Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Richard Miller. Richard is a master of yoga and meditation who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology. He is recognized as a leading authority on the practice of yoga nidra, and is currently teaching iRest, a healing technique he developed based on deep relaxation and meditative inquiry. Richard has recently worked with Sounds True to create an integrated book-and-audio learning program called Yoga Nidra: The Meditative Heart of Yoga.
In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” Richard and I spoke about the stages of yoga nidra, how the practice is a path to realization and self-inquiry, the nature of paradoxical sleep, and Richard’s ongoing work with soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder through the practice of yoga nidra. Here’s my very interesting conversation with Richard Miller.
Richard, you’re referenced as one of the foremost experts in the West on yoga nidra. So to begin, what is yoga nidra?
Richard Miller: Yoga nidra is actually a combination of two words. First “yoga,” and I’m defining yoga here as embodying our sense of nonseparation, where everything that we see and feel and experience we realize is actually an aspect of ourselves. “Nidra” is a word that means “sleep” in Sanskrit, but when it’s coupled with the word “yoga” in “yoga nidra,” it actually means to know yourself as that sense of nonseparation, whatever state you’re in. So “sleep” here is taken as a state of consciousness that’s changing, like waking, dreaming, deep sleep, whereas the underlying strata in which all those states are unfolding, the sense of nonseparation is what yoga nidra helps us access.
And it’s also a set of steps or stages that we engage—body sensing, breathing, working with intention, welcoming things like emotions and thoughts and sensations and joy. And as we welcome those and we become in a way familiar with them, they stop binding our attention. Our attention becomes more free for the inquiry during yoga nidra into this underlying—I’ll call it a sense of being or presence that has the flavor of nondual or nonseparation in it. So then yoga nidra taken as a whole would mean that we’re able to navigate and be with all the different changing states at the same time that we are in touch with or we are experiencing this feeling of pure awareness, pure being, pure presence, which has the sense of nonseparation in it.
TS: So yoga nidra is not simply a practice that I do as I’m getting ready to go to bed?
RM: No. Actually I love to think of yoga nidra as a set of practices, which we could do before we go to bed or anytime during the day. But I think of it more as a path of meditation itself, or a path of discovering who we are, what all the different changing states are in ourselves, emotions, thoughts, feelings, and becoming very comfortable with them. So it’s both a kind of a path and a means for realizing this path of meditation.
TS: OK, let’s go into it a little bit more.
RM: Sure.
TS: In the yoga nidra path, how do I relate to thoughts and emotions?
RM: When we have a thought or an emotion, it’s actually registering in our body as a sensation. So I would say first and foremost, during the practice of yoga nidra we’re learning to relate to our emotions and our thoughts as also body sensations, and as messengers that are providing information to us that when we have a right relationship to them, they basically help us navigate our world.
And so during yoga nidra, the emphasis is not on trying to change our emotions or change our thoughts, but actually on learning how to welcome them as messengers. And by then welcoming them—I call it welcoming into our guesthouse of awareness—but by learning how to be with an emotion, recognize it for the information it’s providing us, and then respond appropriately to what that emotion or thought might be bringing to our table, [we find that] when we respond to it, it tends to then dissolve, because it’s served its function or its usefulness.
So yoga nidra is really a wonderful practice for coming into right relationship, I would say, with our emotions, with our thoughts, treating them as messengers of information.
TS: So let’s say somebody is listening and they find themselves feeling—oh, we’ll just take something like irritated, for example, or worried. And they’re having thoughts of worry or feelings of irritation. What would be the yoga nidra approach? What would they do?
RM: Several things. One is we have an intention, which we start out with, which would be to recognize this feeling of irritation or worry, and that we want to respond to it correctly. So we have right intention at the beginning.
Then what I do is I ask a person to feel, “Where are you feeling this sense of anxiety or worry or irritation or concern in your body?” So that might be in your belly or your heart or your arms or your head. So we feel it, we encounter it as a sensorial experience in the body.
And then sometimes when we have worry or concern or anxiety, it comes in with attendants, I call them. So I’ll say, “Is there anything else that’s present as you’re feeling this concern or worry or irritation?” And the subset attendant might be, “Well, yes, I’d like to get rid of it.” So I want to welcome those feelings or preferences in as well.
Then I’m basically asking a set of three questions to the concern or the irritation: What does it want? What does it need? And is there some action that it’s asking me to take into the world with respect to what I’m feeling or the situation I’m encountering?
So I might be in a real-life situation where I’m feeling irritable. I would feel the irritation in my body, ask it what brings it here, and is there some action that it’s asking me to take. And I might realize that the situation that I’m in, I’m actually staying here longer than I should. So the irritation is giving me feedback to go somewhere else. Or the irritation might be pointing to a deeper feeling, which might be something like an expectation I had coming into the situation that isn’t being fulfilled. So the irritation is helping me see my expectation, which then hopefully I’d be able to see it, release it, and then come to the real “what is” of the situation now, rather than meeting it through my expectation.
The real point here, though, is in the quality of welcoming.
TS: Now these are three very interesting questions that you’re proposing.
RM: They are, aren’t they?
TS: What does this emotion or thought want, need, and then what action? Can you tell me a little bit more about what’s underneath each of these three questions?
RM: Yes. The “want”: I was working with a person some months ago, and she had this strong feeling in her body of sadness, and she couldn’t understand what it was about. So I asked her, “Feel it in your body. Where is it in your body?” And she said, “It’s in my throat.”
And I said, “What does it want?” And I asked her to become the feeling and speak as if she were it. And it said, “I want to strangle you.” So she got that.
And then I asked her to ask it, “What does it need?” And she took the position of the feeling, and it said, “I need you to listen to me, and I’m going to keep you with this feeling of being strangled until you finally stop and listen to me.”
And then I asked her to ask it, “What action is it asking you to take into the world?” And when she aligned with the feeling and asked from that question, it responded, “I need you to call this person who you’ve been estranged with for the last two years.”
And interestingly, in the miracle of technology, she pulled out her cell phone, dialed that person, got a hold of that person, talked with them, had a reconciliation in that moment. And when she hung up the phone, I asked her, “How are you feeling now?”
She said, “The feeling is completely gone.”
I said, “Well, check in again.”
She said, “Well, there is a little bit of the residue.”
And I said, “So what does it want, need, and the action?”
And basically it said, “I’m going to hang around just a little bit to make sure that you follow through on what you said during the phone call with this person.”
So I think those questions help a person really orient to the thought or the belief or the feeling that they’re having, and move into it slowly, first from kind of “What does it want?” Then a little deeper: “What does it need?” And then I think the critical question is, “Is there an action that I’m needing to take in the world that I’ve been postponing or refusing to take?” And it might be to say something or to take an action, or it may be to stop saying something or stop doing something.
TS: Now this is all very interesting to me, Richard. And you also have a background in psychotherapy as well, yes?
RM: I do. I’m a licensed clinical psychologist. But I would say foremost I’m a 40-year veteran of meditation, and basically listening to myself and what works.
TS: What I’m curious about is, how the kind of technique that you’re describing—this series of questions sounds very psychological, and it does sound very effective. Is there some basis in the yoga teachings, that this constitutes yoga nidra?
RM: Yes.
TS: What is that? That’s the part I’m curious about.
RM: Absolutely. There are three words from the Sanskrit that are embedded in the practice of yoga nidra. These are shravana, manana, and nidhidhyâsana. These three words come from the teachings of nondualism in which yoga nidra is embedded. Shravana means “to hear.” So it means, “I hear the knock on the door of an emotion or a thought, or the way my attention is being bound up in something. So I hear the knock on the door.” Manana represents that “I respond to the knock on the door, open the door, and basically welcome in this visitor. And then nidhidhyâsana is a wonderful word that means “I enter into deep meditation and deep contemplation with whatever this movement is.”
And in yoga nidra, one of the underlying principles is that our attention really isn’t free. It’s bound up in our conditioning, in our emotions, in the beliefs that we take to be true, that we’ve learned since perhaps little children. And because it binds up our attention, then our attention really isn’t free for the deeper inquiry that meditation requests: Who am I? What is this world around me? And so the first phase of yoga nidra is really aimed at addressing these movements in ourselves of the conditioning that normally binds and fuses our attention.
And by again welcoming in the thoughts, this process of shravana, manana, and nidhidhyâsana, listening to the knock, responding to the knock, meditating on whatever it is that’s coming in, it brings us to a release of these emotions and deep-held core beliefs. And what I see when people release, is it releases also tremendous energy, tremendous joy, and a sense of greater freedom in their life.
And most people will use yoga nidra just to come to this wonderful sense of ease, of freedom, or just ease and joy in their life. But some people will take it the next step, which is all of that free attention, which is no longer being bound up in our conditioning, is now free to turn back in on itself for this next inquiry, which is a part of yoga nidra, which asks this greater question: Who or what am I? And who or what is life? And so it takes us on a very deep inquiry into who we are and the nature of reality, we might say.
TS: Let’s talk a little bit about that, the process of inquiry. What wise part of us is answering a question like “Who am I?”
RM: My feeling here is that we all come from the same place, we might say. Or to use the image that I often use of a doughnut with a hole, and on one side of the hole is before the Big Bang, and on the other side of the doughnut hole is all of this universe, galaxies, ourselves, after the Big Bang. And if we sense that we all come from the original place before the Big Bang, then I would say that this is what is asking the question, and what is ultimately looking for the answer. In other words, our deepest, truest nature is calling us or calling itself back home.
And yoga nidra is a process by which our home is calling us back home. The process of yoga nidra is a lovely, simple set of steps that we can use to come back home to ourselves.
TS: OK, so you’ve mentioned that there are stages to the practice, and you’re talking about steps. Can you outline for us what the stages of the practice are?
RM: Absolutely. The first question I love to ask people is: “What is your deepest, heartfelt desire in life?” If we were on our deathbed about to close our eyes, what would we like to be able to say about how we lived our life, and what might the people around us be saying about who we are and how we lived our life?
So this very deep, heartfelt desire forms the first intention, which we call the sankalpa in yoga nidra. And I think it’s a very important question for all meditators to ask: Why are we sitting? Why are we doing this inquiry?
TS: So a sankalpa is the statement of intention?
RM: It’s a statement of very, very deep intention, which has to do with our life purpose. And then there is the secondary intention we then ask in yoga nidra, which is: “What are the kinds of things that I am doing that are helping me move toward the realization of that deep, heartfelt intention?” And one of our intentions is: “I’d like to do this practice of yoga nidra that’s going to help me move more deeply into my life’s purpose.”
Once we have those intentions in place, I like to help install what we call an inner resource, a place that when we’re in it in our body, when we locate it as a body feeling, we feel secure, at ease, and safe with ourselves. Because yoga nidra is a very deep process that can evoke great energies and liberate long-repressed memories or thoughts, I like people to have a place where if they start to feel overwhelmed, that they can come back to this place, kind of like take a time-out. Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras used a wonderful word called pratipaksha bhavanam, which basically means, if you’re having a difficult time, go to the movies, take a time-out, take a momentary rest or vacation, and then come back and address the issue again. So yoga nidra helps us install this kind of resource at the very beginning.
TS: So just to pause there to make sure that listeners really understand that, can you give me an example of the installation of an inner resource?
RM: I sure can.
TS: In fact, actually Richard, I think it might be good if you could give us an example, but I wonder if you could actually lead our listeners—if you wouldn’t mind, I mean, I’m working you here, but through a small practice where they could find their own inner resource. I think that probably would be so helpful for people.
RM: Sure. Let me give you the example first, and then I’ll lead you through a little process. We had a soldier, an active duty solider, who had to have an MRI, and while he was in the tube getting the MRI, it triggered off his post-traumatic stress, because he had come back from Iraq. And he said he fled the hospital that morning feeling totally devastated by his post-traumatic stress.
He came to our yoga nidra class, we helped him find his inner resource, and helped him develop some little, short breathing and body sensing practices. He called up the hospital, he told them what had happened and they invited him back, and he went back to the hospital. He got in the same machine, and while he was in there, he practiced his inner resource, a little bit of body sensing and breathing. And he said he left the hospital that evening feeling victorious because he was in control of his post-traumatic stress, it wasn’t in control of him. He was basically using the inner resource to help give him a sense of stability while he was undergoing a difficult procedure.
A little example of an inner resource, how we can quickly access it, is I like to ask people: “If you could imagine this is like a summer’s day and you’re in between doing things, so you’ve finished whatever it was you were doing, mowing the lawn, or doing a project, or work. You’re not yet ready to go on to the next event or the next doing, and there’s this momentary kind of time-out where you’re just being. Maybe you’re sitting in a chair, and you’re just being.”
And when you’re just being, I have several questions, one of which is: “Where does it take you in your body when you’re just being?” A lot of people report they feel it in their chest or their belly. One woman at a homeless shelter said, “When I’m just being, I feel everywhere and nowhere specific, and I feel a sense of ease in my body.”
And another question I ask is: “When you’re just being, is there any sense of time, or can you sense when you’re just being how your mind slows down, just relaxes, and you enter into a quality of timelessness?” And this sense of being in your body, and just being, how it has its own quality to it that it doesn’t need anything, it doesn’t need to know anything or do anything, it’s OK and whole just as it is. So if we could just take this moment, this moment of being, and feel where it brings us in our body, the sense of wholeness or completeness about it, and a sense of ease and relaxation that it often invites and evokes into the body.
And this is what we had this soldier do when he was in the MRI. We had him just have a sense of being, even though he was in the midst of a procedure. And because he had been able to access it when we were doing the yoga nidra with him, he was able to return to that feeling. Also doing a little body sensing, and a little breathing where we asked him to exhale slowly and smoothly and just hold his breath out for a few moments. That helped him access that sense of being. And then he was able to navigate his MRI, even though it started to trigger off a little bit of the post-traumatic stress. The ease of being gave him just that sense of inner resource that allowed him to stay the course and leave the hospital that night feeling victorious.
I love this ease of being because I think it’s something everyone knows. Everyone’s experienced moments when they’re between two things, so it’s not unfamiliar. And it does invite this sense of relaxation or restfulness or ease into the body. And I often will ask people to couple it then with images that they might remember from nature where they had this feeling. So to utilize the senses, memory, visual, sounds, anything that can help support and embed this sense of inner resource so that we can access it at a moment’s notice.
TS: OK, so I’m following you.
RM: So first we had our heartfelt intention, and we’ve got some other intentions, like “I’m going to do this practice” or “While I’m doing this practice, I’m going to learn how to feel this sense of inner resource being.” Then we’ve got the inner resource, and then what we do is we take people through a body scan. We have them sense, starting at their mouth, going all the way through their body to their fingertips and toes, so we’re following actually the course of how the motor and sensory cortex are set up in the body.
It’s a very ancient technique, and we use it a lot when we’re doing shavasana, which is the relaxation pose in yoga, where by sensing the body we’re making ourselves very acutely aware of all the possible sensations of information we’re receiving at any time. Because without having access to the physical body, we don’t have access to the deeper emotions or beliefs, and all the information that we need to get to respond correctly to life. So we do a body sensing—
TS: Now Richard, one question about that. You said that this body-scan approach is somehow linked to some part of the brain?
RM: Yes. The motor-sensory cortex in the brain coordinates with the nervous system and all the nerves throughout the body. And if we were to look at a representation of it in a map of the brain, and map it onto a little person, they call it a homunculus, we would see that we have very big lips and big hands and big feet. In other words, these are the parts of the body that contain a lot of nerves.
So during yoga nidra, we take advantage of that, and we spend a lot of time sensing the mouth, the tongue, the ears, the eyes, the scalp, where a lot of nerve endings are. We sense in our hands a lot of the time, in the torso-pelvis general region, down in the feet. Basically [we’re] enlivening these areas of the body so we have access to them sensorially.
And by going in the direction that the motor-sensory cortex moves in, which it starts in the mouth and it ends in the toes, we basically create a kind of a biofeedback chain where eventually I can just ask a person, “Can you feel your mouth?” and it would fire off a whole chain of associations of deep relaxation.
So we use this very effectively when a person is starting to have an anxiety attack. Once they’ve done body sensing over and over again, then when they find themselves in the middle of the anxiety attack, by having them sense their mouth or sense their hands, it’ll fire off or trigger this whole system of biofeedback relaxation throughout the whole body. They don’t have to think about it; it just will fire off automatically. And we do know that anxiety is incompatible with deep sensory relaxation, so if a person is having anxiety or pain in the body, and they’re able to fire off this chain of relaxation in their body, it will often cut through and diminish the anxiety, or give them enough distance so that they can manage it or cope with it.
The same thing with chronic pain. When we can chain these deep relaxation responses with chronic pain, a person will often get a relief or complete remission of the pain. And one of the reasons why the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Army Surgeon General have recently categorized yoga nidra as a complementary alternative medicine for working with chronic pain and post-traumatic stress is because they’ve seen how effective it can be with these two issues, along with sleep and some other issues.
TS: OK, wonderful. So then after the body scan?
RM: So we’ve got the body scan. Then we do a series of breathings, and one of the ones that I like to do is called heart-rate variability, where we ask a person to slowly extend their exhale longer than their inhale, which interestingly creates a stimulation of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and it helps balance them or regulate them.
Good heart-rate variability means that when we exhale, our heart rate and blood pressure slow down and diminish, and when we inhale, our heart speeds up a little bit and our blood pressure rises a little bit. And by doing this in yoga nidra, pairing it with the body relaxation, we can actually get a very good balancing between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems so they operate more functionally.
For instance, people who have post-traumatic stress, their sympathetic nervous system is basically turned on, and the parasympathetic nervous system that helps bring a sense of relaxation is turned off. By doing these kind of breathing exercises during a practice like yoga nidra, we can actually help reinstall a good relationship between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems so they’re operating more functionally. And this breaks in on things like insomnia, chronic pain, post-traumatic stress, worry, irritation, anger, sadness, and grief.
So it has a major effect, and coupled with body sensing, it increases our sensitivity to the information we’re getting all the time from our body, and makes us able to hear and listen to subtler levels of information. Because by doing the breathing, it also helps activate the diaphragm. A lot of emotions are stored in the diaphrammatic area of the body, and so as we do deep breathing in certain ratios and rhythms, it helps release long-stored or repressed emotions that may be binding up a lot of psychic energy.
So the next phase of yoga nidra after we do the body sensing and breathing is welcoming in feelings and emotions, and learning how to be comfortable. I call it learning to play the scales of your emotions, so that we’re able to basically be with any emotion that we may have in our life. We know how to meet it, how to feel it, how to greet it, how to respond to it, how to ask these basically three questions: want, need, and action I need to take in the world. So we’re becoming very familiar with our emotional life and regiments that we feel during the day, and becoming very responsive.
And as those emotions come up, the next stage of yoga nidra is working with thoughts, beliefs, and memories. These tend to get stimulated along with the emotions by the breathing and the body sensing. So it’s just very logical that as we’re working and welcoming in the emotions, we’re also welcoming in deep core-beliefs, both negative and positive beliefs that we might have made with ourselves, pacts as children.
For example, maybe our parents were getting divorced and we made a pact with ourselves that we’d never get married, or if we did get married, we’d never get divorced, or some such strategy. And this pact may have served us as children, but as we become adults, and if we’re in a bad marriage, maybe we do need to get divorced, but that pact is interfering with our need to move forward in life. Or if our pact was never to get married because our parents got divorced and it was such an awful experience, maybe we’re in a wonderful relationship, and that belief is interfering with our ability to move forward.
So we’re working with very core, deep, negative beliefs and positive beliefs that we get stored in our system. And we’re learning just like with the emotions how to welcome them in, how to ask what do they need, what do they want, what action might we be needing to take into the world with respect to this belief.
TS: So it’s the same series of questions when you’re dealing with—
RM: It’s the same series of questions. It’s very simple. And when they’re asked well and we keep in touch with our body experience as we’re working with the beliefs, they tend to resolve. We tend to see actions that we can take that we might not have been taking, things we need to say or do. And then those negative core beliefs after a while tend to dissolve and stop troubling us.
TS: Could you give me an example, Richard, maybe from your own life, related to thoughts or beliefs or memories, and how you worked with yoga nidra to dissolve that configuration?
RM: Sure. When I was in my younger years, in my teenage years, I felt a great deal of isolation and aloneness. And I developed a negative core belief inside myself as some teenagers and young children do, which was that there was something wrong with me. And I was convinced that there was something defective that I carried within myself that didn’t allow me to do life in such a way that allowed me to have the friends I wanted, and navigate social situations with an ease.
As I did yoga nidra when I got into my early twenties (I started the practice when I was 22), I started inviting that negative core belief in: “There’s something wrong with me. I’m unlovable, or I’m defective.” At first, my strategy in welcoming it in was to try to change it and get rid of it. And I tried that for many months, and I realized that ultimately I failed because it wouldn’t go away.
Luckily, I had a very good teacher in those days who was helping me with the process, and she helped me to realize that in welcoming them, my strategy was to try to get rid of it. And true welcoming means that it’s welcome to be here, just as it is. So when I really got that and had a deep insight that I’d been trying to get rid of it through my welcoming, I really started to welcome it in. I imagined the door open and this person who was holding this belief walked into the room, and I met that image, and the memories that I had had. And I began to see distortions that I had created as a child that were no longer serving me.
And interestingly, as I really met the feeling in my body, and really welcomed it in, I had dialogues with it internally. I would ask it these basic questions: “What brings you here? What do you want? What do you need from me? What action do you need me to take?” One of the actions that I got was: “I would like you to go to some parties.” And it turned out this was right around Christmastime and November, so there were lots of parties. It said, “I would like you to go to parties. I would like you to go there, I would like you to just sit on a chair, sit on a couch. Do nothing, don’t try to meet anybody. Just feel your own ease of being, and don’t try to be social, don’t try to be somebody.”
So I took that advice. I started going to parties, I would sit in a chair, I would just be. And invariably, someone might walk up to me and ask me how am I doing, and I’d have a nice conversation. And very slowly, I began to realize I’m OK just as I am. This feeling of being defective began to break up, and what came in was rather than the old feeling that “There’s something about me that’s unlovable,” I began to feel, “Wait a minute! I can love myself just as I am.” And that feeling came in, and ultimately I had a feeling of deep appreciation and love for myself just as I was. I stopped trying to change myself, and ultimately the belief dissolved, all the emotions around it dissolved, and I became a happy camper. That would be a way of meeting a belief.
TS: OK, very good, thank you. Now are there more stages to the practice?
RM: Yes.
TS: We’re not done yet. OK, let’s keep going.
RM: Once we’ve worked with beliefs, there tends to be a great release of energy and tension in the body that was bound up in defending ourselves from these emotions and beliefs and body sensations. What we find is the body often will get spontaneously flooded with joy, so the next stage in yoga nidra is to actually invite in joy, and a sense of happiness and contentment into the body.
And we’ll often spend time here just feeling a sense of joy maybe, first through the triggering of a memory, but eventually joy independent of situation or memory. So it’s just you’re sitting here in your inherent joy that is our inheritance. We carry it in our cells. When it’s liberated, the whole body can feel very joyous. We’ll also invite in feelings like gratitude, compassion, a sense of friendship. So we’re enjoying these different qualities in this stage of yoga nidra.
The last stage of yoga nidra, which actually incidentally we interweave throughout the practice, but we also do a long piece of it at the very end, which is we ask the question—All these things that we’re experiencing, sensations, emotions, thoughts, joy, memories, we’re aware of them, but what does awareness feel like? Mostly our attention is on the objects that are in our awareness, such as emotions, thoughts, sensations, but we spend precious little time feeling into what awareness itself feels like.
So in this final stage of yoga nidra, and interwoven throughout the practice, we ask this question: “If you could feel yourself just as an openness of awareness itself, what does this feel like?” And people will report as they let go of the objects and they just feel themselves as awareness or this sense of being, they’ll start to describe themselves as a quality of vastness or openness, a sense of peace, a sense of deep well-being.
And once they locate that, we’ll help a person to sense if that is unfamiliar to them. And what we find people will say is, “No, this feels very familiar.” We help them kind of track it back as far as they can in their life. Some people go all the way back to when they were five or four, even three or two, and they can see how this sense of being and well-being, or sense of presence or openness, is basically a companion that’s been kind of in the background, and yoga nidra helps move it more into the foreground. And as they live in it, they recognize a deep sense of peace or equanimity that isn’t altered by their situation or by their circumstance. So we’re helping them restore or reveal this deep quality of equanimity that is actually always here, but we simply get distracted by the foreground.
And what we found is like when we’re working with the homeless, and they come into this deep equanimity, this sense of pure being or well-being, they’ll say, “Wow, this feels like my home. And this I can see hasn’t been hurt or damaged by any trauma I’ve experienced. It’s a basic feeling in my body. From here, I can now face my homelessness.”
And many of the military we’re working with say this is the feeling that they found when they were actually on the battlefield. Explosions may have been going off, and yet they found this deep quality of silence or equanimity in the middle of a firefight. And they’ve been looking to find a way back to it: they’ve been riding their motorcycles at 100 miles per hour or doing drugs, and really trying to find this basic, core feeling of well-being, which yoga nidra helps them relocate. And then they realize, “I don’t need drugs, I don’t need fast motorcycles. I can feel this and bring this into my life.”
That forms the core of yoga nidra. And the last, final stage is we help them then feel this and integrate it into their daily life, so it becomes an accompanying program that they’re taking out into the world.
TS: Now Richard, this sequence that you’re describing is very beautiful, very compelling. I think the question I have is, I always hear people talk about yoga nidra as the yoga of sleep. This is the practice that you do when you want to explore being “awake while sleeping.” And yet in the way that you’ve just described this whole sequence, it sounds more like a meditation practice I might do in the early afternoon or something.
RM: It’s both, because as we do yoga nidra, and we often have people lying down when they’re doing it, although eventually I want them to be able to lie down, sit up, stand, and walk while they’re doing the practice so they integrate it into every body position.
But what can happen, and what does happen during yoga nidra, is the brain, when we measure it, goes into deep sleep. It’ll go through beta to alpha to delta to theta to deep sleep, and up into REM and back to theta. So that we see the body is actually in a state of sleep, but the person is awake. In other words, yoga nidra helps a person restore themselves to this aspect of all of us that doesn’t ever sleep. It’s always awake. But because we get identified with the different states of sleep, just like we get identified with the different states during waking emotions and thoughts, we don’t realize there’s this other non-state that’s present, that’s registering this quality of awareness.
So that when a person is in deep yoga nidra, they’re often lying there, they may even start to snore, but afterward they’ll report to us that they heard their body snoring, they could register everything that was going in and on during the practice. And when we take people and we put them into an EEG machine or an MRI, we can see their brain has actually gone into a deep sleep state, but they are alert and wide awake.
So oftentimes, because I’ve done this practice for so many years, as I’m sleeping at night, or as my body is sleeping, there’s a quality of wakefulness. So I’m registering the dream, I’m registering the different movements of thought or emotion that might be happening during the dream state, and at times I’m registering just a kind of a blankness.
TS: Now hold on a minute, Richard. Are you saying to me that somebody could be snoring, their body is so asleep that they’re snoring, but while they’re snoring they’re also registering enough through their wakefulness that they’ll have memories afterward when they’re no longer snoring?
RM: Absolutely. And this has been well-known in the annals of sleep researchers. We go to Stanford Sleep Research Center and they know this very well, because they have people come in all the time who say, “I’m not sleeping at all. Can you understand what’s going on?” And they’ll put them in the sleep lab, they’ll wire them up, and in the morning they’ll show the person their sleep results, and how they went through all the different stages of sleep and dream and REM and all of that, and they got a very restful night of sleep, and yet the person will still report, “I didn’t sleep a wink.”
They call it paradoxical sleep; it’s a natural occurring phenomenon for some people, that even while the body is in deep sleep, they are fully awake and conscious. Yoga nidra is a technique of meditation that actually brings this state on. So yes, the body can be totally sleeping, snoring, and yet there is a wakefulness going on inside, so that a person can report events that might have been happening around them in the room, or they’re being able to register the dreams that they were having.
And we know this in lucidity of sleep and all the work that’s been done on lucid dreaming, that people can be dreaming and be awake in their dream. Yoga nidra brings this quality of lucidity. The difference between a lucid dreamer and a yoga nidra meditator is the lucid dreamer often then wants to get involved in their dreams and go to Hawaii or learn to fly and have fun, whereas for a yoga nidra meditator, they take that extra time when they’re awake during sleep, and they can turn it into this quality of abiding as pure presence, and inquiry into their deeper nature and what is this that’s awake while the body is asleep.
TS: I want to understand more about this, this idea that we’re awake while our body is asleep. And maybe a way to help me understand more about it would be for you to talk to me about your personal experience of this, what that’s like for you.
RM: Well, let’s start with the waking state, because I think that transfers us then very easily into the sleep state. So while we’re awake, we’re registering emotions and thoughts and images, and we at times get so caught up in them that we forget that we are the one experiencing them. Just like when we go to the movies and the movie draws us in, we forget that we’re a participant in the movie theatre; we are identified with the movie on the screen. Then there are times when we go, “Wait a minute, I’m sitting in the movies here.” You can look around at all the other people around you who are caught up in the movie, and you realize, “Wait a minute! It’s just a movie.”
So if we understand that as the waking state, that we’re experiencing all these changing states, yet there’s something here that is awake and aware. And if we can inquire and feel that quality of awareness and awakefulness that’s here during the waking state, then we might see that the movement or the transition into dreaming is actually just a transition of new images, new states that are arising. And this wakefulness that was here during the waking state is also here during and registering the sleep state.
And there’s a homework that I engage myself in for years, and I love to support my students to do it, which is before going to bed, I would drink a 12- to 16-ounce glass of water. This means that about four hours later, around midnight or one, right when most people are entering into the dream state, the REM state, the water is going to go through us and wake us up. In that moment of waking, when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t move a muscle. And I could feel the remnants of the dream that was still active, that I was just involved in a moment ago when I was asleep. And then I would feel myself as the one who is aware of this dream, and aware that I am awake now. And then I could feel back that awareness that was there a moment ago when the body was sleeping and that dream was appearing. So I’d feel that kind of continuity of awareness; I could feel that the awareness that is here now while I’m awake is feeling the same as when I was in the dream.
And I’d go to the bathroom, come back, and then watch the body fall asleep in that quality of wakefulness. And with practice, we can actually feel the body going through these stages of sleep—delta, alpha, theta, delta—we can actually feel it, almost like you’re going through the gears of a sports car. And you can feel the body shift from waking, to hypnagogic, to a deeper state of alpha, to a deeper state of theta and delta. And with practice, as the body’s going through those states, you’re staying in your wakefulness.
And we begin to see that the wakefulness that we have here in the waking state is actually the same feeling quality of awareness when we’re in the dream state, but we’ve broken our identification with these different states of movements, emotions, thoughts, alpha, theta, delta, brain states.
TS: OK now, Richard, I’m with you in terms of coming out of sleep, and even going back into sleep, and being able to track the presence of awareness during those phases. But then, this is at least my experience, and probably many listeners, there’s often chunks of times, a couple of hours, three hours, four hours, five hours, I have no idea what happened. I have no idea. I mean, somebody might say, “What were your dreams?” It’s just blank; I have no idea. I don’t have any sense that there’s awareness there; I have nothing.
RM: Right. So there’s a state of sleep when basically the hearing, for all intents and purposes, has turned off. We’re not aware of things on the outside. The REM state of dreams has dropped off; we’re in a deep state of theta. There’s no dreaming, there’s just a quality of blankness. And when the mind becomes blank and thoughts cease, there is a tendency for our attention to fuse with that state of blankness. And there’s a kind of a quality of going unconscious.
During yoga nidra, we are learning to register even that quality of blankness, and to realize that this too is a state unfolding in this quality of wakefulness or pure awareness. And I would say there’s enough activity still, even in that deep, deep state of quiescence, that creates enough of a contrast, where awareness can feel itself in contrast to this state of quiescence. There are other times where awareness itself kind of folds into itself, and there’s a total disappearance. But I like to distinguish between a disappearance of a quality of being knocked unconscious and where awareness draws into itself and there’s no register, there’s no register-er separate, and so there’s just pure awareness, without any contrast in it.
I would say that meditation in general, and yoga nidra specifically, is a process where we’re learning to distinguish these very, very subtle movements where the brain and the mind has become very, very quiescent, and we can feel this underlying strata of pure awareness that then when the brain reengages and the mind reengages back into thinking, we can by contrast continue to feel it and bring it into the waking state, and experience it in the dream state as well.
And there are these moments where awareness folds into itself, loses all sense of separation and separate witness, and then when enough consciousness comes back, there’s a re-registering of ourselves as awareness, aware of all the objects that we would call the world, our body, and our mind.
TS: So are you saying that then it’s possible for someone, and that it’s even your experience, that this continuity of awareness even in the midst of deep sleep states is actually there for you night after night after night after night?
RM: I would say absolutely yes, that is my experience. And it’s not something I would say that I’m in control of; the process of meditation and yoga nidra basically evokes it over time. And there are nights when that consciousness or awareness fuses into itself, and I don’t have much memory or awareness of what happened during the night. But for most nights, there is a quality of wakefulness there the entire night. Yes.
TS: Very interesting. And then just one final question, Richard. I know that you’re experimenting introducing yoga nidra into many different populations. You talked a little bit during our conversation here about your work with people with post-traumatic stress and working with people with chronic pain. And I’m curious to know what you see ahead, and what different kinds of populations you think will really benefit the most from yoga nidra.
RM: It’s an exciting time for all of us who have been meditating for years. And the research that I’ve been fortunately invited into, we’re working with active duty and veteran soldiers who are wounded warriors, who have post-traumatic stress, or physical injuries, or chronic pain. So we’ve been doing a lot of research, and as a result, as I’ve said, the U.S. Surgeon General and the Department of Defense have listed yoga nidra as a complementary alternative for working with chronic pain and post-traumatic stress.
But we’re also working with the homeless, and we’re doing work with chemical dependency. We just finished a study on stress-related disorders with people experiencing multiple sclerosis and cancer, and got very statistically significant results helping people reduce their stress and their reactions to the chemotherapy they were going through.
We did a wonderful compassionate-care fatigue study with the workers who are in the amputee and the burn units, helping people who have massive burns and massive amputations, and they themselves get post-traumatic stress from the work that they’re doing. And as a result of the study that we did with them, they said that they were sleeping through the night again, they reclaimed their enthusiasm and their joy for their job, and they were looking forward to going back to their job, and looking forward to having a regular yoga nidra built into their job so they could keep that enthusiasm going.
And we’re also working with preschool children. So we’re in Head Start and some other schools where we’re showing how to introduce these simple principles to preschoolers and kindergarteners, and help them basically learn these principles at a very early age so that they can carry them with them hopefully the rest of their lives.
It’s a fascinating time. I’m getting involved in some studies with MRI techniques where we’re looking at what’s happening with the brain and cortisol and gabba, which has to do with depression. And we’re looking at what are the centers in the brain, if there are any, that are lighting up when a person is completely asleep, and yet they’re reporting that they’re awake. What’s the difference between a control who believes they’re asleep and a yoga nidra practitioner who knows that their body is asleep, but feels themselves as awake? So it’s an exciting time to look at using this modern technology, MRIs and such, to really see what’s going on in the body. And the incredible capacity that we have here that is so untapped.
And what I love is the practices are so simple, and I can bring them now into a homeless shelter, or a chemical dependency center, or a veterans’ center group. And people love the practice: they pick it up right away, they tell us that it helps them sleep through the night, manages their chronic pain. We’ve had so many people with chronic pain who’ve said they’ve either gone into remission, or they finally have a set of tools that they can work with that can help them manage it. Because some people have chronic pain: they’re never going to get out of it, so they need the tools like yoga nidra to help them.
TS: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Richard, for talking with us, and for the work that you’re doing. It’s really wonderful.
RM: Well, thank you, Tami. It’s a delightful conversation. I love sharing it.
TS: Richard Miller has given us a very wonderful introduction to yoga nidra. He has also created a book-and-CD set with Sounds True called Yoga Nidra: The Meditative Heart of Yoga, and it’s a wonderful instructional program where Richard and his soft, beautiful, hypnotic voice leads you through the yoga nidra practice.
Richard, thank you so much for being with us on “Insights at the Edge.”
RM: You’re welcome, Tami. Thank you very much.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
