60 minutes
SDS 500: Yoga Nidra with Jes Allen
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Welcome to this special 500th episode of the SuperDataScience Podcast! We’re on with Jes Allen who walks us through the practice of Yoga Nidra, including a full practice session.
About Jes Allen
Jes Allen has been living and sharing the practices of yoga for a decade. She has devoted her entire life to intuitive living. Her mission is to hold loving, safe containers for healing. Through practice, one awakens to their divine nature. Jes's work emboldens knowledge of oneself and deep relationship with the unfolding path of one's life.
Overview
Stretching is how I used to think of yoga. But it’s so much more than that. When I first tried yoga in Singapore I was hooked, and I found a studio in Manhattan that Jes happened to be leading. Since then, I’ve taken hundreds of classes with Jess, gone on yoga retreats with her, and consider her an amazing yoga practitioner and mentor.
Yoga, as I’ve learned, is not just stretching nor it is simply physical postures. As Jes tells us, yoga is so much more than physical capabilities or physical activities, it’s about becoming one with consciousness and remembering that we ourselves are consciousness. As you stretch and open your body, you expand your awareness of yourself and your consciousness. Consciousness is always expanding on its own, and the practice of yoga brings us into awareness of this expansion. Jes has been practicing yoga since she was a teenager when she fell in love with yoga as a method of opening awareness. We all want to live a life of less suffering, and yoga can be a part of that healing process.
During the pandemic, Jes has been focusing on empowering the practitioner at home. She says what we need is more practitioners rather than more teachers. She believes we must all be in practice and wake up to ourselves and our life. So, she’s started mentorship for practitioners. From here, we went into the actual yoga Nidra practice which is focused on coming into practice in a state of relaxation and near sleep, but consciousness is there. The intentions for the project are healing, physically and mentally, as well as cognitive improvements and awareness.
In this episode you will learn:
- What yoga means [3:40]
- Jes’s current work as a yoga practitioner [10:00]
- How to find Jes online [22:31]
- The Yoga Nidra practice [27:09]
- Coming out of the practice [54:50]
Items mentioned in this podcast:
Follow Jes:
Episode Transcript
Podcast Transcript
Jon Krohn: 00:00:05
Welcome to the SuperDataScience show. For this special 500th episode, we're going to enjoy a mind-expanding Yoga Nidra session led by the wonderful Yogi, Jes Allen.
Jon Krohn: 00:00:27
Jes Allen, can't believe you're on the SuperDataScience podcast. It's wonderful to have you here. I was thinking for a while, I was thinking for months when I noticed that episode 500 was coming up, and what was months ago a distant future. And now it's not that far away, episode 500 will be released very soon and we're recording it right now. And so I was thinking to myself for months, I was like, "What can I do that would be extra special for the audience for episode 500?" And time and again, the idea that kept coming back to me was you offering a yoga Nidra practice. So now here you are.
Jes Allen: 00:01:09
Yeah. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I'm so happy to be here.
Jon Krohn: 00:01:15
So I've known you for a long time. I started doing yoga practice, the poses of yoga in 2012, I was living in Singapore and once a week on Saturdays at this mixed martial arts gym, I was a part of, they had this yoga class. And I was sore a lot from all the mixed martial arts, And so I was like, "I really need to stretch." So stretching, that's what yoga is. And we'll get into this, but yoga is a lot more than stretching, but that's what I thought at the time. And so I went to the Saturday class and I remember the opening up of my body, literally, I mean, the physical postures are helpful for opening you up. I remember feeling amazing in a way that I couldn't remember having felt later that Saturday, later that day. So I went back, started going back every Saturday. Left Singapore, moved to New York, and not long after that, I went to a yoga studio in Manhattan in NoHo and you were one of the teachers there. And I had a class with you that was incredible, completely beyond the quality of any yoga class I'd ever had before. And at the end of the class, you said, "All right, well that was my" ... I can't remember what the classes were called.
