We engage in Yoga Nidra

Image by Fabian Møller

Our readings today relate to Yoga Nidra, and I have selected extracts from one of my favourite books “Yoga Nidra the Art of Transformational Sleep” by Kamini Desai, 2017). You can find the link here: Kamini Desai

Many practitioners think that Yoga Nidra is one of the least known and most under-appreciated practices of Yoga. It is about releasing the struggling and striving to get somewhere. It is the art and practice of doing nothing to arrive exactly where you want to be (Desai, 2017).

Throughout Yoga Nidra we experience:

Breath awareness

Body awareness

Sound awareness

Imaginative awareness

Energy awareness (Desai, 2017)

The result is that we are transported into progressive states of non-doing, we relax, and let go. We surrender ourselves to the moment. In Yoga Nidra, we are moving closer to ‘non-doing’ rather than ‘doing’.

Benefits of Yoga Nidra:

1. Relaxation and restoration are two of the main features that Yoga Nidra offers us which includes stress reduction and a renewed sense of health.

2. Yoga Nidra helps us hold our thought patterns and then redirects them so that they are manageable (we practice holding our polarities or dualities at the same time, and in so doing we practice balancing our anxiety, worry and fear with peace and love).

3. We begin our journey towards creating a different relationship to limiting perceptions that have a profound impact on our lives (Desai, 2017)

Yoga Nidra allows us to resolve and release incomplete, unprocessed emotions and experiences that came but never left. Sometimes we hold on to overwhelming events that we can’t process we shut down (Kamini Desai, 2017). Yoga Nidra helps us let go of these limiting beliefs. We practice awareness in a slow and logical way, noticing what we notice.

These are the six tools of Yoga Nidra that move us closer to life mastery:

1. Relaxation

2. Integration

3. Dis-identification

4. Intention (and most times when I lead a Yoga Nidra I add iRest Yoga Nidra’s offerings here , by including Heart Felt Desire and Inner Resource)

5. Relaxation

6. Restoration.

Yoga Nidra is far more than just a guided meditation or a ‘rest’. It is a “secret door to liberation” (Desai, 2017)

In workshops or classes, I sometimes talk about the sky. What if the sky was us…with little restriction. The idea is that the sky is a representation of our wholeness. The things such as the clouds that cross the sky are a representation of our moods and emotions. The sky doesn’t change because of the moods and emotions that flow below it, rather it simply holds the space until the moods and emotions have passed. The more we can think of ourselves as the sky, the happier we will become. Believing we are the clouds, rather than the sky is the source of all our suffering and sadness.

Kamini Desai writes:

This confusion between the container [the sky] and that which is contained [the clouds etc.] is the source of suffering. It is the problem all Yoga practices, including Yoga Nidra, seek to solve. In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali 2: 17 it is said “the union between the seer and the seen is the source of suffering (in Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep by Kamini Desai, 2017)

The techniques that we employ in Yoga Nidra help us slow down our brain waves. We then can enter a state where change is not so challenging.

Warmest

Margi