In episode three, Monika and Elizabeth engage in an immersive conversation with the organically joyful, undeniably wise, and playful Richard Miller about yoga nidra, non-dualism, connecting with our inner essence, the indestructible ease we all carry within us, accepting and welcoming our challenges, (re)discovering that nothing is wrong, radical truth and authenticity, making peace with life, and so much more.

About Richard Miller

Richard C. Miller, PhD, C-IAYT, ERYT-500 is the Founder, Chairman, and Executive Director of iRest Institute, Co-Founder of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, and Founding Member and past President of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology.

He is a clinical psychologist, author, researcher, yogic scholar, and spiritual teacher who, for over 50 years, has devoted his life to integrating western psychology and neuroscience with the ancient nondual wisdom teachings of Yoga, Tantra, Advaita, Taoism, and Buddhism.

Author of Yoga Nidra, The iRest Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing, iRest Meditation: Restorative Practices for Health, Healing and Well Being, The iRest Program for Healing PTSD, and Yoga Nidra: The Meditative Heart of Yoga, Richard serves as a research consultant studying the nondual somatic-based meditation protocol he’s developed —iRest Yoga Nidra Meditation— researching its efficacy on health, healing, and well-being with diverse populations and issues. Grounded in 35+ research studies, the US Army Surgeon General and the Defense Centers of Excellence have recognized iRest as a Complimentary Program for healing chronic pain and PTSD. Richard leads international trainings and meditation retreats on the integration of enlightened living into daily life.

Connect with Richard to learn more about iRest, his simple and accessible form of meditation designed for modern living, yoga nidra, and nonduality, or to attend any of the trainings and events he offers, including the free 10-Step iRest Protocol.

A copy of his book, Yoga Nidra: The iRest Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing is found here. And, as promised, here is The Open Secret in the book's Introduction:

"When we dwell in the pleasures of our senses, attractions to further pleasures arise. From attraction comes attachment, the desire for possession that leads to passion and burns into anger. Passion and anger cloud judgment and lead to confusion, the inability to learn from past mistakes, and the failure to choose between what is wise and what is unwise.

This is the path of separation. But when we move in the world of the senses, yet keep our senses in harmony, free from attachment to attraction or aversion, we rest in the wisdom heart of our Essential Nature, the true Equanimity of Being, in which all sorrow and suffering cease."

To learn more about The Heart of Now and the hosts, visit us on Instagram, LinkedIn or online.

Richard Miller Interview

[INTRO] Welcome, welcome everyone! All the wonderful people who are tuning in with us today. We are incredibly fortunate to be speaking with Richard Miller.

Richard gratefully comes to us today through our first guest, Lama Palden Drolma. Richard is a prominent figure in the field of mind,/body wellness, best known as the developer of the integrative restoration iRest program of meditation. He is the Founder, Chairman and Executive Director of iRest Institute.

His career spending over 5 decades has been marked by significant contributions to the integration of Western psychology and neuroscience with the ancient nondual wisdom, teachings of yoga, tantra, Advaita, Taoism, and Buddhism.

In addition to his role at the iRest Institute, Miller is Co-Founder of the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) and Editor of the professional journal of IAYT. Okay. I got that right. And past president of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology.

These roles underline his commitment to bridging the gap between traditional spiritual practices and contemporary scientific understanding.

His work, particularly in the era of trauma, healing, and wellness has been influential in the yoga and psychology communities.

You can learn a lot more about Richard and all of his accomplishments at iRest. org. Welcome, Richard. So good to have you. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you, Monica. It's nice to be with you.

[Monika] Yeah. I would love to dive in because your background is so incredibly rich, and I would love to know a little bit of your backstory, if possible.

Absolutely. How you got those five decades of experience.

[Richard] Every time someone asks that, it's interesting. I always go to two actual events. One when I was 13 years old, when I used to visit my grandmother for spring vacations and she loved sending me to these dances on Saturday night, and Thursday night get togethers, which I never really enjoyed.

So she dropped me off. I'd walk through the front door and walk out the back door and go out for a long walk on the beach down in Florida where I was, uh, but one night I was accompanied by a really dear friend of mine who I had met while I was on spring vacation. We were wandering along and we decided for whatever reason to lie down in the sand trap of the 8th fairway of the golf course that was nearby.

