Yoga Nidra Virgin

Photo: Yoga cocoons at Simply Yoga, Delray Beach, FL

If you teach yoga, there’s nothing more rewarding than someone stepping onto a yoga mat for the first time. There’s also nothing more frightening — when it’s your yoga class and you’re not sure if they’re going to like it, and for a moment you question whether you should have asked/persuaded/begged/blackmailed them to try it, and you wonder if you’re going to be the one yoga teacher in the world who is responsible for Ruining Yoga Forever.

Marie Speed has enjoyed some yoga in the past, but is brand new to Yoga Nidra. This month, she was our Yoga Nidra Virgin and I’m relieved and delighted to report that not only did she not run out of the studio at the first chime of woo-woo yoga music,  leaving her shoes behind as she made a hasty exit, but it sounds like she actually enjoyed the experience. Chubby sardines and all.

Here is Marie’s hilarious read, courtesy of Boca Magazine …

“So I have this pal Julie Murphy from South Africa who used to be a corporate big wig but is now this great yoga teacher who runs around India for fun and is always talking about things like “alignment” as opposed to shoe sales. For some reason she still likes to hang out with me now and then despite the fact that I long ago replaced my downward dog with a sideways slug-on-the-couch variation. So here we are walking the other day and she tells me about this new practice she has launched called Yoga Nidra which Wikipedia likes to call “yogic sleep”—an hour of lying down on a yoga mat listening to woo-woo music and Julie telling you how to be happy.

Sign me up, I said, wanting to be supportive, and there I was last Sunday, my yoga mat neatly rolled out, looking at a sea of other people hunkering down for a state of consciousness described somewhere between waking and sleeping which is pretty much how I operate anyway.

At first I was sort of alarmed; the prospect of drifting around in a semi-conscious state with a bunch of strangers …” read more …