Teaching Yoga Nidra: The Yoga of Sleep

I just spent the weekend hosting an incredible live Yoga Nidra Training, training other people not only what Yoga Nidra is about and what this incredible practice is pointing to, but also how to skillfully teach it to others. I’m always so pumped when I get done teaching trainings! Even though I’m supposed to be the one who is teaching the subject, in the process of preparing and teaching, I learn so much about it! Have you had that experience, where you’ve tried to teach or write about something but in so doing, you find yourself learning so much in the process? Crazy, right?

Photo by David Newkirk

In my training program I try to emphasize what the main principles are around Yoga Nidra and how it’s different that other types of mindfulness practices such as that Yoga Nidra:

• Is a guided meditation or practice

• Is the meditation that invites you to explore all the layers of your ego so that you may leverage them to illuminate the infinite part of you, the part that is Source itself.

• Helps you to become identified as unchanging Awareness itself through changing elements of the ego (Koshas)

• Allows you to simply welcome, recognize, and witness whatever arises rather than trying to control or find focus your mind to focus only on certain things.

• Leverages relaxation as the secret weapon to enter the liminal Nidra state, the daydream state between waking and dreaming consciousness thus blurring the conscious mind’s iron grip on “reality” and showing yourself that you’re much, much more expansive than anything that could be expressed by a binary system, that your True Nature is a Both And experience.

• Helps you to see your life and problems with astounding clarity to eliminate self-limiting beliefs, heal body/mind/sprit, and open up to your true essence with is love.

Just to name a few …

My hope is to try to teach my students what Yoga Nidra is pointing to so that they can understand for themselves how to guide people using the power of their own authentic voice to meet the needs of their own clients and students, not to mention leading themselves through the transformational practice. Once you know the what and why of the practice you don’t need a rote, dogmatic approach to do what you were naturally born to do which is to help yourself and others awaken to their True Essence.

That said, it’s nice to have some guidelines, some maps, along the way until you can create your own voice. In my training I have several scripts that come along with the training manual and in the spirit of sharing the love, I would like to offer one of my favorites scripts to you for free. It is a script that uses Yoga Nidra to anchor a person’s Awareness in their body by exploring the Anamaya kosha, the body layer of the ego. This script acts like a body scan in many ways and is very practical to help yourself or students enter an extremely relaxed state, to facilitate healing to the body by bringing deep Awareness to it, and to anchor their attention on the thing that is almost always present in our attention field, our body. It promotes calm and deep relaxation while also opening a person’s Awareness.

Feel free to use this however you’d like, however I would appreciate if you reference me.

If you would like to pre-purchase my volume of 20 Yoga Nidra scripts, ranging on practices that help you or your students achieve greater compassion, rest, goal setting, managing stress, grief, or a suite of other subjects, click the button below. Many of them are the scripts for my recently released Essential Yoga Nidra by Scott Moore Volume 1, over seven hours of Yoga Nidra recordings for every-day life.