Monthly Archives: September 2009

What is Yoga Nidra

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The best way to understand what Yoga Nidra is to understand who is practicing it.

The one who practices Yoga Nidra is a yogi and the clearest definition of what a yogi is comes from the Bagavad Gita 4:18 as follows: “One who sees inaction in action, and action in inaction, is intelligent among men, he is a yogi  and has accomplished everything (he is in the transcendental position although engaged in all sorts of activities).”

This definition evokes the obvious questions, “What does inaction in action and action in inaction mean?”

Inaction in action and action in inaction means that your very being is doing . For example in deep sleep you are not consciously active yet there is no discontinuity to life.

The practice of Yoga Nidra approximates deep sleep. In the practice ‘you’ are inactive yet you are awake, alert and active as your true nature – thus you experientially understand ‘inaction in action’, ‘action in inaction’ and you also then know what it means to be a yogi who has accomplished everything.

In this light Yoga Nidra is the practice of inaction is action and action in inaction.

Yoga Nidra Yoga

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Yoga Nidra is a yoga practice and it is the result of that practice such that the journey is the destination.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 1.2 states ‘Yoga is the cessation of the modifications of the mind’. This sutra denotes both the process of dissolving mental modifications (i.e. modes of perception, sensations, psycho-emotional states, etc.) into the ‘mind-field’ (citta) and the result as mental treanquility wherein Awareness is pure and unmodified.

In this light it is clear that the practice of Yoga Nidra is Yoga as the union that is Presence when the ‘doer’ is relaxed-absent. In other words the mind is silent yet nothing has been lost; instead there is a clarity as seeing without the distortions or modifications that come from seeing through the lens of knowledge, memory and experience.

Thus Yoga Nidra is the practice of ‘yogic sleep’ as a means of being awake as your true nature.

Yoga Nidra – cause and effect

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Ancient Coin(click the image above for the animation)

Yoga Nidra is a means to see that cause and effect are two sides of the same coin. This is because what relaxes in the practice of Yoga Nidra is your thinking mind  or what I call the ‘hamster mind’.

When  your mind is silent you haven’t lost your mind – it is simply silent. Life continues while your mind is silent; what is different is that there is no distortion of what is seen as you no longer see things through the lens of knowledge, memory and experience. In this way there is an innocence in seeing as in infancy.

And it is patently obvious that you are not an infant. Thus you have the best of both – the innocence of the infant and the understanding of the adult. In this case what is seeing and acting is your fundamental nature which is awareness and here seeing and acting are not separate.

Lastly, this is not something that you are being asked to believe because it is self-evident when it is unfolding.

In this light it is clear that seeing is doing and that cause and effect are not separate; as stated above, they are two sides/phases of the same thing – like a wave.

Yoga Nidra – what it’s like…

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Sleeping Buddha

Imagine what it would be like to wake up inside a dream where the physical limitations that you are familiar with during the waking state are absent. In their place you find an unbounded territory that you can explore any way you wish.

What makes this so beautiful and so awesomely powerful is that this is not difficult as everyone has had dream experiences like the situation described above; what is not commonly understood is that in addition to consciously dreaming, the seeds that you plant while doing so flower across all states of consciousness including the waking state. In other words yoga nidra is a means for you apply synergistic principles like ‘energy follows awareness’ and what is popularly called the ‘Law of Attraction’.

Lastly what is most incredible about this process is that you access it by being at ease and deliberately relax out of the conscious waking state and awake aware and alert in the boundryless realms of alpha, theta and delta where you can explore without limitations.