Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Richard Miller. Richard is a master of yoga and meditation who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology. Recognized as a leading authority on the practice of Yoga Nidra, he has founded and cofounded several key organizations including the International Association of Yoga Therapy, the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology, and the Integrative Restoration Institute.
With Sounds True, Richard has published several titles, including a new audio training series called iRest Meditation and a classic book-and-CD package called Yoga Nidra.
Today, Richard and I spoke about iRest Meditation for working with military personnel to heal trauma and PTSD. We also explored some of the core principles of iRest Meditation, including learning to welcome all experience and understanding what Richard calls “the law of awareness.” Finally, Richard took us through an iRest meditative practice in which we discovered an inner somatic resource and learned to simultaneously welcome opposite feelings—and the impact doing so has on our state of being. Here’s my conversation with Richard Miller:
To begin with, Richard, I’m wondering if you can share with our listeners how you first developed iRest Meditation.
Richard Miller: Sure. In 1970, I was introduced to a rudimentary form of the practice in the first ever yoga class that I ever took. At the end of the class, the teacher took us through a rudimentary Yoga Nidra. It had such a profound transformative effect on my life in that one instant. I felt like I had come home to myself. This spontaneous intention—vow, however you might want to frame it—rose in me as I came home that evening to really begin to explore what just happened to me and what this process [was] that I was just put through.
So began a decades-long inquiry through my own practice, working with teachers, reading deeply into the literature, looking into this practice that’s called Yoga Nidra. I saw it as a very comprehensive, in-depth form of meditation—that I could see all the different principles and all the different contemplative traditions within this one approach.
In the ‘70s, as I started to learn it and began to teach it—working with my students [and] seeing that there were a lot of cultural aspects to the practice from the East that weren’t really suitable for the Western archetype that we carry in our psyche. So, I began to really adapt the practices in a more secular form of inquiry—using the traditional steps of Yoga Nidra, but really using them as portals that my students could begin to use to inquire into their own sense of self and healing that they needed to come to—whether it was psychological, physical, spiritual, or had the whole aspect of awakening to our essential nature.
Then in 2004, when the military approached me to actually do research on my protocol, it really was a time to pull all the aspects that I had put together into a manual and to a book, and really bring it all together so I could have a manualized practice where I could train teachers out of a certification program. That’s where it is today, from 1970 until today—where we’re still tuning it. But, we’ve got the essential program in place and the research that’s been done on it.
So, it’s been a lifelong—I would say—love affair.
TS: Now, take us back to 1970. You’re in a yoga class for people who are brand new to this term “Yoga Nidra.” What did you experience in that yoga class? What happened?
RM: I was lying on the floor and she took us through a form of sensing our body, being with our different feelings and emotions and thoughts, and playing a little bit with opposites of emotions and thoughts. And then, basically, [she] took us into sensing the awareness—the field of awareness in which all these thoughts were arising. In that moment, my thoughts and my emotions—it felt like they all harmonized. All sense of conflict internally fell away. A sense of incredible joy arose—a sense of well-being.
Then, especially as I walked home—I was gazing up into the nighttime sky and the trees around me—it felt like I could feel myself in everything [and] everything in myself. It just dissolved the sense of separation. It was a very unexpected, transformative moment in what—to me—was a simple practice. It was quite astounding.
TS: Now, [Richard], you mentioned that in 2004, the military approached you to learn more about how your work with Yoga Nidra could—I presume—help returning veterans. So, how did they find out about you? Why did the military approach you?
RM: Back in those days, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center—in their Deployment Health Clinical Center—they were having wounded warriors coming back from the warfront. They were looking at ways they could help heal them.
As part of the program, they were running a Dean Ornish cardiac care aspect to work with some of the wounded warriors. They had a yoga component. One of my—who is now one of my teachers—was invited as a guest teacher in to teach the Hatha yoga that day. She had hurt her back and said, “Do you mind if I teach a Yoga Nidra?” The woman who was running the class said, “Do whatever you want.”
There happened to be a researcher from Walter Reed sitting in on the class that day, just observing the Ornish program. She was so impacted by the Yoga Nidra that this woman, Robin—my teacher now—taught, that she asked Robin after class, “Might you be interested in doing some research with this program with returning veterans?” Robin said yes, went home, and called me up—basically—and said, “You don’t know me. I’ve been reading your materials, listening to your CDs. I just taught a class. I don’t know what I’m doing, and they just asked me to do a research study. Would you train me?”
So, that became a process of several years—training Robin in the comprehensive ability to move the program forward with these veterans or these active-duty military who are experiencing PTSD. We went into a full-fledged study that was so helpful to helping these veterans we working with to resolve their PTSD that the clinic hired Robin right on the spot at the end of the research project. For the next several years, any wounded warrior going through Walter Reed had access to my protocol for helping heal through the injuries that they had sustained—PTSD, but also chronic pain, sleep issues, and other things, which we know now the iRest protocol is very good for.
