Yoga Nidra
If you have ever tried to sit in meditation for 30 minutes, you know that it usually does not take long to feel uncomfortable in either your body or in your own mind. As a meditation technique, Yoga Nidra, is simple, offers a gentle approach, bringing an incredible calmness, peace and clarity. Yoga Nidra is one of the deepest of all meditations and has been described as the most effective. Yoga Nidra requires neither years of practice nor intellectual understanding to access its power. All that is required is a focus of attention and an abiding trust in the process of revelation through direct experience.
Yoga Nidra allows you to release negative emotions and thought patterns, to calm the nervous system and develop an inner sanctuary of well-being and peace. It is a tool where you can free yourself from limitations of the past, stress factors in the present and worries for the future all while developing a greater field of awareness and discovering Your connection to all Living Things. Yoga Nidra asks you to welcome yourself. It is in that moment of true welcoming where the profound transformation takes place.
Yoga Nidra Aids Emotional Healing
It has been estimated that stress is the underlying cause of as much as 80% of all illness. Stress comes in many forms, many of them so much a part of our routine that we fail to recognise them as problems. These hidden stressors continually barrage us; and cumulatively they result in a wide range of health issues, including premature ageing, degenerative diseases, insomnia, digestive issues, high blood pressure, heartburn, addictions to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and more.
Struggle is not an effective solution to change stressful and negative behaviour patterns, unconscious fears, beliefs or habits. Yet this is how most of us navigate these unseen worlds within us. To release these blockages, they need to be dislodged from the very core. Yoga Nidra takes you beyond the barriers of the five senses. It’s sophisticated series of mind-body tools can help you navigate some of life’s harshest moments all while reaching the most profound level of relaxation possible.
It is here you have the power to actualise your intentions, affirmations and prayers. Yoga Nidra initiates shifts from the deepest core of your being and provides you with the space to remove deep tensions and patterns, psychological wounds, all held within the physical, mental and emotional bodies and to bring you with practice to a natural state of balance calm and creativity.
This technique is neither logical nor psychological. It is a quantum leap beyond the comprehension of the intellect to the domain of trust and faith, love and compassion. It bypasses the linear approach and allows you to resolve destructive patterns of behaviour at their source. Yoga Nidra is a powerful tool to help you reshape your life, rebuild your health and renew yourself. It opens a doorway to a place where we can see ourselves and our lives in the most positive light.
What is Yoga Nidra
Yoga Nidra is mostly taught lying down. This is part of the reason why it is so simple. You learn to focus your awareness on your breath and bodily sensations.
Yoga Nidra means Yogic Sleep. It is a state of conscious Deep Sleep. In general meditation, you remain in the waking state of consciousness and gently focus the mind, while allowing thought patterns, emotions, sensations and images to arise and go on. However, in Yoga Nidra, you leave this waking state, go past the dreaming state, and go to Deep Sleep, yet remain awake.
Most of us are sleep deprived and in the beginning when we practice Yoga Nidra we may do just that, go to sleep, this is fine, our consciousness is always present and awake and you will wake at the right time every time at the end of your session. Eventually you will not fall asleep and you will be able to remain fully awake and alert.
The diagram below shows that over the course of a general nights sleep, the most healing therapeutic part of our sleep is only 15%. Out of our entire 8 hours, this equates to approximately 90mins. This deeply healing sleep is when we reach the Delta waves. This is the deep sleep state we reach in Yoga Nidra.
Each time you practice Yoga Nidra meditation, you are stilling the waves of the mind through conscious entry into the sleep state.
You start with sensing the body and breathing in specific ways in order to trigger the relaxation response. The relaxation response balances the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and balances the left and right brain. In the process, your brain shifts from beta, an awakened state with lots of brain activity, to alpha, a more relaxed state. In alpha, the mood-regulating hormone serotonin gets released, and this calms you down. People who spend little time in an alpha brain-wave state have more anxiety than those who spend more time in alpha. Think of a car: if you want to stop and turn off the engine, you first need to downshift. Shifting your brain into an alpha state starts its process of “powering down,” or coming into a rest state with slower, restorative brain-wave activity.
From alpha, you go into a deep alpha and high theta brain-wave state, the dream state, REM sleep. In theta, your thoughts slow down to 4 to 8 thoughts per second. This is where super learning happens. Kids and artists experience a lot more theta activity in their brains. Emotional integration and release also happen here, and structures in the brain change. It’s here that some people sometimes have random thoughts or see images. A person in theta may see colors or visions or hear the voice of a person talking yet at the same time not hear this voice. It’s where you begin to enter the gap of nothingness.
After theta, you are guided to delta, where your thoughts are only 1 to 3.9 thoughts per second. This is the most restorative state, in which your organs regenerate, and the stress hormone cortisol is removed from your system.
When you are put under anesthesia, you are put into a delta brain-wave state. People in comas are also in a delta brain-wave state, which gives their bodies a chance to restore their systems. In our culture, very few people are going into the deep states of sleep like theta and delta on a regular basis, and therefore, our bodies are not powering down and getting the chance to restore themselves. Depressed people go to beta and alpha states, but rarely go to theta and delta.
From delta, the guided Yoga Nidra experience takes you down into an even deeper brain-wave state—one that cannot be reached through conventional sleep. In this fourth state of consciousness, below delta, your brain is thoughtless. This state is sort of like a complete loss of consciousness, but you are awake. This state is one of such a deep surrender, where your consciousness is so far away from the physical body, that living here every day would be difficult. Not everyone who practices Yoga Nidra touches this state, but the more you practice, the more you will receive glimpses of it.
After you touch into the fourth state of consciousness, you are guided back to a waking state. Again, you could not live in this fourth state, but because of touching into it, you bring a little of its peace back with you to your waking, everyday brain state. You also can rewire your thoughts and emotions because your subconscious mind in this fourth state is fertile, more open to intentions and affirmations, than it is when you are in your waking state. Consequently, in your everyday life, you begin to rest more and more in the space between emotions and thoughts, and this resting in this space gives rise to a sense of freedom, where you are not triggered so much by the stuff in your life.
Benefits to the Body
While Yoga Nidra is not a substitute for sleep, the number one reason most people practice Yoga Nidra is that 45 minutes of yogic sleep feels and due to reaching the delta state is equal to 3 hours of regular sleep. People come out of the practice feeling deeply refreshed after and notice that the practice of Yoga Nidra helps them to fall asleep easier and stay asleep at night.
Feeling well rested is life changing, but Yoga Nidra also improves your overall health. A 2013 study showed that practicing Yoga Nidra improved anxiety, depression, and overall well-being for women experiencing menstrual irregularities and psychological problems. Evidence shows tremendous success using Yoga Nidra to help them manage pre- and post-surgical operations and decrease pain. And even more science points to how Yoga Nidra can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol and improve blood glucose fluctuations and symptoms associated with diabetes.
The explosion of studies supporting the benefits of meditation also apply to Yoga Nidra. Both meditation and Yoga Nidra help activate the relaxation response and improve the functioning of your nervous system and endocrine system, which affects your hormones. Both meditation and Yoga Nidra help cells regenerate and repair, and both help decrease anxiety and improve your mood.