Yoga Nidra

by Richard Miller, Ph. D.

  From the very beginning there has been total paradox when I feel something; what Jean Klein calls the “absence of the absence.” I was in the grocery store late one evening when anonymity seems that much easier. There came a moment when the body felt overwhelmingly transparent; a feeling of well-being beyond anything physical; a transparency in which the body was wholly missing. I laughed! I would not have been surprised to find that I truly was invisible to others. It is beautiful to be anonymous. If only everyone knew what this really meant. It is indescribable. It makes itself. You need do nothing.9

  While it is easy to prove that matter is actually empty spaciousness, that we are not separate from the objects around us, and that the “I” is a fictitious entity without substance, unless we find a way to embody these understandings, they remain intellectual formulations that have no substantive impact on our lives. Scientists who make these incredible discoveries go home at night to their families as if they’ve discovered nothing of significance. Our lives don’t change just because we’ve intellectually uncovered the fact that “I” doesn’t exist and that our Real Nature is empty spacious Being that is the Source of everything. Talking schools of nondualism have existed for millennia. What we’re after is firsthand experience that deeply impacts our daily life and significantly changes our negative beliefs and destructive habit patterns.

  FIRSTHAND KNOWING

  Yoga Nidra insists that intellectual insight gives way to heartfelt, experiential firsthand understanding. It is one thing to understand facts conceptually. Yoga Nidra beckons you to understand them as your actual embodied experience. Living embodied wisdom frees you from anxiety, fear, and doubt, replacing them with equanimity and an inner gyroscope of unshakable stability.

  During Yoga Nidra, we directly face all the changing movements of the body, mind, senses, and the world around us while we undertake simple and direct inquiries. We believe that “I am a separate entity distinct from all others.” During Yoga Nidra, we inquire, “Is this true? What is life like when I believe that this is true? What is it like when I don’t take this to be true?”

  We believe we are a body and when the body dies, we die. We inquire, “Is this true? Am I this body or is it that this body exists in my awareness?” And, if this is so, “Who am I as this awareness?” When we experience anxiety or fear we inquire, “Am ‘I’ afraid or is it that fear is arising in me?” We ask, “Who or what is this awareness in which fear, anxiety, and depression are arising?” When we are stuck in negative thought patterns we inquire, “If this thought is a movement in ‘me,’ who, what, and where is this ‘I-ness’?”

  In order to truly answer these questions and discover unshakable equanimity and the unqualified Presence of Being, we must relinquish our secondhand beliefs based on the testimony of others. Yoga Nidra offers you simple but exquisite tools to gain firsthand knowledge of who you are and how the universe really works. Only then can you be your own authority, free from the tyranny of “shoulds” and the opinions of others, a light unto yourself.

  WITNESSING

  When we struggle to change what is into what we believe should be, we invite stress, tension, and conflict into our life. Our constant struggling to change our inner and outer world is a movement born in conflict that creates division. The impossibility of resolution that is inherent in this struggle leads us to feel chronically tense, tired, confused, and stressed. Paradoxically, it is only when we accept our situation as it is, that we are able to gain insight that allows us to move into new ways of being and responding. Acceptance, however, doesn’t mean resignation, which is still a stance of defense against truly accepting what is.

  Yoga Nidra teaches you how to be aware of and experience the ever-changing internal and external phenomena of your life. Yoga Nidra does not ask you to change anything. It asks only that you observe your habitual tendency to want to change things into something other than what they are. True witnessing, which Yoga Nidra develops, invites clarity of insight and right action as natural and spontaneous outcomes of seeing things as they are. Witnessing, insight, and right action are synonymous with love and compassion, and all are essential qualities of your innate True Nature. Witnessing awareness, which Yoga Nidra reveals, enables you to see all sides of an issue with discriminative wisdom and love. Only through love and discriminative wisdom can you understand and engage truly authentic action that is appropriate to each situation.

  DON ‘T WITHDRAW, DISIDENTIFY

  During Yoga Nidra, you learn to disidentify from distracting sensory impressions and habit patterns (Sanskrit: pratyahara = “restoration of the senses and mind to their natural functioning”), which allows you to recognize right action and abide as your innate spacious clarity of Being. The image of a turtle with its head drawn inside its shell is sometimes cited to represent meditation as a drawing away from the world. But Yoga Nidra does not entail withdrawing from the world. You are born with the innate knowledge of how to naturally let go of and resolve stressful situations while remaining in the field of world and action. Yoga Nidra helps restore your natural aptitude to see and respond clearly to each situation you face.

  When you are in a room with a loudly ticking clock, you don’t need to withdraw from or block out the ticking sound. When you are open to hearing sound without resistance, when you don’t fight sound or try to get rid of it, your mind naturally transcends—disidentifies—and goes beyond the sound. While sound continues to be present, it no longer disturbs and distracts the mind. This is how we learn to deal with stressful situations and difficult emotions, thoughts, and sensations.

