In fact, yoga nidra precedes the trend by about some five thousand plus years. Sri Dharma Mittra, a guru in Lower Manhattan who has practiced for six decades, thinks it probably even precedes yoga. “Many people in the past knew that in order to restore our bodies, in order to go into healing, we have to place the body in sleep,” he explains over Zoom. The earliest yoga sessions in human history would regularly end with short intervals of rest. “Gradually, teachers worked up the process of relaxing a little longer,” he said; they would ring bells at intervals to keep practitioners on the brink of consciousness.
Huberman’s preferred protocols, as well as the free ones he offers to his own congregations, borrow that ancient tool known as the YouTube guided meditation audio-video. Mittra suggests setting alarms on your phone for every two minutes, like digital bells, and setting yourself up as comfortably as possible in your bed. “At a [yoga] studio, if the floor is uncomfortable, people get restless,” Mittra says.
“I recommend a lot of yoga nidra to patients,” explains Dr. Salas, who typically prescribes it to patients who experience anxiety or insomnia, at the onset of their bedtime routine. She instructs her patients to poke around Google until they find a soothing video or audio, but also invented a protocol involving a breathing exercise in which patients blow their worries into the air, visualizing them floating away and popping into nothingness; she calls them Salas bubbles. “It’s merging rest with intention,” she says.
Dr. Holliday-Bell maintains a simpler practice. If given 30 minutes and the choice of a nap or NSDR session, she’ll take the former. But my favorite protocol was the state of concentration Mittra described instead. “Let’s compare our body to a telescope. During the first step, the first level, we are repairing the telescope,” he explains. “Once the body is relaxed and the telescope is fixed, we get to see the power of the telescope—and go deep into divine perception.” It could take a lifetime, or longer, to catch even a glimpse through this lens, and it requires the sustained practice of removing one’s consciousness from time and place. It takes “a tremendous effort,” Mittra says, “not to disappear completely.”