The Menstruality Podcast - The Power of Rest for a Healthy Cycle, Menopause and Life (Karen Brody)

Episode Date: December 23, 2021

In a world where rest is seen as laziness, one of the most radical and daring things we can do is lie down and do nothing. And in doing so, we can wake up and bring to consciousness all that is hidden under our busyness. Our guest today is Karen Brody - a mother, writer and author of the book “Daring To Rest”. She is one of the leaders in this movement to be radically well-rested, through her Daring to Rest Leadership programme, where she teaches Yoga Nidra for the modern world. This conversation explores the quietly transformative healing power that rest brings to our lives.How rest - in a similar way to menstruation - is the anchor that roots us into who we are, opening the door to ‘soul whispers’ which help us access intuitive wisdom and live our Calling. How to take care of our frazzled nervous systems and ‘power down’ into truly nourishing deep rest, through the power of Yoga Nidra.How to dare to rest in a world which perceives rest as lazy, weak and unproductive, especially during the transitional moments in life, such as menstruation, menopause and motherhood.---Registration is open for our 2022 Menstruality Leadership Programme. You can check it out here. https://www.redschool.net/menstruality-leadership-programme-2022---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @red.school - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolKaren Brody: @karen_brody(This is the final episode for season one of the Menstruality podcast. We're taking a week off on December 30th, and we'll be back on January 6th with season two! Thank you for listening this year - we're exciting to share more game-changing Menstruality conversations with you in 2022). 

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening today. This is our final episode of the first season of the menstruality podcast. Thank you so much for your support. We're actually taking a break next week for Red School's winter rest period and we'll be back on January the 6th with an exciting invitation to

a free online retreat which is designed to enhance your vitality and creativity and leadership through the power of menstrual cycle awareness. If you want to save the date it's from the 11th to the 25th of January. Today's episode, let's talk about that. It's all about rest and in a world where rest is seen often as laziness, one of the most radical things we can do is to actually lie down and do nothing. Our guest is Karen Brody. She's a mother, a writer and the author of the book Daring to Rest. She's one of the leaders in this important movement, maybe one of the most important movements of our times to be radically well rested through her Daring to Rest leadership program.

Our conversation today explores the quietly transformative healing power of rest. We look at how rest in a similar way to menstruation is the anchor that roots us to ourselves, to our calling, how it opens the door to soul whispers which help us access our intuitive wisdom. We look at how to take care of our frazzled nervous systems which feel so important at this time of year and power down into truly nourishing deep rest through the power of yoga nidra. And we talk about how we can actually dare to rest in a world which often perceives rest as lazy and weak and unproductive, especially during the transitional moments in life, such as menstruation and menopause. Karen, thank you so much for joining us today on the menstruality podcast I cannot wait to talk

to you about rest it's something that's so so deeply needed in our world I know I need it and before we get into talking about the the power of rest the importance of rest and how we can actually do it to do more of it in our lives. I'd love to begin how we always begin, which is with a cycle check-in and you're in your post menopause phase of your life. So I'd love to hear from you if, and how you experience your cyclical nature in this phase of your life. Yeah, thank you for that question. And it's wonderful to be here. Well, for me, the moon is everything. And I am very lucky because where I live in New Mexico, and in my home, there's actually even a lot of skylights. So at night, I'm very in tune with the moon.

And I do rituals on new moon and also the full moon. And just I love the light and dark that plays with the moon in the evenings. And so for me, that's how I stay in touch with cycles. And that's been really important and so for me that's how I stay in touch with cycles and that's been really important and potent for me. I'd love to hear about your passion for yoga nidra what inspired this daring to rest epic journey that you're on and now that you're guiding other people on. Yeah. Where did that all begin for you? Yeah, well, it came sort of out of the blue. I'd never heard of yoga nidra. I wasn't seeking it. I didn't necessarily think I needed more rest, although I guess intellectually I knew I needed rest because I was a mom at the time of two kids who were preschool age. So they were about two and four. And so, yeah, I mean, everyone who was, who is a mom, even, even now my kids are 20 and 22. I I'll say I need rest now as a mom, but, but the, the, the, the piece back

then for me was really, it came accidentally finding Yoga Nidra at a local yoga studio where I wasn't a regular yoga practitioner even, but I dabbled in yoga. And I thought, well, I should maybe after I drop my kids off in this place for some morning care, I should go care for myself maybe for an hour and do a bendy stretchy yoga class. And when I walked in to go and sign up, I heard this voice of a woman guiding people in yoga nidra. I didn't know that at the time, but I looked in this room and the door was only slightly ajar, but I heard her voice and I peeked in and I saw about 25 women lying down with blankets and pillows and eye pillows over their eyes, looking like they were on a spa day, you know, having the best nap of their lives. And I, I just knew in my body, I thought, oh my gosh, I want what they got. And I don't know exactly what it is.

