you're right.

It's been the biggest healing. It was so unexpected too. I had no idea what I was doing when I was just taking that first little DNA test and tapping into my tree. I had no idea that that journey was going to be probably the I think that there's a lot of fear sometimes in finding out who our ancestors are and learning their stories but you know the thing is whether you like it or not their stories live in our bones their prayers live in our bones just thinking to my soul i couldn't even speak that what you just said out loud until recently so that's how i know when the healing is really beginning because when i can actually speak it and i've moved past the emotional part and now

it comes with the strength that i know one day there was a woman on her knees praying for her future lineage, that they would be free, that they would be able to use their voice, that they would be strong women, be able to marry who they choose to marry and, you know, to have all the things that she dreamt of. And I see it so clearly. Yeah. Yeah. It's big. I really do think that this is part of our spiritual journey is to touch into the ancestors. I do think that since the pandemic, it feels like there was a portal that opened during that time that really allowed people to become more interested in their ancestors, people, especially people, as you even said before, people, your father died young, people who were taken away. And then, you know, maybe because of the stillness that we were

experiencing during that time, people were able to more feel the presence of loved ones. And there became more of a curiosity. I do think that it's really important for us to know who we are because many of us have had that information taken from us. And so the DNA test is one way to just begin the journey of having a relationship with the ancestors. A relationship. I think that's a great word because I got to know so many of them and I felt at one point lined up in a lot, like a mile long line for me to know their stories. One after one. And as soon as I thought it was done, another one would

come in I was like when is this ever going to end it went on for like six years I mean I visited places that they were I met family I never knew existed it was really it was amazing it was such a huge healing for me and also it was it was timeless because I could sense that there was a healing, not just for myself, but for them and also for my children. And then I, in turn, decided to, you know, I helped one person because they saw I was into, and now I've probably done over a hundred trees with people and talk about a history lesson, the true history that I have learned that has never been told. They want their stories told. And yes, they're living in you. They want you to have the awareness.

And I think that that's kind of what I think you were saying, like in that time during COVID, it's like we became very conscious because everything kind of stood still. That's right. It was this space that kind of like you were saying that you created in yourself. We're all in a global sadhana of stillness, of the uncertainty of the future, which we can also say is the liminal, right? And that liminal space is a portal. That liminal space is scary. It feels like it's empty, but it's also full of potential. And so I think depending on what it was that people were choosing to do during that time of liminality, a lot of people went into nature. A lot of people decided to rest.

Some people were binging on Netflix. No judgment on any of that, right? Because it could have been a combination of all of those things. But I think in the times of really connecting to the uncertainty, connecting to the liminal space, there was a lot of inquiry that maybe happened with people. And we got a little bit deeper and a little bit more awake during that time. So I'm really touched by just hearing your story because what I saw in my mind when you talked about this mile long line of people whose stories you heard was you kind of in the middle and then another line in front of you, right? It's like, we are the future ancestors. We're the ones who are the bridge between the

past and the future. And we have to step up into that space to be able to try to create as much as we can a more conscious and better world and forgetting the history of who we are and having that taken away from us also. And just being able to tune into those prayers and the stories and pull the threads and ask for more information. I know for me, when I started to, when I created an ancestor altar and started to bring in the request to know more ancestors, because there, there weren't a lot of photographs, there weren't a lot of stories. There weren't a lot of, there were things that were missing. And literally the moment that I did that, it was like two days later, I got a phone call from someone who I didn't know existed and found out that there was a whole branch of my family that

I didn't know about that were thriving and had stories and had photographs. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. It was really interesting. And then there were other photographs that came from the 1800s that was like how, like someone was holding onto these things, had never thought to say, oh, by the way, I have this whole treasure trove of information and stories and I'm the lineage holder of, of this, you know, paternal side of the family. So yeah, it's when you ask and when you want to know, I do think things can come through in various ways, even if you are adopted and don't know

your, your birth family. Oh, I love that. It's so true. I feel like they've been waiting for most people to be open to receive this. And yeah, today's the time, especially for women. I think often when I work with clients, it's been just over the past year, really strongly that people's grandmother energy is around them. I mean, I can't, I mean, it's, it's been such a regular thing with my clients, you know, whether it's in meditations or in a Reiki session or in dreams, there's like this feminine energy that is undeniably rising into our consciousness. And I always think like, can you imagine like our great, great, great grandmothers, you know, listening to you and I right now going, look at them. I'm sure they are. I have no doubt about that.

