Resources
Meditation & Yoga Nidra Resources
Practical Guidance, Traditional Maps & Resources for Exploring Inner Experience
This page brings together resources I developed across many years of meditation, Yoga Nidra, teaching, and contemplative inquiry.
Some are practical: how to begin meditating, how to work with a Yoga Nidra recording, and how to become more attentive to sensation, thought, emotion, and inner experience.
Others introduce maps that shaped my work for many years, including Sankalpa, brain states, the Koshas, witnessing, visualization, conditioning, and the relationship between conscious and less-conscious processes.
I hold these different kinds of knowledge more distinctly today than I once did.
A traditional yogic map can be deeply valuable without requiring us to treat it as a scientific description of reality. A scientific model can illuminate aspects of meditation without explaining the whole of contemplative experience. And a direct experience can be profound while leaving open questions about what that experience ultimately means.
You are invited to use these resources in that spirit: learn the maps, enter the practices, notice what you experience, and remain curious about the relationship between them.
Getting Started
Meditation can appear remarkably simple: become still and pay attention.
The experience itself can be considerably more complex.
When external stimulation decreases, you may become more aware of thought, restlessness, sensation, emotion, boredom, sleepiness, or discomfort. This doesn't necessarily mean that meditation is going badly. You may simply be noticing more clearly what was already occurring.
Begin gently.
The purpose of these introductory practices is to develop familiarity with attention and experience rather than to achieve a particular meditative state.
Observing the Mind
Begin by noticing what arises. A thought may appear and another may quickly follow. At some point, you might realize that you have become completely absorbed in what you were thinking and that your attention has wandered for several minutes. That moment of recognition is itself part of the practice.
What interests me here is our capacity to observe that thinking is happening. Rather than immediately deciding what this capacity tells us about the nature of consciousness or Self, we can first become familiar with the experience itself. We can notice the kinds of thoughts that repeat, what seems to trigger them, what happens in the body while we are thinking, and how quickly a thought can develop into a story that we then experience as true.
Over time, this simple practice of observation can reveal a great deal about the relationship between thought, perception, interpretation, belief, and identity.
Anchor in the Body
Sensation gives attention something immediate to encounter. Feel the contact between your body and whatever is supporting you, notice the movement of the breath, and become curious about temperature, pressure, vibration, tension, softness, movement, or stillness.
See if you can stay close to the sensation itself before immediately describing or explaining it. This distinction can be subtle because interpretation happens so quickly. There is what we actually feel, followed almost immediately by the words, memories, associations, judgments, and meanings that gather around what we feel.
Meditation gives us an opportunity to become increasingly sensitive to this relationship. We begin to recognize sensation as it is occurring while also noticing the mind's movement toward naming and interpreting the experience.
A Simple Meditation Practice
Find a position in which you feel comfortable and reasonably alert, whether that is sitting in a chair, on the floor, or on a cushion. Allow your body to settle and take a moment to notice the places where you are being supported.
Bring your attention to your breathing and feel a breath as it arrives and leaves without needing to change it. When you become aware that you are thinking, simply acknowledge the thought and allow your attention to return to immediate experience. You might notice the breath, sensation in the body, sounds around you, or whatever else is present.
If emotion arises, become curious about how it is actually being experienced. Where do you feel it in the body? What sensations accompany it? What thoughts or interpretations begin to gather around it? There is no need to answer these questions intellectually while you meditate; they are invitations to become more attentive to what is happening.
You might begin with five or ten minutes and allow the length of your practice to develop naturally over time. Meditation does not require an empty mind or a particular experience. It is an opportunity to become increasingly intimate with what is occurring and increasingly able to recognize the difference between the experience itself and what the mind makes of it.
Your Body
Comfort and alertness are both useful in meditation.
Choose a position that allows your body to feel supported without requiring unnecessary effort. You can sit in a chair, on a cushion, on the floor, or choose another posture appropriate for your body.
There is no universally correct meditation posture.
An upright position can help some people remain alert. Others may need additional support because of pain, injury, fatigue, disability, or the needs of their nervous system.
Adjust accordingly.
Your body is part of the practice rather than an obstacle to it.
Your Breath
The breath can provide a simple point of contact with present experience.
