Yoga Nidra Workshops with Olena Baker
Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation
When: Saturday 25th June
Time: 14.00-16.00
Price: €30 per workshop
The daily pressures of life can leave us feeling overwhelmed, tired, stressed and ‘off-centre’. Relax and unwind as you feel tension melt away to reveal a sense of wellbeing and connectedness. Discover how stress and ‘busy-ness’ affect the body mind and can stop us from feeling at ease, content and happy with life. This workshop will include deeply soothing body and breath sensing and guided yoga nidra meditation.
This workshop focuses on stress (which everyone experiences to some degree!) and how the particular elements of breath and body sensing in a yoga nidra practice activate the relaxation response in the nervous system. Its basis is neurophysiology.
Yoga Nidra workshops are appropriate for people new to, or experienced with meditation/yoga nidra. For experienced people it’s a chance to learn something new about the practice with a different teacher and for new people the practice is very accessible.
The Ease of Being
When: Sunday 26th June 2016
Time: 14.30-16.30
Price: €30 per workshop
Yoga nidra is a complete meditation practice of mindfulness, welcoming emotions and thoughts and experiencing yourself as awareness, your true nature. It is suitable for experienced meditators and complete novices alike. It is especially great for anyone who finds sitting still and ‘emptying the mind’ impossible. This profound practice is amazingly simple and without even trying you’ll find yourself in a place where deep healing can take place. It is in that place of neither asleep nor awake where you discover your true nature and a sense of wellbeing that is always there. Come away with tools for meeting the challenges that life presents you with and connecting back to the awareness of who you truly are.
This workshop gets deeper into the practice of Yoga Nidra, looking at each of the stages and why it is a complete mediation practice. The focus is on the experience of abiding in True Nature as non-separate Being, which is the feeling of connectedness. Its basis is philosophy. Yoga Nidra workshops are appropriate for people new to, or experienced with meditation/yoga nidra. For experienced people it’s a chance to learn something new about the practice with a different teacher and for new people the practice is very accessible.
About Olena
In 2011, Olena found herself in Dharamsala, India on Himalaya Yoga Valley’s foundation teacher training programme. A believer in life guiding you to where you need to be, she now teaches full time with a special interest in trauma, mental wellbeing and end of life care. Her aim is to enable people to discover the part of themselves that is always whole, perfect and at peace no matter what circumstances life presents.
On beginning her yoga journey, Olena says, “I started experimenting with meditation in my late teens and went to my first yoga class at an Iyengar studio in Canada in 1993. I felt out of my comfort zone and stuck with it for only a few months. It wasn’t an immediate love affair with the practice I’ll admit and over the years I tried several different styles of yoga. However, yoga creates a sense of ease in my body and mind and that was the reason I kept coming back. Now it’s my life.”
Experiencing and learning through your own physical challenges is the greatest teacher. Olena explores this through the mind-body practices of ashtanga vinyasa and gentle yoga, pranayama and yoga nidra meditation. It was a running accident in 2012 that led her to yoga nidra, and her teacher James Reeves, as a means of dealing with the emotional turmoil that a traumatic brain injury brings. Very much a blessing in disguise, she credits this life-changing event with her passion to spread the joy of this simple yet profound method of self-inquiry.
Committed to personal and professional development Olena has attended workshops, trainings and retreats with specialist teachers, including iRest yoga nidra founder and non-dualistic scholar Richard Miller, anatomy and fascia experts Gary Carter and Jill Miller and international ashtanga teachers Lucy Crawford Scott, David Swenson and David Garrigues.
Olena currently teaches to drug and alcohol rehabilitation clients, private clients and the public through a variety of classes in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. She supports her partner in running their studio, Akarmalife, and teaches on Yoga London’s 200 and 500 hour yoga teacher training programmes. You can connect with Olena on Facebook and Twitter through www.yogaswaha.co.uk.
