Karen Brody: Daring to Rest

    —
October 31, 2017

Karen Brody: Daring to Rest

Karen Brody — October 31, 2017

Karen Brody is the founder of the Daring to Rest™ Program for Women, which promotes women’s empowerment and increased health through yoga nidra meditation. With Sounds True, Karen has published Daring to Rest: Reclaim Your Power with Yoga Nidra Rest Meditation. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Karen and Tami Simon have a serious discussion about the epidemic of burnout and exhaustion in modern culture. This is especially true for women, who are often held to the societal expectation that they serve the needs of those around them before they ever consider taking even the most necessary rest. Karen offers yoga nidra as a one part of the solution to this wave of fatigue, describing how her own practice and the cultivation of turiya—”the sleep of the yogis”—helped her move past a period of intense, chronic sleeplessness. Finally, Karen and Tami speak on the liberation in abandoning perfectionism and how yoga nidra can be folded into the course of our daily lives. (64 minutes)

Karen Brody is a women’s well-being and leadership expert who helps women journey from worn out to well rested and then dream big in their work and lives. A certified yoga nidra instructor, she is the founder of Daring to Rest™, a yoga nidra-based self-empowerment program for women. She has an MA in Women and International Development from the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, and a BA in sociology from Vassar. Karen is also a playwright, and Birth, her theater-for-social-change play has been seen in over 75 cities around the world. She is the mother of two boys and met her husband in the Peace Corps. She resides in Washington, DC, but considers the world her home.

Author photo © Judith Rae

900 Episodes and Counting…

Subscribe to Insights at the Edge to hear all of Tami’s interviews (transcripts available too!), featuring Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Adyashanti, and many more.

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Each week on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon interviews leading voices in the Mind/Body/Spirit space about a vast spectrum of fascinating ideas. Since 2009, Tami and her guests have been exploring the edge of understanding, nearly 1,000 episodes on the honest work of change, including spiritual discovery, awakening, intuition, purpose, trauma, and grief.

Photo © Jason Elias

Also By Author

Karen Brody: Daring to Rest

Karen Brody is the founder of the Daring to Rest™ Program for Women, which promotes women’s empowerment and increased health through yoga nidra meditation. With Sounds True, Karen has published Daring to Rest: Reclaim Your Power with Yoga Nidra Rest Meditation. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Karen and Tami Simon have a serious discussion about the epidemic of burnout and exhaustion in modern culture. This is especially true for women, who are often held to the societal expectation that they serve the needs of those around them before they ever consider taking even the most necessary rest. Karen offers yoga nidra as a one part of the solution to this wave of fatigue, describing how her own practice and the cultivation of turiya—”the sleep of the yogis”—helped her move past a period of intense, chronic sleeplessness. Finally, Karen and Tami speak on the liberation in abandoning perfectionism and how yoga nidra can be folded into the course of our daily lives. (64 minutes)

You Might Also Enjoy

Kimberly Ann Johnson: “Becoming a Sexual Alchemi...

What if aging isn’t the slow closing of your erotic life, but the doorway into its most alive season?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Kimberly Ann Johnson—sexological body worker, somatic experiencing practitioner, birth doula, and author of the new Sounds True book Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality—about what she calls erotic sovereignty, and the sentence that closes her book: the female body is its own spiritual path.

Join Tami and Kimberly to explore:

  • Erotic sovereignty—your relationship to your own life force, and why it stays with you across every season
  • Why the goal isn’t a more regulated nervous system, but a more responsive one, and what it means to run more charge
  • The four erotic seasons—maiden, mother, virgin, crone—and the surprising reason virgin comes after mother
  • Why hormonal transitions are “wet clay”: golden opportunities for repatterning that our culture teaches us to rush past
  • Menopause as a death rehearsal, and the life review that arrives decades before we expect it
  • Hot sex and warm sex—widening the range beyond adrenaline, and learning the language of the pause
  • “Hormones are gods”: the collective endocrine system, and why living intergenerationally may be the original hormone therapy
  • Becoming a sexual alchemist—arousal as healing energy, and why care is the whole ethic

Whether you are 25 or 75, Kimberly offers a map for meeting your body’s changes as thresholds rather than losses.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of sexual abuse and sexual wounding, including Kimberly Ann Johnson’s own experience.

Listen now, and meet your body as the path. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

The Point of Insight | Our Medicine Lives in the Wound


What if the very thing that wounded you is the source of the medicine you’re here to give?

In this month’s Point of Insight, Tami Simon shares a personal story: minutes before going live with an archetypal astrologer, she was told—correctly, and within seconds—that she carried “the mother of all mother wounds.” That single moment became the culmination of a much longer, gradual unfolding: a lifetime’s worth of “drops,” from a mentor she called the Queen of the Reframe, to an interview with yoga teacher and activist Seane Corn titled “Your Pain Is Your Purpose,” to an email from a business coach whose four simple words reframed everything—your karma is your dharma.

Join Tami as she reflects on:

  • How a lifelong feeling of not belonging became the soil for a life’s work helping others feel connected
  • The difference between sudden insight and the slow, gradual “boiling water” of a tipping point
  • Why real breakthrough requires going all the way through pain, not around it
  • Joanna Macy’s question—”What breaks your heart?”—and how grief and care become fuel for service
  • Why “never turn away” may be one of the most important spiritual instructions there is

This is a shorter, solo reflection from Tami—released once a month on the Insights at the Edge feed—on where our deepest wounds and our clearest purpose meet.

Listen now. →

Find the original Insights at the Edge episodes here: “Seane Corn: Your Pain Is Your Purpose“

Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times

What if the antidote to a world coming apart isn’t a bigger plan, but a smaller, daily act of devotion?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Tracee Stanley—teacher of yoga nidra, meditation, and self-inquiry, founder of Empowered Life Circle, and author of the new Sounds True book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit—about why ritual may be the most important practice we have during what she calls threshold times.

Join Tami and Tracee to explore:

  • The threshold question at the heart of ritual: what within me is dying, and what is waiting to be born?
  • Why devotion, not discipline, is the doorway—and how to weave practice through an ordinary householder’s day without shame
  • Tracee’s shard of light in Cape Town, and the years it took to find language for it
  • The body as shrine: the origins of yoga nidra in nyasa, the ancient practice of anointing the body as a divine temple
  • Earth dreaming—lying on the land and letting the land dream through you
  • Her reframe of the four Purusharthas, turning prosperity into support and pleasure into relationship
  • Sankalpa as a vow that leads to dharma, not a manifestation wish list
  • The analog cocoon and the night school: reclaiming sleep and dream time from the phone
  • Why enlightenment may be less a permanent state than a moment available in the space between two breaths

Tracee also speaks candidly about walking away from a successful film career, and what a surgery taught her about the ego that refuses to let the body rest.

Tracee opens and closes this interview with a short guided ritual you can practice along with.

Listen now, and let something be reshaped. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.