Jes Allen: 00:02:40
They were really simple names, like strong, energize, relax.
Jon Krohn: 00:02:47
Right. It wouldn't surprise you even with what I've just said, and certainly just the way you know me, but I was there for the strong classes, the strong yoga. So I would come for your strong class and then at the end of it, you're like, "At 10 minutes or something, I have another class starting, a relaxed class in the same studio." And I was like, "Oh, alright." And I stayed for that. So it was like three hours or something of yoga with you just to kick things off. And now I've been following you around the world. So that was eight years ago. And I've gone on retreats with you to Mexico, to Greece and have been to classes at studios of yours, studios that you've taught at all over New York. So anyway, huge fan. And I know episode 500 is going to be amazing.
Jon Krohn: 00:03:43
So in episode 450, we had Steve Fazzari whom you've met once, he came to a yoga class of yours once. And Steve talked to us about the physiological benefits of yoga nidra, like improves sleep, for example, is one of the things that he talked about. And at the end of the episode, he did a quick five minute run through of kind of like the structure of a yoga nidra practice. And so for today's episode, we're going to do a full practice. But before we get to that, I'd like to talk a bit about what yoga means and what it means to be a yoga practitioner. So as I've now learned in the last decade, yoga is not just stretching, and yoga is not even just the physical postures. So what in yoga are called the asana, the physical postures, that's part of it. But I mean, just tell us more generally what yoga is all about.
Jes Allen: 00:04:42
Well, I have to comment on your language of stretching and opening, because even those two words, you are referring to them in your physical form, but it is still, they're expansion words, they're words that also mean to expand. And yoga, it means union or to yoke, but it's to become unified consciously with the one consciousness, it's to remember that we don't have to come together because we're not apart. We don't have to unify, we are unified. And so we expand our awareness of consciousness through practice to remember that we are consciousness ourselves, that the essence of us and all things is pure consciousness. So as you stretch your body, you stretch your consciousness. As you open your body, you open your consciousness. You expand, you expand your awareness of yourself, of how you hold patterns, of what it feels like to be in a human form, of how you relate to emotions and programming.
Jes Allen: 00:06:16
And as you become aware of yourself, you start to become aware of your interactions with everything. So even starting with the asana as a practice is incredibly expansive. And I think we all experience that in the beginning, we're like, "Wow. And I feel more connected to myself." And life starts opening up because I'm opening to myself, which is how we experience everything. And then at a certain point, our curiosity, if we feel called to continue to expand our consciousness, takes us into different states of practice. And I think ultimately, as starting also as a very strong yoga asana practitioner, and then in my journeys over the past decade, coming down to settling into a practice such as yoga nidra, which is laying on the ground doing nothing, there has been quite a journey. But this is where the expansion of consciousness and understanding that has taken me ... And I think it's just important to note that we're not expanding consciousness, just our awareness of consciousness. Consciousness is always expanding on its own. So these practices bring us into relationship with the natural expansion of life, as opposed to feeling like it's something that we are separate from.
Jon Krohn: 00:07:51
A beautiful definition. So in this decade of practicing yoga, you started off teaching these kinds of athletic classes. There were meditative elements. It was through my early yoga practices, and particularly through your classes that I started to be present in the moment in the room, in my own mind for a few instance. And I remember thinking, being on a yoga mat, doing a yoga flow and being like, "Oh wow, I'm here. I've got hands. My hands are on the mat, there they are." And not being caught up in the next thing that I need to do or things that I'd done that day that I could have done better. And so anyway, so you started with the physical, teaching the physical asana practice about a decade ago, and that has now transformed, as you're saying, to include things like yoga nidra. And so yoga, it can be a big umbrella term to capture the physical postures like asana, nidra, like you said laying down, and surely not doing nothing, but not moving.
