From Restless to Rested: My Yoga Nidra Story
I had an addiction to busyness. It started in high school and lasted into my mid-30s.
I don't say that lightly — it was a real, functional addiction. If I had a spare moment, my brain would immediately scan for the next item on my to-do list. Rest wasn't something I did. Rest was what happened when I finally ran out of energy and collapsed into bed.
What I didn't realize was that I wasn't just busy. I was running away from the discomfort of sitting with myself.
I didn’t have the knowledge or language to express this, but I was living with a traumatized nervous system stuck in “fight or flight” mode. And I didn’t know how to rest.
The Earthquake That Changed My Nervous System
In 2011, I was living in Japan when one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded struck the coast. The earthquake triggered a tsunami, and the tsunami triggered the nuclear disaster at Fukushima.
Physically, I was safe (enough). My nervous system was not (at all).
What followed was years of hypervigilance. That constant, exhausting state where your body never fully believes it's safe. I couldn't sleep. Even when I did fall asleep, the smallest vibration or sound would jolt me awake. At my worst, I was cycling through two to three hours of sleep, two to three hours of waking, and just trying to make it to the end of the day.
I did talk therapy, which helped me process the emotions around what I'd experienced. But my body didn’t get the message. The physical imprint of that event was still running quietly in the background, keeping my nervous system on high alert.
So at three in the morning, exhausted and out of ideas, I did what any desperate person does.
I turned on my phone and asked Google.
The 3 AM Miracle
My search history from that period is not flattering. Somewhere between meditation for sleep and how long can a person survive without sleep — great fuel for anxiety-based insomnia by the way — I stumbled onto yoga nidra.
I had no idea what it was. I picked a video because the thumbnail looked peaceful and the teacher had a lot of followers. It was a Hail Mary. I didn't care. It was three in the morning.
That teacher was Ally Boothroyd. And what happened next was the best decision I've ever made at 3am. Honestly, it may be the best decision I’ve ever made because it changed the trajectory of my life.
About 10 minutes into the meditation, I fell asleep. Deeply, completely, earthquake-can’t-wake-me-up asleep.
I did this every night for four months. Each time, I fell asleep before the meditation was over. And slowly — so slowly I almost didn't notice — something started shifting. I was sleeping longer. Waking less. Feeling, for the first time in years, like my body was beginning to trust that it could rest safely again.
“Yoga nidra, in my definition, is really a practice of remembering. Because it’s not only a technique that guides us there, but it’s the state of consciousness that this technique leads us to. ”
A Different Kind of Yoga
Yoga nidra is not yoga the way most people picture it. There are no poses, no movement, no effort required. You lie down. You listen. That's it.
The intention of yoga nidra is to guide you into a very specific state of consciousness — somewhere between waking and sleep — where your body is as deeply relaxed as it is during sleep, but your awareness remains present. It's not unconsciousness. It's not a nap. It's something else entirely, something that turns out to be woven into our biology in ways that researchers are only beginning to fully understand.
About eight months into my daily practice, I enrolled in Transformational Sleep Yoga Nidra Teacher Training with Ally and the wonderful team at The School of Living Yoga. I thought I had a pretty good handle on what yoga nidra was. A few months later, I realized I had been looking at a single snowflake and thinking I understood the iceberg.
The depth of this practice — philosophically, neurologically, personally — is staggering. And the more I learned, the more this thought swirled around my mind: Why doesn't everybody know about this?
A Practice That Grows With You
Five years later, yoga nidra had stopped being a band-aid for insomnia and has become an integral part of my life.
An evolution I could never have predicted. I came to this practice as a desperate insomniac. What I didn't anticipate was how completely it would reorganize my own nervous system, offering an embodied sense of safety that traditional therapy could not. Being able to access this calm and grounded state of being “on demand” so to speak has changed my relationship with work, rest, and recovery.
I practice before creative work. There's a particular receptive mental state that's hard to force and easy to lose, and a short NSDR session before I sit down to write or begin a new project reliably puts me there. My best ideas don't come from pushing harder. They come from the 20 minutes I spent breathing, listening, and being present.
I use it as a refresh to break up sessions of heavy mental work. Tax season used to make me cry. I'm not exaggerating — the combination of sustained focus, financial stress, and screen time would leave me wrung out in a way that no amount of coffee could fix. Now, I treat it like any other recovery protocol. Thirty minutes of deep rest between hard mental sessions, and I come back with more focus and about 60% reduced desire to throw my laptop out the window.
I practice during periods of heightened anxiety — not to escape what I'm feeling, but to give my nervous system somewhere to land. There's a difference between suppressing anxiety and metabolizing it, and yoga nidra has taught me that difference in my body, not just in my head. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the times I’m most resistant to practicing are the times I need it the most.
I use it as a pathway to access positive bhavana, connecting to an intentional positive state of emotion like gratitude, confidence, trust, and contentment. This was one of the more surprising discoveries from my teacher training: that the deeply relaxed state of yoga nidra isn't just restorative, it's receptive. You can communicate with your subconscious through imagery and words. Language begins to rewire neural pathways. I've used this to work with confidence during periods of self-doubt, and with trust during transitions when nothing felt certain.
And I use it for physical recovery. When I got COVID, yoga nidra became part of my daily routine almost immediately — once or twice a day through the acute phase, and consistently for the month that followed as my body worked to rebuild. I treated it the way an athlete might treat ice baths or compression: not optional, not indulgent, just part of the recovery process.
That framing — rest as recovery, not reward — is maybe the most important shift this practice has made in me. I spent years treating rest as something I'd earned once everything else was done. (Plot twist: it’s never done!) Yoga nidra taught me that rest is how you make everything else possible.
Which led me to start thinking about students.
Because if this is what intentional rest can do for an overextended adult — a former insomniac, a person who once Googled how long can a human survive without sleep at three in the morning — what might it do for an overstimulated fifteen-year-old? What might it do for the teacher standing in front of that student, running on bad sleep and cortisol?
The Rested Classroom is built around questions like these. In the process of my own recovery, wishing I had known about yoga nidra as a student or earlier in my teaching career, I realized that what had changed my life might be exactly what is missing from the school day.
Why I Do This Work
I came to yoga nidra as a desperate insomniac at three in the morning. I stayed because it changed the way I understand what it means to be a whole person — to stop fighting certain parts of yourself and start welcoming them instead.
The body, the breath, the mind, the emotions, the deeper witnessing awareness that can observe all of it without judgment: yoga nidra holds space for all of it, simultaneously.
I continue to share yoga nidra practices and speak about the practice because there are so many people who have never heard of it. The exhausted educators. The overstimulated students. The healthcare professionals running on empty. The people Googling how long can I survive without sleep at three in the morning.
Whether you’re feeling curious or skeptical about yoga nidra, I encourage you to try it for yourself. If you've ever fallen asleep, you can do yoga nidra. Everything else, you can learn along the way.
“My favorite aspect of this collective practice was the Yoga Nidra. I often have trouble getting my mind to calm down and stop racing thoughts and I found this to be really helpful. I had previously assumed that yoga required movement and specific poses, but I enjoyed the flexibility of this practice. Being able to find whatever position feels comfortable to me allowed me to feel not only physically comfortable but mentally as well. … I enjoyed that Yoga Nidra seemed to be less about the physical posture, and more about the mental state between sleep and wake. Bringing your attention to the physical sensations of your body made me feel very connected and grounded. I was surprised how much this helped me to relax. From this practice I can take away a helpful relaxation strategy to incorporate for myself and share with friends and family.”