I ended up, I don't know how many brick walls I came to, I kept jumping over them in my imagination, and all of a sudden, everything melted away, and I felt this sense of being one with everything, the universe, everything around me. It was very powerful. Startling. And I don't know how long I lay there in that mystical experience, but then I got up with my friend and we walked back into our teenage life as if nothing special had happened.

So I never met a person, actually. We walked into the building in silence and we left the building in silence at the Integral Yoga Institute. But that first evening at the very end of the the class, the woman taught what I now know was a rudimentary yoga nidra practice. And I had that same exact experience I had at 13.

And I felt as I walked home, one, what just happened to me? And how do I duplicate this? And how do I learn more about this? And that really set the tone. My, journey kicked off, because some weeks later, I was working at a clinic learning the art of psychotherapy, and a woman had just arrived from the Far East, and we got to talking, and she asked me, you know, why was I at the clinic, and I told her I was working.

So she came to me with a Buddhist, humanistic, existential, phenomenal background. And taught me the art of psychotherapy because she said, if you're going to learn it, then join me in every session that I give. So I started doing co-therapy with her. But in that first session, I entered in with her at the end.

We went into a little room and we would start to talk about what happened in the room. And she said, so what happened? When you were in that room, and I gave her this long winded psychological spiel about the person we've been seeing, she listened very attentively. And then when I stopped, she said, no, I want to know what happened in you when you were in that room. And that really started my studies on many different levels.

[Elizabeth] Sounds like whether you chose it or not, from an early age, you learned the art of surrender.

On Thursdays, my dad would barbecue up a steak, I'd have hamburgers, hot dogs. Not until I was 18 years old did I find that I was allergic to Um, and fortunately when I did and I stopped eating everything that do with the cow, the migraines and everything went away, but they were so severe that at times I would be hospitalized.

They put me to sleep because of the pain. But what I learned as a five year old was to lie down on my bed in a dark room, put a pillow over my eyes, ice bag on my neck and my feet and not have a thought. Because, I found and discovered back then, if I had a thought, the pain would come. If I had no thoughts, the pain would recede.

[Monika] Well, that sounds like a version of Yoga Nidra that you were actually doing at that age.

[Richard] You know, Monika, it's true, because as I started studying Yoga Nidra, you're right, we lay down in a supine pose with our eyes closed and we would begin to inquire into what was going on inside of us. Back then, I was learning from the Bihar school, which brought in a lot of the cultural mores and perspectives of India.

And back then I was starting to teach, I'd been invited to teach yoga, so I would have my students do the same thing. I'd have them inquire into their bodies. What were the sensations most calling them? What were the emotions, the thoughts? And then we went from there exploring more spontaneously what would arise.

[Elizabeth] That's amazing.

[Richard] Yeah, it has been an amazing, amazing journey. Tremendous gift too. So thank you for that.

[Elizabeth] Monika, what were you going to say?

[Monika] Uh, I was just going to say, you know, that's his iRest program for those people who are curious about it, which is based on yoga nidra.

[Richard] Yeah. And interesting. You bring that up because the military, when I started working with them said, we're military, we don't meditate and we don't do yoga. It's something else. So, I came up with the name integrative restoration because it integrates our psychology and restores us to an innate sense of well being that's, as I've discovered, indestructible and innate within all of us.

And as an acronym, I called it iRest with a small "i" to put the ego in its proper position and rest for that restoration. And the military said, we can do iRest. So all of our research was based on the yoga nidra protocol, but calling it iRest.

Yeah. So I call it Integrative Restoration, iRest, Yoga Nidra Meditation. So when I go into a hospital or a clinical setting, I call it iRest. If I go to a Buddhist center, I call it meditation. And if I go to a yoga center, I get to call it yoga nidra.

[Monika] There you go. I love it. So I'd love to move us along to our second question, which is really a question about how does humanity deal and solve the challenges we're currently facing.

There's just so much happening in the world, and so much intensity, people are feeling a lot of emotions. And what do you believe are kind of the opportunities, both individually and collectively for us?

