Dearest Friends,
Feathered Pipe Board member Clint Willis recently interviewed Nöle Giulini, who will be leading her first retreat at Feathered Pipe Ranch this summer. Nöle was born in Germany and has a degree in Art, Psychology, and Art Therapy. She has been teaching yoga for 27 years and is certified to teach Yoga by Erich Schiffmann
and Kripalu. She is a certified Senior iRest®Yoga Nidra teacher as well as a certified Senior iRest trainer offering bilingual workshops, immersions, and retreats in the U.S. as well as in Germany and Switzerland. Together with her life partner, Gary Lemons, she owns and runs Tender Paws Yoga Studio in Port Townsend, Washington.
CW: I’m so happy you’ll be leading a retreat at Feathered Pipe this summer! Can you talk a little about iRest Yoga Nidra?
Nöle: iRest Yoga Nidra is a research-based meditation practice developed by Richard Miller. It brings together the wisdom of the non-dual tradition with the techniques of mindfulness and with current findings in neuroscience. We offer people a skill set they can use to activate and engage emotions and thoughts, a process we call liberating the content into awareness. There are elements from talk therapy and other modalities, but the goal is not to understand or fix
or change anything. Instead, the practice is to meet, greet and welcome emotions, thoughts, memories, and core beliefs we hold to be true about ourselves. Everything that arises is a messenger, something that wants our attention. If we look away, it will only come back again. We invite people to truly welcome this gift and unwrap it. Take it out of the box--not to heal or fix or understand, but to be with it. People think they have to do something: understand it, figure it out, heal it,
transform it. But iRest isn’t about any of that. I always say that with iRest we exchange letting go for letting be. If we truly are welcoming then we meet and greet tension, pain and conflict as best friends. They are here to point out some place where we – the “I” that we take ourselves to be - have fused with a particular perception. Asking somebody to “relax” or “let go” is then an imposition. Obviously this body needs to express tension, pain
or conflict exactly now and precisely in this way.
CW: What’s the key to welcoming experience in this practice?
 Nöle: This practice engages the content through the body. I invite students to peel off the conceptual label. Don’t call the emotion anything. Put aside the names, the interpretation, and the analysis. Track the emotion in the body. Where and how is
it moving? Is it moving? Describe to me your raw, unfiltered, first hand experience. Go very deep, and find it in the body. Initiating this perspective shift is very different from conceptualizing the content. I’ve found it’s hugely shifting for people to follow sensation and then describe their experience.
CW: What led you to your current spiritual practice?
Nöle: I come from a very troubled household, which I left at 19 years old in order to save myself. I first traveled to India overland from Germany, then moved from Germany to America. I didn’t know anybody here. I studied art and found yoga through my sister, who took me to Kripalu. I loved it, loved it, loved it...but I was so locked up in my body, with so much pain and despair, that I couldn’t attend regular classes or go to teachers. I went to
Kripalu once a year and wrote everything down, the most minute descriptions of poses and teachings, and took those notes home and practiced two hours of asana every day. I was really happy about this, and it changed the biochemistry in my body to some extent. But after many years, I felt i was still stuck...bumping up against some old core beliefs and ideas about being worthless. I was experiencing serious depression, convinced that I didn’t belong in this world.
CW: How did you move beyond those ideas?
Nöle: That is interesting that you should say “ideas”! Because I recognized them exactly for what they were: the iron grip of mental constructs. I encountered the practice of iRest at a workshop led by Donna Farhi and Richard Miller. I think it was in 2002 in Canada. It really opened things up for me. I knew I had to do this. You could say that just following and trusting that this was the next step for me--even though I didn’t understand mentally
what was happening--shifted the biochemical conditioning, and allowed me to exit the familiar groove in my neurocircuitry. One of the core pieces was remembering that I am already whole and perfect and complete the way I am. There is nothing I have to fix or change. I just have to hang out with these emotions and feel them and welcome them. One of the core principles of iRest is to bring into awareness your deepest heart’s calling--what you are here to complete in this life. I was - and I
am!- determined to follow that question. This process is not about finding the one right answer, but about following the current of aliveness through the body and listening to it closely. It unveils pure joy, a sense of connection and belonging to myself and the world, and unimaginable freedom. I realized I had to teach this work; it was so precious. And so I trained, and practiced, and eventually was invited to be a teacher.
CW: Your teaching includes other important elements.
