Random Access Wellness Generator 009: Yoga Nidra

I like to feel productive. I also love to stop. I’m Sleeping Beauty replanting the rose briars to keep the prince out of the garden while I nap.

Do you fear for me, a professional woman at midlife confessing that she enjoys being unproductive? If so, I get it. Non-productivity is the cardinal sin of our age. I’m therefore stoked that our virtual spinner stopped today on yoga nidra, the “sleeping meditation.”

If you already do this practice, please grab your headphones and go lie down. It’s allowed. The Generator kicked this topic out to remind us how good it is to drop everything and do nothing.

Yoga Nidra, in its modern form, is a guided meditation that leads you to a state of interoceptive awareness (my favorite!) and profound relaxation. All you do is lie down and listen to the prompts of your guide…until you don’t. Falling asleep is a wholly acceptable and likely outcome. This practice is one of the most beneficial things I ever learned as an editor. I started doing it regularly when I acquired the book Daring to Rest by rest advocate Karen Brody. Since then, Tricia Hersey's Rest is Resistance has furthered its reframing as a liberatory tool of empowerment. It is that. Yoga nidra has also been secularized as a treatment for PTSD symptoms in veterans. It is that, as well.

Just now, the writing wasn’t going well. I stopped to do the thing I am writing about. I spent a mere thirty minutes with headphones on and a pillow over my eyes, my attention guided gently throughout my body and mind. Now I’m asking myself why it has it been so dang long since I did this. My limbs feel pleasantly tingly and my mind is alert. The angst I see in my morning messages is as a cloud before the sun. I am able to write. I am able to plan. It is a mystery to me why I gave up cultivating this rested clarity gained from simple listening.

Or perhaps it is no mystery. The onus to perform and produce weighs on me here on the other side of work nearly as much as it did in my corporate days. It is still difficult to privilege rest. My dreams are so often of Getting Things Done, of problem-solving against a deadline. I wake up already feeling guilty for what I have not yet accomplished. The wheel goes ‘round and ‘round. And yet I now remember that, at a time when my personal life was melting down, a regular practice of yoga nidra helped me maintain an improbable level of productivity. I never want to go back to that level of overwork. I know you may not have a choice.

We used to have a meme posted over the watercooler at work, a supposed Hungarian proverb: “I have so much to do I am going to bed.” This is one of my mottos. If you want to make it yours, download yourself some “nidras” and let me know how it goes! I promise, you don’t even have to do it every day to feel the power of rest.

Until the next time, may you be well and very well.