I’ve been teaching Yoga Nidra since 2008. While I initially took Dr. Richard Millers iRest Yoga Nidra training and have the deepest respect for that method, I do not teach that method. Instead, I’ve learned volumes about the fascinating and spiritually illuminating subject of Yoga Nidra by simply doing the practice and studying many teachers. I have since developed my own Yoga Nidra training and Yoga Nidra scripts which I feel gives teachers the power of understanding Yoga Nidra’s “what” and “why” so that they can deliver the practice in their own voice based on certain essential principles derived from their own experience.
My teaching style is based on using the koshas to explore the ego as a tool to illuminate the other half of your being, your Awareness. I encourage students to welcome anything and everything that arises into their Awareness, to acknowledge it for what it is with as much objectivity as possible, and learn to merely observe it. Doing so opens practitioners to the magical opportunity of responding rather than reacting to stimuli, not only in the practice of Yoga Nidra but more usefully in the practice of life. After all, Krishnamurti said that “The highest form of intelligence is the ability to observe without evaluating.”
I teach that what we seek to accomplish in Yoga Nidra is to wake up to our True Nature, one that is not bound by the limits of the ego nor is that of pure consciousness, but rather what I call the Both And Nature which is the beautiful express of consciousness meets form.
One of the tools I use regularly to arrive at the beautiful experience is using opposites during a Yoga Nidra practice.
We use the practice of exploring a binary and then attempt to hold the opposites in our Awareness in order to pop out of ego consciousness, limited to experiencing the world as this or that, and instead experience ourselves as Awareness itself. Ego exists only in a realm of this or that. Awareness is the Singularity, the place where everything exists as part of the larger whole. There are no opposites in Awareness, it's non-binary. Holding opposites together in your Awareness is a simple and useful tool to help you experience yourself as Awareness itself. Eventually, this will then lead you to experiencing your life in your Both And Nature, the marriage of the ego and Awareness.
After establishing the feeling of being Awareness itself, perhaps arrived at by holding opposites like the sound of my voice and the feeling in your heart, you then reinforce and deepen this feeling throughout your Yoga Nidra practice as you go move further into your layered Awareness by exploring the koshas. Remember that whatever you are aware of reveals Awareness itself. You can use opposites to illuminate Awareness in the realms of body (anamayakosha), for example, by first bringing attention one's to right hand, then left, then holding right and left simultaneously in Awareness. You can do this in other koshas too by holding opposite emotions or thoughts or beliefs.
I tend to start a Yoga Nidra practice with an opposites exercise because it's great to begin the practice with a felt sense of Awareness, even if it's mild or somewhat contrived, rather than arriving at it in the middle or end of practice. I believe it works best to do this because we experience deepening awareness in layers rather than in a linear fashion. In other words, start by inviting the practitioners to feel themselves as Awareness right off the bat, perhaps with an opposites exercise, then continue doing it here and there
throughout the practice and in each koshas. (Remember that you don't have to do it through every koshas. Each kosha is just one way to anchor your Awareness.) Each time you invite the practitioner to experience themselves as Awareness, perhaps by doing the opposites exercise, it deepens the practitioner's Awareness. They will therefore experience the practice from that point forward with increasingly deeper Awareness. Even if you were to repeat a body scan a few times in a row, each time you go through it, provided they were reminded of being Awareness iteslf, they would experience it differently because of the layered nature of Awareness.
Again, you're not trying to divorce the ego and seek to experience yourself as only Awareness. Rather, you're using the ego to illuminate that which you would otherwise not know about yourself, the Awareness part of you, the part that always is and never changes. Ultimately as you come to know both ego and Awareness intimately, you give birth to a third thing, what I call the Both And Nature, the marriage of Awareness and form.
To continue explaining it, the ego exists in a binary, a state that sees things as this or that, me or you, have or have not. We naturally tend to identify as the ego because we define our reality by what we can see, taste, feel, etc. What's more is that it's our natural psychology makes us differentiate ourselves from other objects from an early age. Why would we know anything other than the ego? Well, we come from the place that is beyond ego, Source, and no matter how much of a seeker you are or how "spiritually minded" you want to be, we are all constantly reach to come back to our Origin, Source, home, be that consciously or unconsciously. We search every discipline imaginable to tell us what it means to be.
The Awareness part of us has no form, cannot be seen, felt, etc. This is tricky because typically we have heretofore defined everything we know as "real" based on the criteria of the ego, that which we can feel, see, taste, etc. So how can we possibly come to know ourselves as Awareness and not just the ego?
The ego is the perfect and balanced opposite of Awareness. The ego cannot exist in a vacuum any more than Awareness can. We don't transcend the ego to understand ourselves only as Awareness. In fact, the ego is our greatest tool that illuminates our Awareness and the experience of the marriage of the two gives us our True Nature, our Both And Nature. I like the analogy of a marriage, consciousness marries form and the love child between the two is YOU, a spiritual being born of Awareness and form. You are the Divine, up-leveling itself to wake up know itself more intimately. You are giving birth to yourself as you practice presence.
But arriving at experiencing yourself as this holy marriage takes a practice. We must learn how to not identify only as ego but rather as this third thing. But since ego is what we are most familiar with, what we pay most of our attention to, it actually serves as perhaps the best way to illuminate that which lies beyond the ego.
In Yoga Nidra we can practice experiencing our Both And Nature by first establishing a binary to bring opposites into our field of attention, opposites like inside/outside, me/you, body/sound. Doing so leans into the practiced attention to ego and refines your focus and attention on one thing and then the another. Then, as you try holding them together, simultaneously in your Awareness, your ego freaks out and experiences cognitive dissonance because it only knows a world of this or that and never the twain shall meet, at least according the the ego. While these two things seem like complete opposites, they share something so obviously in common that it's as easy to miss as the nose on your face. What these two apparent opposites have in common is that you are aware of them. What you're aware of reveals Awareness itself. When you hold opposites simultaneously in your Awareness, your consciousness is forced to leave the realm of the binary to experience that which exists in the grand Singularity, Awareness itself.
Learning to regularly experience the Awareness part of your being through practices such as Yoga Nidra, forever alters your self-concept. You no longer feel yourself as only ego. Instead you begin to feel your Both And Nature, the beautiful marriage that joins finite and infinite, body and spirit, form and consciousness. Living life in your Both And Nature doesn't make you blind to the ego, the natural textures, emotions, and vicissitudes of life. Quite the opposite. Living life from your Both And Nature helps you to begin to see every molecule in the world as an opportunity to practice presence, Awareness. The entire world, with its flavors, textures emotions, and even challenges, exists as a testament to your own Beingness. Every sunrise, every rainy afternoon, every breakup is somehow a love letter from the Universe, form whispering to consciousness, "Wake up! Watch this! I've made it just for you!"
Truly anything that helps you to be present has the capacity to do this for you but Yoga Nidra is a great and easy way of doing it. Powerful and effective. Plus relaxing. The opposites exercise is just one mechanism to help practice.
This reminds me of the Sermon of the Flower, origin of Zen Budhism where the Buddha gathers his disciples and without a word holds up a single flower. Most are mute with confusion by this gesture but Mahakasyapa smiles with understanding. He understands that this flower has the same beingness as everything else in the Universe. Words cannot explain this knowing. Mahakasypa experiences the marriage of form and consciousness. He hears what every object in the universe is whispering, including this humble flower is whispering the truth, that every thing exists in the marriage of form and being.