Jon Krohn: 00:09:14
You can think of it as like a philosophy of life. There's teachings, there's literature that you can read. I have experienced that. I've been to your apartment in Brooklyn and studied the Upanishads which are Hindu scripture and studying those week after week with a group of people. And there are books like that, the Bhagavad Gita is a popular one in yoga. And so there's these books that you can use to learn about yoga as a way of life, as opposed to just postures. But what I'm specifically getting to is today, what do you offer as a yoga practitioner? So we're going to talk about yoga nidra a lot. So that's obviously something that you offer and we're going to experience on this podcast. You also have weekly online asana physical practice. I know you still do retreats. There's one coming up in Greece in September. And it sounds like I've also heard you recently been getting into coaching. So maybe tell us about all of those things.
Jes Allen: 00:10:26
Sure, yeah. So I guess I am an intuitive being and we all are intuitive beings. And I've always related to myself as an artist first growing up, this was really what it was for me. So my path with yoga and practices have been really circular and I'm a curious being. So I actually was a gymnast growing up and I took my first yoga class when I was 17. And it was a little slow for me at the time, but I remembered understanding it because of the postures and creating sequences and having body awareness that I learned. And I understood it to be a self-discipline even at that age. And there was something magical that clicked for me in the opening of awareness. And like many of us at that age, I was in a pretty nodded relationship with myself.
Jes Allen: 00:11:37
And I did my first teacher training when I was 21. And the most amazing thing for me in that training was learning about the chakra system and the energetic systems of our bodies, because this is how I really was. I was looking for the magic, right? I didn't want the answer in a scientific way. I wanted to understand life the way I was understanding and receiving it, which was through feeling and awe and magic and alignment synchronicity. So I had a rough start in my healing, my early 20 healing years. And when I finally really came back to yoga, it started with the asana, and it was so important for me at the time because it gave me confidence to change my life. It showed me that I could learn things and build strength and figure out tricky asanas. And it empowered me to go, "I can change my life. I can figure these things out." And that was really important to me then.
Jes Allen: 00:12:43
And since then, basically I started practicing and teaching at the same time, in that way. I had been practicing for a while, when I came back to it, I was like, "This is what I have to do. I have to teach." And so my practices in my teachings have gone like this. So as I have ... One in front of the other, like little steps, like a little track. And so I would have an opening in myself and feel called towards something. And then once I would feel like it was embodied in my being, I would want to give it back. And so one of my favorite things to do, and what I started doing early in my teaching was cultivating my own classes at different venues in New York, in the early days in Brooklyn. And then I started leading retreats.
Jes Allen: 00:13:37
So retreats have been just the most magical experiences for me to create over the past five years. I've led, I think, 17 retreats in that time. And it's just the most amazing thing to bring. As you have felt a couple of times, a group of human beings together in a particular place, for a particular amount of time and just really dive in and like magic is super available. So that is a forever passion of mine and I'll always be offering those. It's tricky in the world right now, but we are going to Greece in a month. And I'm working on Bali or Morocco over the winter. So that's happening.
Jon Krohn: 00:14:29
Just talk quickly about the retreat experience. I don't know, I've only done yoga retreats with you, so I might not have a really good understanding of what they're like. But I might have thought prior to going on them with you that a yoga retreat was this kind of intensive physical practice. And of course, I expect the same kinds of like you're saying, as I open myself physically, I'll open mine and I'll have this amazing positive experience, getting just a good break away from the world and do lots of yoga with cool people and talk to them. But, the way that you structure your retreats, and it sounds to me like the way you increasingly structured them is so that yes, there is a physical practice. So probably twice a day. So there's like a morning practice and evening practice on most days, but there's tons of other deliberate practice of journaling, of answering tough questions together in a structured way, of getting to know what people are like in a structured way and what your own mind is like and what you are like and what you want and what you could be doing and what you could do in the future. And, yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:15:48
I mean, I guess I'm trying to make a case for yoga retreats in general, and yoga retreats in particular with you. But if you want to get away from the regular patterns that you're in, in the other 50 weeks of the year and spend a week or two of your year, just taking a step back and thinking about, "What am I doing?"
