Yoga means union, and nidra means sleep. In yoga nidra, your physical, energetic, mental, and astral aspects rest, but the bliss body (anandamayakosha) remains aware. (For more about the bodies or koshas, the layers of non-Self, please do a search on Advaita Vedanta.)
Yoga nidra is an advanced yoga practice (and very easy). It is advanced in that it can bring you into union at a deeper level and much faster than most yoga practices. In fact, beginning students often report the experience of selflessness.
Yet there is no yoga practice easier than relaxing on the floor and listening to the voice of the teacher. You don’t even have to concentrate in yoga nidra, all you need to do is listen. Even in your sleep (though you should at least try to remain awake), anandamayakosha listens and benefits from the practice.
Yoga nidra was devised by Paramahamsa Satyananda Saraswati, a student of Swami Sivananda Saraswati of Rishikesh and founder of the Bihar School of Yoga (called Satyananda Yoga outside India), the most comprehensive system of traditional yoga that has survived into the 21st Century.
Swami Satyananda devised yoga nidra from ancient texts called Tantras that described lost yoga practices of consecrating the body for spiritual practice.
In Swami Satyananda’s yoga nidra, there are eight stages in the practice. In the practice you drop from awareness of the body into a dream state. In yoga nidra, you consciously create the dream. Then you slowly emerge from the dream, refreshed.
A half hour of yoga nidra can provide the same depth of rest as several hours’ sleep.
And though most students come to yoga nidra for deep relaxation, it is truly a spiritual practice. Vishnu, the sleeping god of Hinduism, is the deity of sustenance. Even from a Western/Christian/Quaker perspective, Vishnu can be understood to be the sustaining aspect of the Divine. And through yoga nidra, you may participate in the Divine Dream:
“Vishnu is pictured as the divine dreamer of the world dream. Vishnu sleeps on a great serpent, whose name is Ananta, which means ‘Endless.’ The serpent floats on the universal ocean, called the Milky Ocean. But this Milky Ocean and the Serpent and the sleeping God: these are all the same thing. They are three inflections of the same thing, and that thing can be thought of also as the subtle substance that the wind of the mind stirs into action when the universe of all these shifting forms is brought into being. Vishnu, the God, sleeps, and the activity of his mind stuff creates dreams, and we are all his dream: the world is Vishnu’s dream. And just as, in your dreams, all the images that you behold and all the people who appear are really manifestations of your own dreaming power, so are we all manifestations of Vishnu’s dreaming power. We are no more independent entities than the dream figures in our own dreams.
“Hence, we are all one in Vishnu: manifestations, inflections, of this dreaming power of Vishnu; broken images of himself rippling on the spontaneously active surface of his subtle mind stuff. Moreover, this sleeping god’s divine dream of the universe is pictured in Indian art as a great lotus plant growing from his navel. The idea is that the dream unfolds like a glorious flower, and that this flower is the energy — or, as the Indians say, the Shakti or goddess — of the god. I hope that some of you are recalling the counterparts of some of these images in the Biblical tradition. The waters that are stirred into action when creation takes place are comparable to those of the first verse of the Bible, where it is said that the wind or breath of God blew, or brooded, over the waters.
“This metaphor represents the miracle of creation, bringing the world into being as a multiplicity out of the stillness of an unstirred sleep. And the bride of the divine being, coming forth in the Indian myth from the navel of a dreaming god, is drawn in the Biblical myth from the rib of a dreaming man. What was originally one has become two. And how delightful it is to see such an image — reflection of an aspect of one’s own being — which was not present to consciousness before, and yet was there, nevertheless! So it is with Vishnu’s dream. The god becomes aware of his own power and is delighted by the charms of his own power, as represented in the presence derived from him: the presence of his own dream, which is the universe. Thus, the universe is the dream-bride, or dream-goddess, of God.”
Joseph Campbell
“Hinduism”
Please come check out a yoga nidra class with us taught in a style inspired by Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Schedule of classes.
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