Yoga nidra for people who can’t nap

People tell me they can’t do nidra before they have tried it, and the reason is always the same. I’m a terrible sleeper. I lie down and my head starts up. I’ve never been able to nap, not as a child, not on a plane, not once.

Good. That is exactly the room I want. Yoga nidra is not a nap, and being bad at sleeping does not disqualify you from it. It asks you to lie on the floor and follow a voice. That is the whole requirement, and it works about as well on people who cannot switch off as on people who can, which nobody believes until they have done one.

Nothing is being tested

Here is the method, all of it. You lie down with a bolster under your knees and a blanket over you. Socks on, because the body cools quickly once it stops moving. I talk, and I move your attention around the body in a fixed order: thumb, first finger, second finger, palm, wrist, forearm, and on around to the soles of the feet. Then the breath. Then a few images that do not mean anything in particular. A road at night. Still water. A door.

Forty minutes later I ring the bowl, you sit up, and we drink tea. There is no posture to hold and no alignment to keep. There is nothing you can do wrong, because there is nothing you are being asked to do.

That sounds like a nice thing a teacher says. It is actually the mechanism. The trouble with trying to nap is that trying is a task, and the body will not stand down while a task is running. Nidra hands your attention a small, dull, harmless job — go to the left thumb — so that it lets go of the big one.

Trying to fall asleep is work. Nidra is the one hour in the week with no work in it.

You may well fall asleep. Roughly half the room does at some point, and I know because people snore. That is fine, but it is not the goal, and if you sleep through the whole thing you have had a nap in company, which is pleasant and not much else. The interesting state is the one just before sleep, where you can still hear me but you have stopped keeping track of the sentences. Most people pass through it several times an hour without noticing.

What it actually feels like

Heavier than you expect. Limbs that seem to have shifted slightly without moving. A jaw that unclenches about twenty minutes in and takes you by surprise, because you did not know it was clenched. Time goes strange: forty minutes reads as ten to some people and as an hour and a half to others, and the same person gets both on different weeks.

At some point you will remember an email. Everyone does. The instruction is not to push it away, which does not work, but to let it finish and go back to the thumb. I say that out loud during the session so nobody lies there quietly deciding they have failed.

Practical things. The props are here — bolsters, blankets, eye pillows — so bring nothing but socks and something warm. Eight mats, so it is never a crowd, and the oak floor holds the heat from the morning. If you are exhausted, come especially; that is the state the practice was built for.

And if you spend the whole session awake and mildly irritated, that was still forty minutes lying on the floor doing nothing, which is more than most weeks give you. You don’t have to fall asleep. You just have to stop trying not to.