Yeah. I have goosebumps all over because women are getting to speak out and be respected and have a voice of power and not just treated as less than. Hmm. Well, I mean, there's still so much work to do. There's so much work to do for all peoples to be able to have that voice and to have that platform. So we just have to keep shining a light and keep standing up. Yeah. There's just so many powerful women I come by and I always get so excited. In fact, I just said last night, I was like, man, I've talked to some amazing men lately. And I was like, I need a powerful woman.

I saw your name cut like, yes, I've been waiting for this. The universe is sending me and also our listeners exactly what we need. And there's a lot of women who listen to this podcast who often come to me and say, I'm trying to stay calm and I'm not trying to be stressed. And during this time, it's very overwhelming. Even if I try to stay away from the news, I can still feel the heaviness. There's a lot of empathic people who, even if they try to stay away from all of it, they sense the weight of the world. And again, tools. But what is your suggestion? Because there's a lot going on. It's kind of a shit show out there. Yeah, there's a lot going on. I think it's really important to stay informed. And I think that when you have a devoted spiritual practice, that is something

that anchors you, it allows you to be in the world and also at the same time, have a different perspective of what's happening in the world so that it allows you to have the discernment to know when to move into right action and to be able to then recede when you need to nourish yourself, which we all need to nourish ourselves, is to A, be able to listen to the messages like, okay, it's time to nourish yourself. Have the courage to be able to do it, right? Because a lot of times there's all these pulls, like we were talking about from the external world. And then B, in practices, and those practices may be different from the external world, and then be in practices. And those practices may be different for each of us, but to be in practices that remind you that

there's a place within you that is always at rest. There's a place within you that's always peaceful and that that is a well that you can pull from when you come back into the world. But if you don't have that as a foundation, it's very hard to stay anchored and grounded and discerning. And so for me, those practices that I lean on every day are practices of yoga nidra, which yoga nidra translates to the yoga of conscious sleep or the yoga of awakened sleep, or there's so many different ways to think about this kind of sleep. But it is this practice that connects you to that part of you that was there before you had a name and will be there when you no longer have a body. And that's the knowing that I feel like gives us a different way to move in the world even amongst

all of the things that are happening it allows us to just be able to have the discernment to see when and how to act and speak to try to make change and make a difference in the world while not depleting ourselves and there's no fear in that space, because that's really truly what it is, is the fear that anchors itself to you. And when you go into that space, you're free from that, because it is such a peaceful place within yourself. It's like that oasis, you know, that you can, you know, kind of escape to, but I love what you said. I feel like besides awareness, my number two most important thing is discernment. Just the gift to discern and trust your inner self, your body will tell you

a hundred percent. This has never been taught to people. I mean, I should have been taught this as a child, but my mom was never taught that as a child. My dad was never taught that as a child. Yeah. Discernment is really big. And I think that it requires a lot. It requires a lot for us to be able to understand how our mind works, why our mind works the way it does, how sometimes we see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. And it really requires for me, at least in my journey, discernment requires constant self-inquiry, constant reflection. It requires being in a community and a cohort of people who we can compare notes and we can talk about experiences. And I can also be in relationship with people who have a differing opinion than what I do so that we can converse and talk about

different ways of seeing the world. I think that's also very important. So building discernment, I feel like it's not something that comes overnight. At least for me, it hasn't come overnight. It's definitely something that is a practice and it's a practice of not sleepwalking through life, but being able to be awake and aware in this way that you're constantly inquiring within yourself. Yeah, I see it as like a superpower. I do. I think it's like something that's magical within us that once you connect to it, it becomes like your go-to. Even if it's not true to you, it's true to me and I can feel it within me that it's true. And I sit with the truth. I feel good and I feel aligned and there's no resistance and it just is. And it's my experience and it can't be taken from me.

You know, people can have all the knowledge in the world, but until you can actually understand and use that knowledge, then it's wisdom, right? And that I think discernment, that is exactly what I just recently was discovering. I was like, discernment is like connecting with inner wisdom. Yeah, that's what I hear you saying is that you're taught what I feel when you're what comes up when you're talking about this is this idea of inner knowing. And that the spiritual teachings do say that there is a place within us that knows and knows that it knows. And so if we can connect to that place, because there's a lot of, you know, we have to catch ourselves when we start spiritually bypassing, we have to catch ourselves when we want the easiest

route for us to take, as opposed to leaning into this discomfort, which a lot of times discomfort is the portal to kind of tuning into that discernment or inner wisdom. And so I do think that that is one of the benefits of spiritual practice is that your inner wisdom starts to become louder and then we have to learn to trust it. In the trusting, to me, the early days of trusting was like, oh, let me test this out. This is a feeling I have. Let me test this out. Let me see what happens when I don't listen. Oh, okay. I had my intuition and I didn't listen. Why didn't I listen? And just being able to learn to trust yourself, to learn to release doubt and to trace back the origins of why doubt is there. And at the same time, to me, I feel like that inner knowing is a frequency and the thought waves are a different frequency.

