Yoga Nidra: Waking From The Dream
Yoga Nidra is a fascinating process of coming to know Self through the relaxing and mindful process of layered Awareness. Essentially, Yoga Nidra acts much like a guided meditation where the practitioner lies down, closes their eyes, and listens to the facilitator lead them through layers of Awareness, such as being aware of sensation, thoughts, emotions, etc. This has the effect of learning to observe all the changeable aspects of what we typically identify as, your ego elements like body, thoughts, emotions, etc., as the illuminating tools to help you practice experiencing your True Nature, that of Awareness itself. When rooted in this ground of your being, you continue to live this human life, but with greater perspective. You still are very aware of body, emotions, thoughts, etc, but Yoga Nidra helps to give you the perspective of what they are. Truly these elements are mere tools to help illuminate what I call your Both And Nature, the part of you that is BOTH pure consciousness (perusha) and form (pracriti), that is both that which is infinite and finite. Coming into this Both And Nature is another way of expressing the end goal of yoga as stated in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, to arrive at the place of grand Singularity, that of complete Oneness.
So this yogic Oneness is the goal and Nidra is the method. Nidra refers to that in between state, somewhere between waking and dreaming. Nidra is achieved through relaxed awareness and is the secret door that opens you to experience your True Nature. It’s as simple as listening and relaxing. In truth, what seems like sleep is actually helping us wake up to our True Nature. It sometimes takes a relaxing of the rigid confines of our rational thinking, perhaps the most pervasive and strong element of our ego, to realize that we are more than our ego.
What you listen to in a Yoga Nidra practice is all the things that filter into your Awareness. Mostly these are the elements of the ego. Understanding them as tools to illuminate our Awareness. This helps us to see things such as thoughts, beliefs, and emotions for what they are—parts of us that cannot define who we are but which point to our Divine essence. Though we may have thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, we are not thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. They are mere tools, games to play in the beautiful mortal experience, as we wake up to our Divine essence through this textured and beautiful thing called being human.
Don't Think Everything You Believe: Moving Past the Rational Mind and Understanding Thoughts, Emotions, and Beliefs
Thoughts, emotions, and beliefs are powerful elements in our lives. For many, they seem to rule our lives. Yoga Nidra is a powerful tool to understand our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs for what they are and begin to see them with a proper perspective.
Yoga Nidra is a Tantric practice. Tantra refers to a school of thought that says everything is part of a non-dualist great whole. In Tantra, the idea is that anything that suggests we are separate from anything else, is an illusion. Yoga Nidra explores perhaps our 5 greatest layers of the ego called the maya (illusion) kosha (sheath or body) By understanding our maya koshas, we can learn to not identify with the changeable parts of our beings but rather to use them as a way of exposing our True Self, Awareness.
The Pranayamaya deals in part with energy and emotions, the Manomaya kosha with mind thoughts and how thought leads to emotion, and the Vijnanamaya kosha, beliefs, dreams, the collective unconscious and even our own deep wisdom. Just like everything else in the maya kosha realms, our thoughts, emotions, and even beliefs change. To think of them as reality is a misidentification away from your True Nature, Awareness.By understanding your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs for what they are, you dismantle their control over you. Instead you begin to identify with Awareness that experiences emotions, thought, or belief, for example, without confounding your identity as that emotion, thought, or belief.
Like everything, learning to use an emotion as a method of experiencing your True Self may seem like a tall order. Of course it may take practice to be aligned with Awareness enough to become objective about harsh thoughts or emotions but hey, that's what we are practicing by taking this course, right?
The Realm of the Mind: Manomaya Kosha
Things like anxiety, fear, or heartbreak, can't co-exist while you are relaxed. That's big! It is one reason why we emphasize relaxation so often as we begin the Yoga Nidra process. When relaxed, you may then observe any emotion arise and see it for what it is: an interesting part of you that changes and that ultimately may help you grow greater Awareness. Not Truth, not who you are.
Practicing switching between perceived opposite emotions is a skillful way of stimulating your brain and allowing you to witness and be with, rather than react to, certain emotional states. Remember that sometimes this takes practice but can be very effective even from the first practice of doing this.
In the late 1950's, Joseph Wolpe added to Pavlov's work by developing a treatment for anxiety using counter-conditioning. He stated that anxiety symptoms were lessened or eliminated when stressors were presented gradually and also systematically and paired with a relaxation response. Relax and then address your emotion to see it with the right perspective. Remember you are Awareness that experiences emotion, not emotion itself. Yoga Nidra can help some practitioners deal with some of the things that give them stress and even trauma because Yoga Nidra helps you to be relaxed enough to observe all kinds of benign objects, like the sensation of your hands for example, as a way of learning to also witness things like stress and emotions with the same kind of objectivity. When practiced regularly, it weakens your stress response and instead you can merely observe something that otherwise would stress you out.
Habituation is when you bring attention to something that is persistent and in so doing the stimulation eventually loses its power to cause a reaction. It's like sleeping through white noise. Once your mind has heard the noise, can acknowledge it, it can stop becoming agitated by it and simply move on. It can relax. The sound (or other stimulation, read pain or emotions) may still exist, but they don't have the same power over your mind.
The Only Way To Get There Is To Be Here: Emotions and Beliefs
Failure to acknowledge where you are in life ironically keeps you locked in that place like a prisoner. Don't deny the emotion, for example. Rather, Yoga Nidra helps us to face whatever comes up for you and practice witnessing it. Therefore emotions will often lose their power to control your life.
Some cool things about the layer of beliefs, symbol, and dreams, the Vignanamaya kosha:
It lies beneath our rational mind. P.S. "rational" isn't Reality (with a capital R)--it's just the best way our brains seem to create an order in an otherwise chaotic world the best it can.
A compounded thought turns into a belief. Think it long enough and you actually believe it. Like everything else in this Universe, beliefs are neither True or not true. They are just beliefs. They come and go.
Archetypes are a fascinating way of examining the Vijnanamaya Kosha. When I think of a wise person, I think of Gandalf, the wizard from Lord of the Rings. He is my archetype I hold for my inner-wisdom. If I were to summon that wise person inside of me, the one that knows the answers and can tell me where to go, I'd think of Gandalf and see what he says. I know that Gandalf is really just the deep wisdom part of me.
Remember that what comes up when we examine our dreams, symbols, and archetypes, lies beneath our rational mind and therefore doesn't always make sense, nor does it need to. Just have fun with it and see if it speaks to you. If not, think of it as an interesting way to practice paying attention and move on. It's like examining your dreams for symbols that might represent something happening in the conscious realm. Just have fun with it.
As always, our primary objective with Yoga Nidra is to cultivate and identify as Awareness. Allow everything that presents itself as you welcome, recognize, and witness it, as a tool to practice Awareness.