I wasn't even sure that this was like a thing, you know, like a whole class. I thought maybe it was the end of the class, but it did seem like they had been lying there for a long time, but I just got really curious. And then when I signed up for this yoga nidra class, it really changed my life. And in so many ways, I realized just how tired I was. I mean, bone tired. I was so tired. It was actually quite frightening to get so still and feel how tired my body felt in every cell, every atom. And then I began to see the benefits of lying down and being still, which is I had more energy. I was sleeping better.

As a mom, I was so tired. There were times I'd go through stop signs. I would make a turn and I'd go over a curb. And now I was driving more from a place of rest. And also I was just showing up with my children more rested. I felt more present in that relationship with my children and with my partner. And it was slowly like making me really curious. And it began to also feed into my creativity because I was writing a play at the time of about 118 women I had interviewed about their birth

stories. And I thought I was writing a book. I shouldn't say I was writing a play. I thought I was writing a book, but through my yoga nidra, I started getting what I now call soul whispers. I started getting all of these messages from my soul, from the inner world. And I, I, I was led to, to write this play that now, you know, has been performed all over the world and raised a lot of money to improve maternity care. And, and that was, these stories weren't going anywhere at the time. So I got really curious, like, wait a minute through rest, I was now writing a play. I was doing things really out of the box from like, I had written a book before. So I thought, oh, I'll write another book. And you know how the story just like you stay in a story,

but sometimes the story has to change and you don't know when you're so busy that the story has to change. But the moment I paused, it was like, oh, that's the book. It's not working because it's not supposed to be a book. And so I could really hear this on a more profound level. And, and then I'll just say also yoga nidra for me, and this was unexpected. I didn't practice yoga nidra to end a lifelong relationship with panic attacks, but really I, I had showed up to this yoga studio and laid down practicing yoga nidra after a lifelong history of panic attacks. And probably about maybe two, three years before when my youngest son was really like just under a year, I had gone on anti-anxiety medication because I just couldn't

function without some form of medication, which was a huge step for me. I had my children at home. I was home, like I barely took an ibuprofen. So, you know, it was huge to actually take an anti-anxiety pill. And at the same time, it helped me function. And when I started practicing yoga nidra, my nervous system got so relaxed that I realized, my gosh, I don't need this anymore. I'm okay. I found a practice. Rest is such a foundation. And now I have this foundation and the panic attacks went away and I got off the medication. There's this really inspiring sentence on your website, which says in our culture today, where rest is seen as lazy, weak, and unproductive, it's daring to give yourself permission to lie down and wake up to more wisdom and wellbeing,

which is a short way of saying what you just described which is such a powerful story that I'm sure so many of us can relate to I felt my body and my nervous system relaxing just hearing you speak and I think we we do have a kind of nervous system crisis happening in our culture where so many of us are moving so mass so moving so fast and holding so much that we aren't it's almost like there's something in us that stops us from pausing because it's scary to pause and actually feel the fullness of what's happening. Could you walk us into how our world got so crazy to get so far away from this rest that we deeply need and how did so get to be so demonized,

and seen as lazy and weak and unproductive? Yeah, well, thank you for that. And yes, rest is daring. And that is why I call it daring to rest, you know, because on so many levels and yoga nidra, the practice of yoga nidra is so daring. But the one thing that I feel our culture has hypnotized us into believing is that our worth rests, rests, no pun intended or pun intended, our value rests in being productive. And this is the capitalist model. And this form of capitalism actually is actively working against us resting. In fact, it doesn't want us to rest. And particularly women, because if women rested, we know how intuitive we are. If women rested, we'd be the witches that we actually have in our lineage, and we wouldn't demonize them, which historically in most of our lineages for women have herbalists, midwives, the women who were in touch with intuition on a level that

became demonized first by the heroic tradition, which is the white male coming in and saying, okay, we'll take over now. And doing very many of the same things with that, that, that midwives and herbalists and, and, and, and the, the intuitive ways of women were, were being done, but then women were, were really burned at the stake during that time. And even, even more so in the scientific tradition, which went even further to say, okay, let's, there's, there's no, let's poo poo all of that. And, and in doing so, I think rest is a big part of that story because women hold in their bodies, this natural inclination to follow their gut instinct. But when we are pushed into productivity, we never have a moment to even tap into what is my gut instinct. It's

like when women have young children, a lot of times they get to a point like, who am I? Because it is busy when we're parenting, especially at those younger ages where we really are almost like a waitress, you know, what do you need? And what do you need? And what do you need? And so there is a true exhaustion to life. And at the same time, I think one of the most radical things, one of the most daring things we can do is rest, because it's saying to this capitalist culture, I will not feed into that. In fact, I will be a rested woman. And therefore, in that, in that way, I will be totally awake in my life. Because when you lie down, you wake up consciously, you bring to consciousness what often lays unconscious when we are so busy.

