Yoga Nidra: The iRest Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing

By Richard Miller

A new edition of this acclaimed guide—updated with the most current, research-supported iRest® practices and insights
 
Within you resides an ever-present self that is always whole and healthy, filled with an abiding sense of inner peace, and completely indestructible. This is your true Essence, and no matter what you’ve been through in the past, it is here, waiting to be recognized, embodied, and remembered.
 
In this updated edition of his groundbreaking book Yoga Nidra, yogic scholar and clinical psychologist Dr. Richard Miller invites you to experience iRest®—a research-based approach to the ancient meditative art of Yoga Nidra.
 
While Yoga Nidra is perhaps best known as a practice for deep relaxation and better sleep, at its heart lies a profound path to inner freedom. With practice, we discover that everything we need to find healing, presence, and joy is already within us.
 
With clear instruction, new insights into the deeper roots of well-being, supplemental worksheets, and online audio practices, Miller guides you step-by-step to:
 
•  Discover life-changing practices for vibrant health, personal empowerment, and inner transformation
•  Enjoy complete relaxation and deep sleep—awaken refreshed and full of inspiration
•  Find healing from trauma, addiction, chronic pain, daily stress, and more
•  Explore the Vedic roots of Yoga Nidra—we are at once unique individuals and interconnected parts of a greater whole
•  Access the state of consciousness between waking and sleeping at will and learn to work with your subconscious mind for greater healing and insight
•  Awaken to your true Essence and the unshakable goodness, health, and joy already within
 
“Wholeness, presence, and indestructible well-being exist innately within us,” teaches Miller. “With Yoga Nidra, we realize that these aren’t qualities to attain down the road—they are gifts to be experienced from the outset of whatever journey we’re on.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sounds True
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781683648987

Book preview

Cover Page for Yoga Nidra

Praise for Yoga Nidra

Whether you’re looking for deep relaxation, stress reduction, or spiritual transformation, you’re in good hands with yoga master and nondual psychotherapist Richard Miller, whose wise, warmhearted, accessible instruction in the time-honored practice of Yoga Nidra has the power to guide you all the way home!

–Stephan Bodian

former editor-in-chief of Yoga Journal, author of Meditation for Dummies, and coauthor of Buddhism for Dummies

In this collection, Richard brings us the practice of Yoga Nidra with a sophistication and power that it has not previously known in the West. Yoga Nidra is in so many ways the perfect tool for his nondual teachings, and his practices are absolutely delicious—simple, deep, and transformative. Like all authentic spiritual work, these practices produce fruit from the very beginning. They require only presence, and as such represent both the path and the goal of nondual practice.

–Stephen Cope

author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self and The Wisdom of Yoga

"Dr. Richard Miller is the ultimate teacher of teachers. In Yoga Nidra he shares from his personal experience the clear, concise path to our essential nature. Highly recommended for teachers and students on the spiritual path."

–Larry Payne, PhD

founder of Yoga Therapy Rx, coauthor of Yoga for Dummies and Yoga Rx, and author of Yoga After 50 for Dummies

"Richard Miller’s book Yoga Nidra makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of this most ancient practice. In a sea of new and often empty publications, this book deserves a place on the bookshelf of every yoga practitioner, be they beginner or teacher. Richard’s warmth and radiant presence, so familiar to his students and colleagues, ring through on every page."

–Donna Farhi

author of Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit and Bringing Yoga to Life

Richard Miller eloquently invites everyone, from all pathways and spiritual traditions, to join him in this most powerful practice of Yoga Nidra. His wise guidance is clear and inspiring. This book is a must for everyone who hears the call and feels the inner longing for enlightenment.

–Lilias Folan

author of Lilias! Yoga Gets Better with Age

Gratitude filled my heart as I turned each page of this book. It was gratitude, of course, for the deep teaching it offers. But gratitude also for the clear and gentle way Richard guides us on a most personal journey—the journey home to ourselves. This is a book to read slowly and ingest on the deepest levels.

–Judith Hanson Lasater, PhD

author of Yogabody

Whether your goal is peace of mind or the secret of enlightenment, your journey begins here. Richard Miller leads you on a journey (which you can repeat every day for the rest of your life) to discover—beneath your current mood, beneath your body’s aches and pains, and beneath your mind’s self-limiting beliefs—the ‘vastness’ of who you really are.

–Amy Weintraub

author of Yoga for Depression

Yoga Nidra

Yoga Nidra

The iRest Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing

Richard Miller, PhD

New Edition

A single word is sufficient to reveal the truth.