Jes Allen: 00:16:13
Well, that's what retreat means, right? It means to step back. It means to withdraw yourself from a moment. And I know that you meditate every day. And one aspect of meditation is just in the beginning, to just become a witness to your mind and to your life. And we don't give ourselves enough time to really see how we're living and see how we're seeing. And so when we intentionally remove ourselves, we can go on vacation and that can feed us in a million ways. And when you retreat, you drawback consciously and engage in inner practices, things I'm doing now are like asana in the morning, meditation, yoga nidra, again, sound, cacao ceremony, silence. All different kinds of workshops to awaken you. And this really has been my path with practice is finding all these different things to serve as mirrors to who we are.
Jes Allen: 00:17:19
I have told myself that I'm on a path of many mirrors because this is so exciting to me to go in. I started with asana and at a certain point ... And then the energetic systems. And then I moved into chigong, and I moved into meditation, and I moved into cacao and journaling and different aspects of meditation and yoga nidra and more. But each of these little things showed me a different perspective of myself, a different piece, a different way to see myself, a different way to experience myself. And this helps us see the world in that many ways. If I can see myself in this many ways, I can only access in another being as much as I've access of myself. I can only access in life as much as I have accessed in me. So the more I understand how diverse and expansive I am, the more diverse and expansive my life can be.
Jes Allen: 00:18:26
And something I want to just highlight is that when we talk about yoga and we talk about expanding consciousness or expanding our awareness of consciousness, it's like, "What's the point? What's the point in all of this?" There's like a lot of big, fancy words and that's cool to be spiritual and everything, and like, "Yeah. I'm one, and [inaudible 00:18:57] conceptually." But what is the point? What's the point in doing practice? What's the point in showing up every single day? And then we get into this big word, which is healing. Healing is the point. We are wanting ... I think all of us are wanting to live a life of less suffering. And we are part of a collective evolution that is at the pace that it is at. And the first thing we do is heal ourselves.
Jes Allen: 00:19:29
As we heal ourselves, we create a ripple in consciousness that continues to stimulate awakenings all over the place. And that's how the one organism of humanity wakes up. But even just for us on an individual level, if I can observe my life without so much attachment to outcomes, expectations, stories of the past, things that I want, things that I'm not okay with, if I'm able to loosen my grip, can I live with more grace? Can I feel more joy? Can I feel more gratitude? Can I allow things that are uncomfortable for me to come through my field and move out without completely destroying my day or longer than that? And so these practices are really like, can you associate yourself? Can you learn to relate to the part of you that is unchanging? The conscious witness that we all are, can you relate to that? Enough that the fluctuations of life and the mind no longer with you around like a ship out in a storm.
Jes Allen: 00:20:38
And when we can do that, we just naturally become more loving and more compassionate and more understanding of the fluctuations of everything around us. So if I can show up and say, "I'm working myself towards understanding the one consciousness and surrendering over to an evolutionary current that I am not in control of, but I am a witness to. Well, now, I'm so free." I'm so free to step into life and be forgiving of everything that I can't control and return to what are the universal truths? My teacher Yogarupa Rod Stryker, who I received my yoga nidra training with that I resonate with the most, he says, "If it's not true for everyone, it's not true." And this is something I come back to, if it's not true for everyone, it's not true. And that's not to say your experience isn't valid, your feelings aren't valid, all of them are true and valid, but what is the ultimate truth? And can I remember that peace in myself so that I'm not only just Allen who lived in Brooklyn for 12 years and just moved upstate and used to teach there, and now does this, right? I'm not only those things. Which is challenging and confusing to be my emotions, my actions, my relationships, that's hard. So I'm not only that.
Jon Krohn: 00:22:18
All right. So obviously your retreats sound amazing. Yoga retreats in general sound amazing and can be hugely fruitful, but not everyone, especially in a pandemic can get up and fly to Greece. So how are ways that people can engage with you to get mentorship in some other way?
