YOGA NIDRA is a beautiful relaxation and meditation method that helps you deeply relax, rejuvenate, and therefore energize. It also increases your awareness and thus your ability to be truly present and calm. Taught at AHA! Yoga in the Himalayan Tradition, this approach to Yoga Nidra leads you to a wakeful awareness that allows your MIND as well as your body to deeply rest.
Newcomers are often surprised to learn that YOGA NIDRA is considered a master technqiue. YOGA NIDRA is taught to students to increase focus, enhance calmness of mind, master sleep, soothe and even direct the autonomic nervous system, reduce physical and mental tension, and even to alleviate pain, and encourage recovery from many illnesses and discomforts of aging.
Yoga Nidra is also known as “Yogic Sleep.” This simple sequence is also referred to as “Exercise without Movement,” as the subtle motions can be practiced by any body. It was designed by Swami Rama, and has been passed along to his students. Virginia Hill, your AHA Yoga teacher, learned it from her teacher, Rolf Sovik.
Yoga Nidra helps your body rest and therefore heal. Yet it is so much more than that. With practice, we not only rest, but learn to witness and therefore benefit from the various stages of consciousness. This is why it is indeed a master practice, and can take your personal practice and even life focus, joy, and purpose to its highest level.
This class is mainly about relaxation, as the body-mind must be fully relaxed and nourished to experience deeper states of meditation. Through subtle techniques of pleasant stretching, tension relieving exercises, guided systemtatic relaxation, and breath training, YOGA NIDRA leads to a conscious sleep. In this way, not only the body but also the mind find profound rest, which then empowers the entire system to heal.
What is the practice like? We will do a few standing warm-ups—think 1970s gym class! Shaking wrists, knees, arms, shoulders, marching, lengthening arms overhead. These are very simple: people with basic mobility to walk and get up and down from the floor can do this. This routine is easier than common yoga poses. Then we lie on the floor and first do two calming breath awareness practices. Next are some simple exercises such as lifting legs and arms, squeezing glutes, for example. The next step, also down lying down, is a tension-release exercise (hence the “exercise with no movement” moniker), another full-body breath exercise, and then a guided point-visualization technique. This then smoothly transitions into breathing in such a way to open up each side of the body, while resting in a supine position. Finally, there is a guided meditation that leads to the resting consciousness state of Yoga Nidra, a brief yet intense meditation.
Want to experience the deepest rest of both body and mind, so you feel your best? Want to save your place in our next YOGA NIDRA on Sunday, July 8, 2018?
Yes, please!
Then REGISTER HERE for two hours of gentle movement followed by deep relaxation and a brief yet intense period of meditation.
Want to hear what other students have had to say about their experience of YOGA NIDRA with me? Then check out these testimonials from recent Yoga Nidra students:
I look forward to sharing YOGA NIDRA–the practice that has changed my own sadhana (daily practice) as well as deeper, long-lasting transformation, with you!
Alligator Healing Arts Yoga 
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