What I see is people are feeling so isolated or alienated or helpless that they don't feel that they have a role that they can really be helpful with. And it leads them to feel a sense of separation. So, I'm always thinking, how do I help people heal within themselves any qualities of separation they feel within themselves, and then with the outer world as well?

And so what I'm helping people do through the work is heal first any kind of separation they're feeling within themselves so they feel deeply connected to themselves, and then to be able to look out at the world not feeling separate from other people around them, or from the trees, or the rocks, or the mountains, so that they come into proper relationship with themselves and the world around them.

And with that sense of deep connection, I know that people have within them the capacity to meet these challenges.

And then what I see is spontaneously people see them in that deep connection and then begin to invite them into their gardens and how they may help them. So I think healing this inner sense of separation that we're all prone to as human beings gives us access to creativity within ourselves that we're all going to need to meet these incredible challenges we're all facing.

[Monika] I mean, I know you work with a population that has a lot of anxiety and a lot of PTSD. How do you help someone who is very uncomfortable potentially in being quiet and sitting? Like how do you help them understand they're not separate?

What I try to do is begin with what's right about a person as one veteran from a study we did in Miami said every program that I had ever been in for healing my PTSD had always emphasized from the beginning what was wrong that I needed to overcome. You're the first program that helped me find and locate what's right about me from the very beginning so that I wasn't healing to become whole, I was healing from my wholeness that you helped me discover.

They are not needing to be healed, the body and the mind do. And there's some simple inquiries. I help a person engage that helps them locate this innate sense of well being and indestructible sense of ease and peace we all carry within us. But what I've seen is we've separated from it when we were little children and lost touch with it.

We have the skills within us. I've discovered very simple tools that people can learn easily. They just need to practice them and put it into place.

[Elizabeth] And those frameworks that you've created are so easy, simple, accessible when someone has PTSD. I've myself have healed from that fairly recently. You need to understand that it's not this long road that's never ending that there is something that you could do daily to incorporate in your healing process and that you have the empowerment to be able to do that.

Exactly. It's not outside, right? It's not outside of us. It's within us.

We feel empowered then, but some people are able to heal completely from their trauma, their anxiety, depression, but I want to make sure people have those tools in their, in their toolkit. So healing the inner sense of separation.

[Monika] That's such an important point that you're making. I'm wondering, can you tie that into how we free ourselves from the suffering that we experience? And maybe they're one in the same. What do you think about that? I see how they're one in the same.

And I think it's kind of tantamount that uou know if you showed up at my doorstep and you were my neighbor And you were having a difficult moment and you said, may I come in for tea and a little bit of conversation? I'd, I'd love to discuss this with you. And I said, well, you're welcome to come in if you'll go away.

That's the way I think people are relating to their emotions, their thoughts and their past experiences. Sure. I'm welcome. You're welcome to come in if you'll go away. Right. And I think of our emotions on our thoughts. Trauma is undigested material that's needing to be brought back in and synthesized and metabolized and integrated.

[Elizabeth] Right, right. But we have to really face ourself from an attitude of accepting and welcoming and kindness, not self judgment. And not from the perspective that there's something wrong with me.

[Richard] I like to help people recognize, it sounds like there's something wrong here, but let's not confuse something's wrong with something's wrong with you. And let's see if, again, we can find that ground of foundation of well being, then we can meet.

[Richard] Well, there are two parts of our protocol, the protocol I've developed where we actually ask a person to take the challenging emotion or thought or memory and imagine a door opening if it were to walk into the room and they started to dialogue with it. To come into right relationship with it. It is that kind of parts work you're talking about we find in family systems therapy because as a psychologist I studied all these modalities and integrated them into my protocol.

And if you were feeling that, somatically, where would you feel that in your body? And then to go back and forth feeling each of these opposites in turn, and then to feel our way into both at the same time. And the research shows that when I feel one opposite or the other, I'm in a decidedly interesting place in my nervous system and my brain. But when I go to feel them both at the same time, it switches me into a whole another part of my brain, the defocusing network of my brain, which is where we get insights spontaneously coming to us that won't come when we're just working with one opposite.

difficult emotion or circumstance, a depression and anxiety, we can get hung up like on the horns of a bull, is the metaphor. If we just switch to the opposite, we can get hung up on the other horn of the bull. When we hold both opposites at the same time, we go through the horns of the dilemma into an insight we otherwise don't have or might not be able to access.