–Shen Hui

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Lorin Roche

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

The Open Secret

Chapter One

The Marvelous World of Yoga Nidra

Chapter Two

The Practice of iRest Yoga Nidra

Step One: The Search for Truth

Setting Your Intention

Step Two: Discovering Footprints

Affirming Your Heartfelt Desire

Step Three: Perceiving Truth

Experiencing Your Inner Resource

Step Four: Catching Truth

Sensing Your Body

Step Five: Knowing Truth

Awareness of Breath and Energy

Step Six: Taming Truth

Awareness of Feeling and Emotion

Step Seven: Riding Truth Home

Awareness of the Body of Intellect

Step Eight: Transcending Truth

Awareness of the Body of Joy

Step Nine: Truth and Self Transcended

Awareness of the Body of Ego-I

Step Ten: Reaching Source

Living the Natural State

Back in the Marketplace

Living Essential Nature in Everyday Life

Chapter Three

Final Reflections

iRest Yoga Nidra Worksheet

Examples of Opposites

Resources for Supporting Your Practice

Notes

References

Readings in Nondual Śaivism

About the Author

About Sounds True

Acknowledgments

Gratitude to Laura Cummings and Jean Klein for revealing the truth within; my wife, Anne, for her love, and for living truth with me all these years; everyone at Sounds True for their help in bringing this book into your life; and to the students, clients, and teachers I’ve worked and studied with over the decades who’ve helped me realize the truth of these precious teachings.

Foreword

Falling asleep is one of life’s great pleasures. Even sweeter is falling almost asleep and lingering there in a blissful state of total relaxation, in meditation. This is the world of Yoga Nidra, and it is one of the fundamental practices in the meditation tradition.

We all need rest. We need time to lie down and give over to the repair work that occurs during sleep. If we do not get enough rest, we can feel like we are falling apart, because the body has not had enough time in maintenance mode. Life is a rhythm of activity and rest, and to thrive we need both in proper balance. Really, it is amazing how much sleep we need—about seven to nine hours for most adult humans. Children need even more time sleeping and dreaming, and babies can sleep up to fifteen hours a day. Cats, of course, sleep up to twenty hours a day. Even ants take hundreds of little one-minute power naps every day.

Sleep is a magic power that Nature has evolved over billions of years for mending bodies and keeping us functioning at our best. As we pursue our chores and passions during the day, we get worn out; in sleep, the body’s recovery mechanisms rebuild us to be stronger than before. During the night’s sleep, the body unleashes its healing powers to wash away the fatigue of the previous day, mend our body, and rewire us to emerge better able to cope with our challenges.

Sometimes we can become more exhausted than a simple night’s healing can repair. It happens to us all. As we go through life, we can accumulate minor and major traumas, and these require something more powerful than a night’s sleep in order for healing to occur. We can also get stuck in a vicious downward spiral, where the residue of stress in our system prevents us from being able to sleep deeply. Then, the next day, because we are sleep-deprived, we are in a weaker state and more prone to becoming even more stressed.

Fortunately, Nature has equipped our bodies with additional powers of self-healing. These states of meditation are physiologically a deeper level of restfulness than sleep, while allowing us to practice while wide awake inside.

This is the realm of Yoga Nidra, where yoga = union, method, connection, and nidra = sleep. Put together, Yoga Nidra = the sleep of the yogi—a state of meditation-sleep, half meditation and half sleep, and, a state of such deep meditation as to resemble sleep. We can enter Yoga Nidra intentionally, in the way described in this book, and we can enter spontaneously, because this is a built-in capacity of the human body, part of our survival instincts. If you have ever fallen into a kind of nap, in which you were awake inside and immersed in the glow of life, then emerged after an hour or so feeling brand-new, you have experienced your own natural form of Yoga Nidra. It can feel like you just drank a magic healing potion or had a therapy session with an angel.

One afternoon I stopped by to visit my sister. As we stood in her living room, I could see that she was glowing with an inner light, the kind of radiance that shines through people who have had a profound meditation experience, or brides standing at the altar.

I said, Danielle, you look as if you have been meditating. She laughed at this absurd thought, for she had three children—a 6-month-old, and two others under the age of seven. She said, No, impossible. I barely have time to pee.

I said, But you do, you look as if you have had a deep meditative experience. You’re glowing. Tell me about your day.

Danielle described waking up at 2 a.m. to nurse the baby, sitting right there on the sofa in the living room. Since it was summer, the windows were open and she could hear the world all around and the gentle rustle of the leaves in the breeze. The baby finished nursing and fell asleep, and she sat there holding him, staying very still so that he wouldn’t wake up. I sat there in the dark for a long time, just adoring this little being, and I drifted off I don’t know where. I guess I was half asleep and half just being here. I sort of disappeared, then I was listening to the wind in the trees again and everything was peaceful, and all seemed right with the world.

This experience always come up for me as a good description of the naturally occurring Yoga Nidra state. People who love with their whole body find entrance to realms of healing. Lovers know. Painters know. Musicians know. Sailors on night watches know. Nursing mothers know.

The yogis of the past observed carefully the second-by-second changes that occur as we fall asleep or shift into meditation, and they discovered a whole world of inner riches. They cherished the gift of rejuvenation that resides in the space between our regular waking state and the sleeping state; therefore, they made sure to preserve the knowledge in the chanted literature of their sutras and tantras. In the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra it is said, Between the states of waking and sleeping there is a sacred realm of pure repose, enter this realm and bathe in the healing energies of the Supreme Goddess.

The Sanskrit of the text is poetic and evocative. It includes parā Devῑ prskāśate, where parā = beyond, supreme, Devῑ = the Goddess, the female aspect of Divine Consciousness, and prakāśa = visible, shining, brightness, splendor, glory, laughter. To paraphrase, in this delicious restfulness, it is as if you have entered the sacred healing temple of the Goddess who is Life