A special gift to the Girls Write Now community
On October 6th, Girls Write Now hosted an inspiring evening of exhaling with yoga master Mona Anand. We soared through the sky on a lavender eagle, gathered on a cloud and looked up at the blue sky, and visualized a healing world together. Thank you to everyone who was able to join us on this journey.
The practice began with gentle asana to release tension from the body, breath and mind, followed by a long Yoga Nidra to help us see what we want to manifest as we move into the fall.
Yoga Nidra is a guided meditation technique used to deeply relax, to release what lies in our subconscious and unconscious and to experience an expanded state of awareness. Just like with writing, it is in filling in the details that make our visuals more powerful.
We see life through the lens of our culture, our ethnicity, our spiritual traditions, our families and our individual life experiences, which shape the imagery and thoughts that continuously play across the screen of our minds—our whole reality. In this class, the aim was to bring awareness to the beliefs and underlying assumptions we make about life. Imagination comes from the word magic and is the beginning of the manifestation process. We used creative visualization techniques to see what it is we want to manifest in our lives, in our communities and in the world, to bring our dreams into reality.
Mona Anand is a co-owner of ISHTA yoga and a yogiraj or yoga master in the ISHTA lineage. She is a senior trainer in ISHTA’s 500-hour teacher training and has also designed her own Yoga Nidra trainings: “Mona Anand’s ISHTA Yoga Nidra,” and “Yoga Nidra and the chakras.” Mona has Yoga Nidra recordings designed for different purposes including deep relaxation or sleep, to lift your spirits, and to ground, center and correct specific chakra and dosha imbalances.
The event also featured a performance from third-year Girls Write Now mentee Irene Hao! Irene is a high school senior from Brooklyn, NY. She read a poem titled, “the day never looked so red.”