Jes Allen: 00:22:38
Yeah. Well, one thing that the pandemic has definitely opened up, it has been the online platform. And I started a Patreon account really as like a response to all of the yoga studios getting shut down about a year and a half ago. And it's been such an amazing opportunity to share content. And so I've got that platform that has tons of asana practices, yoga nidras, meditations, some workshops, and I get on and do lectures every once in a while. And what that has really opened for me is this understanding of empowering the practitioner at home so that we aren't actually relying on going to a yoga studio every single day, or even going on retreats which is something that you might only be able to do once a year, if that anyway. And what has become very apparent to me is that what we need is more practitioners as opposed to teachers. There's a lot of teacher training programs out there, and that's great. And also you spend a good amount of time learning how to teach in a teacher training, which might not necessarily be what you want to do. And I believe that we need to all be in practice. This is how we are waking up to ourselves and to our life.
Jes Allen: 00:23:55
And so I have recently started mentorship for practitioners. So I've been doing mentorship for teachers for many years, newer teachers, teachers who want to go deeper, and that is really amazing. And I love to get into that work from that teacher mindset. And I've started in the past few months doing mentorship for practitioners. So basically that looks like us meeting and dissecting, like, "Let's look at what's happening in life right now. Let's look at what you're feeling on creating, expanding, opening within yourself." And then the past really like decade or more than that, of me being super living and practice, living and practice. And navigating my life through practice, I'm able to help you build a practice for yourself. And navigate where you want to go and give you the tools so that you feel empowered to be able to take these tools into your own life, even when I'm not around.
Jes Allen: 00:25:01
And that's really the goal is to empower your own intuition and feel like you have enough tools and enough knowledge that you can care for yourself and that you have antidotes and medicine in your life to come to every day. And this has been an amazingly rewarding practice for myself to offer in this kind of way and see people start to blossom and just get so excited about practice and empower and empower them to take control in their own life and on a regular basis. I don't go a day without practicing. I can't imagine what that would be like, however, it doesn't look the same every day. And that's important to know too.
Jon Krohn: 00:25:53
That sounds really cool. And so a yoga practitioner can be anyone, right? So a yoga teacher, we kind of think of that as like, "Okay, maybe you need" ... I mean, you don't actually, but you kind of think of it as needing a formal qualification and then being qualified, stand in front of a room and talk to people. Being a yoga practitioner means just practicing the teachings of yoga and experiencing more connection with everything around you.
Jes Allen: 00:26:19
Absolutely. And this is the key to us. We're not all going to be yoga teachers. We're not all going to be meditation teachers and spiritual teachers, but we are all beings of yoga or beings of spirituality. And we can be that.
Jon Krohn: 00:26:37
Beautifully said Jes, and I'm looking forward to reviewing the recording and experiencing everything you just said there again, because that was awesome. I guess we should get into the yoga nidra practice. I mean, I think we've teed it up really well now. So we had a bit of an introduction to yoga nidra in episode 450 with Steve, but you teach yoga nidra from a different lineage. So I think we might as well just hear it fresh from you. So what is yoga nidra? What are we about to experience?
Jes Allen: 00:27:13
Yeah. So actually, the lineage that I am teaching in is the Shri Vidya tradition, my teacher is Yogarupa Rod Stryker. These practices and the interpretation of yoga nidra, the way that he has received them from his teacher and were passed to me are from the Mandukya Upanishad. So straight from the upanishadic literature, which speaks to the four states of consciousness and the actual technique of yoga nidra, and yoga nidra of being both a practice and a state. So when you say yoga, yoga is not just a practice, there are yoga practices, but yoga is a state of being, it's the state of being connected consciously. Nidra means sleep, which Steve probably spoke too. And so yoga nidra means sleep with yoga or sleep of consciousness. So it's to come into a state where you've rested your entire body, mind, all of that is asleep, but consciousness is still there. Consciousness still exists.