You can notice where breathing is easiest to perceive: perhaps the nostrils, chest, ribs, abdomen, or the movement of the whole body.
There is usually no need to force a particular rhythm.
When the mind becomes busy, notice that activity and return gently to the felt experience of breathing.
Over time, you may begin noticing the relationship between breathing, emotion, attention, and your overall state without needing to decide immediately what those relationships mean.
Your Emotions
Emotion can be one of the richest and most challenging territories of contemplative practice.
Rather than assuming an emotion should disappear within a particular amount of time, become interested in how it actually moves through you.
Where do you feel it?
Does it have temperature, pressure, movement, contraction, heaviness, tingling, or another sensory quality?
What happens when you remain close to sensation?
What happens when interpretation enters?
What story accompanies the feeling?
You can begin learning the difference between an emotion, its bodily sensations, the thoughts associated with it, and the meaning you make from the entire experience.
If an emotion becomes overwhelming, you do not need to remain immersed in it. Open your eyes, orient to the room, feel your feet or another point of physical support, move your body, or end the practice.
Meditation can include knowing when to stay and when to step away.
Your Environment
Your environment can influence the quality of your practice.
Some people appreciate silence. Others settle more easily with gentle sound or guided meditation. Experiment and notice what supports you.
You may also enjoy creating a physical place associated with contemplation. It can be very simple: a particular chair, candle, object, photograph, flowers, or anything that helps signal that you are entering a period of intentional practice.
If you use an altar or objects from a spiritual tradition, you can allow them to hold whatever meaning they genuinely have for you.
The purpose is to create conditions that help you arrive.
“Don’t force yourself to sit longer than you are comfortable with. Give yourself permission to start small—perhaps 10 minutes. Increase the length of your meditation sessions as you evolve with your practice.”
How to Use the Yoga Nidra Recordings
Choose a time when you are unlikely to be disturbed and give yourself approximately 30–45 minutes for the practice. Yoga Nidra is traditionally practiced lying on the back, although comfort is important. You might place a pillow beneath your head or knees, cover yourself with a blanket, or make any other adjustments that allow your body to feel supported. If lying down does not work well for your body, you can also practice seated or in another comfortable position.
Once you are settled, allow your body to relax and simply follow the guidance as best you can. You may remain aware throughout the entire practice, drift toward sleep, or move somewhere between waking and sleeping. These shifts can be part of the experience, and there is no need to force yourself into or maintain a particular state.
The recordings in the Free Library were created across many different periods of my Yoga Nidra work and reflect the evolution of more than twenty years of practice, study, and teaching. They are arranged chronologically, with the older recordings near the top of the library and the most recent toward the bottom. As you move through them, you may notice changes in my language, interpretation, understanding, and way of guiding.
I think of the collection now as a living record of that journey. You are welcome to begin wherever you feel drawn, experience the practice for yourself, and notice what you discover.
Sankalpa
Intention, Recognition & Embodiment
Sankalpa is often translated as intention, resolve, or heartfelt desire. Within Yoga Nidra, it is traditionally repeated at particular points in the practice, when the body is deeply relaxed and the mind has become quieter and more receptive. I still value this way of working with Sankalpa, and repetition continues to be an important part of how I understand and practice it.
Over many years of practice, teaching, and my own journey with Sankalpa, my understanding of it has deepened. I have become increasingly interested in what happens before we choose the words. Where does a desire come from? What is moving within us when we feel drawn toward something? Is that movement connected to fear, conditioning, protection, longing, expectation, identity, or something deeper? And is it possible for a Sankalpa to be discovered or realized before we have language for it?
These questions opened an important distinction for me between forming a Sankalpa and realizing a Sankalpa. There have been times when I have consciously chosen a Sankalpa that expresses something I genuinely desire to cultivate, experience, or move toward, even though I have not first experienced it as a deeper inner realization. I still consider this a meaningful and effective way of working with Sankalpa. The repetition itself can become part of the relationship with that desire, allowing us to encounter what it evokes and how it begins to participate in our lives.
There are also times when the movement begins somewhere deeper. Something becomes recognizable inwardly before there are words for it, and the Sankalpa emerges from that recognition. When this occurs, repetition has a different quality for me. I am less interested in convincing myself that something is true and more interested in allowing what has already been recognized inwardly to become increasingly stable, embodied, and expressed through the different dimensions of my life.
