General Guidelines For Practicing Yog Nidra

1 - Kirti Tarang Pande

Official Website, Instagram, Twitter

Mandala Courtesy: Bhavana Agarawal, Instructor, Home Yogis' Home

1. Yog Nidra is usually practiced for 1 or 2 ghatika, i.e. 20 or 40 minutes.
2. Light and loose clothes should be worn for the practice.
3. There are separate Yog Nidra practices for – therapy, learning and for spiritual progress.
4. The practice rooms should be quiet, well ventilated, the temperature should be neither hot nor cold, and semi dark.
5. Television, music, mobile and other forms of distractions should be turned off before starting this practice.
6. Shavasana is the recommended posture for Yog Nidra. This minimizes touch sensations by eliminating contact between the limbs of the body. Fingertips are extremely sensitive organs of tactile sensations, therefore palms are turned upwards. In order to, eliminate the sight stimuli, eyes are kept shut.
7. During the meditation, the instructions should be followed with gentle awareness. Please do not concentrate or hold your breathe.
8. Staying awake is the most important aspect of Yog Nidra.
9. While focusing of sound, no sensory impressions are to be forcibly excluded. Thoughts should not be forcibly excluded. On application of force, just like a wild horse, mind too gets disturbed and restless. The best way out is- not to accept or reject any sensory impression or thought. If sensory impressions are coming, allow them to come, if thoughts are coming let them come, just don’t pay any attention to them. After sometime, mind loses interests in external world and automatically becomes quiet. This methid of calming the mind is called Antar Mouna. It prepares the consciousness to practice Yog Nidra.


Want to know more? Read...

1. Nyasa Tantra and Yog Nidra
2. What is Yog Nidra
3. How to stay awake during Yog Nidra?

On unrelated note, suggested reading:

1. Orgasm and Yoga



2. Yoga Kit for Surviving Heartbreak

How to stay awake during Yog Nidra?

- Kirti Tarang Pande
Official Website, Instagram, Twitter

Mandala Courtesy: Bhavana Agarawal, Instructor, Home Yogis' Home

At beginner’s level, it’s very common to fall asleep. That’s why at Home Yogis’ Home before initiating a practitioner into Yog Nidra, we start with ‘Antar Maun’ meditation. This prepares the mind of the practitioner how to rest in a relaxed awareness without falling asleep.

However, if you’re practicing ‘Antar Maun’ sincerely and regularly for some time and still struggling with staying awake, then I suggest that you try the following steps:

1. Take a cold shower before practice.

2. Instead of Shavasana, practice in a sitting posture with support to keep the spine straight.

3. Take a resolve before entering the practice- I will stay awake.

How to deal with falling asleep at beginner’s level?

With love, patience and acceptance.

Initially, while practicing Yog Nidra you will fall asleep. So don’t stress too much about. Just maintain this awareness that full benefits of Yog Nidra can only be experienced by staying awake. It is more powerful that way.

So, always enter the Yog Nidra with a resolve- “I will stay awake throughout the process”, eventually, this resolve with turn into reality.

However, till that happens, treat your mind and practice with love and patience. We are not training our mind, we are transforming it by becoming its friend and just hanging out with it.

If you are practicing it with a trained teacher, who have nothing to worry because a trained teacher knows- when you’re falling asleep and how to bring you back without pulling you out of deep relaxation.

If you’re practicing it with a recording, like the one on Home Yogis’ Home’s youtube channel, then a little effort is required from your side.

When you fall asleep while listening to it; let the recording play anyway. This will work at unconscious level. Then, replay the recording first thing in the morning after waking up, with direct attention. This will create a bridge between your unconscious and conscious mind.

In fact, Swami Satayananda Saraswati propounded this as a very effective learning method.

Want to know more? Read... 1. General guidelines for practicing Yog Nidra
2. What is Yog Nidra
3. Nyasa Tantra and Yog Nidra

On unrelated note, suggested reading:

1. Orgasm and Yoga

2. Yoga Kit for Surviving Heartbreak

Nyasa Tantra and Yog Nidra

- Kirti Tarang Pande
Official Website, Instagram, Twitter

Mandala Courtesy: Bhavana Agarawal, Home Yogis' Home

What is Nyasa Tantra?

Nyasa means to place and Tantra means technique, this makes Nyasa Tantra a technique of physically and/or mentally placing matrikas on the body parts of the sadhak.

Some tantrics view Nyasa Tantra as a practice of ‘divinizing the body’.

Yog Nidra and Nyasa Tantra

Until Swami Satyananada Saraswati popularized it, Yog Nidra remained as a lesser known practice of this tantric sect.

