The other day I was teaching a Yoga Nidra workshop.
I explained how Yoga Nidra acts as concentrated rest, that basically you can 4X the time of Yoga Nidra with the quality of rest you get. In other words, 30 minutes of Yoga Nidra is the equivalent of rest you get from a 2-hour nap.
One of my students raised her hands and asked me why we don’t practice Yoga Nidra for an hour. “Isn’t more Nidra more rest?”
I explained to her that yes, this is true … but only to a point.
So today I thought I’d discuss the optimal lengths for a Yoga Nidra practice: What is too long and what is too short.
Too Long
After teaching literally thousands of hours of Yoga Nidra, I have found that my sweet spot regarding length of a Yoga Nidra class is about 30 minutes. After that, the shifting and restlessness in the room alerts me to the fact that the objects that people are welcoming, recognizing, and witnessing has boiled down to feeling quite uncomfortable in their backs.
Sure, it’s easy to get uncomfortable if you’re lying down on the floor—on top of a yoga mat and maybe some blankets—but what about if you’re lying down on the bed or a couch or something more comfortable? In this case, it’s true that you will likely be more comfortable but even still, students sometimes hit a “Nidra saturation point” where they have simply had enough time in the realm of the timeless, enough time welcoming, recognizing, and witnessing (maybe responding) to the many objects that may be floating through their field of Awareness.
After a while, people simply need a break. Too long in a Yoga Nidra practice can sometimes also make people feel groggy, loopy, or simply bugged. While I do maintain that it’s ok to fall asleep in a Yoga Nidra practice, oftentimes too long in a practice will result in mass napping.
That said, there’s certainly an application for a longer Yoga Nidra practice. One application for a longer practice—maybe 45–60 minutes—could be a Yoga Nidra practice specifically designed to help people fall asleep, one that is likely pre-recorded which people can listen to and maybe ostensibly fall asleep to while listening. Of course, with a practice like this, I would suggest not using a bell to mark the end of practice but simply offering a simple countdown and finishing the practice.
Keep in mind that even if you wanted to dedicate a longer time while facilitating a Yoga Nidra practice to offer a detailed visualization or want to do a very thorough exploration through all of the koshas, that you’d still be better off keeping the entire practice under 35 minutes. 45 max. Otherwise, by the time you finally get to the juice of the practice, the fantastic visualization you’d planned or whatever, your class is sawing logs or moaning with bruised sacrums such that they can’t absorb your practice.
Plus, remember that in Nidra you’re helping people to enter into the realm of the timeless. A feeling of time dysmorphia during Yoga Nidra is a real thing while in Nidra so 30 minutes could actually feel like several hours. Instead of spending 30 minutes exploring 6,437 different points in a body scan before going onto all the koshas for another 30 minutes per kosha, try doing what you need to do in shorter amounts of time.
Too Short
Can a Yoga Nidra practice be too short?
I’ve occasionally led very short Nidra-esque practice, such as in savasana after an asana class, which use many of the tools or components of a Yoga Nidra practice, but I wouldn’t necessarily call that a full Yoga Nidra practice.
Let’s remember that the optimal mental state we are aiming to help our students achieve is one of great Awareness while in the Nidra state, the state somewhere between waking and dreaming. That’s not to say that a person can’t experience great Awareness and even deep relaxation, insight, and illumination in another state, but in Yoga Nidra we are aiming for that state generally.
It takes the brain about 15 minutes to begin to settle down enough to get into that state. According to one of my teachers, master teacher Dr. Judeth Lasater, the founder of Restorative Yoga, and one of founders of Yoga Journal (when it was actually a journal and not so much a magazine), the brain can’t even relax enough to enjoy savasana until 15 minutes. She’s pointing to the neuroscience that suggests the amount of time it takes for people to switch out of their thinking and analyzing minds and enter into a place of deep relaxation.
For that reason, most of the Yoga Nidra practices I lead are no shorter than 15 minutes.
Like I say in my basic Yoga Nidra trainings, Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep and Facilitating Transformation with the Yoga of Sleep, if you’re following the Yoga Nidra Roadmap and if a practice is roughly 30 minutes long and you spend the first half helping people relax through permissions, broad Awareness, Sankalpa, Sanctuary, and a solid body scan, relaxing the body through Awareness to the Anamaya kosha, then at the half-way mark, at 15 minutes, you’ve succeeded at helping people arrive to that crucial point of deep relaxation.
And since we experience this practice in fractals and not a line (one of my two game-changing “Yoga Ninja” tactics), we experience the second half of the practice much, much deeper than the first half so we can do more in less amount of time during the second half of practice before we do our quick review of the practice and make our affirmation before finishing.
Summary
In summary, to facilitate an effective Yoga Nidra practice, I’d aim to lead a practice that is between 15–45 minutes. Again 30 minutes is what I feel is the sweet spot, what I feel is most effective. Sure a practice can be shorter or longer but maybe keep 30 minutes in your mind as your benchmark.
I invite you to explore to see what works best for you and your students.
In the meantime, I invite you to come and geek-out with me as you stretch into becoming a master Yoga Nidra facilitator in my Advanced Yoga Nidra teacher training happening in-person in Salt Lake City and via Zoom from anywhere in the world over two weekends, February 17–18 and 24–25.
We are going to explore similar topics as the one above and many more as we work in a very personable way to help you evolve into the Yoga Nidra facilitator you’re meant to be.
I only offer this once a year AND limit enrollment to give specialized attention to each person so please register today.
