Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign hello, welcome to Deep in your yoga practice. I'm your host, Lauren leduc, the owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. And today I want to talk about something so important and so vital. In fact, I didn't even know how important and vital it was until I had so little access to it, which is sleep. So I've always been a big sleeper. I've loved my sleep. When I was teenager and in my 20s I could sleep in forever. That's changed now as a 40 year old, but I never realized how much I loved sleep until a little over four years ago. I gave birth to my beautiful low sleep needs baby girl. She is, she had a lot of issues waking in the middle of the night many times. Some nights, you know, we'd wake up 10, 15 times and my body got really used to running on very little sleep and just feeling tired all the time. And I really realized how much sleep is a basic need. And it probably sounds so obvious but again, it wasn't so obvious to me until I wasn't getting what I needed anymore. So over time her sleep has improved just as she's developed and gotten older. And also I've spent more time focusing on getting better quality of sleep. I've done it in a lot of different ways. I'm happy to share some with you, but I do want to stick to more of a yogic context today. So today we're talking about yoga for better sleep using asana or posture using breath and more. So like I said, sleep is so important. It is so vital for your overall health and well being. It is so hard to function on little sleep. Some of the consequences of low or poor quality of sleep is a weakened immune system, weight gain, cardiovascular issues, heightened diabetes risk, fatigue and low energy, memory impairment, poor concentration, decreased problem solving skills, increased risk of accidents, mood swings, anxiety and depression, reduced coping skills and the long term health risks are chronic diseases, neurodegeneration and shortened lifespan. I'm so glad I didn't read this list when I was so sleep deprived because it really would've stressed me out I think. And part of my sleep journey is just the waiting game. But obviously there are a lot of poor consequences to not sleeping or getting a low quality of sleep if you're not sure how you're sleeping. I definitely recommend like getting a sleep study because there could always be airway things. I have what's called an aura ring O U R A and it's a sleep tracker. It tracks other biometrics as well in the body. But I love it for sleep. It has helped me see my sleep for exactly what it is, all broken down. What's going on with my heart, what's going on with my oxygen saturation, et cetera. And it's really helped me make better choices because I personally like tracking. I like seeing scores and stuff like that. And my personality just wants to improve it. So I'm so happy to have this yogic toolbox to pull from that has helped me improve this quality of sleep. So I will talk about about some asanas or postures for better sleep. So these you could do right before bedtime or in the evening. So I recommend getting the lights low, either no music or just listening to really calming music. Maybe getting a nice calming smell going, like lavender, if that is calming for you. And taking a few minutes in these poses to relax. And these you could even do in bed. So one is child's pose or balasana. So that's sitting back onto your heels, reaching your arms forward or even letting them just relax next to your sides with the head down onto the floor or bed and taking a few really slow, deep breaths for a couple of minutes in this posture. And it helps us kind of curl in for the day to symbolically tell the body it's time to sleep. Almost like we're in a embryo pose or something like that. And it can promote this beautiful feeling of safety, especially if the nervous system is ramped up. Another posture that is probably my favorite for sleep is legs up the wall or viparita karani. So again, you can do this on your bed, even laying down. Your bum is right up against the wall or headboard or whatever it is that you're up against and the legs are resting up and on the wall. You can even put like a pillow under your hips if you want a little extra lift there. But this helps create an inversion in the body. It starts to slow the heart. It can reduce stress levels and relieve physical. Especially if you're somebody who's on your feet a lot through the day. This pose can be like absolutely life changing. And I know that sounds dramatic, but it is true. I would hold that for a few minutes. Another nice posture you can do in bed is reclined bound angle pose or supta baddha konasana. And that is bringing your soles of your feet together, letting your knees splay apart as you lie on your back. And if you feel a lot of tension in your hips when you do this, you can slide a couple pillows or one pillow under each knee or thigh so that you don't feel like you have to engage any muscles to be in this position. I love this one for releasing the hip flexors and the psoas. And to me, when I can get a psoas, release it like automatically downregulates my nervous system. It slows things down and it helps me feel so much more relaxed. Another one, and this might seem obvious, but is Shavasana and maybe with a bolster. So you could place a pillow or a bolster underneath your knees. You might even cover your eyes with like an eye pillow and take deep breaths. Sometimes students can get confused as to what mentally is going on or energetically even in Shavasana. And I would say it's sort of can be an infuriating answer, but it's nothing. It's really a posture to just absorb. There's nothing you need to change about what you're doing. You simply just be with yourself and your thoughts and allow things to be what they are as you let the body do nothing. So maybe easier said than done, but it can promote such a sense of relaxation when you just let things be. So again, I would do these for a few minutes at a time, maybe three to five, with dim lighting, quiet space and just letting yourself not be in any kind of rush. There are also some really nice breath techniques for sleep. They are probably what I use the most when I can't sleep because maybe by this time they've already been in bed for a little while and it's just not happening for me. So one is Nadi Shodhana, which is alternate nostril breathing. And for that you plug one nostril, breathe in through the