TS: Now, could you help me understand how the iRest protocol—the mechanism by which it creates healing and transformation in people? What’s happening?
RM: Maybe I should step back and define the terms “Yoga Nidra,” out of which the iRest protocol has developed as a secular version of a very ancient meditation process. “Yoga,” as I define it, is our sense of connectedness with ourself and with the world around us, where we feel a sense of harmony in our actions with our sense of self and our actions into the world, [as well as] our relationships and everything we work with. “Nidra” is a word that means a sleep, but it represents a changing state of consciousness.
So, “Yoga Nidra,” when you put them together, means that ability to feel a sense of connectedness with self, other, and the world, no matter the state of mind we may be in or the circumstances we’re under. So, Yoga Nidra as a practice helps us connect with a deep sense of equanimity and peace that we carry with us no matter our circumstance or state of mind.
So, using that as a kind of core definition, what Yoga Nidra does—and the iRest program I developed [does]—it takes a person through—you might say—a 10-step protocol that helps them come into relationship with their body, their senses, [and] all the different functionings of their mind, including their feelings, emotions, thoughts, a healthy sense of ego or sense of personality. It introduces them to what we feel is a core, innate, felt sense of well-being and equanimity that we all carry within us. We’re born with it, but somehow we may lose touch with it through circumstances—trials and tribulations.
So, it introduces people to that core sense of well-being. It also allows them to—we might say—be able to step back and—no matter the situation they’re in—be able to gain a perspective, because when we’re in difficult circumstances, there’s a tendency to become confused or over-involved with our emotions or thoughts or the situation. Yoga Nidra as a practice helps this ability to maintain perspective no matter what else is going on, so that we can feed the right actions we need to take to move through any situation or emotion we may be experiencing. [This is] so that we have a response, not a reaction, to our situations and can move through them.
So, it’s really a set of—I call them—life tools that we may not have received as an owner’s manual when we were born. So, it’s kind of like an owner’s manual that we give to people. “Here’s how your body, mind, and senses work. Here’s how to relate to them in a functioning way—a healthy manner.” We basically give them the tools, show them how to use them, put them in circumstances that help them really refine it, and then test them out in the world. [They] come back, keep refining them, [and] keep testing them out so that we’re trying to give people these essential tools that we need as a human being to navigate our lives.
TS: Yes. When I think though, Richard, of something like trauma and how trauma is in the body, and we have these responses—whether it’s fear or memories that are running back through us—it’s almost hair-trigger quick. How does Yoga Nidra help at that level? Often, people may know all kinds of tools, but they don’t have access to them when their trauma is triggered.
RM: Correct. So, that’s a vital point. What we see in the research we’re doing—and what we see with research on meditation in general—is [that] through the tools, we’re actually growing their capacity in their nervous system [and] in their brain, in the body itself, to be able to respond in the midst of these deep crises that trauma and other things may bring to the table.
By practicing the tools—say, with relaxation—what we do during the exercises as a person learns the different tools [is] we actually begin to pair them with stressful situations. So, they’re learning to maintain that sense of equanimity or access to the tools in greater and greater increments of stress so that, ultimately, they can be under tremendous stress and a sense of equanimity and perspective would [still] be there because it’s been embedded somatically into their bodies.
So, I like to say to people who I work with—there’s this incredible moment where you’re not having to remember the tool. The tool is now remembering you.
I’ll tell a little story to go along with that. We were working with a veteran with tremendous rage issues as a result of his PTSD and trauma that he carried with him. He was known to have gone into fits of road rage and actually stopped people, pulled them out of their car, and had violent altercations. He reported to us—when came back for one of our iRest sessions—that that afternoon, he had been on the road [and] a vehicle had cut him off. Then it turned into a parking lot and he felt his whole sense of—what he wanted to do—his visualization and all that—was follow that car and he was going to pull that driver out, and again, get into a violent altercation.
He said as he was thinking of that, his hands were actually turning his car in the opposite direction. Then he said to himself, “I realize now the protocol is working, because I didn’t have to think about it. It was leading me in the right direction, whereas my mind was still thinking of the other direction.”
So, what I see when people really engage these practices over time carefully and systematically—they do develop this interesting—as you say—body-based, somatic skill set that basically is now moving them or us through the world. So, we don’t have to remember in the midst of the crisis what to do. It’s actually [that] the protocol kicks in and is remembering us—and what to do, and what to think, and how to respond.
TS: Now, Richard, I’m wondering if you could actually give me an even more specific example of how you teach people to do the practice under stress such that the practice remembers them—because I can imagine people listening right now thinking, “This would be really useful. I would like it if I was under a tremendous amount of stress—if something would just kick into my system.” So, how do you train people in that?