So when we bring anything to consciousness, we have this opportunity to transform, to tell a new story, to move from suffering to freedom. You know, at Red School, as you know, you've interviewed Alexandra and Shani. We teach about the power of rest in the inner winter of the cycle so people with periods have this natural momentum that if we can tune into it it's guiding us to drop our bundles to find a way to make some space in our lives even if it's for 10 minutes of lying down so that we can wake up there's this lovely quote from wild power which is when menstruation is ignored not only do you slowly erode your vitality, you lose the ground of your life. It's as if the anchor that roots you into who you are comes

adrift. And I think we could replace that with rest in many ways when rest is ignored. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Can you speak about, you've already walked in, walked us into this really beautifully, but can you speak about some of the magic that happens for people, the people that you work with when they embrace this rest, instead of ignoring it, does their vitality become enhanced? Do they find the ground of their lives? Like, do they remember their roots? And how does that look like? Yeah, it's, it's, it's transformational. That's the word that keeps coming up. And there's no words for it, because it's, it looks different for everyone. I do want to take a step back and just say something about rest. Because I think it is important to rest. and we don't know how to rest. We don't know how to

power our bodies down. So just like a doctor will often tell people if they are sick to rest, and that's about the only time we're told to rest, right? When we're sick, but you know, we are told to rest at a certain point when we get to a certain level of exhaustion or illness or whatever it is to rest. We think rest is lying down with a book, which is relaxing, but it's not rest. Or we think it's going out for a bike ride, which is relaxing, but it's not rest. And so I want to just maybe ground the definition of rest and rest, you know, really can't be defined in some ways, but, but, but it is this non active place. So, so we can have a self care day where we could be journaling and we can be this and that, and that's really sweet and special.

And rest is something different. Rest is the void. Rest is the doing nothing. Like that's pretty radical. And so the moment we, and it's very hard for us because we are literally jacked up. Our cortisol is pumping so much and we are trained from a very young age to be productive, to keep going. It's very hard to slow down and actually do nothing, not even read a book. So I just want to kind of put that there. And then in terms of how this impacts women when they rest deeply, not just, I'm not talking about taking the day to read a book, right? Like when they actually go into a state of non-doing that powers the whole body down, they find that they sleep better, first of

all, because, well, many of us are not even getting into deep sleep. So a practice like yoga nidra takes you into these deep sleep brainwaves and beyond to a fourth state of consciousness. So you're, you're literally powering your body down, you're teaching your body how to power down. And then it learns to go to how to go to sleep at night, it learns the stages of going from waking to dreaming to deep sleep. And, and, and that's really beneficial for women who are up all night. I mean, especially, especially in menopause, you start to hear this, but it's, it's all, it's in our culture. It's endemic. In fact, during the pandemic, it's, it's been astronomical. The number of people

who aren't sleeping, despite all the sleep clinics out there, helping people sleep. So we need to think about that. Although sleep clinics really are, again, back to the capitalist system, they're there to make money. So they mostly focus on sleep apnea and things like that. And they actually, insomnia is what people are suffering from. They're not sleeping. So I find, I get emails all the time from women that they're sleeping better than ever. I get, we have, you know, the community of Daring to Rest where we come together and women express all the time how it's helping them to reclaim their power. And this is really the subtitle of the book, Daring to Rest. And that's a broad topic, but it's like, they just begin to have awakened clarity on things in their lives. They know their yeses, they know their no's.

Things that we don't necessarily associate with rest, but actually are critical to feeling rested. If we say yes to everything where we feel a no, or we don't even know how we feel. So we're not making those decisions consciously. They're just living their lives more consciously. And in that sense, just setting a more of a rest tone in their lives. So women have, similar to me, my story with anxiety, they've stopped having panic attacks because of practicing this practice of yoga nidra. They have started speaking up for themselves. They've improved their marriages and they've left their marriages. I mean, it can go either way, but they're showing up. Again, this is about being awake, about being conscious. They're showing up more and more conscious.

And that's when we feel more of a peace. Even if it's hard, we're clear in our bodies. And I just see again and again, women making decisions that, for example, the book they plan to write and they never wrote, now they're writing that book. It's all different things. Every woman's different and it takes time. And we have layers of what my rest mentor, Dr. Ruben Nyman, likes to talk about, the junk from the trunk that comes forward when you rest.

