CLICK HERE FOR We Teach The Yoga Of Awareness
Have you ever felt discombobulated? Had a big day and feeling like your brain is not keeping up with your body? Have you ever woken up frumpy, without enough sleep, knowing that you haven’t got enough juice in your tank to deal with the day that’s ahead? 🤪
If you’ve known these experiences, and looking to learn a new super power, then Yoga Nidra could be your new BFF. An ancient technique of empowered rest that is fast gaining traction in the modern world as a means to redress sleep deprivation and anxiety, improving concentration & focus, achieving personal goals and dealing with deep seeded patterns of addiction and trauma.
Doctor Andrew Huberman is a pre-eminent neuroscientist from Stanford University, and godfather of the modern day bio-hackers, seeing to improve cognitive & metabolic function through doing things rather than taking things. Dr Huberman is all about Yoga Nidra, recommending it in his top 3 practices for optimising health and top of the list for anyone seeking to improve neuroplasticity - ie. the brains ability to rewire and absorb new information. It has been shown that the practice of Yoga Nidra done after a period of learning new information improves neuro-plasticity by up to 50%! So yoga nidra helps you to learn faster and retain information longer…
In sum, Yoga Nidra is very good for your, for a whole bunch of reasons, if you haven’t tried it yet, maybe you should?
Yoga Nidra as a No-Mind State.
Yoga Nidra, quite literally means yogic sleep, in this case yoga could mean to be ‘connected’ or to remain ‘aware’ - so essentially Yoga Nidra means sleep with awareness, quite literally, we are putting our body into a state of deep rest whilst the mind remains awake & aware. Andrew Huberman refers to it as NSDR or Non Sleep Deep Rest (who doesn’t love an acronym!) - and speaks about regular intersessions of NSDR as being the secret weapon for those seeking to improve cognitive performance.
From a neurological perspective, in Yoga Nidra we are quite literally slowing down the activity of the the brains, in normal waking moments our brain waves move between 13-28Hz, depending on our level of excitement and focus, these states are referred to as Beta (13-25Hz) & Gamma (<25Hz). In Yoga Nidra we are slowing the brain waves right down, to around 1-7Hz - this is described as Delta (1-3Hz) and Theta 4-7Hz)
With most meditation techniques there is a practice of focussing required, applying our attention in a specific direction, which although relaxing is not necessarily restful. With yoga nidra, whilst we use concentration in the preliminary stages, once we go deep into the practice, there is a letting go of effort, a deep relaxation of the mind to achieve the ‘no mind state’.
In yogic texts they speak about the Turiya or ‘timeless' state, where in Yoga Nidra we move beyond the mental construct of time and become completely present within the current experience. As much of our existential anxiety has to do with time, having to do something or be somewhere, this feeling of experiencing true timelessness is very relaxing, some (me included) might say regular connect with the experience is absolutely life changing.
Yoga Nidra - The Love Affair
Perhaps the best thing about Yoga Nidra is that it is easy! Compared to other yoga & meditation practices the entry point is rather gentle, we are lying down, guided gently through the practice and asked to relax and rest throughout. In my experience teaching meditation over many years, Yoga Nidra is the practice that people genuinely fall in love with. I think when we discover that we can reset our inner clock with incredible efficiency and ease, it is incredibly empowering, to find a practice that dissolves tension so easily and supports us to 'do the work’ resolving inner wounds and trauma, it is hard not to fall in love with it, most of us just wish that we had discovered it sooner.
Yoga Nidra & the Art of Change
In addition to the profound cognitive benefits aforementioned, Yoga Nidra offers a technique called Sankalpa which gives us a tool to cultivate profound change in limiting self beliefs and behaviours. I’ve written about this extensively in blogs here & here.
How to Practice Yoga Nidra
We offer a weekly (free!) community yoga nidra practice at Bamboo Yoga every Wednesday at 1pm. If you can’t make it to the studio, I have numerous practices available on the Insight Timer app here (also free). I also run yoga nidra courses intermittently in Byron Bay and online and if you are wishing to take a deep dive into the practice perhaps you might want to join our Meditation Teacher Training?