opposite nostril, you plug the nostril, you breathed in through and then breathe out through the other one. Then breathe in through that same one, plug the nostril, breathe out through the other. So I'm breathing in right, breathing out left, breathing in left, breathing out right and doing this over and over and over again, nice and slow. Another breath I love for sleep is three part breath or Durga Pranayama. This I really love. Combined with Supta Baddha Konasana or reclined cobbler's pose. Placing one hand on the belly and one hand on the heart. And you can inhale and think of the low belly kind of filling and rising first, then the upper belly, then the heart exhaling, feeling the heart lower first, then the upper belly, then the low belly. So inhale low belly, upper belly, heart, exhale heart, upper belly, lower belly. And it's almost like this beautiful ocean wave that's happening within your energy and within your body. It can really help slow things down. It's one of my favorite things to do, like toward the end of a yoga practice, but it can be really nice for sleep as well also, if anxiety is what's keeping you up. One of my very favorite breaths is brahmari pranayama, or hummingbee breath. It's really simple. You inhale through your nose and as you exhale, you hum. You just hum one note. You're not really humming like a song or anything like that, just one note. Sustain it as long as you can and continue that cycle over and over and over. And there's something about the vibration that it creates through the throat and the heart that really seems to travel elsewhere in the body and create this deep sense of calm. One of my favorite breaths for anxiety ever and for sleep. One other breath that isn't necessarily of yogic origin, but has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years, especially for calming the nervous system and for sleep, is 4, 7, 8 breath. I love doing this one if I can't sleep as well. You breathe in for a count of four, hold the breath for a count of seven, and breathe out for a count of eight. And you do that over and over and over. I might like give myself a goal of doing it 20 times or something like that if I'm laying in bed and can't sleep. And I'm usually asleep before the end of it. So I've kind of talked about using these breaths if you can't sleep. But you might also just plan ahead and do these before as part of your nighttime routine and see how, how it prepares your body for sleep. You can also use meditation and visualization to help aid sleep. So I love recorded guided meditations or yoga nidras even that include like body scans, progressive muscle relaxation, et cetera, to help prepare the body for a state of sleep. Visualization techniques are great, like imagining a peaceful environment around you or a serene place. Like it might be a place you have been in real life or not, but you know, your happy, calm place that you can go back to. Uh, and you can use mantra or affirmations like I release the day and welcome restful sleep. I release the day and welcome restful sleep. And repeat that over and over. You know, there's a reason that people have recommended counting sheep for a long time. I think the, the visualization combined with the counting, honestly combined with it being kind of boring, is a good way to find sleep. But we can make that more yogic, more intentional, more present and awareness focused by shifting to these more yogic visualizations. I also wanted to share a few Ayurvedic tips for sleep. So Ayurveda is the sister science of yoga that deals with lifestyle. So one is oil massage with warm sesame oil to calm vata dosha. And vata is the air and ether within that creates this beautiful sense of lightness and movement, but when out of balance can cause a lot of anxiety. So warm sesame oil. I'm drinking warm golden milk before bed. So that's milk milk of whatever choice you'd like with turmeric, nutmeg and honey or teas like chamomile tea or sleepy time tea. And also keeping a really consistent sleep schedule is an important part of an Ayurvedic routine. So making sure you're going to bed around the same time every night. And then I also wanted to share just some general tips for creating a sleep friendly environment. One is dimming the lights one or two hours before bed. So that might mean turning on lamps or lighting some candles rather than having on any kind of harsh overhead lighting. That also means turning off the blue light or putting on blue light glasses, maybe turning your screens to red light if that's possible. So that really means, you know, obviously this isn't like in the the old yogic philosophy text because they didn't have screen time then. But it's creating healthy boundaries around screen time at night and around just artificial light in general. It's using calming scents like lavender or sandalwood or whatever you find calming. And this is a hard one for me because I love like reading on a Kindle at night but keeping electronics out of the bedroom as much as possible. So to close sleep is so important. It's a vital part of our health. And thankfully yoga gives us some really wonderful tools to aid sleep in a world that can fry our nervous systems. Right? So many great asanas for sleep like child's pose and legs up the wall pranayama for sleep like three part breath or hummingbee breath. There's guided meditations, yoga nidras visualizations and affirmations and then really awesome Ayurvedic evening rituals like abhyanga oil massage and drinking golden milk. I'd love for you to experiment with these suggested practices. If you're having a hard time getting enough sleep or high quality sleep and let me how it's working, feel free to reach out. My email is laurenrulovyoga kc.com you can also always DM me on Instagram. I want to thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope that you get as good of quality of sleep as you possibly can. Which reminds me of one more thing is when I was getting really poor quality sleep for a long time is I would start to set an intention at night to just get the most I possibly could out of whatever sleep I was given that night. And just by being more intentional I feel like my sleep quality did improve. So I love that Yoga always teaches us to be present and conscious and intentional in everything we do. So thank you for taking this time to cultivate more intention around your sleep and thank you so much for tuning in. Have a beautiful week. Om Shanti Om Peace.
