Yoga nidra is a powerful healing practice that can help rewire subconscious habits and beliefs that may be harmful to your being. Unlike other guided meditations, yoga nidra has specific, intentional stages, allowing the brain to drift from fast thinking beta waves, to slower alpha and theta waves. This does wonders for you in many ways:
- Your mind relaxes and gets cleared of clutter, improving problem solving, learning, and creativity
- With alpha brain waves, serotonin is produced, elevating mood. Anxiety and depression were significantly reduced with yoga nidra, in several studies.
- Through the stages of yoga nidra, we enter into the subconscious. Here, we can reprogram our self-concept with more positive beliefs.
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Two of my favorite stages in yoga nidra are the Feeling of Opposites and Rapid Imagery. These two stages help our emotional regulation.
Feeling of Opposites is where we’re asked to feel one thing, and then feel its complete opposite. We then go back and forth b/t the two. And eventually, we’re asked to feel both at the same time.
For ex: Feel anxious. Extremely worried and anxious. Now feel calm and stable. Grounded. Go back to feeling anxious and worried. Notice the sensations in your body. Now go back to feeling calm and grounded. Stable and secure in yourself. Now feel both at the same time. Meld the feeling of anxious and calm together.
What is this doing for us? We are neutralizing emotions. When we can experience both sides at the same time, we take the “positive” and “negative” charges out of them. This gives us the tools to change our reactions to emotions and how they affect us. In a state of deep relaxation, we can practice being the witness to our range of feelings, without getting dragged into extremes. In this practice of opposites, we can learn to be more neutral to our emotions when they arise.
In the next stage of Rapid Imagery, we are given words to visualize. At times these words may evoke certain feelings within us. Words such as Jesus Christ, a full moon, a spider, a lotus flower, skeleton bones, the rising sun.
These images may evoke certain feelings within us. For example, if we “hate spiders”, we will have reactions to them based on fear. Where did this fear come from and why is it embedded into our subconscious so much that we may try and avoid spiders as much as possible?
It’s in this layer of the practice that we get to see and release our unconscious beliefs that are stored in our subconscious from a relaxed, neutral state.
Yoga Nidra works its magic by bringing you into deeper layers of yourself.
Going through the stages of yoga nidra, we can become the Witness, transcend the ego, and dive into our true nature. This practice can be for pure relaxation, but it can go beyond that. It has the power to help us rewire our habits and thought patterns, and all we have to do is lay down and listen.
Find the Yoga Nidra meditation that works for you.
To work through a specific issue, you can set an intention at the beginning of your yoga nidra practice. Most guided meditations have a space for this in the beginning. Some yoga nidra meditations are well written to a specific theme such as Letting Go, Self-Love, Trust, etc. These are valuable when you know the issue you want to work on.
If you’d like to listen to a yoga nidra meditation to work through a particular issue, I’d be happy to customize a guided meditation for you. Let me know what you’re looking for in the form below.