About the Session

Listen to the rest stories of Daring to Rest Facilitators who are leading today’s yoga nidras. Their stories remind us why rest matters—and gently encourage you to claim more space for yourself as a Rested Woman.

This hour you’ll hear stories from:

• Tonya

• Charmaine

• Malica

About the Session

Dignity of Softness and Spark is a Yoga Nidra that explores the sacred meeting place of strength and surrender. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s words, it invites you to remember the shimmer beneath the surface—the hum that remains even in stillness. This practice honors the quiet dignity of being human and the divine spark that endures within us all.

Music: Tender by Alayna

Meet Tonya

Tonya Clark is the founder of Mend + Abide and Mindfuled, sister brands devoted to restoring wholeness in education, leadership, and life. Through her school-based leadership coaching and wellness practices, she helps educators and executives integrate rest as a strategy for renewal and sustainable impact. Her Yoga Nidra and mindfulness offerings invite others to slow down, listen deeply, and lead from softness without losing their spark.

You can learn more about Tonya here.

About the Session

Years of healing from chronic burnout have revealed to me that at the root of this unsustainable drive that kept me burnt out was a belief that I wasn’t safe or lovable as I was. That I had to hustle, overfunction and over-give to be valuable in the eyes of others. I had a deep belief that things had to be hard, perfect and full of effort to be worthy. As I healed, I began to notice my true voice whispering that it just desired more Ease. To drop all the heavy shoulds and exhausting ways, and just trust in something easier, softer, gentler. This yoga nidra is an invitation to remember yourself as whole and enough, trusting that ease is often a pathway to what your heart and soul truly desires. We can trust ease as our compass.

Music: Surrender by Maria Gauthier

Meet Charmaine

Charmaine Renée is a Breathwork practitioner, Daring to Rest® Yoga Nidra Facilitator and Rest coach who’s walked a long and winding path of healing decades of chronic burnout and disconnect from her body’s signals. A final debilitating burnout in 2018 changed the course of her life and career forever. Through the breath, nervous system regulation, and deep rest, she found her way off the hamster wheel of her conditioning back home to her essential self, and heart’s wisdom. She now supports other women in reclaiming self-liberation, embodied wisdom and joy through rest and the easeful path.

You can learn more about Charmaine here or on Instagram @charmaine.renee.

About the Session

In this guided rest practice, Malica invites you to surrender into deep, soul-level rest, a sanctuary where the body releases striving, the mind softens, and the spirit remembers peace. Still Waters is a gentle, faith-centered journey from outer noise to inner calm, weaving breath, intention, and ancestral support into a restorative experience of divine replenishment. You’ll leave grounded, renewed, and reminded that true rest isn’t escape, it’s a sacred return to yourself.

Music: Dimensions by Arcade Fire & Owen Pallet

Meet Malica

Malica Ahmad is mom to Jalen, a Daring to Rest® Facilitator, Thrive-Certified Wellness Coach, and Tiny Habits® Coach helping women release sugar, exhaustion, and old narratives of “doing” so they can reclaim their energy, confidence, and feminine flow. After 25 years in Corporate America, Malica’s own journey through burnout and healing redefined her leadership, anchoring it in rest, faith, and radical self-compassion. She now weaves rest as an integral part of her health coaching practice, because health is holistic, and how can we truly be healthy without rest? Through her coaching, Malica guides purpose-driven women to lead from alignment rather than hustle and to embrace rest not as a reward, but as a sacred right.

You can learn more about Malica here or connect with her at hello@malicanahmad.com.

About the Session

In my work with women, I see a common challenge of navigating the ongoing complexity and challenges of the world we live in while staying connected to our own grounding and wholeness. Held by the Earth is a Yoga Nidra practice that offers rest as a way to return to the steadiness of the earth and the wisdom of the body. Through this guided rest practice, we’ll remember that amid the world’s complexity, rest is a quiet act of resilience, and that we are held, supported, and enough, just as we are.

Music: Vyana by East Forest

Meet Cheri

For over fifteen years, Cheri Poss has worked at the intersection of strategy, facilitation, and social change in the reproductive justice movement. As a meditation facilitator and coach, she supports women leaders and advocates in reclaiming rest, creativity, and embodied leadership as pathways to a more just and compassionate world. Drawing on training in the Enneagram and somatic practices, Cheri creates spaces for personal and spiritual transformation where rest becomes both a return home to oneself and a path forward to what's unfolding.

You can learn more about Cheri here or contact her at cheriposs@gmail.com.

About the Session

“One of the greatest challenges for modern humanity is to learn how to slow down.”

