10 Reasons to Try Yoga Nidra

Yoga nidra means ‘yogic sleep’. It is an effortless yoga relaxation and meditation practice that anyone can do, by themselves with an audio recording or with the guidance of a teacher in person. It is usually done lying down in stillness using blankets and cushions as support, but you can practice in a supported seated position.

Yoga nidra brings you to a deeply relaxed state of mind and body, whilst you are still awake.

This is the state between sleep and wakefulness (called the hypnogogic state in psychology), where you float between consciousness and unconsciousness, being aware of the resting state of the body and mind as it is happening in the moment.

“Within that state, guided visualizations help support the body to rest and recover, while the mind is settled and ordered, and the heart can open.” Theodora Wildcroft

I have found yoga nidra to be one of the best ways to relax and release my body completely, and one of the easiest ways to enter the meditative space. It really is effortless. On average it takes 15 minutes for someone to completely release the body physiologically. A yoga nidra is usually at least 15 minutes long, so the length of the yoga nidra combined with the gentle guidance of awareness around the body (or rotation of consciousness) really helps you to relax. This is often surprising to those who find it difficult to relax, stop or let go.

Some yoga nidras use visualisations to help you into a deeper state of rest or meditation, some use a more body based awareness approach – which is helpful if you find visualising hard. Some will offer positive intentions/affirmations to help you to integrate positivity as you rest. You can use intentions specific to something you are dealing with, making it a personalised practice.

Delivered by a qualified therapist, yoga nidra can be delivered not just as a relaxation or meditation but as a powerful tool to help with trauma, mental health and other issues. At its most simple level yoga nidra is accessible to everyone and can create profound mental and physical healing just from enabling you to stop and rest in an effortless way. I see this every time I guide students in yoga nidra.

Below are 10 reasons to try yoga nidra, I hope they inspire you to put aside 20 minutes to listen to one and enjoy some deep rest.

And...to celebrate ten years of teaching and of Breathing Space Yoga, which I established in 2013, I have created a mini library of ten of my favourite yoga nidra’s, recorded for my classes so that anyone can access and enjoy them through my website.

I’d love you to experience yoga nidra with me, especially if you have never listened to one before. To listen to them please go to https://www.breathingspace-yoga.com/yoganidraminilibrary

10 reasons to try Yoga Nidra

1. If you find it hard to sleep

"We sleep for a rich litany of functions, plural - an abundant constellation of night-time benefits that service both our brains and our bodies. There does not seem to be one major organ within the body, or process within the brain, that isn't optimally enhanced by sleep (and detrimentally impaired when we don't get enough)." Matthew Walker author of Why We Sleep

We all need more rest. Achieving this, however can be very challenging for most of us, especially if you find it hard to relax, to fall asleep or to stay asleep. Listening to a yoga nidra is a wonderful way to fall asleep, especially if it is a specific yoga nidra for sleep which will guide you into sleep at the end, rather than guide you out of your relaxation. I know many colleagues who listen to yoga nidras at bedtime, or if they wake in the night to help them get back to sleep.

Nirlipta Tuli my teacher at Yoga Nidra Network used yoga nidra to help cure his insomnia and he has yoga nidra sleep courses on their webpage: https://www.yoganidranetwork.org/

2. If you find it hard to switch off and relax

Yoga nidra helps the body and mind to become familiar with relaxation and thus over time the body may settle to rest or sleep more easily.

“Yoga is really about union, oneness and then nidra is the Sanskrit word for sleep. So this is the sleep of the yogi. This is a sleep-based meditation technique that you’re guided into deep sleep brain waves with a trace of awareness. So it’s not sleep. Your mind is invited to have a trace of awareness throughout it. As a result, you go into deep relaxation, which you would feel if you went into a nice deep sleep, but you go even further. You go into this fourth state of consciousness where you literally are thoughtless, and the potential to rewire and recharge your whole system becomes available to you. It’s a very deep form of conscious relaxation.” Karen Brody author of Daring to Rest

The more you listen to yoga nidra, the more your body and mind responds. There will be times in yoga nidra when you are wide awake, and times when you drift and times when you fall asleep, but however your body responds, it is taking on board the guidance to rest, to relax the body and relax the mind.

3. You can practice in any way you like

Anyone can enjoy yoga nidra, you can listen sitting up, lying down, with eyes open or eyes closed. As a minimum you need a comfortable place to rest – this could be on a bed or sofa or on the floor with cushions and blankets. That’s it. You then just listen.

Lots of yoga nidra’s, like mine, are invitational which means you can follow all of the guidance and be comfortably, happily aware of your body and mind at rest. Or you might drift in and out, and enjoy a period of rest with the guidance in the background. You can also choose (or sometimes your body chooses) to drift off to sleep. There is no right or wrong and yoga nidra usually meets you where you are and provides you with just what you need.

“There’s a part of you that’s always awake. So first of all, you haven’t fallen asleep... but many people feel they go into such a deep state of relaxation, the mind goes—you become thoughtless. You go into this place where you see beyond the activity of the mind—to the source, into this cosmic mind so to speak. Then when you’re in this space, you sometimes won’t hear my voice. You’ll go in and out almost like a coma. The brain waves are very similar. That’s when the organs can rejuvenate, your body rejuvenates.” Karen Brody author of Daring to Rest

4. It doesn’t cost anything

There are many places to find free yoga nidra’s to listen to. There’s a list of useful places at the bottom of this blog. You don’t need any special equipment – except the device you are listening on.