So we have layers of emotions, of thoughts, of patterns, of habits that we meet when we rest. And actually, when you do a practice like yoga nidra, it's very different than meditation. Meditation keeps you in most, most meditation, not all, but most keeps you in your waking state, in your beta brain. So you follow your breath, you follow a mantra, but in yoga nidra, because you go into deeper and deeper brain waves, you actually are able to kind of get out of your own way. Like the inner critic softens, your ego mind falls back, your cosmic mind falls forward. And when it comes forward, that cosmic consciousness is so important right now. It's

expansive. It allows us to think outside of the box, to be not just all of the preconceived notions we have about ourselves or we've been told about ourselves. It gives us a broader canvas to create, I believe, a more rested life? There's something that gets in the way of me resting. So this is a personal question. And I imagine it's really going to speak to a lot of people that are listening because I hear it in my friends and I see it in our community. And actually it's connected to a specific point in the cycle, which is just before the menstrual cycle, which is just before the bleed, Alexander and Shani talked to speak about it as the chamber of separation. So the more you track your cycle, the more you capture this moment. So for me, in my last cycle, I was

in a food hall, I was surrounded by dozens, if not a couple of a hundred people being loud I had my baby that I was trying to feed I was having conversations with friends it was it was chaos and suddenly I felt this call to separate because I could feel that my bleed was coming and my nervous system went into a panicked state because I needed to retreat and I was in the middle of the most chaotic situation I could really imagine not the most but most socially chaotic, if you know what I mean. And I noticed that when I do set aside some time to rest or when I am feeling that call to, as you said, to sort of power down into my bleed. Sometimes there's so much momentum in my body. You know, you pointed to it as the cortisol in our system.

There's so much momentum that to slow down is almost painful. And I'd love to be able to navigate this moment because then I could ease myself into the sort of pockets of rest that I can carve out in my day more easily. Do you have some guidance for that to begin the powering down process? Yeah, no, I appreciate everything you're saying, because this is real life. You know, this is real life. And there's no perfect science here to and everyone's different. But I would say that that for the most part, often just starting with our breath. So I often like in a chaotic situation, if possible,

if I can hand the baby to someone else, I will just excuse myself to go to the bathroom for a moment. And that's where I take my three breaths, come into my body, and just have a moment, just give myself a moment. And if it's not in that moment, I then have a conversation with myself of when is going to be the moment that I'm going to, I'm going to take that time. And it's interesting because when my kids were young, it was really challenging. And I did find yoga nidra when they were two and four. But what I found is, for example, what I would love to have been 20 minutes of rest time became three minutes. And I gave myself that before I went to sleep. And then I when I woke up in the morning, so I'd have three minutes and sometimes not even when I

woke up in the morning, because my, my oldest son woke up very early. But there are these pockets of time that when we really truly look at our schedule, we are usually going through our phones for at least 10, 20 minutes of the day. Those are the times where we can begin to say, okay, instead of going through my phone right now, I'm going to rest. And I believe a lot of people, I tell them if they're really unable to find a time, the sunrise and sunset is really, they're very potent times to rest. And I would say even expand that a little to when you go to sleep and when you wake up. So it might not be exactly sunrise and sunset, but that hypnagogic, liminal and hypnopopic, those two times, those are the liminal dream space times where we are waking in the morning and we're a bit groggy or we're going

to sleep at night and we're just beginning to fall down to sleep. I would say more in the morning for a lot of people, it's that grogginess that if you stay in that and you just, just be silent and appreciate that for three minutes, you know, five minutes, if you have more time, but just beginning to appreciate the pause moments will start to allow the body to recognize the slowing down piece. And then, you know, there's obviously deeper practices like yoga nidra, but not everyone has the time for that. But when, for me, it was once a week, I practiced yoga nidra noon on a Friday. That was it. And then I picked up my kids and that was it. And it changed my life. That was once a week. And by the end of the year, I was off anti-anxiety medication. And I'm not saying

how people have to get off medication. It's not really about the medication. It's about the consciousness and where that leads you. So bringing what's unconscious to consciousness can lead us to, I think, a more powerful place. What I'm hearing and what you're saying is that it's possible to cultivate a momentum of powering down and rest that can meet the momentum of movement and busyness and speed and doing and so that when there is a moment that opens up Friday at noon or five minutes instead of scrolling through Instagram that the you'll more naturally be able to drop into a rested state yeah well I can tell you the moment that I transitioned from personally loving the practice of rest to professionally offering it was in this moment of crisis in our family. there was no space to rest. And then I realized it just had to demand the space. And I, I told my

husband, I'm resting for this whole year, every day, I'm practicing yoga nidra for 20 minutes down in our basement, in between boxes, it literally I set up a little, what I call a rest cave. And he was like, okay, you know, but he, he traveled a lot of the year, but whenever he came home, I handed the kids to him and I said, that's it. I'm going for a rest right now. And it really changed my life. I mean, I'm talking about, it changed, it changed my skin. Like I had had lots of rosacea.

