Understanding the Vagal Nerve and Heart Rate Variability for Stress Management

If you regularly feel stressed out, overwhelmed, depressed, anxious, or tired – that isn’t just a symptom of modern society, although there is an epidemic of lethargy and our collective mental health is on the decline. You can change the way you experience the world, without quitting your job and moving into the middle of nowhere (as nice as that might sound some days).

To solve modern problems, though, I often think the best solutions involve going back to ancient wisdom; there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel when our ancestors have already figured out tools and techniques we can use to overcome overwhelm. So I think there’s a lot of value in looking at how we can apply ancient wisdom to our modern times.

One of these ancient techniques is called Yoga Nidra, an Ayurvedic meditation practice that’s sometimes referred to as “yogic sleep.” And if you watch someone practicing Yoga Nidra, it does look like they’re asleep, but it’s a bit more than that – it’s a meditation designed to lure your body into a state of consciousness that’s between being awake and being asleep, and it has transformative potential in our busy world.

To learn more about the benefits of Yoga Nidra and how it works, I sat down with Rich Lister, a trained nurse and the founder of Medicine For Modern Times. He also created a program called RadicalRest, which is an application of Yoga Nidra combined with other complementary medical and spiritual practices.

I met Rich at the Ra Ma Festival and I respect the way he’s helping people improve their lives by integrating both the spiritual and the medical into their mind-body experience, and I think Yoga Nidra is a tool that a lot of us will be able to incorporate into our daily lives so that we can re-focus on that mind-body experience and thrive in our modern world.

Topics Discussed In This Episode:

• Rich’s 15 years of experience in the ER & how it broke him
• How Rich started developing his yoga practice
• How ancient yoga and meditation practice first made their way to the West – and then started finding popularity, again, in the mid 90s
• Why your unconscious mind is the root is all healthy living
• The ins and outs of RadicalRest: a deep meditation practice that helps you release negative emotions and thought patterns, calm your nervous system, and develop the aptitude necessary to meet all of life’s challenges
• Can someone practice Yoga Nidra or RadicalRest alone?
• Bringing science to the esoteric
• The relationship between the vagus nerve and the female orgasm
• What we should know about HRV and the unconscious mind
• The subjectivity of trauma
• We are doing the best we can with the tools we have

More about this episode.

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