“In yoga Nidra, you have the waking state, go through the dreaming state and into the deep sleep state, yet remain fully awake.” — www.swamij.com
I tried yoga nidra for the first time on Saturday during my meditation teacher training, thanks to Natalie who led the session. The experience I had was wonderful. In just 30 minutes, I found myself sinking into such a deep state of relaxation, I knew I’d be practising this regularly.
“30 minutes of Yoga Nidra is the equivalent of 3 to 4 hours of sleep” — www.bigshakti.com
I won’t go into too much detail about what yoga nidra is in this article — partly because I’m far from an expert, but If you’ve never tried it before, I’d definitely recommend it. There’s loads of guided yoga nidra sessions on Youtube. I just listened to this:
Once again, I found myself going into such a soothing relaxed state, but the experience wasn’t as great as the one I had on Saturday, so definitely try a few different ones first before you make your mind up as to whether yoga nidra is a practice you’d like to do more of.
One thing I will say is that if you practise yoga regularly, it gives Savasana (corpse pose) a whole new meaning.
On the handout we were given at the end of the session Natalie highlighted that in day to day life our brains are predominantly in the beta brainwave state. During yoga nidra we leave that state, travel through the alpha state and experience yoga nidra in the theta state.
Finally, if you’d like to explore yoga nidra in more depth after going to a class or trying out some of the guided yoga nidra meditations online, Richard Miller PhD is the person to look up.
He’s a master of yoga and meditation; he holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and is recognised as a leading authority on the practice of yoga nidra. I just bought his book, ‘Yoga nidra, a meditative practice for deep relaxation and healing’.