RM: A couple of ways. One is we help them discover within themselves what we call an “inner resource”—a felt sense of ground, security, safety—and we really help them to develop that first as a somatic, really bodily response that they can access and basically trigger off whenever they think about it. Then we take that inner resource and we begin to pair it with positive and negative emotions that they’re experiencing so that, ultimately, the negative emotion will actually trigger off that inner resource of grounded stability.
In the practice, then, we’ll help them identify the negative emotions that they get caught in, [what we call] “discursive loopings” that cause them difficulty. We help them access the negative emotions—say it might be fear or it might be rage—where they feel it in their body, how they feel it. We’re helping them learn, basically, not how to get rid of it, but how to really deal with it and welcome it.
As they’re doing that, we’re pairing systematically their inner resource. Then, interestingly, we ask them to find an opposite of any negative emotion they might be experiencing. Say they’re experiencing fear. We say, “If this had an opposite, what might its opposite be for you, and where would you feel that in your body?”
They might say, “Well, the opposite of fear, say, is courage.” Or it might be “peace.” Or for another person it might be a sense of equilibrium. We never know, but we want each individual to discover their opposite.
Then, say they say that the opposite of fear is courage. So, we say, “When you feel that sense of courage, where and how do you feel that in your body?” Then we help them pair that with the inner resource as well.
Then we have them go back and forth between those two emotions—first the negative and then the positive, back and forth, being able to access each one, and helping them in the moment as they’re accessing it [to] feel that inner resource. So, it begins a kind of biofeedback training where, eventually, they’re going to find themselves in a situation that evokes, say, fear. It’s going to then automatically cascade into their body that opposite feeling of peace or courage, [as well as] the grounded sense of their inner resource. We do this over and over.
So, we’re working with both the body sensation. We might say how they breathe when they’re doing that, so we’re helping them access good breathing rhythms. So, eventually, when they’re fearful—which tends to constrict the lungs and restrict the belly-breathing and tighten the nervous system—we’re helping them how to relax their breathing so that eventually—in the midst of the traumatic, fearful response or anger that they might be having—their breathing actually begins to regulate itself as a spontaneous—we might say—embedded, learned response.
So, we do this very systematically with sensations and emotions, thoughts, memories, images. So, we’re really helping their body learn a life skill here so that eventually any negative emotion that occurs to them is automatically paired with its opposite emotion and with this grounded sense of inner resource.
TS: Is it possible, Richard, to give our listeners a taste of this experientially right now? Is it possible to lead us through?
RM: Absolutely.
TS: Could we do that?
RM: Yes. It’ll take just a few minutes.
So, for you who are listening, first take a moment. With your eyes open or closed, just settle into wherever you are, whether it’s sitting or lying down or standing. Just take a moment and relax your attention.
I’d like you to feel first your left hand—just the raw sensation in the left hand. Then, as much as you can, bring attention over to the right hand. Welcome the sensation of the right palm and fingers. Just because this is a simple, brief exercise, come back to the left hand—just sensing it, feeling it. Right hand. Now, both hands at the same time.
As you’re doing this, can you sense into your body some kind of feeling—it might be well-being, a sense of quietness or peace? Every once and a while, returning to a feeling in your two hands. Just some sense of well-being or it might be a relaxed sense of quietness or peace—and how you experience that in your body, whether it’s in your abdomen or your heart or anywhere else in your body.
Now, take a moment. Look back at your day—or it might be something you’re carrying with you into this moment from a prior moment in your life or today. Some kind of perhaps negative emotion or feeling that you have in your body. It might be a sense of conflict or irritation. It could be a leftover sense of anger, fear, or anxiety.
Whatever it is, just take a moment and feel where it is and how you feel it in your body. Just try to sense it. If it’s anxiety, it could be in your throat or your heart or your belly. If it’s fear, it could be in your belly or some other part of your body. But, just welcome it for a moment. [We’re] not trying to fix or change it. Just sense this negative emotion—where and how you feel it in your body.
Now, if you would, take a moment. Come back to sensing your hands. As much as you can, access that sense of peace or stillness that you had a moment ago when you were sensing your hands. Then come back and feel the negative emotion—however you’re feeling it.
Then try to feel all of this at the same time—the negative emotion, the sense of relaxation or peace or well-being—and then I’d like to ask one more thing of you. If this negative emotion that you’re experiencing had an opposite, what might that opposite be?
So, if you’re feeling anxious, it could be a sense of ease. If you’re feeling fear, it could be a sense of courage. If you’re feeling a sense of conflict, it could be a sense of what happens when you feel resolved. See what’s the opposite of the negative emotion, identify it, and then welcome it into your body for a moment. See if you can evoke it a little bit. Feel that sense of ease or peace or resolution—where it might be felt in your body if you were feeling that way right now.
Where and how do you feel it in your body? How do you access it?