I'd been really struggling with skin issues. My skin changed in 40 days. That's why I wrote this book as a 40-day program, the Daring to Rest book, and why I started initially teaching this only as a 40-day program, because I couldn't believe the difference in 40 days in my whole mind, body, and spirit. So I guess what I'm saying is, you know, there's this, there's this opportunity when we rest to know ourselves so deeply. And, and there's, there's really, there are so many excuses not to rest. But I find when we make rest non negotiable, almost like we would a physical therapy appointment, right? You

wouldn't miss your physical therapy appointment. Like if you'd, if you'd broken your leg and you knew that you weren't going to walk again, unless you did your physiotherapy, you would absolutely go. And, and something inside us is broken with this lack of rest. And it requires that kind of dedication. And, and, and just to take it to the next level for me, I rest for myself, but I really, I rest for my children. I rest for all the women in my lineage who have not rested and didn't feel they had the right to rest and have been daughters of patriarchy and, and, and, and feel like they need to feed into this capitalist productive model. And so I feel like the days I don't want to rest for myself,

I remember actually when I'm a rested woman, my children benefit and my lineage benefits. If you feel called by Karen's daring to rest work registration for her daring to rest facilitator training is now open it's a powerful new approach to leadership that puts rest at the center it's a professional training which teaches women and gender fluid people also to reclaim their power through rest the practice of yoga nidra and more to share the message of rest with others to lift others out of exhaustion including yourself the next training starts in late january 2022 and if you feel called to join you can see the show notes on our website, webschool.net forward slash podcast for the link.

And the whole for you, but specifically many hundreds and many thousands of people are benefiting because you've created such an immense body of work that is people are now going out and teaching to others so you're you leading this rest revolution that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't made that drawn that line in the sand and said I will rest for 20 minutes every day it's really exciting I want to talk about these soul whispers tracking your soul whispers because that feels really core to what happened for you actually that you were able to hear because you began to rest you were able to hear something that was calling from deeper within you which is also the focus of alexandra

and shani's work in red school with the cycle it's if we can cultivate an intimacy with this natural ebb and flow and rhythm of the cycle or the menopause process depending on the phase you're at in your life there is so much wisdom waiting for us there's this wild power our calling waiting which will guide us and keep us moving forwards towards our purpose And it feels so aligned with the way that you speak about rest and soul whispers. Could you talk about what that process is like to track your soul whispers? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think has been detrimental for women is that we talk about positive affirmations and, you know, look in the mirror and tell yourself something positive every day. Well, the reality is, is that we, we, sometimes we don't feel positive and that we, what, what if we meet both? So we meet whatever is rising in us in that moment. And what if whatever we meet, even if it's a difficult emotion, we can go beyond. In fact, it will fuel us to be more in our power, more able to lead, whether that's in our home or in our work or whatever it is. So with soul whispers, I began to notice personally for

myself, when I practice yoga nidra, I would, I would start to hear messages, I would hear things like, you know, keep resting, or I would hear a message that would say, well, in the case of my play, you know, this isn't a book, it's a play. I mean, very clearly that was the message. It's a play, which seemed crazy. I mean, crazy. And then I started even hearing some of the voices of the women I'd interviewed and their voices were in this play-like format. And I realized, wow, yeah, this is a play. So it's like listening to that voice that is, when we pause, we can hear this inner voice, our inner world. We have an outer world that we're mostly engaged with, unless you sleep, we're engaged with all the time. And then there's this inner world that we only get if we really get really deep, great sleep.

And so the practice of yoga nidra takes us to that inner world so intimately. I don't really believe, honestly, in affirmations or all these positive statements when we're in our waking state, our beta brain. Why? Because we have that, what Sierra Bender calls the itty-bitty shitty committee, just like literally it's, it's, it's chattering to us, you know, the inner critic it's, you know, you're not worthy, you're not safe, You're not this. So we actually don't believe it. And this is where rest is so critical because when you rest so deeply, you enter the subconscious mind, which is so fertile. It's so open to new affirmations, new your intention.