And just being able to tune into when do I feel that true frequency of knowing like there's something outside of me almost that is allowing me to remember that there is a knowing and that comes in the form for me as the frequency. Wow. Discernment. It's not only just a superpower, but it is a teacher. It helps you sort out all of the things, all the conditions and all of the patterns that are going on within you as you work them out, as you trust the system and see what works. But yet some of it, you're going to be like, oh, well, I should have listened. I didn't listen. And now I'm in the hospital because I didn't listen. And my body was trying to tell me, and I didn't sit with it long enough. I spiritual bypassed it. This just happened to me not too

long ago. I was going to ask, is this from a personal experience? It sounds a little too detailed. Literally just happened to me not too long ago when I ended up, you know, I got really good at like flooding pain with light, which became a superpower. And I just, oh, I have pain. Oh, I'm just going to sit with it. Thought it was like skipping over all of that. What is this pain telling me? What is the message that I should be listening to?

There's pain here for a reason. And boy, I made a mistake. I should have listened. Yeah. And the other question, the other inquiry that I just kind of heard was, why am I surpassing? Why am I trying to surpass this pain? Why am I trying to use my spiritual gifts of bringing light in to surpass this pain to what end? Just like taking medicine before, which then I thought, oh, this is better because now I could flood it with light. So what was the lesson that you received? There was a lesson. There was such a lesson. It was truly a blessing, but at the time it wasn't. I mean, I ended up having colitis because I was taking so much ibuprofen because I talk so much.

And I had like laryngitis for like weeks and weeks and weeks. And so I took too much ibuprofen. But in the hospital, I had to fast, which did not know the power in fasting until then. And then I also had a cleanse and I was full of shit before. And then I came home and it was like four days and you would have thought I would have been exhausted. I mean, I hadn't ate, hadn't, you know, slept because, you know, you're in the hospital, they're poking me all the time. And here I had more energy than I had, could even remember. I mean, I didn't even know how bad I felt before. So I was not taking care of the temple. I was bypassing the pain.

And all of a sudden I felt so good on nothing. And I became so conscious and mindful about what I wanted to put back in this temple. And it was the first time that I truly saw my body as a temple, like for the first time. And I was like, okay, okay. I'm getting older. I'm 47 years old. They said, you don't have cancer or anything, but you've got, you know, this and that you got to be careful. So, I mean, just the awareness, the whole experience just opened my eyes. It actually put me on an awakening of more of my body because I have been too busy to care for the body. So it slowed me down. Yeah.

I appreciate hearing that. And thank you for sharing that part of your story. Cause it feels like we've kind of come full circle a little bit from talking about your father also. Wow. Wow. Goodness, Tracy. I didn't think about that. Yep. You're so right. There you go. Thank you for, for you see that's why just like you said having conversations about this kind of stuff with other people who can maybe even see you in a light that you can't right or put together help you connect the dots that's why I love this community. I love connecting with people. Yeah. We need reflections. Yes. And we never know when that reflection is going to happen.

It could be in the supermarket with the checkout person or it could be here. So thank you for opening that portal yeah and just being more present we're multi-dimensional you know oftentimes i am in a space that we're talking so much about all this woo stuff and i think it's so fun but it's sometimes distracting, you know, from just coming home to myself. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. Thank you for that.

Let's just pause there for a moment. Because I think it's good maybe for all of us to take a moment and those who are listening to ask the question, what are the ways in which you distract yourself? What are the ways in which you distract yourself from your own knowing, from taking care of your body temple, from connecting with the ancestors? What are the ways in which you distract yourself and just write a list of how you distract yourself and then once the list is done maybe choose a couple of things on there that you're ready to stop doing because if we're not moving towards things that are life affirming, and we are working and moving in a way that is actually extracting in the distraction, it really takes our life energy. It's depleting to us.