Now, to your capacity, come back to the negative emotion—whatever it is. Feel where and how you feel it in your body. Come back and feel its positive opposite, and where and how you feel that in your body. Now, welcome both to be here at the same time—the positive emotion and where you feel that in your body, and the negative emotion—where you feel that in your body. Weave in that felt sense of your hands. Welcome in that sense of well-being or peace when you were feeling your hands.
To your capacity, sense all of these different elements at the same time. Watch how your mind may go from one to the other to the other very quickly. But then, just relax your attention. See if you can—as much as you can—feel them all in the same moment. Negative emotion, positive opposite, that sense of well-being, palms of your hands. Just notice the effect of this on your body and on your mind.
Then, to your capacity, just relax your attention in a way. Let go of all these that you’ve just been focusing on. Let your attention soften. It’s as if you are seeing, in this moment, not just what’s out in front of you, but sensing what’s behind you and to the left and right of you. Your attention is open everywhere. Just notice the effect this has on your body and your mind.
Then, again, I’d like you to just check in. How are you feeling in this moment? What’s present? What’s most calling your attention. Just [welcome] it as it is.
Before ending, I might ask you to just—very briefly—come back to the felt sense of both hands at the same moment—the feeling of both hands. As much as you can, that feeling of well-being or peace that comes as you feel both hands. Take this with you back into your life.
So, that’s a really brief—I don’t know how long that was, five, ten minutes—where we begin by just letting attention relax, sensing the body a little bit, and opposites—one hand, the other hand. Both opposites. We can see that when we sense opposites—actually, whether it’s opposite parts of your body—opposite hands—or opposite emotions or opposite anything, attention has to relax. The mind and thinking have to subside for you to do that.
So, what we’re doing is we’re actually—if we look at you in an MRI, we’re helping relax what we call your “default mode of recursive, negative thinking”—helping basically thinking to quiet down a bit. As you focus on opposites, it’s actually stimulating another part of your brain we call “the present-centered network,” which is actually opening you to the possibility of a new insight. We’re pairing that sense of both hands with an inner sense of well-being. So, we’re developing an inner resource of ground and security.
Then we’re doing the same thing with negative and positive emotions—first feeling one and then pairing it with its opposite, and asking you to experience both at the same time, which you can’t do with your thinking mind.
So, again, the thinking mind drops and it’s an interesting affair. When we are willing and able to sense two opposites at the same time, it again opens us to this possibility of insight that we might not have otherwise had when we’re only fused or lost in one emotion—one side of the equation. We can do this with thoughts, beliefs, images, memories. We can do it with emotions and feelings. And we can do it with different parts of the body.
When somebody’s experiencing chronic pain, we can do the same thing. Where do you feel the pain? If there was a part of your body with no pain, what would that feel like? We can have you alternate between the two. What we often find [with] people in chronic pain is that they get an immediate sense of relief—sometimes a tremendous sense of remission from their pain.
It’s a very simple intervention [and] easily dismissed because of its simplicity. But, it’s incredibly powerful. We’ve done a lot of research with it—with statistical results showing we can intervene with people with traumatic brain injury, chronic pain, sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress. It really helps them access an inner sense of well-being actually extraordinarily quickly.
I’d say the downside of doing this it’s often so simple that people dismiss it. But, they can’t refute oftentimes the effect that it has in just a few minutes.
TS: Now, Richard, let me ask you a question about feeling opposite emotions somatically at the same time. I definitely get the idea of alternating. So, let’s take for example a feeling in the body of anger—like, “I’m going to punch,” or my teeth are all grinding. Real serious. I’m so mad.
[I’m] pretending that the opposite of that might be something like just totally letting go. No agenda, no fighting, nothing. Just dropping all the . . .
How do I feel somatically both of those things at the same moment? I get the alternation—one-one-one, you know—but at the same time?
RM: Let me make it a little simpler because those are complex emotions. Right now, if we take our attention, we can probably feel a little bit of coolness on our skin—a sense of coolness. If we shift our attention, we can sense a little bit of warmth somewhere.
So, both are present—warmth and coolness. In order to experience both at the same time, we actually have to drop the labels “cool” and “hot.” Our attention has to relax. We begin to move into a new way of sensing that’s not focused on one or the other. We’re not trying to melt them together. But, you’re actually having to sense—you open up a whole new way of sensing, we might say. It’s a broader, wider way of using your sensing function.
It’s the same thing with something like anger and that sense of relaxation. We can know—because if we practiced sensory relaxation, progressive relaxation, and other techniques, we can build into the body that sense of relaxation [and] access it pretty quickly. It may not be totally deep, but the jaw can begin to unclench, the shoulders can drop, the palms can [come] back to sensation, and we can move the blood out of the forehead and down into the hands and feet so we go away from thinking.
The same thing with anger: we can grow our ability to access it quickly, and go back and forth between these two, actually. First very slowly—one and then the other, taking our time—and then very quickly. When we ask a person to sense both at the same time, you have to drop the label “anger” and you have to drop the label “relaxation” or “peace.”
We do that in the midst of when they’re working with either the anger or the peace. When they’re working with anger, we ask them at some point just to strip away this concept “anger,” and just sense how and where you feel it in your body, [learning] how to do that.
The same thing with peace—we strip away the label. What’s the actual somatic, felt sense of peace? Peace is a concept—what’s the actual feeling?
Now, we can ask you to sense into both as bodily sensations. We will see that the mind very quickly tries one, then the other—then the other, then the other, then the other, then the other. But, there’s a moment where the mind begins to let go more and more—the thinking mind. We begin to sense in to both of them at the same time. We’re not actually concerned so much that you’re able to sense both at the same time—although I know you can with practice—as much as in that trying, the thinking mind stops, attention opens, and you open a portal—we might say a gateway—into a whole other part of your brain that has access to insight.
When we’re just captured by the thinking mind or we’re so caught up in the negative emotion, we don’t have the capacity to entertain a possibility of a new way of being or relating in that moment. By sensing opposites, we actually see a whole other part of your brain light up in an MRI that’s been associated with insight and the ability to have a new way of seeing through an old situation. It’s like we’re putting to sleep in that moment the past and all of your conditioning, and we’re opening you up to a new possibility.
So, again, it’s a very simple technique, but it can have very quick and profound results.
TS: Now, Richard, you’ve been practicing and teaching iRest Yoga Nidra for quite some time. In your experience, does anything flip you out? Do you get triggered? Can your wife—or if you have children—or any of the things that flip the rest of us out in our life. I’m just using everyday language here. I think you know what I mean. Does anything like that happen in your life, or have you been so trained—?
RM: Absolutely, because I’m a human being. So, what I have discovered now in myself is—in the moment of an altercation, say, with my wife or something else at work—I can feel my nervous system begin to fire off and ramp up.
But, all these processes I’ve learned begin to kick in automatically—perspective, recognizing the nervous system is getting excited, that there’s a kind of tightening going on in my musculature, and a desire to react or become defensive—and all the opposites are firing off at the same time—the ability to step back a little bit, to relax my breathing, to soften my shoulders.
So, I’m actually feeling both. While, as a human being, of course life is intense and I find myself at times feeling this reactive tendencies, the protocol is so embedded in my system that all the opposites are firing off at the same time. So, what happens is I don’t find myself in reaction to the reaction fusing with the reaction, but instead contemplating alternative possibilities in that moment. It’s like that other part of my brain is being accessed even in the midst of that reactive tendency in the nervous system. It’s quite extraordinary.
I would say: For a number of years, I practiced all these. There was a moment where I could really feel a switch happen in my body. I give the image that it felt like—until that moment—there was a light switch that would turn on or off. I would be in reaction or I’d be in relaxation. All of a sudden, somebody got in there and soldered all the wires together. While reaction may still occur, there’s no reaction to the reaction. There’s just a meeting it—in a way, a welcoming it—which is really the principal, core concept I’m teaching in all the work I do. It’s how to welcome whatever is arising as the what is in the moment, contemplating at the same time, “I wonder what my response to this would be that, by responding this way, it feels like I’m keeping a sense of equanimity as I move through a difficult, challenging circumstance.”
In response to your question: Yes, I still react. Or, reactions still occur in difficult moments. And yet, there’s a whole mechanism here that’s just somatically on its own. It just kicks in right away, relaxes my thinking, relaxes my breathing. The thinking mind still may be engaged, but there’s some other process that’s lighting up a different response that helps me see through the situation.
TS: Now, you took us through the example of welcoming opposites when it comes to a feeling. Now, another step—or another tool—in the iRest protocol is welcoming opposites of thought. I wonder if you can explain that. How do we work with thinking?
RM: We have certain beliefs that we’ve inherited through our family, upbringing, or culture and our personal incidents we’ve lived through in our life, that can give rise to core—I call them “core negative beliefs”—like, “There’s something wrong with me,” or, “I’m flawed,” or it could be anything.
We know that people who go through trauma—and especially repeated trauma—they can end up having the belief that they’re broken. Something about them is never going to be able to be fixed. They’ll never get back to where they were before the traumatic event. Those are core negative beliefs that come with recursive negative thinking and self-criticism, self-judgment.
So, it can become a really locked-in system that can be triggered off by a loud bang or somebody sitting watching the Fourth of July fireworks. All of a sudden, they’re in a trauma remembering. So, they’re caught in a looping cycle of thoughts and images.
So, we’re doing the very same thing with those negative beliefs as we did with the emotions, feelings, and sensations. We ask them to find what is a core belief that they struggle with. I say, “When either you’re by yourself, you’re in a social situation, or you’re in a stressful situation, what are the kind of core beliefs that you get caught in?” I’m flawed, something’s wrong with me, I’m broken.
Then, again, we go through the same cycle. When you feel that core belief and you take it to be true as your only reality, how does that register in your body somatically? What’s the felt sense that you begin to slip into?
So, we’re accessing the body’s feeling that co-arises with the negative thought. Then we do the same thing, which is we say, “If that negative belief had an opposite, what might it be? And if you are really identified with this opposite, what would that feel like in your body?” Then we go back and forth between the two thoughts—the two beliefs; the negative and its opposite—and the somatic, felt sense of each one. Then we ask the person in the same way to contemplate both as true in this moment. What’s the overall effect of that?
We’re also doing something else, which we do with emotions and sensations—which is what I call the inner resource, which we develop first. This sense of a core feeling that’s in the body that, when we are there, we feel a sense of grounded safety. I like to tell people that one of our ultimate resources [is] just our native sense of being.
So, I spend a lot of time with people developing this aspect of being and well-being within them. So then, we’re bringing in [and] weaving in that sense of being and well-being into the negative emotion or the negative thought, and into its positive opposite belief. So, now we have a person sensing the core negative belief—“I’m broken. Something’s wrong with me,”—to its opposite, which might be, “I’m always doing the best I know how,” or, “There’s something about me that feels whole and healthy.”
Then one [and] then the other, then both. Then weaving in that inner resource of inner being and well-being.
Again, what we see is the very same thing as emotions. People will access an insight that’s not just mental, but it’s actually somatic. The power of the protocol is it’s somatic. It’s felt sense. It’s in the body. So, it’s accessing very deep, core insights that actually have a transformative effect—much like what I felt [with] that first Yoga Nidra I did back in 1970. It really radically transformed how I felt about myself.
TS: Now, Richard, what I find really impressive and awesome—having this conversation with you—is how you’re taking what I think is pretty deep work—I mean, you’re talking about helping people feel the sense of being, find an inner resource, work with opposite feelings simultaneously while working with the inner resource—and you’re bringing it into really mainstream applications. From the term “Yoga Nidra” to the way you’re presenting it as a “iRest Meditation,” you’ve mainstreamed—if you will—the practice by using language we can all relate to. “iRest Meditation.”
So, I’m awestruck by this—by your success in doing this. I guess one of the questions I have is: Do you ever have this sense when you’re working with people that they’re like, “God, this is esoteric [and] too complicated. I can’t do it?”
RM: I’ve tried over the years to simplify it, because when I began back in the ‘70s, it did feel very esoteric. The people who were coming to my courses and classes tended to be more on the esoteric side. I kept wondering and musing to myself, “How can I bring this to people from very different lifestyles, philosophical orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds?”
So, I started to really work with people and see, “What are the core principals here that are very simple, easy to communicate?” Then I found myself starting to work with unique populations—the homeless, the military. I’m working now with women who have been rescued from human trafficking, working with small kids—people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds—and really trying to find what the core principals [are] in this approach of meditation that anybody could relate to.
I’ve been profoundly struck—I might say—how now I can go into a setting—like I was at the Martinez VA a few months ago with a group of veterans who are experiencing both post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury. They’re inpatients. They have depression, chronic anxiety, sleeplessness. I’m able now, through working with thousands of people—for that particular group, I went in and I did about a 20-minute exercise just on feeling your core inner resource of being and well-being. That’s all I did, and I did a little bit of sensing their hands.
But, I was yet to work with the emotions or the thoughts. I just wanted them to get a sense of grounded well-being and being. At the end of that 20 minutes, when I asked for reflections, one of the veterans over to my right replied—and this is exactly what he said—“I feel like I just came home.”
I know now we can introduce very simple concepts that actually aren’t esoteric. In fact, we all know what it feels like to sit back on a summer’s day in a chair when we’ve finished mowing the lawn or doing whatever we were doing. We’re not yet ready to go on to the next moment. We’re just sitting there with a delightful sense of being and ease. We all know that feeling. It’s common to all human beings.
So, what I find is we can invite that experience back into the room. What people quickly see when they’re just in that ease of simple being—it’s familiar, it’s easily accessed. Thinking begins to drop away. Time drops away. Most importantly, they discover something about [themselves] that doesn’t feel that it’s been broken, harmed, or injured, and that it’s always been here—but they forgot it, and they’ve ignored it.
So, one of the things I want to do with anybody I’m working with—whether it’s somebody who’s experienced trauma, or somebody who’s just coming in because they want to feel more a sense of well-being in their life, or they’re after enlightenment—I want them to experience this easy, felt sense of being that is in all of our human experience. There’s something about them that has never been broken, harmed, hurt, or injured.
When a veteran gets a hold of that—who’s been experiencing trauma for years—Vietnam vets, Korean War vets, and all the people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever—they can easily get that. They say, to a one, “My God! It never has been hurt or injured. There is something about me that has always been here, whole and healthy.”
One vet I’ll never forget: In Miami, he said, “Without knowing this, I never want to visit my worst nightmare. But now that I know this about myself that isn’t broken, harmed, or injured—and is whole—I’m now willing to work with my nightmares.”
So, your question, I think, really gets at the core, which is these are simple principles that all of us as human beings can easily access. It’s just being in the right atmosphere with a good teacher and helping to ease into these very simple principles with this core sense of not trying to fix or change ourself, but just welcoming the “what is” of the moment—the “what is-ness” of the physical sensation of the emotion or the thought or the belief—and we see radical change can happen in very short periods of time.
TS: Now, Richard, as part of your work with iRest Meditation, you list a series of core principles. You’ve already shared one with us, which is this idea of learning to be welcoming. There are several others, though, that I think are really interesting. If we have time here, let’s see if I can get you to comment on a few of them.
One of them is, “Know that everything is a messenger.” Can you explain that as a core principle of iRest?
RM: Yes. We’re genetically engineered to survive. Genetics has engineered into our body sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts. Each of these—I’d say—is a messenger that’s arising in our body to help us navigate life.
So, when we begin to relate to emotions not as negative, actually—as something we’re trying to get rid of, fix, or change—but as a messenger, I’m actually now listening to my fear and asking, “What is it that it’s asking of me?” Is there an action that it’s asking me to take into my life that, by taking it, the fear has served its purpose and disappears?
We can do the same thing with any thought, any belief, any sensation or emotion. We treat them as core messengers that are showing up in our body or in our life to help us actually navigate our life. When we stop trying to get rid of them, suppress them, or change them, but actually welcome and listen to them—and we have a number of exercises we’ve developed to help learn how to meet, greet, welcome, be with, and proactively engage these different messengers so that we’re really listening. What’s the action I need to take in this moment in respect to this fear that’s arising or this anxiety that, by taking it, this fear basically falls away because it’s served its purpose?
So, I see every perception that we have as designed by nature for us to respond to it. What has happened culturally or in our family upbringing is we’ve been taught to suppress or get rid of or not feel these. We don’t learn how to relate to them early on as messengers. If we could, we’d be in much better shape as human beings.
It’s a very simple approach. It takes time because we’re so used to denying or repressing, trying to fix or change. But truly, this core concept of welcoming and everything as a messenger are two really important principles to really get in our bodies.
So, when an emotion shows up, our first response is, “Hey! Come on in. What’s bringing you here today? What are you asking of me?” Same thing with any emotion, any belief.
I often tell my students [that] any core negative belief—“I’m broken,”—is just arising because it’s trying to take you home to your core sense of wholeness and health. If we invite it in—that felt sense of, “I’m broken,” or, “There’s something wrong with me,”—we can peel away the “I” thought—“There’s something wrong with me,” —to just, “There’s something wrong here. Let me attune to it and see what’s the action I need to take with respect to it.” That puts me back on track.
So, it does entail welcoming, experiencing, listening, and that willingness to respond potentially in new ways that we might not have otherwise thought of.
TS: Here’s another one of the core principles of iRest: “Understand the law of awareness.”
RM: That’s a beautiful understanding. What we see is everything we’re experiencing—sensations, emotions, thoughts—we’re aware of them. They are arising, one might say, in the field of our awareness.
In iRest—in Yoga Nidra—we’re both putting emphasis on what’s arising in awareness—the thought or the sensation or the emotion—but we’re also spending time feeling into this vast, open field of awareness. We’re getting familiar with it. What we begin to realize—when we stop focusing on trying to change what’s arising, we just in a way welcome it and set it free to be here—we see that everything goes through five fundamental movements. A thought, emotion, sensation—they go through five phases.
Each are born. They grow. They stabilize for a while. Then they begin to decay, and ultimately they dissolve.
When we get fused or over-involved with a thought, we eventually block it from going through that natural cycle. When we’re willing to welcome it, we’re freeing it actually to go through that natural cycle of birth to death. We realize that in the midst of any thought, sensation, or emotion going through those five cycles—birth, growth, stability, decay, and death—we’re here as the one who is aware as a kind of an unchanging principle. So, when we feel into that unchanging principle of awareness, we realize there’s tremendous equanimity [and] peace there.
So, we’re doing several things then: We’re allowing anything that’s arising in awareness—anything that’s placed in awareness. Ultimately, it goes through its life cycle and will dissolve if we just sit there learning how to welcome and be with it. Part of what we’re teaching is not just to note it and be with it, but how to proactively engage it so that we’re learning what we need to from it as a messenger. Then, setting it free to be here, what we see is it just goes through those five stages and ultimately dissolves.
When we understand that truly at a somatic, really embedded way of being with it, we have a new relationship to our emotions. [For instance,] when a negative emotion—like you were asking if I ever react. When a reaction starts in my body, I’m beginning to register it. “Oh look, here’s a reaction that’s coming. It just was given birth. Oh, it’s in the growing phase. I know it’s going to stabilize for a while, but if I really welcome it and let it free here, and listen to what it’s asking of me, I know that eventually it’s going to start to decay and go away.” So, I don’t need to be afraid of it.
I was working with a fellow today on fear. Basically, what he saw was the problem wasn’t the fear that he was experiencing, but his fear of the fear. As we got him to accept first the fear of his fear and learn how to relax in the midst of the fear, then we have this attention to look into the fear that was arising as a messenger. He saw an insight of an action that he needed to take in his life today that that fear was arising around. So, now he was going to go back to his spouse and have a conversation with her around something that was arising in their life or in him, but he had been afraid to bring that conversation to.
The fear wasn’t the problem. It was the fear of the fear. When he was able to welcome that, he was able to see the insight of the conversation he needed to have. He said [that] immediately he felt a sense of relief and the fear starting to go away.
So, again, whatever we’re willing to invite into awareness will ultimately go through those five changes and disappear. We can learn in the midst of it being in awareness how to relate to it in a friendly, compassionate, caring way—that we’re looking to it as a messenger that’s helping us on our way, and we’re simultaneously feeling ourself as that vast, open spaciousness of awareness that has deep equanimity and peace in it. Then we can see—from the stance of being awareness—we’re open for anything then to arise, be experienced, and ultimately pass away.
TS: Richard, I just have one final question for you. I’m curious to know what your vision is, if you will, for iRest Meditation in the world—and if you see any major obstacles to it being realized.
RM: My vision, truly, is to keep doing research with it showing how it’s tremendously effective with all sorts of issues and populations. People are finding access to it. I’ve trained well over 2,000 teachers now around the world, and I hope that they’ll train each 2,000 teachers.
So, it becomes basically a core protocol that’s being used in all sorts of situations. We’re in forty-odd VA settings now—hospitals, clinics, Department of Defense sites, and recreation centers. I’m trying to train meditation teachers to bring it in. Whatever their discipline is—it may be Buddhists or Sufi; they may be Catholics or Christians or Jews or from Islam—but they can utilize the principles wherever they are [and] with the populations they’re working with.
So, my vision would be that it really does spread and I leave a legacy of that. But, other people are taking [it] up.
The thing that could get in the way is people take it as yet another tool to change themselves. That’s where I see—without proper training and education . . .
The good news is the protocol works. I can meet an emotion, meet a thought, meet a negative situation [or] challenging circumstance, pull the tools out, and I can navigate with those tools through any situation or circumstance.
The problem I see is the mind can get a hold of it and say, “Oh, I know what to do the next time the negative emotion comes up. I know how to get rid of it.” Now, the technique will ultimately have a short life because we’re not really then engaging the principle of welcoming and listening to it as a messenger. We’re back in the old game of trying to get rid of it.
The only other difficulty I can see is—because it’s based on core, ancient principles of meditation—some places where I’ve brought it to were highly skeptical. They see it as a—with the word “yoga” associated with it and immediately say, “It’s a cult following. Let’s not do this.”
But, when I’m able to actually demonstrate the protocol—have them experience it a little bit—I do this all the time in hospitals and clinics and settings—I can get them just to experience it, they all say, “OK. Got it. How can we bring this in? Do you have a teacher we could access to bring this into our site?”
But, I’d say that main difficulty would be that we’re so trained to try to fix and change ourself with this core belief, “I should be other than I am,” that we really need to face that core belief and see that everything that is arising within you doesn’t need to be fixed or changed. It needs to be met, listened to, responded to as a messenger—and then we do see that it does change. It does move away. But it’s doing that spontaneously, not as a result of me trying to get rid of it. It just naturally goes through its life cycles.
So, a grand vision, knowing some of the difficulties I’ve encountered along the way. But, it seems like it’s catching fire and growing very nicely through the world.
TS: Very beautiful. Thank you, Richard. I’m so happy to hear about 2,000 teachers and the different audiences and environments you’re able to bring iRest Meditation. It’s such wonderful work. Thank you so much.
RM: Thank you, Tami. It’s been nice talking with you, and also nice working with Sounds True and having the support of Sounds True and the different products that are related to iRest, and bringing those out into the world.
TS: Richard Miller has created a new audio training series. It’s called iRest Meditation: Restorative Practices for Health, Resiliency, and Well-Being. He’s also written a new book called The iRest Program for Healing Post-Traumatic Stress, as well as a book-and-CD combination program—a classic program—with Sounds True called Yoga Nidra: A Meditative Practice for Deeper Relaxation and Healing.
Again, Richard, thank you for your good work and wonderful to talk to you as always. Your voice is so mellifluous—so calming. It always changes my state. So, thank you so much.
RM: Thank you, Tami. Lovely being with you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
