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 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.

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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.

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.

Yoga Nidra is a blend of deep sleep, self-hypnosis and profound relaxation. What makes Yoga Nidra distinct is that although you appear to be doing noting there is action involved.

This paradox of appearing to do nothing yet being active evokes the question ‘how is this so?’

Like all yoga practice and life itself the answer to that question is experiential. And in this case the experience is the understanding of your true nature.

What is your true nature? Why has every sage in some way or another directed you to ‘Know Thyself’?

Again the answer to these questions is experiential as to know yourself is to be aware. This is self-evident once seen and what sees this is awareness.

In the light of understanding your true nature as awareness the Yoga Nidra paradox of being active while appearing to do nothing is also resolved because Awareness is active. In short Awareness acts and its action arises simultaneously with its seeeing as awareness; in other words seeing is doing.

Still another way that this can be stated is that your true nature is mind with the experiential understanding that mind really means ‘minding’ wherein there is the activity of being aware and the simultaneous action that arises with it.

In this light your are mind or Awareness as the openness where everything is seen and what is seen is the content as your experience of life. And like breathing and all other things in the universe ‘minding’ is fourfold as four degrees or wave levels that correspond to your four brainwave patterns.

The awesome power of this understanding is that by being what you already are, which means awareness, you can remain alert through all four degrees of your mental activity and because you are aware you can command energy to take form by using the principle of ‘energy follows awareness’ and what is called the ‘Law of Attraction’.

It is often said that knowledge is power. This is simply not true because true power lies in the relationship of know how and acting out the how in the now. The relationship, like everything else, is a wave.

Most folks know what to do yet not everybody does what they know. For example most folks in what are called ‘first world’ countries know how important it is to eat healthily and stay fit yet vast numbers of people in these countries have health problems that are directly related to obesity and lack of proper exercise.

Some other examples: 1) most educated folks know that when they an iceberg at sea against the backdrop of a partially cloudy sky  that they are really observing four different forms of water as ice, liquid water, water vapor and ionized water; 2) when folks see an active volcano like Kilauea they know that they are seeing four different forms of the same thing as solid rock, liquid lava, gas vapors and plasma (fire; ionized materials); 3) people know that breathing is wave process of breathing air from outside your body, extracting the life-giving energy and expelling the wastes, (breathing earth, water and fire happens in the same manner – see Breathing Waves); and 4) modern scientists have demonstrated that the human brain has four basic brainwave patterns that correspond to four degrees or planes of consciousness … yet few folks act in ways that are in harmony with these examples of common knowledge.

Why?

The examples listed above and others like them are true yet folks have not made this knowledge their own by acting on it. Thus the energy wave breaks down. It is like a man who has a container of medication with a label on it that says ‘take two pills in the morning and two pills in the evening’ yet the man only ever reads the label and wonders why the medication does not have any impact on his health situation.

In this light the energy or power associated with knowledge is the energy wave of having the know how and acting out the how in the now such that the wave is complete and in order with the nature of things.

Yoga Nidra, the process of deep yoga relaxation, is a direct means for you to apply what you know by guiding you to breathe, relax and be aware through all four brainwave patterns.

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It is self-evident that breathing unfolds as waves; what is not usually seen is that just as you breathe the gaseous-air element air, you also breathe the solid-earth element as food, you breathe the liquid-water element as liquid water and you breathe the plasma-fire element as things like heat, light and Vitamin D that we get from our sun.

In all cases you breathe these fundamental elements in the same manner that you breathe air. In all cases you take the fundamental element in from somewhere outside your body, you body’s inherent intelligence extracts the life-giving energies (see resonance) and it expels the wastes.

In other words you literally breathe earth, water, air and fire!