Jes Allen: 00:28:47
So the way I have also been passed information in this lineage is through having a handful of different intentions for the practice. One of those being healing and general healing, which is what Steve really spoke to in the physiological healing of the body, the nervous system, getting immense amount of rest, which is so, so, so, so, so important. Another intention that we'll be diving into today in the practice is a cognitive practice, which allows us to associate ourselves with the witness consciousness and then observe the way our mind is producing thought and what is retaining through our days, through our life. And if those things are beneficial to us or not. And then if we want to continue to explore how to work with our awareness to perhaps bring more grace into your life. There is also a transformative practice, which we can take things that are triggering or activating, or that we're having challenges with in our life and bring them into this soft state of yoga nidra and activate them in our being. And then ask for resolution or healing imagery not necessarily mental-based conversational solutions, but felt energetic healing for these things to bring ourselves into a state of peace and to be able to work with them with more grace.
Jes Allen: 00:30:21
There's also the practice of sankalpa, which Steve may have spoke to also. This is a practice of creating a resolve for yourself that is like an intention that is almost something bigger than you think that you can do on your own. So you call for divine intervention. Yeah. So it should be a really big intention, something around eight to 12, eight to 18 months even. A goal this big, right? Nothing that you're like, "I can do that next month." At least a year your calling in this prayer. And then the primary intention and at the basis of all of this is spiritual awakening or becoming unified with consciousness and resting in that one consciousness. So there are several different kinds of techniques to work within these spaces. And they're almost a progression. Not that one is better than the other, but that we have to first heal our bodies, understand our minds, transform our perspectives, create goals from a pure place, create fulfilling lives for ourselves from that awareness, and then be able to rest back enough to awaken into the magic of truth.
Jes Allen: 00:31:50
So the way I use these techniques is they're all over the place. They're not this linear progression that our mind wants to grip onto because we have that past, future ladder mentality, but everything is circular. So they work together. And part of practice is knowing when one can come in and [inaudible 00:32:16] when they shift. It's very deep. It's extensive. One thing I do want to share that was one of the greatest insights I have received through this work is that when you set up the conditions for healing, healing happens on its own. And we're really attached to us being the doer and us changing ourselves, whether that's through physical change, we feel like we have to ... I'm using my hands here because we feel like we have to grip and change and mutate, and that is only our will that creates change in our life.
Jes Allen: 00:33:01
But that's not true. We do have to be an active participant, but our soul calls us into alignment and it's just our job to walk towards our own soul, our own vision. And healing is really the natural state. So we talk about this as like a remembering of who we are. We're not learning something new, we're just uncovering the truth. And so when you lay yourself down and you come into a space of unity, you remember. And that healing starts to happen on its own because as your body, not even your mind, but as your body and your cells, your nervous system start to remember that you are safe, you are loved, you are held by this earth that you came from her, that we are connected to one source. All of these other fears and anxieties, they start to dissipate. The more that we remember our truth, the more we see the illusions of these fears. And so we can work into the healing through coming into love, coming into love, coming into love instead of how do I get through this pain? How do I get through this pain? How do I get to this pain?
Jes Allen: 00:34:22
So the yoga nidra practice that we are going to be diving into in this episode is the cognitive practice that I spoke to in which we will use entering the state of yoga nidra as a foundation for us to bring awareness to our mind, our days, how we are seeing, what we are remembering. And get a better perspective, even an eagle-view of our life. So for this practice, you will want to be laying down and be comfortable. Being comfortable is one of the most important things in this practice. But we'll give you a moment just to set up, you could lay down on the floor with a blanket underneath you and a pillow underneath your head. You could lay on a couch, you could lay in your bed. It doesn't matter as long as you're comfortable. It is recommended, although not necessary, if you're in a very light-filled room to cover your eyes with a light piece of fabric. And if you're cold at all, to place a blanket over knee, over your chest or over your legs. If you are placing a blanket over you, it's recommended that the fingertips are exposed. So you can just let your hands slip out the sides, or even create little tents underneath the blanket with your hands so that the fingertips are sensitive and aware of space around them without weight.