 Nöle: My style of teaching yoga combines lots of humor and invented things. I spent a lot of time with teachers with a linear approach to asana, and that was uncomfortable for me. I found teachers like Erich Schiffmann who encourage yogis to find
their own form. I took that further by sometimes inventing poses or by inviting people to start with a traditional pose and blossom into their true expression at this moment. Sometimes I include music, or I invite them to make sounds. Having fun grunting, howling, chirping, or clucking—and being goofy, laughing--increases the vagal tone and boosts our immune system. Together with the participants we create and hold a sanctuary so that explorations like these serve some of the same purposes
as a physical yoga posture: they reveal to us the places of holding or tension that are begging to simply be welcomed and liberated into awareness. I have worked very diligently on establishing a language that speaks to the feeling body. I keep a book where I write down words that speak to feeling rather than thinking and conceptualizing. Most of my teaching comes from my own sense of creativity and yearning for freedom...which i understand is what is yoga is about anyway.
CW: Can you talk more about freedom? What does it take to be free?
Nöle: I used to say in my classes: we’re not just seeking “freedom from”, but rather “freedom to”: you can only live who you are in there, and not anybody else. So the work is about being safe with yourself, being safe to be who you really are, belonging to yourself. And that ultimately leads to: Can you be safe with unsafety? In iRest we start out by inviting a feeling-experience of safety and security into the body. This may be
initiated by a memory or a visualization, but eventually you are looking for the sensation of safety in the body that you can recall and that will remember you. For me ultimate freedom is experiencing that we are this spacious openness – this translucence - within which the movement of body, mind and emotion come and go. We are living this paradox: we are personality, with its particular features, conditioning, history, likes and dislikes, which can steer this organism through life
intact—and—we are wide open spacious translucence.
CW: I imagine that doesn’t happen overnight.
 Nöle: It’s a process. But it’s not effort. You can just take home what follows you home. You do the work, and you let it be--you let it percolate through your body, through your unconscious. I’m sure there are scientific
explanations for why it works and how it works; how new grooves and patterns are established as you learn new ways. But I don’t need to understand it. I’m learning to trust that whatever I need to know will come with me; the rest will come again--or maybe not. It’s a huge relief and a freedom not only to believe this but actually to live it.
CW: What will the workshop be like?
Nöle: I teach a morning and an afternoon session. In the morning I talk some about the practice: how it was developed, what it’s about, what it looks like. In a magical way the dialogue with the participants always opens up a relevant aspect of the teaching. You couldn’t plan or devise this in advance! It is the mystery of relationship and connection. We go pretty quickly into movement experience of the practice. We’ll do yoga asana, but in the
widest sense: a body sensing experience. It may look like an asana or go from there into something completely new. We’ll find creative and fun ways to feel ourselves in our bodies. We also explore breathing practice in traditional and not-so-traditional ways. Then we’ll lie down for an iRest practice. After a lunch break, we’ll come back for dialogue...then a co-meditation process. You sit with another person, and work with a set of questions. Basically the other is your sacred
mirror who sits with you like a witness and asks you the questions so you can unpack what comes up when you hear that question. The other is just there to be with you while you surf your own inner landscape. We’ll take a break, and we’ll come together as group and talk about that experience. Following this, I lead the group through another iRest guided meditation.
CW: Sounds really interesting, and really nice.
Nöle: I love this work. It has taught me so much. Translucence is nothing you can understand or figure out mentally. But you can feel it. If you ask me what i want to bring to a workshop: I want to facilitate an environment within which it’s safe for people to venture out of the habitual and get in touch with the translucence that they are, and respect and honor personality at the same time.
We invite you to join us at the Feathered Pipe Ranch this summer, June 23 - 30, for this very special weeklong program - The Practice of Welcoming: iRest® Yoga Nidra with Nöle Giulin.
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Rising Feminine: Love Action – Brooke Medicine Eagle
We are in the time of the Rising Feminine. Male elders from primary traditions around the world have in the past few decades handed the wands of power to females. Those seers among us observe the uplifting energy of NURTURING and RENEWING from where it has been resting deep in the Earth – pushing up before it all energies of a different or contrary nature, and thus we see more hatred, anger, prejudice, misogeny, greed and other destructive energies
right now than have been evident for a very long time.
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Why We Need Gentle Yoga – Lanita Varshell
A beautiful larger woman, somewhere in her 50’s, walked into my center today with her friend. I could tell that she was apprehensive walking in the door, but when she saw me, a well-rounded 50+ year-young teacher and the Studio owner, she relaxed a little. The story she told me is similar what I have heard from hundreds of women in the last 15 years...
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Contact Us |
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Feathered Pipe Foundation
P.O. Box 1682
Helena, MT 59624
(406) 442-8196
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