So we are working. It's like non dual actually. It's just a non dual perspective, right? It's a non dual perspective that's helping us open up channels in our nervous system that we need to be able to, access for healing.

[Elizabeth] And that's the beauty and the brilliance of your work to me is that you've incorporated all of these different methodologies and philosophies into a very simple framework that's accessible, but it's so rich and layered.

And offers a tremendous transformation.

[Monika] Nice. Beautiful. So Richard, you know, our, our next question for you really is how are you committed to truth? And I know you've actually been talking about that already, but I don't know if there's any other insights you might want to share about your own personal experience.

There's a series of inquiries I go through when I meditate in the morning and have been for decades now. I'll ask myself questions like: Am I safe and secure with myself? Is that true? And then I look for any. place within my body or my experience in the day before or the days prior where I might have shaved the truth in some way or stepped out of my authenticity.

essence that I feel has given birth to the entire universe, of which we are each a very vibrant and unique expression, may I say, so I think of each of us as a unique expression.

So when I look out at the two of you, I see each of your personalities, the different flavors you are the different ways that you are unique.

[Monika] Don't forget the neuroses. I got some good ones for you, Richard.

[Richard] Yeah. I'm seeing the essence that connects us all, that isn't separate. So that when I'm relating, say, to you or to another or to a tree, I'm relating from that underlying essence that I've discovered we all share in common.

And if you're still trying to change me, then I'm going to be asking you, well, can you say more about that? And how is that for you? In other words, I'm not going to fight with you. I want to come to a deeper understanding of yourself as I work hard to come to a deep understanding of myself.

So, I've worked very diligently and I've had incredible teachers and understandings that have awakened that kind of underlying essence in me that I carry with me that, initially I thought I was trying to get in touch with, that I, somehow I was responsible for what I've come to realize that it's within all of us and when we get in touch with it, it starts living us.

[Elizabeth] I love that perspective so much. And I was just thinking when you were talking about that, my son's in sixth grade. And so right now it's all about fitting in and belonging, right?

There's no, there's no deviation from, and he always says, I just don't want to be called weird. And I said, well, you're limited edition. That's what this is, right? And he likes, he's like, yeah. Limited edition. I like that. I like that.

[Richard] You gotta learn how to do these reframes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who doesn't want limited edition?

[Elizabeth] I think, I mean, I know I do. I love the way you articulated that. And I think maybe this next question can dovetail into that. It's, it's about joy. How do you, since you are authentic and you live in integrity a lot and we love the word radical on this show, don't we, Monika?

[Monika] Yeah. Yes, for sure.

[Richard] I'll turn it around on its head. I'll say joy is living in me and wanting to express itself constantly. Now, as I really felt into, and that, you know, that experience at 13. And then that experience at 22, when I was in San Francisco in that first yoga nidra class, and then with my mentors, I've discovered that living essence that I think has given birth to everything in the entire universe to myself as a unique expression of it.

so, I like spending at least part of my day sitting and being in touch with that joy and that well being, which I've found, even then when I'm in a moment of grief, because a friend has died or some challenging, stressful situation. That joy and that well being is there. It's the ground, again, from which I'm meeting the circumstance.

So I think as we align more with life, and we do that switch over to from I'm living life to life is living itself through me as its unique expression, I think that that joy just starts bubbling up.

It's not being covered over now as it did when I was a child. I've grown it, nourished it, and I nourish it on a daily basis.

[Elizabeth] Oh, lovely. I had a feeling you might answer that way, just based on your last answer. So I walked right into that one. That was good. Well, it does dovetail back to that sense of suffering.

[Richard] Why is it that we suffer? I think it is because we are trying to change our circumstances, first, first accepting them. And I remember one of my mentors, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who I spent time with fortunately in India and in Ojai, I remember him being asked, what was his secret to living life? And everybody kind of got very hushed as he was about to reveal his secret.