Jes Allen: 00:36:12
So just making your final adjustments here, and perhaps even fidgeting a little bit in the body. If there's excess energy, you could squeeze your hands and squeeze your feet just for a moment and then exhale and let them go so you can feel that release. And then you'll just want to commit in this moment to being still throughout the duration of the practice. If you feel the urge to move or adjust now, just do it so that you can say, "Okay, now I'm comfortable enough to be here for the next 15 minutes." Just notice your breath. Now allow your body to open to the earth. The back body to become sensitive to the draw of gravity. Perhaps even feeling how deeply held you are. And then that feeling of being held, give your body any amount more over the rest. Become aware of yourself in the space.
Jes Allen: 00:38:27
There is a floor or a piece of furniture underneath you, walls around you, sealing above you, and you are occupying this space, and this space is holding you. Just becoming aware of any sound, allowing your consciousness or your awareness to just travel to one sound and the next not lingering too long on any sound. Rather just tuning yourself to the textures of this space. Bringing your awareness to your breath and specifically down to your belly, and just gently beginning to shape diaphragmatic breathing. So on purpose, breathe into the belly and breathe out of the belly.
Jes Allen: 00:39:52
So the chest here is more or less still, and you're directing the breath down into the diaphragm. We'll breathe like this for about a minute, consciously shaping the breath. I think two more breaths. After that second exhale, just allow the breath to return to a natural state, just simply observe the breath flowing. You'll make an intention for yourself here to stay aware throughout the practice. So there's a good chance that the body will sleep and a small chance that the mind could even sleep. But our intention is for awareness to remain, so just say to yourself three times mentally, "I will stay aware throughout the practice."
Jes Allen: 00:42:12
Now please bring your awareness to the third eye center or the space right in between your eyebrows. And notice as you do this, a gentle energy emerges. It might feel like a soft light, but there is a presence here. And just notice that presence that is already existing, but it awakens through your awareness. And then bring your awareness to your throat center and notice that same light or energy emerging with your awareness in the throat. Right shoulder joint, a light or awareness comes from inside the body. Right elbow, same light or presence. Right wrist, light inside the body, energy from within. Right thumb, pointer finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, all emerging light. Again in the right wrist, presence of consciousness. Right elbow, right shoulder joint, same light or presence emerging from within. Again in the throat center, feel that light. Left shoulder joint, again, a presence emerging from within the body, creating softness. Left elbow, inner presence. Left wrist, light emerging. The left thumb, pointer finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky finger, full energy and light.
Jes Allen: 00:45:03
Left wrist, presence from within. Left elbow, left shoulder, inner light. Throat center, awareness. Now in the heart center, feel an energy, a light presence emerge with your awareness of the space of the heart. Same awareness over to the right side of the chest. Back to the heart center. Awareness now in the left side of the chest. And heart center, feeling that light. Awareness, again, in the throat center. And landing the consciousness in the third eye center, the space right in between the eyebrows, and just allowing the consciousness to remain. Notice here that the consciousness bears witness to these energy points, and observe as you allow all of these points of energy or light to illuminate at the same time from within. Watching the brightening of these lights. Allowing that energy to keep the body soft, bringing your awareness back to the dark space behind the brows, behind the forehead, the dark screen of your mind.
Jes Allen: 00:47:23
And beginning 30 minutes ago, recall on that screen what you are doing. And then begin to trace back your entire day until this moment in 30 minute intervals. Just allowing yourself to pass over interactions, actions, thought, feeling, right until you woke up this morning. A few minutes to do this.
