Is it through action and movement, or through quiet contemplation? Through sport, family time, creative expression—or something else entirely?

Yoga therapy was the early foundation of my training. During those three years—somewhere around the second year in particular—I found myself increasingly drawn to mindfulness and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. While I deeply valued the structure and rigor of yoga therapy, I sensed that something essential was missing: a more integrated, embodied understanding of mindfulness within the therapeutic yoga framework.

This curiosity led me to take an eight-hour MBSR (Mindfulness- Based Stress Reduction) course, and not long after, I was introduced to Richard Miller and the iRest Yoga Nidra teachings. It was after the MBSR course and the initial eight-hour iRest experience—both the practice and the philosophy—that I had a clear aha moment. I remember thinking, Yes. This is what has been missing from my yoga therapy toolbox.

I had been trained thoroughly in physical assessments and mental–emotional frameworks. And yet, very little attention had been given to the lived, somatic experience of asana—or even meditation—as it was taught within yoga therapy. There was limited language for how we feel practice from the inside, and how that felt sense becomes a gateway to deeper insight and healing.

That realization led me to complete iRest levels 1 and 2, followed by a year-long certification process. I’m profoundly grateful that I did.

Initially, I understood yoga therapy to be the umbrella under which all my tools lived. After studying iRest—its philosophy, its practices, and the experience of teaching it—I came to understand something quite different: iRest Yoga Nidra is the umbrella under which all other tools can fall.

iRest is not something I add on to my work; it is a lens through which everything I offer is seen. That lens includes not only the capacity to witness and observe experience, but also the felt recognition that there is something here that is more fundamental than the body or the mind.

In classical yoga philosophy, we often speak of Purusha and Prakriti—essence and matter—as distinct. This dualistic framework has its value. iRest Yoga Nidra, however, arises from a nondual understanding. The sense of being a separate “me” looking out at a world “over there” is understood as a useful but limited perspective. Nonduality invites us to notice that the one who is aware and that which is being experienced are not fundamentally separate. Seeing, hearing, sensing, thinking—all are expressions of the same field of knowing

In iRest, awareness itself is the container—the vast, unbounded field that holds the body, mind, emotions, and spirit.

Awareness is not another object to observe. It is something far greater, ultimately unnameable. You might sense it as the vast ocean, the open blue sky, or the night sky—spacious, inclusive, allowing everything to arise and pass without judgment, and perhaps even with love.

There is an aspect of you—your true essence—that is this vastness. This spacious awareness holds all experience without being defined by any of it.

This can sound like a heady or abstract concept, which is why iRest does not ask you to believe it intellectually. Instead, it invites you to feel into it, to explore it directly through meditation. Over time, there may be moments—glimpses, touches, gentle recognitions—when you sense: Oh yes. This has always been here.

Beyond the body.
Beyond personality, name, and role. Quietly present, whole, and unchanging.

And from this recognition, well-being and ease are no longer something to achieve—they are revealed as our natural ground.