This is where the traditional practice of repetition remains particularly meaningful to me. Within the yogic framework that has informed much of my work, the human being is understood through nested dimensions or Koshas: physical, energetic, mental-emotional, discerning, and increasingly subtle dimensions of experience. When I repeat a Sankalpa after it has been deeply recognized, I understand the repetition as a way of stabilizing and patterning that recognition throughout these manifest layers.
The words then become a point of orientation. Through repetition, I return again and again to what has been recognized, allowing it to find expression through the body, thought, feeling, perception, choice, relationship, and action. In this sense, Sankalpa becomes part of the movement between inner recognition and lived experience.
I hold the Koshas as the traditional map through which I learned to understand this process. What continues to interest me most is the direct relationship between recognition, repetition, embodiment, and the way something known inwardly gradually becomes lived.
Working With Sankalpa in Yoga Nidra
During many of my Yoga Nidra recordings, you will be invited to mentally repeat your Sankalpa three times near the beginning of the practice and again toward the end.
If you already have a Sankalpa that arose through a deeper recognition, use it.
Let the repetition become an opportunity to feel its resonance through the whole of your experience rather than simply repeating the words mechanically. Notice the body. Notice the emotional response. Notice where the statement feels settled and where there may still be friction, uncertainty, or movement.
If you have not experienced that kind of recognition, you do not need to wait for it before working with Sankalpa.
You can begin with a heartfelt desire, quality, or resolve that feels genuinely meaningful to you. Choose something you are willing to enter into relationship with rather than something you think you should want.
Some Sankalpas may speak to the human life we are living and qualities we genuinely want to cultivate or embody:
I am peaceful.
I am courageous.
I trust myself.
I am free to speak.
I live with integrity.
I am healthy in body and mind.
And there is another dimension of Sankalpa that has become increasingly important in my own journey: Sankalpas that point toward what I understand as fundamental qualities of consciousness itself.
These may arise differently. Rather than describing something we hope to acquire, they can become expressions of something recognized inwardly:
I am Presence.
I am Love.
I am Awake.
I am Compassion.
I am Peace.
I am Awareness.
For me, these are among the deepest expressions of Sankalpa.
The distinction is subtle. Saying I am Love because I want to become more loving can be a meaningful intention. Saying I am Love after something within me has directly recognized the words can have an entirely different quality. The words may be identical while the movement from which they arise is different.
This is why I have become less interested in finding the “right” Sankalpa and more interested in discovering our relationship with the one we are using.
Stay with the same Sankalpa long enough to learn from that relationship.
Repetition can reveal as much as it reinforces. You may notice resonance, resistance, emotion, contradiction, longing, or an unexpected recognition beneath the words. What begins as a consciously chosen intention can itself become a pathway into deeper inquiry.
From Sankalpa to Realization
My own relationship with Sankalpa eventually led me beyond the question of “What do I want to create?” and into a deeper investigation of “What is the movement beneath the desire?” I became interested in the layers of identification, longing, conditioning, perception, and inner movement that can sit beneath what we think we want, and in what might become visible if we were willing to follow a desire inward rather than immediately trying to bring it into form.
Through my own experience, I began to recognize another way of approaching Sankalpa—one in which recognition might come first, followed by language, repetition, calibration, and eventually lived embodiment. This exploration became the foundation of A Path to Sankalpa, and it significantly expanded the territory of Sankalpa within my work.
The traditional practice of Sankalpa remains meaningful to me within this larger understanding. There are times when we begin with a heartfelt desire and allow repetition to participate in how that desire becomes patterned and embodied. There are times when we follow a desire inward and discover something deeper beneath it, allowing the Sankalpa to emerge from what becomes recognizable. And there are times when recognition itself comes first, with the words arriving afterward.
I have come to see these as different entrances into the same inquiry. Sankalpa can begin with desire, with a word, with a quality we long to embody, or with something already recognized inwardly. What interests me is the relationship between these movements and what happens as we continue to live with them.
At the heart of that exploration is a question that continues to animate my work: What is moving within me, what is asking to become conscious, and how does what I recognize inwardly become lived?