  During Yoga Nidra, we learn to acknowledge and welcome rather than resist and withdraw from every movement that arises in our life and consciousness. Then letting go occurs naturally and we see our way through to correct understanding and right action. You don’t have to be a yogi who lives as a tortoise with your head tucked inside your shell. Yoga Nidra teaches you how to be a yogi who is open to experiencing every movement of life. Your willingness to fully experience life is, paradoxically, what allows you to transcend each experience and live your True Nature in the midst of the circumstances of life.

  THE LAW OF AWARENESS

  The power inherent in Yoga Nidra is based on the Law of Awareness. Whatever you are willing to be with, you go beyond. Sensory impressions and habit patterns that you neither resist nor get involved in expand and pop, dissolve, and disappear, like bubbles rising to the surface of a lake. All movements of sensation, thought, and emotion expand as they come to the surface of your awareness. As they expand, they may appear to be momentarily troublesome. But they are simply seeking the surface, and, when you don’t resist, they disintegrate into the spaciousness of awareness. Whatever is allowed to merely be, as it is, in awareness, resolves, dissolves, and disappears. This truth pertains to your every experience.

  Sharon is experiencing insomnia and has heard from friends that Yoga Nidra may be a helpful resource. Nothing else has helped up to this point. During her initial session, Sharon learns to delight in the tactile flows of sensation and energy in her body and experiences a great release of tension. During her second session of Yoga Nidra, Sharon learns to welcome, rather than resist, her fear of not being able to sleep at night.

  As she invites her fear in for “tea and conversation,” she suddenly realizes that she is afraid of falling asleep. An intimate friend of Sharon’s unexpectedly died during sleep last year. Sharon unknowingly is harboring the fear that this might happen to her. As Sharon opens to her fear of dying, she feels great relief that it is not sleep that is her concern but the grief of losing a beloved friend. During four subsequent sessions of Yoga Nidra, Sharon welcomes in her grief and realizes that it is an expression of the deep love she feels for her friend. She acknowledges the preciousness of life and welcomes in the actions that she needs to take, and has been postponing, in order to deeply open into her own living. How amazing and unexpected. Welcoming her fear leads Sharon to love, engaged action, and a good night�
��s sleep.

  THE MYTH OF SEPARATION

  We mistakenly assume that the objects in our awareness are phenomena separate from ourselves. We hear sounds and greet people with the belief that they are “outside,” while all the time they are actually “inside” us—inside our awareness, inside as sensory perceptions. And because sensory impressions are not separate from the mind that perceives them, we are not separate from what we perceive. Separation is a mental projection formulated by our senses and mind in order to maintain an ordered inner and outer world of duality.

  Experience This Yourself

  • Stop reading and listen to the sounds around you for a few minutes. As you listen, notice at first that you attend to a particular sound that is arising from a particular direction.

  • After a little while, open to hearing all sounds from all directions simultaneously. Feel how the whole body participates in this global hearing, not just the mind.

  • After a few moments, instead of orienting to sound, feel yourself as the awareness in which all sounds are arising. Feel how the thinking mind must stop in order for you to be awareness.

  • Abide as awareness even as sounds move in you.

  • Now try the same exercise with the eyes and seeing.

  In the moment of perceiving, thinking is absent and your thought of being a perceiver is absent. Ego-I is an afterthought that comes five hundred milliseconds after perception takes place.10 The mind, as the ego-I thought, appropriates what is actually a past event and says, “I am having this perception.” In so doing, the mind, through the action of thinking, divides perceiving into an apparent two (perceived and perceiver).11 But the fact remains, in the moment of perceiving, the ego-I is actually absent, and there is only multidimensional perceiving.

  Now carry this understanding to its conclusion. When you abide in perceiving without separating from True Nature or Being, separation is absent, even as Being, perceiving, and perceptions continue. Every “thing,” every perception, is unfolding in perceiving, and perceiving is unfolding in Being. When you embody this realization, identification with thinking stops (even as thinking continues), the ego-I dissolves, and perceiving reveals Being.

  We may be able to repress an experience, but we cannot, ultimately, get rid of it. Everything moves through its unique cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death. Your attempts to control do not change this natural cycle. Better that we allow everything to be just as it is. Things are just as they are anyway, aren’t they?

  When you accept and welcome what is, struggling stops, conflict ceases, the restless mind subsides, and your underlying nature as unqualified Being spontaneously shines forth. When you live as Being, you understand that nothing is lacking. Your True Nature is complete and resides in equanimity. You don’t need to do or obtain in order to “be” happy. You now act not from lack, but from wholeness. You act, not to become, but because it is natural and right to act.

  WELCOMING

  Refusing creates conflict. What you refuse is repressed into the unconscious, and whatever lives in the unconscious is projected out into the world. When you reject anger you project anger into the world. You judge others because you judge your own actions. When you stop judging “self,” you stop judging “other.”

  Embodying this understanding is powerfully transformative. When we stop trying to change and learn to be aware, magic happens. Awareness is like fire. Fire purifies, and awareness purifies. Fire doesn’t judge. It simply burns away the impurities of what is placed within its presence. During Yoga Nidra, we learn to rest in and abide as the fire of awareness. This is the action of welcoming all that is, which is founded upon the insight that trying to change what is always fails. When we rest in and as the fire of awareness, we cease trying to be different and are open to the unknown, welcoming without goal or intention.

