Benefits of Yoga Nidra

Yoga Nidra for Quality Sleep, Deep Rest, Healing

The most popular and well-known variations of Yoga Nidra are those that rejuvenate the body, strengthen the immune system, dissolve muscular tension and help you sleep better.

Research shows that a single hour of yoga nidra is as productive as four hours of conventional sleep. With continued practise, many report that their conventional sleep improves, or if wakeful during the night, this is a great practice to help guide you back into sleep. Even if you don't fall back to sleep, the practice will leave you feeling rested and more peaceful. Deep rest is essential for healing, physical ease and mental balance. The power of deep rest is an art and can't be underestimated! The foundation should be solid and reliable before progressing to expanded Yoga Nidra practices.

Yoga Nidra as transformative Awareness Meditation

Underutilised or less known are the transformative Yoga Nidra practices that open us to clear, expansive states of awareness-presence where we can effortlessly experience our natural state - without the limitation of a rational, analytical, doing mind. Instead of centralising our attention in storylines, feelings and thoughts, we train our attention to relax, over and over, into expansive awareness.

Why is this practice so effective? Extended Yoga Nidra practices take you to brainwave states where the organs and systems of the body are nourished and regenerated. The method deliberately employs the sequential stages we go through when naturally falling asleep; the body sinks, muscles relax, breath quietens, and the mind gradually releases its grip on thoughts and waking activity. The thinking-mind enters a space of non-doing where mind and heart are effortlessly quiet and still.

Yoga Nidra is the art of yogic-sleep; the body and mind drop into states of deep rest that preserve a quality of peaceful unbiased presence

In sleep, we predominantly fall unconscious and have little awareness of the deeper aspects of our being. Even after a long sleep, we might still wake up tired or agitated from a restless night – with or without dream recall. States of Sleep are natural and well-researched. However, in the West we don't have an adequate definition of sleep that includes awareness as described in Eastern traditions of dream and sleep yoga.

The body-mind is its own intelligent healer; it knows how to restore itself in sleep and dreams. However, it needs the right environment to do so. Yoga Nidra is an environment that enables deep states of being, healing and insight. In the deep transformative practice of sleep yoga, we are invited into an intimate relationship with our genuine, compassionate heart-mind.