Take a Break from the Stress Virus

Shut up in your home? Cannot work? Overcome with worry and stress over the uncertainty of the Corona Time? 
Take a one night and morning  break at The Grey Swan Inn Bed and Breakfast. Discover how to turn within through the ancient meditative practice of Yoga Nidra that 

1. releases negative emotions and thought patterns, 
2. calms the nervous system
3. restores a deep sense of well—being and equanimity. 

Yoga Nidra has also been shown to effectively 

1. improve your ability to relax and enjoy life,
2. enhance interpersonal relationships,
3. raise resilience and coping skills,
4. and increase inner peace and well-being

Yoga Nidra is a 30 minute guided relaxation of stress and tension in the body and mind.

What you can expect with a one night stay:

The two Yoga Nidra sessions, each two hours in evening and morning,  can motivate and help you to restore your capacity to deal with stress in your daily life.  You will  take home a Yoga Nidra CD in order to learn how to use the applications of inner relaxation in your daily life. Yoga Nidra as a practice gives you the tools and the motivation to find and relieve stress and tension in your mind as it happens. In addition to the session,  you will have unlimited email correspondence with the instructor.

Make it a two night stay:

The two-day sessions includes additional personal application of the Yoga Nidra techniques. This includes creative dialogues about stress and tension in the mind. You will see the philosophical context on why this practice is so important in our age of anxiety and stress.

When our comfortable and certain world appears to be collapsing around us, that is the moment when we take the unexpected path, open previously ignored doors, and discover the well-spring of joy and creativity that always lies within us.

"God disguised as myriad things
 and playing a game of tag 
 has kissed you and said 
 'You're it..I mean, 
 you're REALLY IT' 

 Now it does not matter 
 what you believe or feel 
 for something wonderful, 
 Major-league Wonderful 
 is someday going to happen." 
 Hafiz 

A Zen story. A Zen master was fanning himself. A monk asked him why he was fanning himself when there was a breeze. The Master just kept on fanning himself. What cracks this koan since logic is no help?

If we are already always enlightened, have Buddha-nature, so why practice? Why do yoga? Why do meditation, all this effort, why fan?

In his non-verbal communication, which is always a transmission of insight in Zen, the master is saying that while enlightenment is already always there it is there as potential. You have to practice to activate the breeze.

It’s like a new credit card. You have to call in to activate the card before you can use it, even though the money is already available.

Yoga Nidra activates your Buddha Nature, your potential Basic Goodness. Basic Goodness, basic contentment (or whatever you call your Source) is always already there but we cannot access it because of the cultural lens given to our mind. We are told from childhood that permanent satisfaction is in the world and it must be chased and fought for. There is nothing within. Don’t even bother going there. In fact, if you do go there, you will release the Devil. We are afraid of what we will find there buried in our basement.

Yoga Nidra is the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha in a single practice. First, you recognize that you are hurting, Second, you notice that your mind is the cause of your hurting, Third, you begin to relax and release the cause of your hurt; with the seeing of the cause, the effect, which is your pain is released. Forth, you practice the conditions, the Yoga Nidra inquiry to create the conditions for the first three truth to be activated.

Ed Conley-Prabhakar is an insight meditation teacher in Blackstone, Virginia, where he lives with his wife, Tilly, a native of Blackstone. From the early 60’s Ed was consumed by hunger for truth and in 1968 he had a profound and life changing awakening through a connection with the world teacher J. Krishnamurti. In the 70’s he found a direction for his journey through association with Alice Christensen, American Yoga Association, and Swami Muktananda of Siddha Yoga. Ed and his wife ran a meditation center for Siddha Yoga in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in 1980-1981.

Having settled in Southside Virginia in the early 80s, Ed began teaching yoga in Blackstone and opened the Blackstone Yoga Center. Ed taught awakening insight meditation through Yoga Nidra for 5 years in Chesterfield County. He is currently a spiritual writer on social media where he practices awakening insight through creative dialogue. 

You can see Ed Conley-Prabhakar’s live talks and writing on awakening insight on his blog: www.tokillaminotaur.com