  When we do not accept ourselves as we are or life as it is, we engage in self-hatred. Nonaccepting is a form of self-loathing. When we wish our experience to be other than it is, we fight with reality. And reality always wins. The paradox of welcoming is that it leads to spontaneous transformation. When we relinquish our attempts to change the world or ourselves according to some belief about how we think things “should” be, insight and right action spontaneously arise to the surface of awareness. Then you will live in welcoming for its own sake because of the joy and freedom it brings.

  David has spent many sessions of Yoga Nidra learning to welcome the myriad sensations, emotions, and thoughts that endlessly pass through his body and mind. David’s attention, no longer absorbed in these movements, is now free to turn into and examine welcoming itself. With a few words of encouragement, he begins to discern the difference between being a welcomer and being Welcoming, wherein his sense of being a separate ego-I dissolves and he feels himself as Being, expressing itself as Welcoming.

  David later reports that during this session all sense of separation “melted away, and I was absorbed in a great ocean of joy that seemed to be everywhere, and quite independent of any particular experience. I felt myself basking in my own sunshine. My body felt completely disarmed by a sense of boundlessness that took me into itself. I felt an extraordinary aliveness, that the body was alive in me. I felt a bit overwhelmed when I realized the real force of that aliveness was not coming from my physical body. Quite the opposite. Thoughts and experiences continued, but I felt myself to be the aliveness in which they came and went. Actually, let me restate that. I feel myself, even now, to be aliveness in which everything is coming and going.”

  DAILY LIFE

  It is wonderful to bear witness to people from all walks of life awakening to their unqualified Presence through this exquisite practice of Yoga Nidra. And what is equally beautiful is to hear how it is transforming their daily life and relationships. David’s glimpse of True Nature continues to saturate his daily life. Problems still occur, but for him nothing seems to diminish the aliveness that he has uncovered. Several months later, David continued his report.

  I see clearly now that my daily experiences are discontinuous. My mind’s activity obscures the underlying Being. So, in fact, Being is the continuity . . . everything else is completely contingent upon Being. I see the forcefulness with which my mind gets in the way of observation . . . and I am continually being transformed by this seeing. I am completely astonished by the turning into what I really am that is happening on a day-to-day basis in my life. And nothing seems to hinder this from happening. My relationships are completely different now because my relationship to myself is totally different. I would never have thought this possible.

  So now let’s look into the actual practice of Yoga Nidra and see how it can transform your life, too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE PRACTICE OF YOGA NIDRA

  Our mind needs consistent training in order to break free of habits that cause tension and conflict and keep us away from our natural state of peace. It is not difficult to resolve conflict when we know what to do. Patient practice brings success and bears its rewards of love, openness, and right action.

  SHEATHS OF SEPARATION

  Western science and Yoga acknowledge three constantly changing states: the physical, mental, and energetic, which Yoga further divides into six sheaths or bodies (Sanskrit: kosha = “sheath,” “body”) and one underlying Essence of True Nature that is changeless. Yoga Nidra reveals that aversion and attachment (not wanting what is to be as it is) to any changing state are the driving forces that fuel chronic stress, pain, conflict, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and lack of peace. Yoga Nidra is a process that enables you to find and relinquish your hidden aversions and attachments associated with each of these changing sheaths of phenomena.

  Each stage in Yoga Nidra addresses a particular sheath. As you move through the stages, stress, conflict, and constriction melt away, disclosing authentic insight and right action, and uncaused happiness, contentment, and peace that exist independent of all changing states of body, mind, and senses. During an individual s
ession of Yoga Nidra, you work with a particular sheath, several sheaths, or all the sheaths in succession.

  Sheaths and Stages of Yoga Nidra

  • Stage 1—Physical Body (annamaya kosha):

  Awareness of sensation

  • Stage 2—Energy Body (pranamaya kosha):

  Awareness of breath and energy

  • Stage 3—Emotional Body (manomaya kosha):

  Awareness of feelings and emotions

  • Stage 4—Body of Intellect (vijñanamaya kosha):

  Awareness of thoughts, beliefs, and images

  • Stage 5—Body of Joy (anandamaya kosha):

  Awareness of desire, pleasure, and joy

  • Stage 6—Body of Ego-I (asmitamaya kosha):

  Awareness of the witness or ego-I

  • Stage 7—Natural State (sahaj):

  Awareness of changeless Being

  Keep in mind that sheaths are only conceptual tools used to organize Yoga Nidra in order to practice in a consistent manner. Yoga Nidra does not require that you believe anything. The only requirement is that you practice and discover for yourself the intrinsic healing power of Yoga Nidra.

  Each sheath may be likened to a territory we travel to. Upon arrival, we explore and map out the landscape of each sheath, getting to know it, all the while welcoming the various sensations, thoughts, emotions, and images that we encounter along the way. We learn to relinquish our identification with all internal and external movements and just be in this moment as it is and as we are. This may be difficult to grasp because you are habituated to identifying with your thoughts, emotions, and sensations. Yoga Nidra affirms, “Stop identifying with your thoughts. Then solutions will appear, and conflict and disharmony will dissolve.”