And so to me, that also includes relationships, right? There's probably certain relationships, certain jobs, certain friends, certain places that you go where you're like, wow, I feel so exhausted after being around this person or in this space. Start to titrate and protect your energy. And also I think that what I think is really important, just from what you said, is how we can construct our lives to be a continuous flow of distraction so that we don't have to be with self. And everybody has done it.'s nobody including myself everybody has done it i remember i i used to work in hollywood as a producer for many years and i really wanted to create a space that was not as toxic and that i had more control over the types of projects that I was doing.

And so I started my own company and, you know, it was wonderful because it was, the pace was exactly how I wanted it. I got to, you know, and then I started to notice, I was like, oh, there's a little bit of uneasiness within me. There's a feeling of like, I want something to happen. And I started to realize when I did the inquiry into it, I was like, oh, there's part of me that is attached to the crisis. There's a part of me that's attached to the always being in emergency mode, always being in crisis mode, always needing to fix something. What is that about? And I had to go down that rabbit hole of just really going down deep to say, oh, when I get to the end of this line, I'm realizing that the crisis and the fixing and the doing makes me feel valuable. It makes me feel worthy. But I'm worthy just because I'm here on

this earth. I'm breathing. So I'm already worthy. And I had to slowly untangle myself. And then I started to think about, oh, while I was in that job, what kind of crises was I creating just to have something to fix, which could have been in the form of procrastination, waiting until the last minute to do this or to do that so that there would be something really energetic to move through so that I could feel worthy. So it's real. We all do it. And we have to dismantle that if we want to be free. Because you are whole already.

That's right. And you need to remember this. Yeah. We're looking for the wholeness out here and out here and with this relationship and with that job and with this big house and that thing and that other thing. And the wholeness is already here. And we are distracted. We've been distracted because there are, you know, there's a lot of distraction, but we're also distracting ourselves.

And are we doing that intentionally to not come home to ourselves? Because what might be there? That's the question. But if we really look and parse out this idea of self, are we talking about self with a small s? Or are we talking about self with a small s or are we talking about self with a capital s because the capital s self the deeper self the inner self the true self that is the self that is the one that is who we really are the small self is all the masks that we've had to put on over the course of our lifetime to stay safe, to be seen, to feel worthy. And when you really go on this journey of finding out who you really are, there's a peeling away. There's a revealing, right? There's a peeling away of, oh, I'm not this.

I'm not that. Who am I really? That is really good. Yeah, I'm feeling you. My body is reacting even to what you're saying. It's like, yes, yes. Let's talk about more about the yoga nidra because i was looking for youtube meditations and yoga nidra just showed up and i started to sleep better i my anxiety started to

go away i used to have restless leg syndrome that went away. I started to be more present with my family. I started to hear things I'd never heard before, see things I'd never seen. And I'd walked past a million times. Yeah. It changed, changed my life. Yeah. Yeah. Yoga Nidra is the practice that awakens you to your life while you're sleeping. That it is a very magical practice. And it's also based in science. So it's, you know, this practice is people love the practice because they can do the practice lying down. The practice is generally guided by someone else. And sometimes if you've been doing it for a long time, you can start to self-guide, but generally it's guided by a person. And that person is guiding you through a technique of

systematic deep relaxation through the body. So there's like a rotation of consciousness that goes through the body to help you to relax and soften different parts of the body. And as you go through that, you start to, first of all, notice things that you never noticed about your own body before. And then you will probably be directed to some kind of diaphragmatic breathing, right? Where you're just observing the navel rising and falling. And that diaphragmatic breathing helps to drop you into a parasympathetic nervous system response,

which helps the body to soften and sink into the earth. And when the body softens and sinks a little bit into the support beneath it, there's this sense of unconditionally holding. It's like you get to feel that you are held. You get to feel that you are held. And then there are many, many different techniques in Yoga Nidra from counting backwards

and allowing yourself to stay awake and aware as you count backwards, let's say from 27 all the way to zero, just being able to find a sacred abode within you, a place that feels safe, whether you are drawing circles of protection around the body for that safety, or you find a place that is in you, or a memory that you have of a place that feels safe. And so this practice really brings you from the place of beta, this brainwave state of beta, which like right now, maybe we're in low beta, those people who are, well, those people who are listening maybe are in low beta,

hopefully you're sitting back relaxed listening to this. And maybe we're a little bit more in high beta because we're asking questions and answering and kind of staying really present. And at the same time, we want to be able to move ourselves into this alpha brainwave state. And so the moment we close our eyes or we soften our gaze, we start to bring our awareness inward. And yoga nidra is this practice of pratyahara, which is known as withdrawal of the senses. So we're withdrawing our sense of sound, we're withdrawing our sense of smell, our sense of sight, our sense of touch, and we're drawing that inward. And as Swami Veda Bharati gives this definition of pratyahara as withdrawal of the senses so that we can re-assimilate into our true nature. That's beautiful. So it's exactly what