It actually doesn't have that inner critic there saying, no, you can't, you intent, your intention, it actually doesn't have that, that inner critic there saying, no, you can't, you know, you're not worthy or whatever it is. You it's a clean slate. You've literally powered down to zero and the ego mind has fallen back. And that's why the inner critic is no longer, you know, so you're like literally able to rise from that with a new imprint. That's the promise of a practice like a deep rest practice like yoga nidra is that it literally rewires your system. It helps with imprints in a way that you can then hear your soul on such a deep, pure level. So it's not just like a, and once you do this often, you can actually do it fairly quickly with three breaths and go in and hear soul whispers. But if you don't have a deep breath practice, you don't know this landscape

of the void of the mystery of the, of the clean slate. And clean slate. And so it's harder to access that pure whisper, soul whisper, I call it, right? That inner voice that provides these messages that inform our leadership in the world. So I started asking the question, like, what if women, and all people really, but what if women, because we focus on women and their leadership at Daring to Rest, but what if women listen to these soul whispers? What if they track them? What if they inform their intentions in the world? And what if the soul whisper was the vehicle for reclaiming your power because the powers within us, we always say this, right? We know this intellectually, you know, it's within you, but, but how do we get within ourselves? Well,

we have to rest. This is not an intellectual process. It's, we have to rest. And so, and so the moment you rest, you may not hear something for an entire year. And then, and then one day, this soul whisper, this voice, this inner voice opens up and it wants to tell you something and something you probably already know. So you're going to just usually get up, you know, and it could be something that's positive or feels not so positive. But what I will say is that we play with opposites a lot at Daring to Rest, meaning everything lives within us. So if it's rage that needs to be heard in this moment, the rage is there to inform you.

And so what's the opposite of rage? And you feel that in your body. And so that when you move out of the rest stage, when you go out back to your outer world, you go from that inner world to outer world, you can bring both. So if it's helpful when women start getting, maybe sometimes they might get soul whispers that feel like they have a lot of charge, maybe it's rage, anger, whatever it is, we do invite them to also listen for the opposite, to remember that everything lives inside of us. Like the panic I had, I thought, oh, I'm just an anxiety panic attack mess, you know, and my father had panic attacks. So I thought, oh, well, this is genetic. Of course, I'm going to have panic attacks for the rest of my life, right? It's in my genes.

But actually, it's not the whole picture. The panic is not the whole picture. So in holding opposites, which we viscerally train people in yoga nidra with this, we go to right side of the body, left side of the body. We begin to have your body have this understanding of oneness, that it's everything, it's every emotion is okay. Can we meet it? Can we meet it? And can we meet it with this clean slate? Because if we meet it in our waking state, in our beta brain, we intellectualize it. We've been trained that way. That's what education does to us. It has us go straight to our mind,

but what if we went to our heart first and we started there, not, not to dismiss the mind because we need this masculine feminine balance, but it's like the, it's like the heroine's journey. We, we, we start off in this culture and it's a very unhealthy feminine and it's an unhealthy masculine that we're taught and it's a salt on the feminine. And then we have to go through this journey and rest takes us there each time to begin to claim a healthy feminine, this healing of the feminine, to claim the healthy masculine, to heal the wounded masculine, and then to come back up with this integration of masculine and feminine in a healthy way. This is the ultimate journey that when we get this, and we will go through this cycle again and again in different parts of our

lives, because life is life, right? So having young kids might send us back into the cycle of relearning this. But when we know this is a cycle, we then can claim our leadership, even in the depths of the descent, the initiation, the burnout that we may actually have that has to take us there to go yet again, rise from that place of burnout. You're making me think of how we, we can spend so much time and so much money and so much of our resource and energy in looking outside of ourselves for the answers for, for all of the things that you're speaking to. So investing in courses and reading book after book after book and this program that program thinking that someone out there can guide us to what it is

that we need to do next and just similarly with cycle awareness what I love that you're pointing to is you're pointing to how when we rest we can actually tap into the massive rivers of intelligence that are here all the time we that we're not making them up they exist you know there are these intelligences in our bodies with science is learning so much more now about the kind of intelligence that does arise from the heart or from the pelvis or from the gut. And the key that you're pointing us to is rest. If we can actually pause and stop and rest, then we can access that wisdom rather than keeping the momentum of seeking. Really. It feels like an antidote to the endless of hamster wheel of seeking that can happen. Yeah. I mean, I am happy that there's so much more science coming out, like the heart math and all the other places where we're, we're starting to, to understand the, the, this, this

very potent inner wisdom that we have and on a scientific level, that's really exciting. And I think that there's, there's this, there's, we've, we've been hypnotized to learn more, read more, understand something. What if we just rested in not understanding? I don't understand this moment. And can I be okay with that? Can I meet that unknown and be in that place of, I don't understand this at all. And that's not going to come from a book. This is where rest to me is the foundation because we are so afraid of the unknown. We're afraid to not understand something. Even if, for example, we get cancer, you know, oh, why did I get cancer? Well, what if we don't know? Because we really don't know, for most cases, we don't know. So can we, like real cases, live in the question? Like, just be in the question and not necessarily look for the answer to every question. And I think rest allows us to,

