Yoga Nidra; Sleep Yoga; Yogic Sleep
What's the difference between Yoga Nidra and Meditation?
Described as “dynamic sleep,” the Yoga Nidra practice allows the body to deeply relax while the mind stays inwardly alert. ... Yoga Nidra guides practitioners into the “hypnagogic state”—the threshold between alpha and theta waves—the knife's edge where the body “sleeps” while the mind is lucid.
Described as “dynamic sleep,” the Yoga Nidra practice allows the body to deeply relax while the mind stays inwardly alert. ... Yoga Nidra guides practitioners into the “hypnagogic state”—the threshold between alpha and theta waves—the knife's edge where the body “sleeps” while the mind is lucid.
How does it work?
Yoga nidra is the practice of psychic sleep. It's a conscious state that flirts on the border of sleep. Deep transformation can happen in yoga nidra when you set a resolve that permeates into the subconscious, bringing powerful potential for healing and self-growth
Yoga nidra is the practice of psychic sleep. It's a conscious state that flirts on the border of sleep. Deep transformation can happen in yoga nidra when you set a resolve that permeates into the subconscious, bringing powerful potential for healing and self-growth
Benefits
Yoga nidra promotes deep rest and relaxation that isn't found in your average meditation practice. The stages of body scan and breath awareness alone can be practiced to calm the nervous system, leading to less stress and better health. 45 minutes of Yoga Nidra can be as restorative as 3 hours of sleep. It creates deep relaxation for health, mental peace, and higher awareness. By receiving the proper rest, we enhance functioning of the immune and metabolic systems. In turn, this improves our overall physical health and leads to higher energy as well as fewer colds and infections of all types. Rest also improves mental health, eliminating brain fog, insomnia, anxiety attacks, PTSD, and depression.
Yoga Nidra eases insomnia, decreases anxiety, alleviates stress, reduces PTSD, chronic pain and chemical dependency. It heighten awareness and focus, transforms negative habits, behaviors and ways of thinking, and fosters feelings of calm, peace, and clarity.
Yoga nidra promotes deep rest and relaxation that isn't found in your average meditation practice. The stages of body scan and breath awareness alone can be practiced to calm the nervous system, leading to less stress and better health. 45 minutes of Yoga Nidra can be as restorative as 3 hours of sleep. It creates deep relaxation for health, mental peace, and higher awareness. By receiving the proper rest, we enhance functioning of the immune and metabolic systems. In turn, this improves our overall physical health and leads to higher energy as well as fewer colds and infections of all types. Rest also improves mental health, eliminating brain fog, insomnia, anxiety attacks, PTSD, and depression.
Yoga Nidra eases insomnia, decreases anxiety, alleviates stress, reduces PTSD, chronic pain and chemical dependency. It heighten awareness and focus, transforms negative habits, behaviors and ways of thinking, and fosters feelings of calm, peace, and clarity.
Stages of relaxation
The form of practice taught by Satyananda includes these stages
- Internalization, sankalpa, rotation of consciousness, breath awareness, manifestation of opposites, creative visualization, sankalpa and externalization
Creating a Sankalpa (Intention or Resolve)
This intention is something we wish to manifest in any area of our life or a quality we wish to cultivate and/or embody. For example, someone might want to manifest fearlessness, courage, inner peace, or fulfillment.
Stage 1: Rotation of Awareness Through the Body
The primary objective in this stage is to isolate the mind. The mind is focused, alert, and separated from external stimuli. We separate from the body, from the senses, and from their need for attention.
So we create pratyahara (sense withdrawal) and command control over the sensory mechanisms of the physical body, specifically through exercises which deal with the mapping of the brain. Pratyahara opens the gate to the contents of the subconscious and unconscious levels of mind.
The science behind this stage is simply to make use of the principle of homunculus, or the walking sensation through the cerebral cortex. The mapped stimulation through the brain relaxes the motor and sensory regions, thereby relaxing the body and the mind.
Stage 2: Awareness of Prana
The objective here is to enhance our ability to be aware and connected to our emotional responses, and to work with the subtle body. We want to become mindful of the realms that lie beyond body and experience the pranic tide of breath without judgement. Through breathing techniques, we continue withdrawal from the external body and continue momentum of the inward journey.
Stage 3: Awareness of Feeling and Emotion
Our aim at this stage is to use the interaction of polarized emotional experience through a type of word association. We want to dissolve our attachment to emotional and conditional programming that lies hidden from conscious awareness in the subconscious mind.
“With detachment and without fear we observe the polarization then seek an equilibrium to their experience to culminate indifference. Experiencing both waves of a feeling or emotion can have significant impact on releasing stored effect of past experience. We simply invite without added distortion what ever may arise remaining fixed . on observing the intensity, and flavor of each experience and even where in the body it’s centered.”- Everett Newell
Stage 4: Visualization
At this stage, we access and work with contents of the unconscious mind and samskaras which are our mental and emotional patterns, individual impressions, ideas, or actions. Together, our samskaras make up our programming.
Here, guidance through a series of archetypal images or a guided visualization in form of a vivid journey will evoke responses in our relaxed mind. We cleanse and heal the mine field of deep-rooted conditioning.
The Final Step
We revisit our intention (sankalpa) and plant it into the field of the unconscious mind. We then return awareness back to the body.
Yoga Nidra takes us through a magical process of releasing the physical body, quieting the brain waves, tapping into our emotional body, and gaining a higher intellect. Even a beginner can enter profoundly deep states of consciousness just the same as any experienced meditator.