we've been talking about. Instead of having our awareness external, we're training ourselves to practice bringing all of our awareness inward and then become acquainted with the inner landscape of what's going on, right? Because if we think about, especially these practices and teachings of tantra, tell us that our body is a microcosm of the macro, that there is a universe within our body. There is the sun, there is a moon, there is the ocean, there are all the elements that are here. And yet we don't know that, we don't learn that, we don't experience that until we start to bring our awareness inward. And so when you talk about this idea of, oh, I started to notice things that I'd walked past many times before and never seen, this is not unusual of what happens with yoga nidra practice because you become so attuned and so awake in the inner world that when you come back into the outer world, you are more awake and more conscious. And so the idea with yoga nidra is that you are

able to kind of float in that space in between. So we talked about that liminal space earlier, is that in yoga nidra, you are floating in that space between being awake and being asleep, right? And even though you may hear your own body snoring, you may, the body itself may completely fall asleep. Consciousness is awake and aware. And that's a different kind of wakefulness, but it's the wakefulness that we need in this lifetime right now. So thank you for asking about Yoga Nidra

because it is a powerful tool. It's a powerful practice. It's done in a supine position. And I will guarantee that anyone who practices Yoga Nidra, let's say seven days in a row, and maybe does some journaling afterwards or in the morning when they wake up, because a lot of times when we first start, we fall asleep, which is totally fine to fall asleep in the beginning. But if you practice that for seven days in a row, you will see a shift. You will see a shift. And then hopefully that will be the shift that encourages you to, and to start to weave it, bring that practice into your daily life in, and there's many different benefits for your creativity, for your sleep, for your feeling rested, and also just for your spiritual life. So, yeah. I loved it so much that I wanted to do it in the morning for my kids.

And I have to tell you, like, dreaming became such an important part of my journey. My dreams are so sometimes I don't even know which is real. When I first wake up, I'm thinking, which? Yeah. Where am I? It's not uncommon that when people start to practice yoga nidra, that they begin to be more awake to their dreams. So remember I said that yoga nidra awakens you to your life. Your dreaming is part of your life, your dream life, something that we normally just don't even think about, right? We just kind of dismiss it. What kind of wisdom, what kind of messages, what kind of processing also is happening in our dream life that we're completely ignoring? This idea that I love is like the weaving of practice through all the states of consciousness. And as a 24 hour practice, that just becomes because now dreaming and remembering your dreams becomes part of a practice. And the practice is not a practice of efforting. Because a lot of times we hear practice and we think there's effort involved. These practices of yoga nidra, these practices of being aware of the dreams, there's no effort. These are practices of rest

and receiving. And those practices of rest and receiving are the most nurturing and I feel like the most healing that I have experienced. Yeah. For your mind, body, and soul. And, you know, what's interesting is I, my mom, I had, I'm from Louisiana where my mom was, my mama, she had Alzheimer's, her mom had Alzheimer's. So, and I have an aunt who's starting to show signs of dementia anyways. So for some reason in my mind, I said, oh, it's so genetic and we're all going to have it. And I had someone on in this doctor, he said, you know, it's less than 5% genetic Alzheimer's. As soon as he said that, I was like, what? Like, I just thought you were going to tell me 95% and I was shit out of luck, but no. And he said, one of the number one reasons is sleep.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. This is where the brain gets to release the toxins physiologically. It's so important. And really yoga nidra practice can take less than, can take 10 to 15 minutes a day. This isn't like some extravagant thing that you need to do. It can be. The more you fall in love with it, the more you might create a rest nest and a special place to do it and have all the things. But this practice is a practice that is accessible for everyone to do. And really, I truly believe everyone should be doing it.

It's almost like it helps train your body to relax. It's, you know, just like any muscle memory thing that you're training yourself to do here in America, or maybe all over the world, we're so busy and so used to go, go, go, that it's almost like we have to retrain ourselves just to relax. Well, we do. And there are also reasons why for some people relaxing doesn't feel safe. So if there's trauma or if there is this information in our epigenetics that tells us that it's not safe to rest.

