There are mornings when eight hours of sleep doesn’t seem to have done the job. The body has been in bed all night, but the mind apparently worked the late shift—sorting through yesterday, rehearsing tomorrow, returning to conversations that ended years ago.

 

Sleep and rest, it turns out, are not necessarily the same thing.

 

That distinction lies at the heart of an old practice with a name that can be slightly misleading: Yoga Nidra.

 

The Sanskrit word nidra means sleep, and Yoga Nidra is often translated as “yogic sleep.” But the objective isn’t simply to fall asleep. The practice moves toward that interesting territory between ordinary wakefulness and sleep, allowing the body to become deeply relaxed while some degree of awareness remains.

 

You may already know something about that territory. It is the place we occasionally visit just before sleep, when thoughts begin to lose their ordinary logic, or during an afternoon rest when we’re no longer completely alert but haven’t quite drifted off to sleep.

 

Yoga Nidra provides a structure for entering it intentionally.

 

And despite the word yoga, nobody is going to ask you to stand on one leg.

 

The practice is generally done lying down, traditionally in the yoga posture known as shavasana, or corpse pose. A teacher’s voice guides attention through the body and breath and may introduce sensations, imagery or an intention. There are no poses to master and very little to “do” in the conventional sense.

 

For people familiar with meditation, some of this will sound familiar. Yet many forms of meditation ask us to sit upright and sustain alert attention. Yoga Nidra deliberately moves us closer to the relaxed state of sleep.

 

An Old Idea, a Modern Practice

Yoga Nidra has ancient roots. The term itself appears in centuries-old Indian texts, and elements associated with today’s practice can be traced to older yogic and tantric traditions. One important antecedent is nyasa, a tantric practice involving the placement of attention or mantras at different points of the body.

 

But it would be misleading to suggest that someone in ancient India was practicing precisely the same Yoga Nidra sequence taught in a class today.

 

The modern, systematic form was developed and popularized during the 20th century. Swami Satyananda Saraswati, founder of the Bihar School of Yoga, drew on older traditions and in the 1960s began presenting Yoga Nidra as an organized method of guided relaxation. His approach included stages involving an intention or resolve, movement of awareness through different parts of the body, attention to breathing, sensations and visualization.

 

Other teachers and traditions subsequently developed their own approaches. As Yoga Nidra spread in the West, it also moved beyond explicitly religious settings and into meditation, stress reduction and wellness programs.

 

Rest Later in Life

Retirement is often imagined as the period when we will finally have time to rest. Then retirement arrives. The alarm clock may disappear while worry remains. So do family concerns, grief, health questions and unfinished business. There can also be the more subtle work of adjusting to life without some of the roles that once organized our days and told us who we were.

 

We can stop working without becoming restful. That may be one reason a practice such as Yoga Nidra takes on a different significance later in life. Its appeal isn’t simply that we get to lie down. It creates a deliberate interruption in the activity of the day.

 

Spiritual traditions have been doing something similar for a very long time. Sabbath, contemplative prayer, meditation, retreat and silence all make room by interrupting activity.

 

There is a familiar idea underneath them: attention requires room. Sometimes we have to stop doing before we can notice what is already there. That doesn’t require Yoga Nidra. Prayer can do it. A walk can do it. Music can do it. Sitting quietly with a cup of coffee can occasionally do it. But some people find that structure helps.

 

A Guided Approach

One contemporary teacher of Yoga Nidra is Kelly Boys, an author, mindfulness trainer and consultant who specializes in the practice. Her work has included teaching through the United Nations and offering trauma-sensitive Yoga Nidra to incarcerated veterans.

 

Boys uses the contemporary term non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR, in describing this kind of practice. Her approach extends beyond the ordinary idea of getting a better night’s sleep.

 

Boys teaches a seven-session course through Mindful called Yoga Nidra: Deep Rest and Renewal. It begins with relaxation and then moves through purpose, core beliefs, acceptance, anxiety, transitions and, finally, sleep. Each lesson includes a guided Yoga Nidra practice.

 

Purpose and transitions are particularly relevant to later life. Who are we when a career ends — when children no longer need us in quite the same way — when a spouse is gone — when health changes what we can do — when the person we were at 50 isn’t quite the person looking back from the mirror at 70? Yoga Nidra cannot answer those questions for us. But creating some quiet space in which to consider them may have real and lasting benefits, especially in later life.

 

Taking the Next Step

Kelly Boys’ Yoga Nidra: Deep Rest and Renewal offers a structured way to experience the practice we’ve been describing. Across seven lessons and seven guided sessions, Boys moves from relaxation into purpose, core beliefs, acceptance, anxiety, transitions and sleep.
 
The course is self-paced and includes lifetime access, allowing the practices to be returned to whenever they may be useful.
 
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Yoga Nidra is contained in the paradox of its name. It takes us toward sleep while asking us, in some sense, to remain awake. And sometimes what needs rest isn’t the part of us that falls asleep.

EXPLORE YOGA NIDRA: DEEP REST AND RENEWAL

Spiritual Seniors is an affiliate partner of Mindful. If you enroll through our link, Spiritual Seniors receives a commission at no additional cost to you. We recommend resources because we believe they may be useful to our readers; affiliate relationships do not determine our editorial recommendations.

 

Related spiritual themes: meditation, sleep, spiritual wellness, yoga, yoga nidra

Reader submissions may be lightly edited for clarity and length, while preserving the writer’s original voice.