Understanding Brain States
A Scientific Lens Alongside a Contemplative Practice
Brain activity can be described partly through patterns of electrical oscillation commonly grouped into frequency bands such as delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma.
These patterns are associated with different aspects of waking, attention, relaxation, and sleep, although the relationship is considerably more complex than assigning one mental or spiritual state to one brainwave band.
For example, alpha activity is commonly associated with relaxed wakefulness, particularly when the eyes are closed. Theta activity can occur in several contexts, including drowsiness and sleep, while delta activity is prominent during deep non-REM sleep. Beta activity is commonly present during ordinary waking cognition and active mental engagement.
These categories can be useful when thinking about the changing physiology associated with relaxation and sleep.
They do not, by themselves, establish concepts such as spiritual awakening, subconscious reprogramming, access to multidimensional reality, manifestation, or Self-realization.
Those are different kinds of claims.
Yoga Nidra is especially interesting because the practice intentionally brings together deep physical relaxation and ongoing attention. How subjective experience relates to measurable brain activity remains an area where contemplative experience and scientific investigation can meet without needing to become the same map.
The Five Koshas
A Traditional Yogic Map of Human Experience
The five Koshas come from the Taittiriya Upanishad and later became an influential map within yogic understandings of human experience.
Kosha is commonly translated as sheath.
The model describes five progressively subtler dimensions or sheaths:
Annamaya Kosha — the food or physical sheath
Associated with the material body and physical existence.
Pranamaya Kosha — the vital-energy sheath
Associated within yogic philosophy with prana, breath, vitality, and life force.
Manomaya Kosha — the mental sheath
Associated with mind, sensory processing, thought, and emotional experience.
Vijnanamaya Kosha — the discernment or wisdom sheath
Associated with intellect, discernment, and deeper knowing.
Anandamaya Kosha — the bliss sheath
The subtlest of the five within this model, associated with bliss and profound interior experience.
Within the philosophical traditions from which this map emerges, the Koshas are explored in relationship to questions concerning Atman or Self.
I spent many years working deeply with this framework, particularly through Yoga Nidra.
Today, I find it important to name it clearly as a traditional contemplative map.
That does not diminish its value.
It allows us to ask a more interesting question:
What happens when we enter the map through practice and compare what the tradition describes with what we actually experience?
This relationship between map and experience is explored much more deeply in The Inward Path.
Awareness & Visualization
Awareness and visualization engage our inner experience in distinctly different ways, and understanding that difference has become increasingly important in my own practice and teaching.
Awareness
By awareness here, I mean the capacity to notice experience as it is occurring without intentionally trying to change what is there. A sensation may arise, a thought may appear, an image may enter the mind, an emotion may move through the body, or a sound may come into awareness. The practice is to remain present with what is occurring and allow it to reveal itself without immediately directing, correcting, improving, suppressing, or replacing it.
This creates an opportunity to become increasingly precise about our experience. What actually happened? What did I perceive? What did I feel? At what point did interpretation enter? What meaning did I give to what occurred?
Awareness, in this sense, is receptive. Its intention is to encounter what is already present. The act of bringing attention to an experience may itself influence what happens—we are human beings participating in what we observe—but we are not consciously introducing new content in order to produce a different experience.
This distinction is important to me. Awareness gives us an opportunity to discover what is there before we decide what it means or what we would prefer it to become.
Visualization
Visualization engages experience differently. It uses the creative capacity of the mind to intentionally introduce an image, sensation, movement, environment, possibility, or other form of imagined experience. Rather than simply encountering what is already present, we are actively contributing something to the experience and allowing the mind and body to respond to what we have introduced.
This can be an extraordinarily useful capacity. We can imagine warmth moving through the body, picture ourselves in a particular place, rehearse a movement, evoke an image or symbol, or intentionally create an inner experience and notice what follows. What we visualize can influence sensation, emotion, perception, and the direction an experience takes.
For this reason, I find it useful to know when I am observing experience and when I am participating in its creation.
With practice, we can become increasingly fluid between the two. We might visualize something intentionally and then stop directing the experience to observe what arises in response. We might begin with observation, notice what is already present, and then consciously introduce visualization to explore how the experience changes. We can move back and forth, allowing each capacity to serve a different purpose.
The important skill is recognizing the shift.
Awareness allows us to encounter what is present. Visualization allows us to intentionally influence what may arise.
