Yoga nidra is a practice that teaches deep rest. To learn deep rest is to provide your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual self with restoration, rejuvenation and revival. This is a very real benefit of yoga nidra as a practice. But what if this yoga nidra state was also the experience of reality, where you have to do nothing but be? 

“The ego is like a tired old dog. We can never kill it, so put it out on the back porch, let it rest there, and step around it.” ~ Carlos Castaneda 

What is Reality?

Kamini Desai PhD teaches yoga nidra as the door to liberation and self-realisation*. Through the art of deep rest you drop into your being state, and this is the reality of who you are and cultivating the disidentification with egoic desires. 

Whatever your journey of this lifetime you will have your experiences of highs and lows. Your soul’s delight is in it all, but your personality will learn to let it all be simply an experience. Exploring archetypes as a journey is a fabulous way to shift associations and beliefs to connect to the reality of staying present and trusting your intuition for steps towards peace in all circumstances. 

How the Yoga Nidra flows

After you have settled, set your Sankalpa and connected to your body through the rotation of consciousness, you are moved into your breath. 

Observe the natural flow of your breath in and out, allowing any natural pauses to arise as feels comfortable. This provides permission to be with your breath and bridge from your physical sense feeling to non-physical feelings like emotions that flow and pause. 

The opposite sensation practice brings you to the feelings you experience when you connect to the words 'limitation’ and ‘justice’. Are these an opposite experience for your body? How do you experience these concepts in your body? As more abstract words they are deeply connected to archetypes that resonate deep in the cells. Your cells hold a history of epigenetics for these meanings to your body and impact behaviour due to these deep associations. With awareness of your feeling response you can control your reactivity and choose to inform yourself about other ways to approach what is justice and how to break free from limitations. 

The visualisation section is a journey of highs and lows through archetypes. You are taken through places, where boundaries could constrict and expansiveness could free, or you can just float through the reality of what they all are - a prompt to remain present and trust in taking one step at a time, and then you can safely move to bliss.

Enjoy the practice at the podcast or on YouTube

*Kamini Desai, PhD in “Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep”

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