Rest as Ritual: Exploring Yoga Nidra

Episode 62 October 20, 2025 00:10:01
Rest as Ritual: Exploring Yoga Nidra
Deepen Your Yoga Practice
Rest as Ritual: Exploring Yoga Nidra

Oct 20 2025 | 00:10:01

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Hosted By

Lauren Leduc

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Episode Summary:
In this episode of Deepen Your Yoga Practice, Lauren Leduc explores the deeply restorative and transformative practice of Yoga Nidra, also known as yogic sleep. She unpacks its roots in yogic philosophy and tantra, explains its effects on the nervous system and brain states, and walks listeners through the key phases of a typical practice. Lauren shares how Yoga Nidra has impacted her personally and offers suggestions for incorporating it into both personal practice and yoga teaching. This episode is a beautiful invitation to embrace rest as a sacred part of the yogic path.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Foreign hello and welcome to Deep in youn Yoga Practice. I'm Lauren Leduc, the owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. And today we will deepen our yoga practices by chatting about Yoga Nidra, the art of Yogic sleep. I absolutely love this practice and cannot wait to share more about it with you. So so we'll talk about Yoga Nidra, what it is, where it comes from, why it matters, and how it can help deepen your practice and your relationship with yourself. I wasn't aware of Yoga Nidra until my initial yoga teacher training years ago, and I was absolutely amazed at how I was able to relax my body and access some deeper levels of consciousness, even getting some beautiful subconscious messages from my highest self. And since then I've loved using this practice when I can't speak, sleep, when I'm in need of inspiration, and maybe when I'm needing a deep rest but don't have time for a full sleep. And I love incorporating it into different styles of yoga, especially yin and restorative and myofascial release. It's such a wonderful complement to the different lunar practices we use in yoga to help down regulate. I've seen this practice support not only myself, but my students in an emotional, in spiritual and physical way. So I'm really excited to share more about it with you today. So what is Yoga Nidra? The little the literal translation is Yogic sleep or sleep with trace awareness. And it's a guided meditation technique that leads the body into deep relaxation while the mind remains aware. So it's not the same as regular sleep or simply napping. You're also not fully conscious and awake. It is a systematic method of releasing tension and accessing subconscious layers and puts you in this beautiful space between sleep and wakefulness. It's often practiced in Savasana or a supported Shavasana with props with very minimal movement. So it's important to be as comfortable as possible as you practice Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra has its roots in Tantra and Sankhya philosophy, though the modern practice was systemized by Swami Satyananda Saraswati in the 20th century, and since then there have been many Yoga Nidra teachers and many different methods developed over time. So I'll be talking about Yoga Nidra in a really general sense today, but know that you might hear of specific brands and teachers and methods, but they all stem from this Yoga Nidra practice. It's related to Pratyahara, or the withdrawal of the senses, which is the fifth limb of yoga, and then Dharana or concentration, which is the sixth limb, and Dhyana, or meditation, which is the seventh limb of the eight limbs of yoga. And yoga is meant to take us through these different states of consciousness that are described in yoga philosophy of waking, of dreaming, deep sleep, but most especially the fourth state, Turiya, which is pure awareness. [00:03:31] Yoga nidra deeply affects the nervous system, so it down regulates the sympathetic nervous system, or stress response, and activates the parasympathetic response, or rest and digest. [00:03:46] So if you're feeling anxious or amped up, if you're feeling a lot of tension in your body, if you've been undergoing a lot of stress, Yoga nidra is a proven and wonderful tool to help bring you more to a state of tension release and relaxation. [00:04:03] EEG studies show that the brain waves shift into alpha, theta and sometimes delta states, very similar to sleep, but with conscious awareness, which can help support reducing anxiety, depression and insomnia, it can help support hormonal balance, PTSD and trauma, recovery and creativity and neuroplasticity. It's often used with people like veterans or people who have undergone severe trauma as a method of healing so that they can find safety and relaxation in their bodies