Learning to distinguish between them gives us greater precision in contemplative practice. It also helps us recognize when something emerged spontaneously within our experience and when our own imagination, expectation, or intention participated in creating it.
Stored Impressions, Memory & Conditioning
Traditional yogic philosophies contain sophisticated teachings about samskaras—impressions or tendencies understood to influence perception, behaviour, and future experience. Modern psychology and neuroscience explore some related territory through very different frameworks, including memory, conditioning, implicit learning, prediction, habit, and emotional response. Although there can be interesting points of contact between these perspectives, they arise from different methods of inquiry and do not necessarily describe the same mechanisms.
What we can observe directly is that previous experience often participates in present experience. A sensation can evoke a memory, a situation can produce an immediate emotional response, an image can arise unexpectedly, or a familiar interpretation can appear so quickly that we barely recognize an interpretation has occurred. Sometimes we know where these responses come from, and sometimes we do not.
Yoga Nidra can create interesting conditions for noticing this terrain. As the body becomes deeply relaxed and attention moves inward, memories, images, emotions, sensations, associations, and other material may become more noticeable. Within yogic traditions, some of what arises may be understood through the language of samskaras, karma, or latent impressions. Other traditions and contemporary psychological frameworks may interpret similar experiences differently.
My interest is increasingly in allowing the experience itself to be encountered before becoming too certain about its explanation. If an image appears, what is the image? If an emotion moves through the body, what is actually being felt? If something seems deeply familiar without an identifiable memory attached to it, can we remain with that experience long enough to discover what it reveals before deciding where it came from?
There may be experiences we eventually understand as psychological, energetic, karmic, ancestral, symbolic, spiritual, or connected to something we do not yet have language for. I am interested in keeping those possibilities available while becoming increasingly precise about the distinction between what arose, what we experienced, and what we believe the experience means.
Beliefs, Perception & the Maps We Live Through
Our beliefs influence how we interpret experience. They develop through many sources—family, culture, education, religion, spiritual traditions, relationships, significant experiences, language, and the conclusions we ourselves make over time. Some beliefs are easy to recognize because we can name them. Others are so deeply embedded in our perception that we may experience them simply as reality.
This is one reason I have become so interested in perception. When something happens, there is the experience itself, what we perceive within that experience, and then the meaning we give to what occurred. Our existing beliefs inevitably participate in that process. They influence what we notice, what we overlook, what we consider possible, and how we understand what we have encountered. Over time, the meanings we make can become beliefs of their own, further shaping what we are capable of perceiving.
Meditation and contemplative inquiry can give us space to observe this process more carefully. As our attention becomes quieter and more precise, we can begin to notice where direct experience ends and interpretation begins. We may also begin to recognize assumptions that have been operating so quietly that we had never thought to question them.
When a belief becomes visible, we have an opportunity to become curious about it. Is this true? How do I know? What experiences led me to believe it? What have I interpreted through this belief? What else might I be unable to see from inside this particular map?
For me, this inquiry has become much more interesting than simply identifying a “negative belief” and replacing it with a “positive” one. I am interested in understanding the architecture of belief itself—how beliefs form, how they shape perception, how perception reinforces them, and what happens when we become willing to examine something we have previously experienced as unquestionably true.
Those questions now sit at the heart of much of my work.
Continue Exploring
These resources reflect many years of practice, study, teaching, and direct experience, alongside an understanding that continues to evolve. I offer them as places to begin and as maps you can return to, explore, question, and experience for yourself.
As you move through them, I encourage you to become familiar with the traditional maps while remaining attentive to your own experience. Scientific language can illuminate certain dimensions of meditation and consciousness, while contemplative and spiritual traditions may offer entirely different ways of understanding what we encounter. Part of the inquiry is learning to recognize what each map can tell us, where its limits may be, and when we have moved from experience into interpretation.
Above all, stay close to what you actually experience. Notice what you perceive, what you conclude from it, and which beliefs or frameworks may be shaping the meaning you give it. Allow yourself to question what you think you know while remaining open to what you have yet to understand.
There is tremendous richness in learning a map deeply without requiring it to become the final answer.
The map can guide the inquiry. Experience gives us something to investigate. Discernment helps us examine what we make of it.