Jes Allen: 00:48:06
(silence)
Jes Allen: 00:49:29
As you approach the morning, can you see yourself in bed right before you woke up, and recall any dreams from the night, encouraging the mind to continue to move in intervals through the evening of sleep. And then perhaps, becoming aware of the moment right before you fell asleep. Allow yourself now to release the hold of memory and draw back so that you may witness anything that was less than beneficial, or didn't sit in the most pleasant resonance from even just this day. And just from the state of witness, gently assess, invite awareness to these areas of your life. With compassion and mere awareness, but awareness doesn't judge, simply witnesses. Can you allow everything that you've drawn out of your mind to exist and bring yourself back to the witness consciousness or the place in you that sees. And arrest in this consciousness as self. Without moving the body at all, simply become aware of the breath in this state. And again, keeping the body very soft, bring your awareness back into the room, feeling yourself again, in this space, on the surface, contained. I'm taking just another moment to hold close to you anything that you'd like to carry with you outside of this practice, you could even plant that like a seed in your heart.
Jes Allen: 00:54:16
And when it feels right for you, you could very gently move your fingers. Take a deeper breath in. I like to place my hands on my belly or my heart as the first movement to keep things gentle without jolting too much out of this sensitive space. I'm just feeling my palms and the breath meet each other. Whenever you are ready, knowing that you could just continue to lay right where you are, you could also shift to a side, come up to sit and eventually invite yourself back into your room, the waking part of your life. So welcome back from that exploration.
Jon Krohn: 00:55:52
Thank you.
Jes Allen: 00:55:53
Thank you. I just want to note that, again, this is a practice that helps us to just bring more awareness into our life and it's something that you could even do as a cognitive practice before you go to bed at night, like five minutes to retrace your day. And it improves memory in general, and it's also just really good for maintaining awareness in our life and being able to assess and shift anything that isn't really serving us. And when we do it in that state of yoga nidra, we're also able to relate to that unchanging piece of us that is it is not our mind, but can work with it.
Jon Krohn: 00:56:52
Yeah, I had not done that before. I had not gone through a nidra practice like this before, and I've done nidras with you, but I think it was before you started studying this particular lineage. And I really was blown away by how many things I've already done today. We're filming in mid-afternoon and wow, so many things already happened. And you talked a lot about healing and something that occurred to me just now is how happy I am with so many of the things that I did today that I feel like I was kind to people around me and I was taking on kind of the right priorities for my day. But there were also a couple of things that came to mind that I was like, "Huh." There's a little thing that like it definitely had been better, that interaction could have been kinder there. And yeah, very cool Jes. It does sound like something that would be super helpful at the end of the day, in particular laying in bed. And maybe even then bringing that piece into my sleep.
Jes Allen: 00:58:08
Yeah, if you practice enough, you'll start recalling your subconscious dreams, which that's a whole other topic but it has a lot of information, just information about how the mind is processing our desires in our life.
Jon Krohn: 00:58:32
Nice. Well listener, I hope you enjoyed this extra special episode 500 of the SuperDataScience show. Jes, how should people be aware of everything that you do, everything that you have to offer? How can people follow you in the world?
Jes Allen: 00:58:49
Well, I have an Instagram, this is the way of the world today. It's just my name, it's Jes Alan. I do spell my name with one S, so it's J-E-S A-L-L-E-N. The handle has little dots in between each of the letters, but you should find me anyway, just my name. And my website is also jesallen.com, and you can find all my retreats, my online content, mentorship programs. I'll be coming out with some group programs also soon that will be accessible in the virtual world. So both, all my content and interactions are on both of those platforms and they seem to be best and easiest. There's also some free content on SoundCloud as far as yoga nidras, and some meditations go, so you could also start by tuning in there.
Jon Krohn: 00:59:42
Yeah. Perfect. Thank you, Jes. And we will include links to all three of those Instagram, website and SoundCloud, which I enjoyed in the run-up to filming this episode as if I needed extra content to be sure that this was the perfect thing for this episode. I did thoroughly enjoy a couple of nidras that you had up on there, on SoundCloud. All right, thank you so much Jes. Have a wonderful rest of your day and we'll catch you again soon.
Jes Allen: 01:00:14
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, it's beautiful to be here.
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