again. So a typical yoga nidra practice is structured in a specific way. First, you start with settling the body, so that's finding comfort within savasana, welcoming in stillness, making sure that you can lay still for a while. Then you set a sankalpa. And sankalpa is a heartfelt intention that's stated in present tense. So it might be something like, I am calm, calm, I am compassionate. Whatever your heartfelt desire is, you can set at that time. Then we go into something called rotation of consciousness. This typically involves a body scan and drawing awareness quickly through each body part. After that, we do breath awareness, which is observing the natural breath. Sometimes it involves things like counting breaths. After that, we go into what's called opposite sensations. So we visualize and imagine these different opposite sensations in the body. Things like feeling hot and then cold and heavy and then light. After that, we go usually into a visualization. So that's some kind of guided imagery, maybe a journey, something like that. Maybe it's nature scenes that someone would talk you through and you can envision yourself doing. After that, we return to sankalpa or reinfirm, reaffirm. This intention we set at the beginning of the practice and then we reintegrate, so we come back to our bodies. It's like coming out of Shavasana. You might find some movement, your breath, becoming very aware of the Present moment because you will feel like at this point you have gone on this journey, that you've maybe even been in a different place in a way. So this grounds us back to the present moment, reintegration. And there are so many different ways to explore Nidra, different themes, Nidra for different needs, et cetera. Really the sky is the limit, but that's typically how it goes. There are so many benefits to Yoga Nidra nervous system regulation being one of them, which can relieve stress and improve your sleep, emotional healing, so accessing and releasing of some conscious patterning. And we can do that by using the Sankalpa through spiritual insight. So this pure awareness, access to our intuition that can come when we really relax our bodies and that being said to creating creativity and clarity as well. And it can help support students at any physical ability level. So this is truly for anyone and it's especially helpful for people with chronic pain, fatigue or limited mobility. This can even be done in a hospital bed. So it's a very accessible practice for any physical ability level. So how can you incorporate Yoga Nidra into your practice or into your teaching? If you're a yoga teacher, you can start maybe with short practices, 5, 10, 20 minutes long and then build up to longer sessions, 30 to 45 minutes. When you have the time, you can practice in restorative Shavasana or supported rest postures. [00:07:49] So when you're practicing yoga, maybe at home you can put on a Yoga Nidra for your Shavasana and really enjoy it. In that way you might use a recorded script. There are so many different Yoga nidra recordings online to choose from on YouTube, insight, timer, et cetera. So you can find one that looks good, maybe one where you connect with the teachers voice. Because you're going to be listening to the voice the whole time. And for teachers, you might learn to lead it yourself. We offer Yoga Nidra training in our 300 hour training at True Love Yoga. And we have an amazing book that we're using for that that provides all kinds of different Yoga nidra scripts. So endless inspiration for a teacher. And this can be a really wonderful addition to yoga workshops, to retreats, to trauma sensitive settings, maybe as a practitioner too, to just your bedtime or your midday rest anytime that you need restore. I hope this episode inspires you to try Yoga Nidra this week. Whether you're using a recording, an app or attending a live class, rest is a powerful act of devotion and of healing. We can't just schedule in our movement and our fire. We also need to incorporate this lunar side this rest, this restoration into our practices, to cultivate balance and to fuel our purpose and our behaviors, to fuel our ideals, to receive inspiration. [00:09:19] We can't just do, do, do all the time. We need time to pause and just be. And those two things really fuel each other in our lives. And Yoga teachers, I'd love for you to join me for our 300 hour YTT starting in January. [00:09:34] You'll learn to write and lead your own yoga NIDRA scripts, explore variation and energetics, and integrate NIDRA into your yoga teacher offerings. Thank you everyone so much for joining today. Let me know if you'd love to learn more about the Lunar Arts of Yoga. I'm so happy you're here. Om Shanti. Om. Peace.

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