to really embrace that living in the question. There's really an initiatory power that you're pointing to here. And it's making me think of my own personal experience with infertility, which many, many times I thought of that Rilke quote, because I couldn't understand why. I just I still get teary thinking about it, even though my little boy's here. But for five years, why, when I want this so much and I have apparently everything needed in my body and so does my hubby to make this happen. And it's not happening. And I've never wanted anything more. And there was no way I could understand it you know and people would say just let go you know it's like I cannot let

go of this this is this is an impossible situation and that that initiated me into a capacity to be with the impossible or to hold the tension as Alexander and Shani say and it's so exciting to hear you speak of rest as a kind of way for us to build this muscle of being with the unknown especially when we're living in the kind of world that we live in you know we've been through this pandemic where there was so much uncertainty and the future has never looked more uncertain for us so this is a this is a personal transformative power but also a collective one isn't it the power of rest oh absolutely i really believe that peace within creates a peaceful world and that this this cosmic consciousness this expanded awareness is needed in the world and it's needed individually as well. And, and I appreciate you sharing your story, Sophie, because it,

it is something that when you, when you're faced with something like what you've just mentioned with fertility issues it, it does become this it can, there's just the, everything that comes from the unknown is not comfortable necessarily. It's not comfortable. And I know that there was a woman in the Daring to Rest community who's allowed me to use her story publicly. In fact, I wrote a little bit about it in the Daring to Rest book, which is her struggle with fertility. And she came into our 40 day program and she didn't get a soul whisper at all. And she was frustrated. She's like, cause we use soul whispers to help inform us of our intention, of our desire, heartfelt desire. And so she was like, Oh,

you know, I'm not getting anything. And, and then what she realized, because we don't always tap into just, you don't always hear a word, might be an image, might be a phrase, but, but sometimes it's just a feeling. And what she realized after 40 days right towards the end which is which the message for her and the intention for her became i feel and she realized yeah how numb her body had become. Mm-hmm. And she claimed, I feel. And I will say she does have a baby now, which is really sweet, but it's not about that. It was for her just, you know, she had a very transformative experience with rest and she continued to rest throughout her fertility journey. And she tells me that her, her baby was built on rest.

Oh, I've got so many more questions. One thing I definitely want us to speak about is menopause and rest you know Alexandra and Shania are in the middle of writing their menopause book and in it they share the five phases of menopause that they've created they've mapped out and the second one is called repair and it's all about doing nothing for a while so the way they speak about it is it's a time when you no longer push or drive yourself you're allowing the inner soil of your psyche to rest and chill repair is the archetypal time for reassessing your health care putting in place new rhythms and practices doing your inner work tending to wounds it's about creating a foundation of rest for yourself for now and for the future. Could you share a bit maybe about your own personal experience of menopause and rest or how you see the relationship and the importance

of rest in this life phase? Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's, you know, rest is, is critical. It's, it's, it's critical through life, but I would say any transition moments that women go through, whether it's your monthly cycle, which is a transition and whether it's the time of menopause for me, and I've shared this with Alexandra on the Daring to Rest podcast, actually, that I was kind of not, I was, I actually didn't enter menopause right away because I kept one of my ovaries, but I made a very conscious decision to have a super cervical hysterectomy in my late forties. I was literally bleeding to death. And this is after many years of painful periods. But then in my mid forties, I started literally, I guess there's

30 days in the month. I think I bled for 24 of those days every month, very heavy, huge clots, tried everything. I mean, I had shamans waving feathers over my head. I was resting. I was doing everything that, and taking even the more of a medical model of care kind of prescriptions at some point, finally, to address this. And it was not resolving. And I was confronted with, again, this space of, wow, okay, what I want isn't happening, despite all this effort. And rest can be effort, too. Rest can can be effort because clearing your life to be to, for it there to be more rest is effort. And, and so I was very curious and through my during to rest practice began to very intentionally listen to soul whispers. And as I listened more and more, I was guided to a medical way of resolving this situation, but not just resolving it like, okay, go and get your, your operation and, and then go on with your life. It was a very

conscious transition. It was a, it was a, I mean, ceremonially, I, you know, gathered my girlfriends, I had a farewell to my uterus party with them. You know, I had, this is before online, but we met online because they were all over the world, my girlfriends, and they all wrote different poems and they had different pieces to me and to my uterus. And it was almost like a vagina monologues kind of moment with my girlfriends to really honor like, and I believe even if your uterus is removed, the energy remains. So I still needed to honor the energy of my uterus and my one ovary that was taken, that needed to be taken. But I still ovulated, which was interesting because in terms of cycles, when you don't bleed,

but you're ovulating, I felt there was even a more deep connection to my monthly cycle because I knew when I was ovulating, I was very in touch with my body. I knew when I was ovulating and yet there was no blood, but I would take that time every month when I was ovulating to honor, you know, whether it was through my journal, whether it was through a little more rest, whatever I needed in that moment, to still honor my cycle until I knew that it had ended. I mean, I was like, oh, it's over. And then I had gone into menopause. And so it's a different way to go into menopause than although some women have had this as well.

