In my Essential Yoga Nidra volume, over 7 hours of Yoga Nidra recordings, I dedicated a Yoga Nidra practice entirely for grief. As I was writing out my Yoga Nidra script, I learned so much about grief and the power that Yoga Nidra has to help us all work through grief.
Grief is a regular part of life. Whenever grief comes to visit you in your life, whether it is cyclically or in unique moments, it's always an invitation to practice deep Awareness. Yoga Nidra is a way of practicing sourcing your deepest strength by experiencing your True Nature, that of Awareness itself. From this place of deep Awareness, you will not replace grief with other emotions, but rather learn to welcome it, see it for what it is, and be the witness of it. Doing so, you will come to know your grief for its unique power to help you experience yourself as Awareness. Yoga Nidra can help you to discover the part of you that is powerful enough to survive any loss and powerful enough to sanctify any event that occurs in your life as you weave together the beautiful and textured tapestry of life.As you come to know yourself as Awareness, you will free yourself from being identified as and attached to emotions such as grief. Doing so also allows you to welcome grief, to hear its message in your heart, and ultimately release grief and allow it to cycle out of your orbit when its time is over.
If you are feeling grief in your life right now, I invite you to give yourself a moment and ground yourself to whatever your body is feeling in this moment. Give yourself a moment to open to your senses, as you relax and close your eyes. Maybe send a few breaths out your mouth with a sigh to release any tension you may have. Yoga Nidra is a relaxing yet powerful method to acknowledge your grief as a witness of your love, a testament of your strength, and a guide that leads you toward your highest being.
What’s Yoga Nidra?
Yoga Nidra feels like a guided meditation. Usually in a Yoga Nidra practice, you will lie down, get comfortable, and listen to a facilitator lead you through deepening layers of Awareness. The primary objective in Yoga Nidra is to begin to explore your True Nature, that of Awareness itself.
Yoga is the “yoking” of body, mind, and spirit. As explained in the second verse of the ancient Yoga Sutras, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” The goal of yoga is to experience samadhi, the home of our Universal Oneness. Grief, like all emotions, exists as a ripple in the pool of consciousness and obfuscates your ability to yoke your body, mind, and spirit to experience your True Nature, that Oneness, of Awareness itself.
Emotions like grief are nothing to reject or be ashamed of. On the contrary, they are beautiful ways to practice waking up to Oneness. Through practices like Yoga Nidra you learn to even appreciate grief for what it is, a way of bringing you to greater Awareness because it is something you can practice being Aware of.
Yoga Nidra helps you leverage emotions like grief as a powerful way of practicing Awareness and even learning to identify as Awareness itself. When identified as Awareness, you experience that part of yourself that has emotions but which is larger than emotions, and is not driven by them. As such, you begin to see powerful emotions like grief with a level of loving objectivity. You learn to hear the true message behind the emotion and acknowledge your grief as a witness of your love, a testament of your strength, and a guide that leads you toward your highest being.
What’s Nidra?
There are thousands of pathways to Oneness. Nidra is perhaps my favorite. Nidra is like napping your way to enlightenment! Nidra is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning sleep but more accurately refers to that state between waking and dreaming consciousness. Yoga Nidra is a Tantric practice and is as old as Yoga.
Usually a facilitator will verbally lead practitioners through deepening Awareness by suggesting things to be aware of. Practitioners are to practice observing and not reacting to anything that arises. This process of guided Awareness usually causes practitioners to become very relaxed.
Yoga Nidra uses relaxation as an essential method of downshifting your nervous system to enter the Nidra state, so you can practice your most natural state of relaxed Alertness. This Nidra state helps you to achieve experiencing the world with increased objectivity about all the things you might be aware of, including body, thoughts, sounds, etc. In this Nidra state, you achieve an entrance into deeper Awareness. Not only do you come to experience greater Awareness, you begin to see yourself as Awareness itself, coming to know itself through all the things you might be aware of.
As I lead practitioners through Yoga Nidra practice, I encourage them to greet everything that comes into their field of Awareness, acknowledge it for what it is, and simply practice observing it. Once in a while you may choose to also respond to the information but this practice helps us to stay out of reactivity and into responsiveness, action based on our deep consciousness.
Yoga Nidra’s Power for Wholeness
How Yoga Nidra Makes You Whole
Like I said, Yoga Nidra’s main intention is to practice Awareness. As you begin to identify as Awareness itself, coming to know itself as all the things you can be aware of, you come to experience your True Self, that which is whole, true, pure, and healed. Grounded in this deeper reality of your True identity, you gain not only a greater perspective about your life and problems, but you also experience the truth that as Source, there’s nothing you can’t do, be, or heal from.
What’s more, the more you wake up to your True Being through practices like Yoga Nidra, you begin to see the entire world, including emotions, experiences, sensations, etc, as pointing to Awareness itself.
Soon you begin to see the entire world, and your own life in particular, as a love note from the Divine. You exist as the product of Universal form and energy (practriti) waking up Universal consciousness (purusha) through the experiences of your life. With this Awareness you live your life with greater consciousness. Through practices like Yoga Nidra, you may even come to even appreciate the vicissitudes of life as beautiful reminders that you are consciousness experiencing waking up unto itself through this textures experience of life
Please enjoy this free Yoga Nidra for Grief recording (below). I loved putting it together and have found it very useful in my own life.
If you are interested in facilitating Yoga Nidra yourself or want to learn more about this fascinating practice, you might consider downloading my Online Yoga Nidra Teacher Training. It’s 20 hours of classroom recordings, a 60+ page manual of teaching direction, plus over 100 pages of Yoga Nidra scripts. It’s very affordable and I’m even offering payment plans during COVID
Thank you!