Awakening With Yoga Nidra, the “Yoga of Sleep”
I love Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra uses the “technology” of the Nidra state, that hypnotic state between waking and dreaming, to enter into an experience of being that isn’t available to us in our regular waking life. Shamanic, religious, and even psychological methods use this state as a way of discovering deeper truths about ourselves. Yoga Nidra is a beautiful and relaxing pathway toward awakening.
I love this poem by David Whyte because like many good poems it can speak to many different things at once. When read from the context of awakening through Yoga Nidra or any other meditative practice, it has a particular poignance.
Enjoy!
What to Remember When Waking
by David Whyte
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
from The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press