Almost everyone agrees that meditation is a healthy and helpful practice, with many personal as well as collective benefits that support greater presence and a conscious wholehearted relationship to life.

Through the practice of meditation you’ll find that you can allow experiences to simply be, respond to them selectively with wisdom and clarity, and not get involved with the ones that don’t serve the moment. That’s when you’ll really fall in love with meditation.

Meditation is one of the most powerful tools to help us restore the harmony within and to gain access to our inner intelligence.

In meditation, we re-discover the silence in our mind and make it part of our life. Silence is the birthplace of happiness; it is where we get our bursts of inspiration, our feelings of compassion, our sense of love. Meditation is a journey to freedom and self-knowledge. It is the foundation for consistent spiritual evolution. Our minds become quiet allowing our bodies to rest deeply releasing stress and fatigue.

We re-connect with our essence which extends into our daily lives bringing benefits such as a clearer and more creative mind, increased effectiveness, reduced stress, improved health, greater happiness and more rewarding relationships.

Regular meditation is a powerful tool for personal and World transformation. It is a key to lasting growth and development.

Course objectives

These classes aim to provide you with the foundation for developing your own meditation practice and will consist of discussion and practise.

What you will receive

• A six week course of personal guidance, discussion and exercises
• Course notes
• Guided Audio Meditations
• Support via email

What you will learn. We will –

• Ask what is meditation and why meditate?
• Examine the key steps to learning meditation – breathing and relaxation techniques; concentration and clearing the mind
• Prepare to meditate, establishing a meditation practice; choose your place, time environment, seated position etc.
• Experience different methods of Meditation
• Practice, practice, practice!

Who should attend this course?

Anyone who wishes to enjoy deep peace, greater freedom and mastery of life. This course is ideal for beginners as well as those wishing to deepen their understanding and experience of meditation.

What is iRest Yoga Nidra?

iRest Yoga Nidra (‘integrative restoration’) is a deep relaxation, a self-inquiry and a meditation. It is integrative because it supports participants in becoming fully functioning, integrated and healthy human beings. It is restorative because it seeks to enable participants to recover their innate sense of joy, peace and wellbeing, enabling feelings of connection with themselves and all of life.

Though its roots lay in thousands of years of philosophies and practices, iRest Yoga Nidra carefully and purposefully applies them to our modern-day outlooks and needs.

iRest Yoga Nidra enables you to explore deep movements of meditation and skillfully enquire into the structures of yourself, which can ultimately lead to profound insight and healing.

Through the process of iRest Yoga Nidra the senses and thinking mind are calmed and you experience the part of you that is unchanging, ever present and always at peace.

iRest has the support of both the yogic community and the scientific community, as the teachings are firmly grounded in ancient yogic wisdom, and contemporary research has shown it to be effective in:

• Increasing inner peace, resilience and well-being
• Reducing depression, fear, trauma and anxiety
• Increasing our ability to relax and enjoy life
• Reducing insomnia and levels of stress
• Improving interpersonal relationships
• reducing chronic and acute pain
• Developing a deep capacity to meet any and all circumstances you may encounter in life

iRest is a powerful educational tool that focuses on health and healing at all levels of your life: physical, psychological and spiritual. iRest empowers you to respond to life’s varying circumstances with greater wisdom, inner strength and sensitivity bringing more joy and fulfilment into your being.

How does it work?

iRest offers a step by step practical approach to Meditation which can help you really learn the stages involved in going inward in a safe and practical way. iRest is a practice open to all who are interested in continued transformation, discovering their home-ground of wellbeing and exploring the depths of the word ‘yoga’ – to feel at one with everything.

Research has shown Yoga Nidra informed by iRest effectively reduces, insomnia, chronic pain, chemical dependency, P.T.S.D, depression, anxiety and the physical symptoms of stress.

In this six week course we will be exploring aspects of the practice which include:

• Cultivating a place within where we may feel completely at ease.
• Exploring what we really wish for ourselves and our life.
• Tools for complete relaxation of the body and mind.
• Befriending and exploring easeful breathing.
• Learning to welcome and be with feelings, emotions and thoughts.
• Experiencing a real ease of being – spacious, light, grounded and a deep connection with yourself, your life and all of life around you.
• And integrate this all back into your daily life…

Each week will consist of a short introduction to the theme for that session and any relevant theory will also be explained. We then dive into the practical, experiential practice. The practice of iRest yoga nidra really supports us to embody the wisdom, rather than just intellectualise it. iRest Yoga Nidra was created by Richard Miller, PhD, a clinical psychologist, author, researcher, yogic scholar and founder of the Integrative Restoration Institute (IRI). It is a unique yoga nidra practice in that it has been substantiated by extensive and continuing research proving it can resolve trauma, pain, chemical dependency and stress, and increase general well being. Richard Miller has dedicated the past 40 years of his life to studying, practicing, teaching and researching yoga nidra.  And the outcome of his decades of work, is Integrative Restoration Yoga Nidra (iRest).

Meditation Group

Dr Yubraj Sharma