When you have practised enough, you can even guide yourself in yoga nidra – Yoga Nidra Made Easy by Nirlipta Tuli and Uma Dinsmore Tuli is a book specifically to help you to learn to guide yourself. Useful if you don’t have a recording to hand, although I prefer to listen to guidance as it feels much less effortful than guiding myself.

5. It helps relieve stress and anxiety

When we create the space to rest we are helping our physical body to release tensions and stress. Yoga nidra also creates the space to settle emotions and thoughts, to reframe our reactions and challenges releasing mental tension and stress.

Yoga nidra helps you to let go of physical and mental stress as it encourages your sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight freeze) to dial down and your parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) to dial up. This helps to promote balance and helps you to reset.

It is a really great way to release stress and anxiety in a simple, gentle and accessible way

6. It doesn’t take much time

We all know that we feel better when we’ve had good sleep or taken a day off. Yoga nidra helps us to create the same feelings of well-being. Whilst it can’t replace a proper nights sleep, making yoga nidra a regular part of your life, daily or weekly, can have a huge impact on your well-being. If you spend 20 minutes a day on social media, or watching TV you can spend 20 minutes resting! Once you try it, you will want to make the time.

“Taking time out each day to relax and renew is essential to living well” Judith Hanson Lasater

7. Yoga nidra can be used as a supportive and healing practice for many things including:

relief of fatigue and tensions
insomnia
stress
anxiety
pain management
pregnancy and birth
mental health
self- enquiry
addiction
PTSD

Yoga nidra can result in more settled emotions, settled thoughts, improved productivity and creativity and even heightened intelligence. And even if you are not suffering from any of the above issues, the practice of yoga nidra will support the maintenance of a balanced physical and mental state.

As you progress through yoga nidra the body resumes optimal functioning of the digestive system, breath and heart rate – you can often hear rumbling as the gut relaxes, a settling into deep breathing and tensions fall away including headache.

When yoga nidra is offered in a therapeutic way it can have really amazing results such as with the I-Rest yoga nidra programs in the USA (they also have teachers across the globe).

“I-Rest is offered at yoga studios, community centers, clinics, schools, hospices, correctional facilities, and U.S. military hospitals. Based on current iRest studies in the military, the Defense Centers of Excellence has approved it as a complementary alternative medicine warranting continued research for its use in the treatment of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). And the U.S. Army Surgeon General has listed yoga nidra as a Tier 1 approach for addressing pain management in military care based on research with iRest.” Yoga International

8. It’s great if you find meditation hard

Traditional meditation, as most people understand and practice it, is an active process. You are working hard to be effortless! In meditation you are bringing a focused awareness to what you are experiencing moment to moment. You are continuously bringing awareness and applying non-judgement to what you experience, over and over. With practice this does become more effortless, but it can take a long time to get to a level where you feel easeful and spacious in meditation.

“Yoga nidra is a journey through different frequencies of brainwave activity and thus through different states of consciousness. What is unique to yoga nidra however, is that these states are all experienced consciously by the practitioner – we are not just experiencing but also witnessing.” Uma Dinsmore Tuli & Nirlipta Tuli, Yoga Nidra Network

Thus yoga nidra is considered by many as a meditation practice. But there there is no active doing, you don’t have to focus your awareness and concentration so fully. Yoga nidra is about receiving. You are just listening and receiving. It is an effortless meditation.

9. It can improve creativity

“Yoga nidra is not just a practice, but also a form of awareness; not simply a technique, but a naturally cyclical nurturing process for entering and inhabiting restful and creative states of consciousness that are every rested human’s birthright.” Uma Dinsmore Tuli and Nirlipta Tuli, Yoga Nidra Made Easy

Often when we make the space to let go, to rest, to pause, we find we open ourselves up to finding solutions, have creative ideas, and welcome opportunities we didn’t know were there. When we stop doing and quieten our minds in meditation and relaxation we can see things more clearly, we open up to our insight, inner wisdom, or instinct that is often hidden under our doing and thinking.

You find this same quiet space in daily life - when you are in the flow of something soothing like walking the dog or sitting on the beach, or when you are resting fully (perhaps when you wake up in the night) and a great idea pops up and you need to write it down before you forget!

Yoga nidra can take you to this same quiet space whenever you listen – and that’s where creativity, problem solving and opportunity might just come along more often.

10. Yoga nidra connects you more deeply to yourself and the world around you

“To me, yoga means our embodied experience of non-separation. Everything… the trees, the rocks, the mountains, other people—everything is made out of one essence...Yoga nidra, for me, means our ability to feel that sense of non-separation—to stay in touch with that underlying essence no matter the changing state of consciousness.” Richard Miller – Yoga International interview

When we take time out to rest, and to drop into the deeper brainwaves of yoga nidra in particular, we make space to step back, to reflect, reframe and respond. We reduce our reactions. This is helpful to ourselves and all of those around us, family, friends, work colleagues, our community. It helps us to be more balanced. When we listen to yoga nidra regularly this ability to take a moment and respond rather than react becomes more frequent in our everyday life. We start to bring yoga nidra into our waking moments and find yoga nidra throughout our daily lives.

“The practice of yoga nidra attunes us to the transitions between the waking, dreaming, and deep sleep states. The transitions are where the power and the magic lie; each one is a little space of the void. There are many transitions throughout the day. If we can begin to be aware of these transitions, we can use them to stay more awake and present to our practice and to the little nidra moments every day.” Tracee Stanley Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation and Awakened Clarity