Yoga Nidra for rest
Yoga nidra, is also known as enlightened sleep. I offer a Savasana including yoga nidra twice a month online. The reason I do it is because it has profound benefits to the body and the mind. The joy of it is that anyone can practice it. I encourage people to wrap themselves in blankets, use eyebags, pillows, cushions, bolsters or any suitable props to create a sense of being held and supported. Yogic sleep invites relaxation, balances the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems as well as the left and right brain. Like reducing the gears to slow down your car as you come to a halt, yoga nidra helps to downshift brain activity so that body and mind come to a rest state, with slower, restorative brain-wave activity.
My yoga and qigong practice has been the cornerstone to keeping my mental health in check in the last few months. We have all had to cope with a sense of isolation, inability to meet freely and hug or to remotely act spontaneously. We have a stress response for a reason, we need it to survive, but in order to thrive our perception of the reality of the way we are living is also something we can affect by the way we breathe, live, eat and communicate.
Taking time to rest and restore is vital to our well being and our immune system. Resilience is a powerful quality as it enables us to restore our health on every level, body, mind and spirit. The way to serve that resilience is to take time for self nourishment, being compassionate and looking after our own bodies and minds and yoga nidra actively assists the process.
To that end, I am taking a break over the Christmas and New Year period to spend some valuable time with my family to practice yoga nidra, rest, walk in nature and be present. It has been a tough year, but I have found real support through the wonderful yogis who attend my online classes on Zoom, THANK YOU to you. I hope to return to some spaces when it is possible to do so safely and I look forward to seeing those of you who used to attend my classes again then.
I hope that you too can find time to rest, pause and restore. I will be taking a break from teaching between:
Thursday 24 December 2020 and returning on Friday 8 January 2021.
“Quiet the mind and the soul will speak” - Ma Jaya
