How can yoga help you sleep

 Yoga is known to help improve sleep and our capacity to fall asleep by balancing the nervous system and bringing the parasympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system responsible for our capacity to rest and digest)  into dominance when rest is required.

When stress hormones dominate our body, we are often unable to discharge all the extra energy available. A yoga practice including movement, breath and meditation then becomes a vital resource for letting steam off and balancing the nervous system. A stronger and more balanced nervous system, allows us to get less nervous when faced with life circumstances and events.

The variety of practices available in Kundalini Yoga provide us with powerful tools which not only work quickly on allowing our body and mind to relax, but also provide lasting sleep solutions by working on the root cause of the insomnia which might be related to stress, trauma, emotional struggles, fear of letting go, a crisis of integrity, an inter-personal conflict or difficult work situation, nervous or glandular system imbalance etc.

The structure of a daily practice helps us set good habits - making us feel safe and supporting our ability to let go of control.

Learning how to move, breathe and manage your mind and emotions to connect inwardly supports better health, therefore supporting our body’s ability to regenerate through sleep.

The wealth of yogic philosophy teachings also available through yoga, provide an opportunity to get perspective, clarity and reconfigure your life based on simple, timeless spiritual principles. This newly acquired perspective helps soothe the mind and supports our capacity to fall asleep.

In my online course YOGA FOR INSOMNIA, I dive deeper into how yoga helps with sleep issues, and specifically helps balance our body-mind system to help regain sleep.

We discuss in depth How Sleep Works. We discuss Brain Waves at length to support your understanding of how to train your brainwaves into balance. We also explore how the glandular system and nervous system are affected by sleep, and understand how yoga helps optimise the health of our glands and healthy hormonal functioning; counteracting certain detrimental effects of lack of sleep. When looking into the nervous system and sleep, we look at how yoga effectively works on increasing the energy moving through particular nerve pathways and increasing interconnection between brain cells - therefore making our nervous system a strong container for us to go through life more balanced and less shaken by events or relationships, resulting in a calmer mind and more capacity to relax and fall asleep.

And SO much more...

The structure of this course is also aimed at creating an emotionally charged experience which begins to take you beyond your habitual emotional responses, and therefore change the biology of your internal circuitry, your neurochemistry and your hormonal expression to begin to rewire the brain and send a new emotional signature beginning to condition the body, the mind and therefore your experience in life.

Yoga for Insomnia is a 40-day journey which I designed to create lasting change in your lives, beyond just your capacity to regain sleep. It is like nothing else available out there. After years of living with Chronic insomnia, and subsequently with the fear of not sleeping, I have decided to bring together in this course all of the wealth of practices and knowledge which have helped me shift and heal. 

 For more information about YOGA FOR INSOMNIA, including introduction videos, please visit THIS PAGE. or simply, signup HERE.

Why yoga can help with insomnia?

Most of us are living a very fast pace life, perhaps not being fully aware of how we really feel, our levels of stress, the extent to which our thoughts control us and prevent us from living our best life.

Or we may feel as though we can no longer hold our lives together, and that letting go would result in our lives crumbling down. Or we are simply incapable of letting go, living in constant control, which is draining, mentally, physically and emotionally.

When we are living in stress, the more primitive aspect of our nervous system tends to be overactive, resulting in us either wanting to RUN, FIGHT/RESIST or HIDE. Does that sound like you?

What a yoga and meditation practice allows us to develop is trust, flexibility of mind (and body), and an agility to flow with change, a capacity to be grounded yet at the same time to elevate our energy to choose higher frequency thoughts and actions in our lives. Everything we do on the mat is only a practice to take away in all aspects of our daily lives. We move stagnant energy which prevents us from shifting our perspective and thoughts. We learn to breathe in a way which balances our nervous system,  alters our emotions and blood chemistry so we experience vitality and clarity. We build our radiance and electromagnetic field so we may be less prone to negativity in our lives - be it our own negativity or that of our external environment.  We off load our subconscious and unconscious minds so we become lighter and do not need to live in constant reaction to our environment. Instead we start to see things for what they are, think and act consciously and elevate our lives.

What does it mean to elevate our lives?

Elevating our lives means to develop a kind of stamina that allows us to stay grounded and centred. To experience vitality, expansion, growth, joy and a sense of purpose and connection. To release old patterns of thoughts and behaviour which are not even ours in the first place, but projected onto us by our early life carers, society, life experiences. It means to release all the underlying fear which is the cause of all our uneasiness. - or dis-ease.

So living an elevated life means bringing ease into everything that we do. That doesn’t mean being passive in any way. We can still work towards our dreams in this state, still engage in our lives, still relate to our relatives and friends, only from a different place which requires less effort and brings more positive results.

We use the yogic practices to help our body and mind work optimally, to remain vital and present. To get out of this constant feeling of being lethargic and tired. From that space we are able to expand around all obstacles coming into our lives - even allow the challenges to expand us.

 As human beings, we have become so disconnected from ourselves, from each other. Re-creating that connection, is what yoga is about - we create wholeness, come back to our neutrality and recognise the power and capacity that each and every one of us has to not create more of the past but to evolve, to choose a different thought or action than we would have before. Our mind is addicted to its habits. It is addicted to trains of thoughts like the ones leading us to insomnia. When we use the powerful yogic tools available to us in Kundalini Yoga, we break out of the hypnosis of the addictive mind; we don’t get caught up in old ways and we re-write our story.

I hope those words support you on your journey. For any questions and enquiry about working together to support your journey of recovering from sleep issues and insomnia, please reach out at [email protected].