It used the powerful technique of Yog Nidra to rotate the consciousness in the body. Through this rotation, physical body is consecrated by higher awareness/divine consciousness. In short, this technique is used by tantrics to dissolve negative karmas and hence become ‘devata-maya’.

Swami Satyananda was the first yogi of modern times to pull Yog Nidra out of tantric rituals which were difficult to incorporate in the daily practice of a common man. Thus, making it relevant to our times.

The practice of Yog Nidra in Nyasa Tantra

In Nyasa Tantra a session of yoga sadhana is closed with Yog Nidra.

Yog Nidra is practiced in sitting posture. First the name of a body part is recited and then corresponding matrika is placed/touched/experienced upon that part.

Angushtadi-Shadanga-nyasa and Hridayi-Shadanga-nyasa is two common Yog Nidra practices amongst modern tantrics of Nyasa sect.

Want to know more? Read...1. General guidelines for practicing Yog Nidra
2. What is Yog Nidra
3. How to stay awake during Yog Nidra?

On unrelated note, suggested reading:

1. Orgasm and Yoga


2. Yoga Kit for Surviving Heartbreak

What is Yog Nidra?

- Kirti Tarang Pande
Official Website, Instagram, Twitter

Mandala Courtesy: Bhavana Agarawal, Instructor, Home Yogis' Home

Yog Nidra (yogic sleep) is a state between sleeping, dreaming and wakefulness.

 At the beginner’s level, Yog Nidra is a state of dynamic sleep. As we go deeper into practice we realize that it’s an experience far beyond all this.

It is a psychic sleep, a state of deep relaxation with inner awareness. It is a spontaneous point of contact with the subconscious and unconscious dimensions.

Where it came from?

The first available reference to Yog Nidra is found in ancient Hindu text- Mandukya Upnishad, written in late 5^th century BCE.
While discussing the four stages of consciousness with respect to the scared utterance of Om (AUM), Mandukya Upnishad talks about Yog Nidra as-

An awareness of consciousness in a deep-sleep state leading to the unraveling of Prajna(highest and purest form of wisdom).

In Raja Yoga, rishi Patanjali refers to Yog Nidra as an aspect of Pratyahar, which leads to higher states of dharna (concentration) and Samadhi. He calls it a state where the mind and mental awareness are dissociated from the sensory channels.

The method:

Yog Nidra, the practitioner is guided by the Guru to turn inwards, away from the outer experiences. The entire process is an attempt to separate the consciousness from external awareness and from sleep. This sieved consciousness is used as a mind transformation tool.

Practice of Yog Nidra

These days Yog Nidra is most commonly used as guided relaxation technique, as a learning tool and as a therapy for insomnia, post traumatic stress disorder and other psychosomatic conditions.

However, traditionally, Yog Nidra is a practice of Mantra Yoga and Nyasa Yoga wings of Yoga.

In Mantra Yoga, Yog Nidra is practiced with the chant of AUM or SOHAM, to invoke the presence of a deity, in the body of a practitioner. This visualization meditation is performed before pooja.

While in Nyasa Tantra, Yog Nidra is performed at the end of the practice as a meditative technique to harmonize the deeper unconscious and awaken the inner potential.

Home Yogis’ Home and Yog Nidra

We infuse the essence of both Nyasa Tantra and Mantra Yoga in the practice of Yog Nidra. For the ease of practice, we have extracted the ritualistic practices of Nyasa Tantra from Yog Nidra. In all this, our attempt is to keep the practice as close to its original source Mandukya Upnishad as possible, while making it adaptable for our modern minds.

Therefore, we teach this powerful technique as a bedtime practice.

Caution:

While we always underline that learning to relax consciously is the step 1 in the practice of Yog Nidra, sleep isn’t regarded as relaxation. In fact, from a yogic point of view, sleep is nothing more than a sensory diversion. Therefore, the biggest challenge of our modern minds in the practice of Yoga Nidra is- to maintain a relaxed awareness and not fall asleep.

What’s the solution?  

            

Go step by step. At Home Yogis’ Home, we approach Yog Nidra through following stages and until a practitioner is comfortable with a stage we do not jump to the next one:

Stage 1:

Initiation into ‘Antar Maun’ meditation, to familiarize the practitioners with the process of resting in a relaxed awareness.

Stage 2:

Preparing the mind through a special ‘preparatory meditation’.

Stage 3:

We touch the surface of Yoga Nidra through four-point Pratyahar.

Stage 4:

Initiation into Yog Nidra.

Want to know more? Read...

1. General guidelines for practicing Yog Nidra
2. How to stay awake during Yog Nidra
3. Nyasa Tantra and Yog Nidra

On unrelated note, suggested reading:

1. Orgasm and Yoga
2. Yoga Kit for Surviving Heartbreak