Emotion Control and Yoga Nidra
Hi everyone, I have recently started the practice of Yoga Nidra and been researching Yoga Nidra for a while now and it seems to me it could be a great aid to attaining lucidity that is more specific than other types of meditations perhaps. Focus, awareness and control are important, but Yoga Nidra can also have a method to work with emotions. Since often when first learning to lucid dream our experiences are cut short by strong emotions – getting overly excited or fearful for example, this could be a great aid.
There seems to be quite a few variations of Yoga Nidra. Some Yoga Nidra involves progressively relaxing the entire body and brining awareness to different body parts. It seem perfectly designed to induce OBEs as they are designed to get the body to be so relaxed it asleep while keeping the conscious “mind” awake. This is an ultimate goal that for most people would take a long time to achieve to get into a state of that profound relaxation yet also awareness.
However, other Yoga Nidra go into more depth and can involve apparently randomly calling out a bunch of words/phrases such as “snake, baby, cat,” or “a calm river, a tall mountain, a stormy ocean” I have done these practices in Yoga classes before and had no idea what that point of that is.
Now from further research it is my understanding that certain pairs of words are used that tend to evoke opposite responses in our minds.
The constant yo-yoing between stressful thoughts and peaceful thoughts for example helps us to see that they are both one in the same and that we don’t need to react strongly either way. This can over-time train us to calmly observe whatever we encounter rather than reaction subconsciously which is so useful in everyday life and in learning to lucid dream!
I would love to hear if anyone has had good success with yoga Nidra especially in relation to understanding emotions and habitual reactions.