And I do believe that when we embark on this journey of either of intentional rest practice or yoga nidra practice, this is part of the inquiry, right? We get to inquire like, oh, here's this thing that is keeping me from actually resting. And so maybe I need to go and get extra support from a mentor or from a coach or from a therapist to be able to start to weave ourselves through the journey and start to unravel some of these things. And so that's where a rest coach can be really important or a therapist can be important to be able to help you to release the layers that are covering anxiety or the fear or the trauma. And then creating space when you do that self-inquiry and you find that and you become aware of it and you release it.

Now you have space to connect with that inner wisdom, because that's one thing I've noticed in my journey and just talking to many people and also coaching people. They want to skip right to the wisdom. Well, who wouldn't, right? Yeah, right to the superpowers. And it's like, but there's all these things like, why haven't you been able to connect with it already? Like, that's the part that you need to work on first. Well, you said a very vital and important word, space. These practices create spaciousness. They create spaciousness. And in that spaciousness, that is where you can touch these things like the inner wisdom, the true self. And I think that anybody that I have met that's come to me to learn how to rest or to learn to teach others how to rest or practice yoga nidra, they feel a lack of spaciousness in the beginning. Like, oh, I don't have time.

I don't have this. I don't have that. I can't let go. And the more that practice starts to become a part of their life and they realize that it's effortless, there's a spaciousness that starts to happen. And I start to see not only a spaciousness within them, even how they speak or how they hold their body or how they relate to their family or their children, that they're also with that spaciousness comes an expansion. And that expansion is easeful. It's all of a sudden, oh, this thing that I've been wanting to do just kind of showed up and it's easeful. This other thing that I've been

wanting to write, I've have time for it now. And then everybody in the house, this is why this is so important is because when our nervous system is regulated, we can regulate the nervous system of the whole household. And when we're practicing and people start to see, oh, you know, she's doing this thing where she's laying down in the middle of the afternoon and listening to a recording. But what I'm noticing is she has more patience. He has more grace. They have more inspiration and energy. What is it that you're doing? And then it becomes like, oh, I want to do this. And then the next thing I get is emails from people saying, oh, my whole family is doing the resting. Everybody is. And you learn to kind of create sacred boundaries around your space. Because you want to keep it this way. You become very protective of this. You're like, this feels so good.

I've got to protect it. Yeah. But by doing that, you also teach your kids and the people in your house to ask for what they need to hold their sacred space to heal. So your house then becomes a healing space. It's so true. It lets go of this chaotic energy, becomes a space of healing, a space of refuge, which is what a home should be. Everything you're saying is so true. You're putting the words to my experience. Thank you. And when you mentioned the word expansion, I also thought that expansion, it doesn't fit no box.

In fact, it flattens that box that you were in. And if we want to think about this as the box or the body as the box, the temple that you talked about earlier, the energy and the light, that same light that you were focusing, that light becomes something that you're aware of that's inside of you already. And it starts to move to fill the body and to move to the space outside of the body. So the expansion is this expansion of frequency, of light, of beauty, of inspiration, of creativity that is just everywhere around your body. And it's almost as though when you walk through the world, other people can feel that. And I'm sure that's why you have so many people that listen to your podcast and are interested to hear your thoughts and to hear your conversations with people because you're emanating from the experience of your practice. I had to share it because I said, shoot, if I can do this, anybody can do this.

Well, you are such a blessing, Tracy. I feel so relaxed. You have such calming energy. It's very, very calming to me. Hopefully this will continue. You never know what the day will bring, but I know that I do have a luminous space within me too, that I can always retreat to. Thank you. Thank you. And this is the whole subject of my new book, The Luminous Self that comes out in October. So hopefully we'll get you a copy of that and maybe there'll be some extra practices in there that can support.

Yes. I would love, love that. And you also have a podcast and you have your prior book. Radiant rest. Yeah. My first book is called radiant rest and it comes with six practices that are downloadable when you buy the book.

So you can just be relaxing right away. Yeah. I was looking at your website earlier. You do have a lot of stuff on there. Oh yeah. People can go to my website. It's Tracy with two E's stanley.com to kind of see what's happening. We have some rest retreats that are coming up next year and some trainings for teachers who are interested in learning how to teach yoga nidra, practice yoga nidra. So yeah, all the things are there. Well, thank you so very much for coming on Sense of Soul. Thank you so much. I really appreciate being here. Thanks for listening to Sense of Soul podcast. And thanks to our special guests for joining me. If you want more of Sense of Soul, check out my website at www.mysenseofsoul.com, where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sense of Soul Podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.