Some women had hysterectomies where they go immediately into menopause. And that is another form. It's initiation. I just consider it initiation. And I never in a million years would have thought that I would have a surgery to remove my uterus. And my body knew this is the right path through my soul whispers. My body said, yes. And so I had a full body. Yes. And I had a full body. Yes. And how I

was going to do it in terms of, you know, honoring my uterus with my friends, but also, and myself, but the, but, but the actual surgeon I picked the actual process of, I was listening to yoga, Nidra, literally into going into the surgery and out and out. So in the pre-op going into the surgery, they were so respectful. And I, and I had, I mean, I could, you know, we could be here for two hours, me telling you all the, all the medical people I met who were, who my body said, no, this person will not be doing this surgery for me. And then when I got the yes, it was like, yes, okay. I know I will be respected. And you know, it's, it's an honoring of yourself. I think when you rest, you learn to honor yourself. That's why at the end of every yoga nidra, I always say to women, be good to yourself. Just like a little

whisper, be good to yourself. Come on, just a little more today. Be good to yourself. Yes. Yes to that. Could you tell us about your Daring to Rest training? It's opening soon for registration, isn't it? Yes. Yes. We are starting at the end of January 2022. This is an approach to women's leadership that puts rest at the center. So we train women to become daring to rest facilitators all over the world who are really dedicated to their personal rest and uplifting or lifting uprooting, so to speak, exhaustion from themselves, but lifting others out of exhaustion as well. So this is really for that woman who may be a healing professional in some way, maybe a coach or even a therapist, but you work with people who you know are exhausted and you want to offer them true rest. I mean, deep rest, not just tell them to rest. This is the problem we have right now, which is telling people to rest. And you also want an approach that not only teaches people to rest, but how to reclaim their power. And that's what we do

at Daring to Rest. So we link rest with reclaiming your power, taking people through three phases, a rest phase, which is uprooting that physical exhaustion in the body or tending to that. We tend to the emotional mental exhaustion in the release phase of daring to rest that we carry. And then we're tending to that sole purpose exhaustion, that lack of dreaming that we get when we are so busy, we stop dreaming and dreams are what really, uh, they, they, they help us to reclaim our power. They bring the unconscious to consciousness. And once we, once we tap into those three phases, we,

it's, it's, it's a recipe for leadership really. And again, putting rest at the center because people don't know how to rest. We can't just tell people to rest. We have to show them. And Yoga Nidra is the best rest teacher I know. I agree. Although we teach more than Yoga Nidra in the program, actually. And we're having Dr. Ruben Niman join us on sleep sleep, dreaming and awakening. We're going to have we talk a lot about holding space and how to hold space. There's there's a lot of pieces to this training. It's a nine month experience. Wow. And if people wanted to find out more about it or get a taste of it, what's the best way?

The best way is to go to daring to rest.com backslash facilitator, and you'll learn about the program, the training itself. We do have a Q and a on January 11th that we're doing. And I would say, come to the Q and a, and you'll, you'll meet myself, other people on the team, on the training team, and also some women who have taken the training before. So you'll get to learn about the program even more that way. Excellent. Thank you. I will link to that page in the show notes too. So people have a really easy way to access, to get to the page. I know there are people in our Red School community who have done your training, who are going out and doing transformational work it's it's they're incredible companions for each other um and Karen you know I you are such uh a powerful ambassador for rest and there's

something about the way you are and and how studied you are in this field and how experienced you are in your body that you transmit it so I feel so rested from having spent this time with you. So I'm really personally grateful for this opportunity. And also for everything, you know, everything you're bringing for this rest revolution that you're that you're spearheading in the world, although spearheading feels like the wrong word. It's more like that you're gently dreaming into the world for everybody. I'm so grateful. Thank you for gifting us with your wisdom and your time today. Thank you, Sophie. And my hope is that all women will feel rest in every cell and every atom of their body. And they'll use that rest medicine to really inform their lives and their leadership.

Thanks for listening today. Please subscribe and follow wherever you listen to podcasts, and it really helps us to reach more people if you can leave a review, especially on Apple Podcasts. We don't have a podcast next week. This is the end of series one. We're starting again on the 6th of January with an episode from Alexander and Shani about how to make 2022 your year of cycle awareness the true depth and potential of menstrual cycle awareness. We also have something exciting coming up in January, we invite you to save the date from the 11th to the 25th for a free online retreat, which is designed to support you to enhance your vitality, your health, your creative power, your leadership through the magic of menstrual cycle awareness so that's coming up from the 11th to the 25th of January we'll tell you more soon okay so we'll see you on January the 6th and until then keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm