Writing a Yoga Nidra Script for Guided Meditation

I begin writing a yoga nidra script for a guided meditation in the hope that those who listen to such meditations might more deeply understand these kinds of invitations. This is a process that I will be unfolding over a five day period of reflection. Then I will pull together these reflections and write and record a yoga nidra guided meditation for download.

It is also hoped that those who teach Yoga Nidra, or are drawn to write their own script, might gain some insight into the process of writing such a guided meditation script.

So let me begin to step you into this personal journey of writing my first Yoga Nidra Guided Meditation.

The Menu

• Yoga and Self Doubt.
• The Language of Union.
• Yoga and Intention.
• Yoga Storytelling.
• Yoga Mythology
• The Light of Yoga
• The Field of Union.
• The Script Continues

Cultivating the Witness

The first step (at least for me personally) is the stepping into doubt.

I doubt how I will begin. I doubt that if I begin how do I make it interesting. I think ,“Who am I to imagine that I have the right to guide anyone into their deepest potential.” I begin to beat myself up and the voice inside my head tells me, “You have no right. This is simply arrogance.”

I listen. I have learned to listen and simply witness. If I fight the doubt, I see in my minds eye the Walt Disney character Brer Rabbit who gets into a fight with the Tar Baby while on the road to going nowhere fast. The more you fight the Tar Baby the more stuck you become.

Learning to be a witness of your doubt is a key yoga lifestyle skill. It is like watching clouds in the sky. They will simply move on.

The doubt is there because I am drawn to begin to explore something new. At least it is new for me.

The witness is your awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Witnessing is like waking up in the morning and then looking in the mirror and noticing yourself — not judging or criticizing, just neutrally observing the quality of being awake. – Excerpt from Ram Dass’ newly released book Polishing the Mirror: How to Live From Your Spiritual Heart

Sweet Moon Language

Photo by Drew Tilk on Unsplash

As a foundation for this yoga nidra script I want to explore the invitation from the poet Hafiz who asks, “Why not become one who lives with a full moon in each eye speaking that sweet moon language that every other eye is longing to hear.”

This involves being committed to living as one who lights up the darkness that is at the heart of both personal and collective suffering on this planet.

That Sweet Moon Language is the language of metaphor, riddle, paradox and mystery. It is the language of mythological storytelling, mystical poetry and what I refer to as Heart song.mystical poetry and what I refer to as Heart song. To use another metaphor this is the palette I have to work with to paint a picture of the journey into the Land of Your True Heart’s Desire.(W. B. Yeats)

In Silent Fellowship

Intention, I think, is the foundation for writing such a script. I spend time exploring the intention for this guided meditation script in what Mike Scott of the Waterboys calls Silent Fellowship. This is silent fellowship with the inner promptings of the heart through the practice of Yoga Nidra.

So the intention of this Yoga Nidra meditation script is to invite you into the placeless Place or The Palace of Presence where you discover your connection to fulfilment and true prosperity or what Thomas Merton refers to as The True Self.

The Fire that Burns No Wood

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

During part of yesterday I worked on writing an article for the website entitled, Want a Yoga Nidra Script for Finding Greater Happiness. Writing this article was easy and fun. However, it needs to include a guided meditation and this is the challenge. That will get published once I write and record this first journey into writing such a script.

As a storyteller I have written and told stories.  As an author I have written books about stories and about Awakening the Heart. Writing this guided meditation is more challenging.

This is because I want to try to create a unique kind of combination that was inspired by listening to a Yoga Nidra meditation by Tanis Fishman of The School of Sankalpa (Absolutely love the name of that school).

For me it is the School of True Heart’s Desire. (Sankalpa)

It is the school I wish I had gone to in Northern Ireland, when at the age of 17 years, I discovered I wanted to be a Yoga teacher. Instead, for most of my life, I worked as an accountant because the culture at the time was screaming, “Yoga is the work of the Devil,” and there was no one to support my heart’s longing.

Who knows, maybe, someday soon I might take Yoga Nidra back to Northern Ireland to heal in some little way the deep divisions within my homeland.

Entering the Gateless Gate

The combination I am intrigued to explore is a combination of mythic storytelling, mystical poetry and song lyrics. These are what I love.

These are what take me into what we in Ireland call, The Land of the Forever Young. This is more a state of consciousness than a place of Irish mythology. It is were you move beyond dualistic and time bound thinking into that state of Timeless awareness.

So I start to play around with phrases that I so love and that I use in the workshop entitled Companioning Your Greatness. (W.B. Yeats)

So here are the first ideas that I begin to play around with as an opening to my first guided yoga nidra meditation. – at least in this format. I have done another yoga nidra script but it is much less guided in terms of inviting you into liminal space through the medium of mystical poetry and mythological symbol.

The phrases I am drawn to are :-

• Through the Gateless Gate to.
• The Field Beyond to follow the
• River beneath the River.

These ideas simply popped into my head after I had practiced Yoga Nidra this morning, had a cup of tea, fed the cats, walked the dog, sorted out a cat fight, noticed the doubt, witnessed the doubt and started to write about the doubt.

Let me say something about why these phrases are what I think Hafiz means by, “Speaking that Sweet Moon Language.” At least for myself, these phrases excite me and intrigue me. The first thing that the average Western mind will jump at when hearing these lines are that they are a bit like a riddle. They are kind of mini Zen Koans.

The key reason for scripting these phrases in this way is to take you out of what the Master Osho refers to as “logic chopping.” My beautiful Rumi says it in another way but with the same glorious invitation:-

Trade logic for bewilderment.

The Light of Yoga

You cannot answer the above phrases by way of intellectual understanding.

These phrases are symbolic of a different dimension. They are invitations to beyond knowledge and information. They invite you into differert states and stages of inner KNOWING. While this dimension of KNOWING is different you are not separate from it.

The reason for much of your personal suffering is because you have forgotten how to FEEL connected to this inner knowing. It is your personal inner GPS that guides your destiny, purpose and, to use a Buddhist term, fulfils your Dharma.

What keeps you from FEELING this connection is your over identification with your personal mind.(the Mask) or what the Christian mystic Thomas Merton refers to as, “The False Self.”

This is what you are invited to leave when you open the Gateless Gate.

This requires trust in the unknown but not the UNKNOWABLE. This is what it feels like when you begin the journey into the direct experience of fulfilment. Moving through the Gateless Gate invites you into the experience shared by the poet Derek Walcot writing in the poem Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Feasting on your life is the direct experience of fulfilment. It is true prosperity. It is moving, not from wanting or lacking, but from a pouring forth of your alignment with Source energy

The Bright Field

I took the idea of entry into the field from the poem by Rumi that says:-

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make any sense.

Rumi

I so love that invitation. I can hear myself say these words in a Yoga Nidra script and I feel the excitement of my heart opening.

This is important. This is so important.

I think if the lines from the script do not touch your heart then how to open the hearts of others. This is called transmission. You are not the one doing it but you recognize that it is being invited through you.

This is indicated by the feeling of enthusiasm from the Greek enthousiasmos “divine inspiration, enthusiasm (produced by certain kinds of music, etc.).”. Again doubt will get in the way of experiencing enthusiasm but simply witness it and let it move on.

Transmission is the experience called holy communion. Only in the personal experience of this writer those who are sharing the invitation have no direct experience of transmission.

Be as a Page that Aches for a Word – Neil Diamond

I will share this journey of writing a yoga meditation script over the period that I write it.  I hope that this sharing is instructional.

Remember that I am writing this yoga nidra script in my own way. There is a right way to do it and that is to be engaged with the heart. How you explore that engagement is up to you.

You might start by painting your first yoga nidra guided mediation. You might turn it into a mandala. You might pull it out of all your favourite inspirational song lyrics that have accompanied you on your life’s journey.

If you find you experience doubt. Witness it. Don’t fight it. Let it be there but do not give it energy. Allow it to float on downstream. Sent doubt on its merry way. Remember too that at one time it was likely your inner protector.

Tomorrow I will share with you why I invite you into The Field of deeper inner body awareness.

If you have any comments, questions or thoughts you would like to share about this article I would really like to hear from you.

In this way we each get to speak that sweet moon language that every other eye in the world is longing to hear. We get, like the moon, to shine light into the darkness of the suffering of the separate sense of self.

This really is the best we do.