Release into Rest is a short yet sweet daily Daring to Rest® practice to help you dip your toes into deep rest. Perfect for beginners, busy minds and those who bleed. Inspired by her year of “resting first” in an attempt to try something different after 40 years of “doing first.” This is the perfect practice for giving your body what it needs most whether on your period, in perimenopause, surrounded by the darkness of winter or experiencing exhaustion in anyway. The short nidra practice is sandwiched lovingly between a very gentle movement practice to ease your mind and body into rest and a yin yoga posture to restore your system even further and return you to your day refreshed and renewed. (Suitable for any body and mobility).

Music: mostly chimes by Adrianne Lenker

Meet Nicole

​Nicole Frederiksen is a certified menstrual cycle, natural contraception and fertility awareness educator with a deep passion for helping women reconnect with their natural cycles and cyclical natures. She is the founder of Season & Cycle (www.seasonandcycle.com) and creator of the ATTUNE cycle charting journal. Through her work supporting individuals, groups and organizations with an interest in living in alignment with the cyclical rhythms inside and out, she came to realize that every person with a period has one thing in common - our inability to slow down, especially during the parts of our cycle (our periods), the seasons (winter) and phases of life (perimenopause) that ask for it the most…herself included. And this realization was the beginning of her personal yoga nidra journey - a quest to find practices and practical tools to help her and her community finally slow down, experience more peaceful periods, hormonal transitions and day-to-day lives.

You can learn more about Nicole here.

About the Session

Woman in Flow is created by Michelle, originally for a dear friend’s 50th birthday gathering of women, by the Ocean in Australia. It is a soft, fluid journey through the feminine landscape, offering energy release, protection and renewal. It’s a Yoga Nidra of Inner Healing and a remembering of the feminine power that is awakened through softness.

Music: Layer by Layer by Savanna

Meet Michelle‍ ‍

Michelle Leck is the founder of Yin Essence Well Being Australia, a soft-landing for women to re-awaken the feminine life force energy from within, through embodied rest practices that soothe the nervous system, harmonize and realign with your most present and true self. The invitation and guidance is to remember what you have always known, and that it can be found in the slow, in the simple, in the rejuvenating, deeply fulfilling pace of deep rest. Michelle is a woman in tune with the seasons and cycles of a living world, a mother of two girls and a Breast Cancer thriver. After a long history of ‘pushing on’, in a culture that values productivity over rest, She now crafts and guides meditations, rest practices, ritual and ceremony. In addition to this, Michelle creates nourishing spaces for women to slow down, tune in to the rhythm and cycles of life, feeling their own unique rhythm emerge, and guidance on how to continue to receive their own inner truth and wisdom. From here liberation begins. ‍ ‍

“She rests. She remembers. She rises.”

‍Learn more about Michelle here or find her on Instagram @yin_essence_ or Insight Timer - Michelle Leck-Yin Essence.

About the Session

Held in Compassion: A Journey Through Yoga Nidra is a guided experience that leads the listener into deep rest and gentle self-acceptance. It invites letting go of control, softening into ease, and meeting every emotion with understanding rather than resistance. Through moments of stillness and reflection, it encourages connection with one’s inner wisdom, the nurturing presence of ancestors, and the quiet voice of the heart. Ultimately, it’s a journey of remembering that compassion, peace, and wholeness already live within us.

Music: Waters of Miriam by Josh Brill

Meet Roxanne

Dr. Roxanne S. Almas is a Developmental Behavioral Pediatrician at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital whose practice centers whole-person care, family partnership, and trauma-informed healing. Fluent in French and proficient in Spanish, she brings cultural awareness, equity, and deep listening to her work. Certified in Daring to Rest® Yoga Nidra and trained in Narrative Medicine, she explores how rest and storytelling support resilience in healthcare. A writer and poet, her reflections on healing and clinician well-being have appeared in Bioethics Today and KevinMD, and one of her poems was adapted into a film for the Breathe: Honoring Voices of Healthcare series. Dr. Almas promotes creative expression and a “rest ethic” as essential to cultivating compassion and sustaining care. Outside of medicine, she finds joy in writing, gardening with her family, and discovering the sacred in everyday life.

You can learn more about Roxanne here or contact her at roxanne.aga@gmail.com.

About the Session

Lie down and listen to the rest stories of Daring to Rest Facilitators who will also be leading today’s yoga nidras. Their stories remind us why rest matters—and gently encourage you to claim more space for yourself as a Rested Woman.

This hour you’ll hear stories from:

• Roxanne

• Michelle

• Nicole

• Cheri