But I, again, I feel like when we're in touch with this essence and we're really feeling we're connected with our humanity, we can. And solve these problems. They're not insolvable issues.

[Elizabeth] Right. I love that. I love that secret. It's a good one. It reminds me of when something happens, I often hear the voice of my head say, Oh, is that so?

[Elizabeth] Yeah. It tries to be neutral. Then my ego and mind kick in. Um, but, but I like that. It's just, It's a surrendering to what's here. I can try to deny it, but it's in my face. It's right here. And when you deny it, the more it becomes an issue. I mean, that's really the piece of it.

[Richard] And I love that, that whenever we deny, the body tells, keeps the score, and it'll start giving us some sense of something's not right. If we're willing to look at, okay, what doesn't feel right here? Because if we don't, then the ego will pick it up and start saying, it's not just that something's not right, but something's not right with me, but that's a secondary response.

The primary one is, something is off here. Let me see what feels off and address it, then I don't have to go to that next step, which is something's wrong with me, which we will go to if we miss that first vital step.

[Elizabeth] Yeah. It's so true. So, so true. And I think it's Tara Brach that calls that the second arrow.

[Richard] Buddha. He, he, uh, there's the famous story of somebody coming to him with a disease and he's asking Buddha all about it.

So we're all caught up. Not. The first arrow really is the something feels off. The second arrow is when we try to fix it, change it, alternate it before we understand it. And like you said, turning it on yourself. That's a sick mistake. Yeah, if somebody gave me a watch that was broken and asked me to fix it, I wouldn't start taking it all apart.

I'd very slowly begin to study it to see what needs fixing. And then when I would find that, fix that, and then the watch would be in. I think that's how we need to face our own issues. We don't want to try to take them apart analytically too quickly, but really probe them, understand them, and then the insights will radically and slowly emerge.

It hasn't already been said. There's been so many, so many moments of deep wisdom. So I am curious what else you have in your tool kit.

[Richard] You remind me of a project that was done in Germany of people who were hating migrants who were coming in from other countries. And so in the research study, they took someone who was really against the migrants who were coming in and they had them sit with another person from another culture and they had them sit, just looking at each other in silence for 12 minutes, 10 or 12 minutes.

That inner essence that we both share in common, we're all just human beings doing the best we know how and trying to do the best we know how. If we could help each other, meet each other in that sense of brotherhood, sisterhood, you might say, then I think we would go a giant step as humanity working with these challenges that are facing us.

And then they stop hating themselves. They stop judging themselves and they start to find the creative solutions that they need to face the problems they're facing.

One of the first things I ask people is, tell me what's going on? And they'll say, well, I say, I have this pain and I'll say, okay, where do you feel it in your body? And now can you take the conceptual label off of it, meet it non- conceptually?

And that's when people start to have these radical breakthroughs when we peel off the conceptual mind and we start to meet it at a very deep, very personal level.

[Monika] Very energetic. Really?

[Elizabeth] That's lovely. Well, it's been so wonderful connecting with you and thank you so much. There's just so much rich material that I'm going to go back and listen to. And I would recommend your book, the introduction, the open secret. It is, it is so rich, that paragraph that you wrote right there alone. And we can put that in the show notes so people can see. We also, we're going to direct people to all of your books and your website. Where else would you like people to find you?

[Richard] Well, first I'd say sit with themselves and find the inner essence, cause then you'd find me in that inner essence.

[Elizabeth] Oh, very nice. Very nice. Touché.

[Monika] We didn't get to a practice what that is. I kept wanting to ask, could we? Yeah. But we're out of time, so that just means another conversation with you.

But otherwise, my website, www. iRest. org, we have a free course that helps showcase this protocol, this 10 step protocol that I've developed where people can begin to learn it for themselves or take our trainings. Lovely.

[Elizabeth] Beautiful. All right. Wonderful. Will you come back and see us for part two of this conversation?

[Richard] You know, I would love to come over and then do the actual, experience. And it's so simple. It's like a 10 minute little inquiry that opens this gateway into a deep indestructible sense of well being.

[Monika] Okay. We say yes. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much, Richard. Take good care.

[Richard] Yeah. Thank you very much.