Season 1, Episode 12: The Wishing Pond

I originally intended this as a scrying pool, until I discovered that term is a ten-dollar Scrabble word that most folks would not connect with. But a wishing pond is the same thing essentially.

This track is my antidote to the hand-wavy “The Secret” approach of “manifesting” — instead, it’s a future visioning exercise inspired by Appreciative Inquiry’s “miracle morning” question. The intent of the practice is to give your mind a chance to really investigate what you’d like to have happen, to see it, and to begin laying out the steps to take toward it. Listening to it again and again will help refine the vision and create a stronger commitment to it.

This is largely an exercise in self-hypnosis, and what in the Yoga Nidra world would be described as a practice to set a Sankalpa, an intention. I learned the bare bones of this from my teacher, Nirlipta Tuli. He consciously mixes hypnosis and Yoga Nidra, and says that in almost every way, they are the same thing. I added the phrase “It’s very good at that” as an homage to Nirlipta’s “Garden” nidra.

I also added a bit of an homage to the Satyananda style of Yoga Nidra, with elements of counting the opposites, and, of course, the Satyananda-style rotation of the consciousness. For imagining the future, I brought in a bit of Open Focus language, inspired by the Racquet Sports Training audio tape.

The Wishing Pond practice is about seeing a goal, believing it, and committing to it. The next practice is about having the focus and confidence to accomplish the goal in the moment, when dealing with self-doubt, anxiety, or other distractions.