Yoga Nidra: The Yoga of Sleep
Yoga Nidra is a form of meditation that seeks to help you understand yourself by truly learning to experience yourself as pure Awareness. Yoga Nidra uses like keen attention and deliberate relaxation to leverage the rational concept we have placed around our Self
One style of meditation that has become increasingly more popular is Nidra, the yoga of sleep. Yoga Nidra is a form of meditation that seeks to help you understand yourself by truly learning to experience yourself as pure Awareness. They way it’s done through Yoga Nidra is by using tools like keen attention and deliberate relaxation to leverage the rational concept we have placed around our Self. Such practice opens the practitioner to experience their non-dualist or “Both And” nature. Through practices such as Yoga Nidra, the Divine essence of the Universe seeks to know itself through and as us, a beautiful and localized version of this divine Source.
The Yoga of Sleep
The word Nidra in Sanskrit means sleep but truly refers to that liminal state of consciousness between waking and dreaming consciousness, between rational thinking and the subconscious. It’s in the Nidra state that our fierce concept of the self, the result of our rational thinking, can expand into the experience of our eternal, non-linear, and True Self.
The experience of your True Nature is one where you feel one with all things—infinite, and whole. This wholeness leads naturally to profound healing for body, mind and spirit. It also affords the practitioner to inhabit their birthright of boundless equanimity and an understanding of life which is far expanded beyond the normal narrative taught to us by our society.
One of the greatest benefits of this expanded awareness, is to dis-identify with things like emotions so they no longer define you. Instead, they actually serve as messengers that help to illuminate your True Nature, Awareness, something you can identify with. That way, when things like emotions do arise in your waking, every-day life, they don’t derail you because you’re grounded with the sure sense of your True Nature, Awareness.
Yoga Nidra offers practitioners a perspective that puts trauma, emotions, and perceived limitations in a clear and workable perspective.
What is Yoga
The stated definition of yoga as presented in the Yoga Sutras is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind to arrive at a state of oneness or Samadhi.
Nowadays the thinkable idea of yoga is based on asana or poses, which is in fact the physical body practice, yoga is a much wide practice than just the poses. In fact, ancient yoga texts outline a 8-limbed path to yoga which incorporates everything from ways to live in the world to very focused meditation.
There is a huge misunderstanding of the nature of the Yoga practice and the effects that it provides to the practitioner, as well as, the conditions in which this practice should be carried out, often careless regarding the place, like location, the atmosphere and so the curated attendees. You can read more on how to practice Yoga in a profitable environment in this article.
Yoga Nidra falls somewhere along the more meditative approaches toward Samadhi or Oneness, where the meditation is kept in states similar to the dream state, where physical senses are driven inwards.
Yoga Nidra and Meditation
One of the few key differences between Yoga Nidra and other forms of meditation is that this form of guided meditation is aimed to help you try to get become as relaxed as possible. Like stated earlier, this deep relaxation leads to a clearer concept of Self. Another important aspect of Yoga Nidra that distinguishes it from other forms of meditation is the experience of Identifying as Awareness itself. You do this by first becoming aware of your immediate surroundings and then you’ll start to notice the many different things that filter through your attention in any given moment. Soon you’ll see that which doesn’t change (your Awareness nature) in contrast to that which does. Also, unlike other meditations, it’s ok if you fall asleep and oftentimes the practitioners can use practices like Yoga Nidra to train themselves to develop lucid dreaming. Therefore, relaxation, developing a greater concept of Self, and identifying as Awareness itself are ways that Yoga Nidra is distinguished from other forms of meditation.
Yoga Nidra are as profound as they are relaxing. This is one of the reasons that people are now flocking to Yoga Nidra. It help to open you to feel at one with all things, increases your capacity for love, and helps you to be more compassionate. It also shows you your gifts for the world, shows you your strength and power, and helps you feel as though someone has turned up all the colors of your life. Yoga Nidra is perhaps the most effective way I know to manage and eliminate trauma and stress.
References:
