What is Advanced Yoga Nidra Journey of Effortless Awakening

What is Advanced Yoga Nidra? –You are established in a daily practice of Yoga Nidra. The focus is more on being present to the body. You are beginning to be more intuitive and value the power of silence. You might be considering becoming a teacher and if you are fortunate you are Graced an awakening.

As I have done with the two other posts on What is Intermediate Yoga Nidra and Yoga Nidra for Beginners I list an outline of the sections of this post so that you might get some idea about its content and be able to choose those aspects that might really be of interest for you to explore.

These sections of What is Advanced Yoga Nidra are shared as follows: –

• Spiritual Intelligence.
• Removing Body Armour
• Becoming Intuitive
• Love of Silence.
• Exploring becoming a Teacher
• Glimpsing the Awakened State.

So let me explore in more detail what each of these aspects might feel like experientially.

Spiritual intelligence is an integrated intelligence of body, emotions, mind and spirit. It is more than the sum of your personal likes and dislikes. You are becoming more In Tune with the Infinite. You are learning to recognize the flow of Y.E.S. – Your Energy System.

Spiritual Intelligence is a marriage of: –

• The inner with the outer.
• Masculine with the Feminine.
• Intuition with Intellect
• Sensing with Feeling
• Knowing with not knowing.

All of this is part and parcel of the experience that unfolds as part of a regular practice of Yoga Nidra. You are not so much doing this intelligence. It is that you are becoming more trusting of allowing spiritual experience to flow through you. It can only do this when you learn to make the voice in the head your servant and not your master.

Knowledge without Spirit is like finding yourself on a cold night with all the wood in the world and no flame to ignite it. — Guy Finley

This intelligence expands the more you get out of the way as the personal sense of self and allow the magnificence of the Light of your own Being to shine through.

You are becoming less afraid of the myriad feeling experience that has created who you identity with. You have learned to recognize how thoughts attached to feeling drive and emotional reactivity.

Rather than live reactively you are more response enabled.

You are more sense aware and have more conscious choice to allow, or not allow the emotional energy expression. You have learned how to feel safe, or at least feel a degree of safety in relation to feelings that once frightened you.

It is amazing how many hints and guides and intuitions for living come to the sensitive person who has ears to hear what his body is saying. Rollo May

This gives you a self-confidence you may not have been used to feeling. You are surer of how you are able to deal with challenging situations in life. You are more detached but not from feelings. You are more detached from emotional reactivity.

The armour that you embodied is slowly releasing.

You feel different in the body. You walk tall. You feel yourself walking tall and KNOW that this can be a cloak that you wear when you need too.

All this from simply lying on your back and giving your attention to your whole body. Kind of miraculous don’t you think.

Before the practice of Yoga Nidra becomes a regular part of your day you tuned into the overthinking mind – the never-ending voice in your head. The old mental scripts that repeat and repeat the same old same as.

Now there is a different dimension entering your life. It is the intuitive arising from your new relationship to the inner power of silence and allowing. You are beginning to engage in whole brain thinking or more to the point being thought through.

Intuition is inner tuition. It is not you are being filled up with information.

You are fulfilled from INNER KNOWING. This is a new way of learning. Like most of the Yoga Nidra journey this is a subtle experience. It requires attention and trust. It is your inner wisdom arising. You begin to KNOW in ways that are NEW.

The deeper we live the life of our bodies, the deeper is the upwelling of love. Stanley Keleman

It takes time to learn to follow intuition. Most of the time you have been taught to shut it down. It is a feminine energy and is that sense you move into a state of allowing. Allowing is really the basis of most Yoga Nidra practice combined with attention.

As your practice of Yoga Nidra deepens I think you will develop a love and respect for the power of silence. Whereas when you began the journey of inner body awareness you thought that there was nothing to find as you commit and practice you will open up to a magical paradox.

At the beginning of Yoga Nidra your personal logical mind cannot grasp this magical paradox. This is the magic of NO-THING-NESS. The experience of NO-THING-NESS comes out of silence.

It is out of this silence of NO-THING-NESS that everything that is made manifest arises into form including NEW THOUGHT.

This NEW THOUGHT is you being thought through. You recognise it as increased creativity, aliveness and inspiration. You are not trying to manipulate this Source Energy which is the teaching of The Law of Attraction.

Only when you drink from the river of silence will you truly sing – Kahlib Gibran

You are allowing the Attractiveness of the Universe to be done through you. This is more mysterious and exciting. It is also challenging because it means you have to follow where it leads. All this arising happens from the silence of NO-THING-NESS that makes everything available. The magic is beginning to open to you.

As an advanced practitioner of Yoga Nidra you may well be drawn to teaching this practice. This may become part of an already established style of yoga that you already teach. It can also, I think, be taught as a complete class on its own.

There are two organizations that I am presently aware off that have teacher training programs. These are: –

• The Yoga Network
• iRest Yoga

As far as I am aware the iRest program does not include the practice of Sankalpa. I would check this out if this is Important to you.

You could of course begin to learn a program and then add a Sankalpa. Exploring Sankalpa (true heart’s desire) in the opinion of this writer invites a deeper connection to purpose and meaning beyond the sense of the limited personal self.

The experience of awakening is always a great Grace. It is the direct experience of union that is the very heart and purpose of Yoga beyond the practice of postures and asanas.

No one can say when, and if, this Grace will be given. It is a mystery. If you are given it you will recognise that it could never be earned. The first time it happens you will want to keep it for yourself.

It gives you everything you think is missing from your life in a psychological sense. Only you cannot stay there. It is not given to you for your personal aggrandizement but for the glory of Love. This is the Love designed to come dancing through you and as you.

Awakening is not changing who you are, but discarding who you are not. Deepak Chopra

Your personal mind will not grasp the magnitude of what is on offer. It becomes available in the inner stillness that is at the heart of Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra, in the opinion of this writer is praying with the body.

The Universe knows absolutely what it wishes to express through you. Your joy (although it begins with a challenge) is to get out of the way and simply allow the joyous dance of Love to inform you. This is real -in-form- ation leading to transformation.

So you are now an advanced Yoga Nidra practitioner.

I suspect that the journey simply moves on into deeper connection with stillness and allowing. I suspect that there will often be two steps forward and one step back. If you are headed in the right direction (beyond the moralistic meaning of right and wrong) that you will deepen into love off: –

• Silence
• Purpose
• Presence
• Service and
• Stillness that Speaks.

All this becomes part of the Yoga Lifestyle of integration that is: –

• Being with doing.
• Time with the Timeless
• Human with the Divine and
• Form with the Formless.

This is the eternal expansive experience of Yoga Journey for Life. It begins with grounding and embodiment. It begins with a commitment to embody the Presence of the One Life of which you are apart and never apart from.

You become a Heavenly body radiating light and Love within this dimension of time and space. Let it be so.