Practice with Hilary on Wanderlust TV: her recent collection, Reclaim Your Right to Rest, is a 4-part yoga nidra series that can support healthy sleep habits and permit deep healing. Access this collection, together with hundreds of yoga, meditation and movement classes on WLTV with a free 14-day WLTV trial.

I’ve been talking concerning the life-changing advantages of rest and yoga nidra for nearly 15 years, and I’ve never wavered in my evangelizing because I do know just how powerful this practice really is.

Let’s travel back to the day all of it began for me: February 9, 2008. I hate to be dramatic, but that basically was ‘the day my life modified ceaselessly.’

I used to be living in Recent Zealand and needed a ‘break’ from my boyfriend on the time, so I went on retreat to a conventional yoga ashram. I used to be lying on the heated floor of a yurt, overlooking Golden Bay, being guided into my first yoga nidra by a particularly tall, extremely blonde German sannyasin (yogic monk) named Swami Marutdeva.

I had been struggling through my adolescence and early 20s with insomnia and anxiety (and this was before smartphones). I had been practicing meditation in a Buddhist tradition for some time by this point, however the techniques I’d practiced at my local Kadampa center in Philadelphia never landed. I never felt peaceful. I at all times just felt like I used to be sitting in a pool of my very own mental filth for an excruciating 45 minutes at a time.

Yoga nidra was different, though. That very practice delivered all the good things. I felt like I melted effortlessly right into a state of what I can only describe as bliss. Right away, I finally understood what was possible through meditation. I finally understood what it felt prefer to let go—to release all tension. To experience a quiet mind. To maneuver beyond the mind. It was a full on spiritual experience. And I wanted more.

I became a yoga nidra junkie. It’s all I talked about. I arranged my life to ensure that I got my fix on a regular basis. I practiced a lot that in only a couple of months, I had memorized three 45 minute recordings, syllable by syllable. It completely shifted my relationship to sleep, and provided major relief for my insomnia and anxiety.

I needed to go even deeper. That October, I went on retreat to spend a while on the yoga lineages’ ashram in India. After a strong spiritual experience in India, I knew I needed to be within the lineage. So in I went. Over the span of 8 years, I took 2 Tantric initiations into the lineage, and spent 2 years living and studying at an ashram as a sannyasin.

During a period at home in Recent Jersey, between ashram years, I experienced a horrible trauma. I lost my childhood best friend and round the corner neighbor to a heroin overdose. (I deeply wish he could have known peace and obliteration of the ego through yoga nidra. It might need helped him get off heroin.)

I used to be with Rocky the day before he died, and my last words to him were, “I really like you Rock. Don’t you go dying on me.” The following morning, on December 30, 2012, I watched him being carried out by the paramedics from my childhood bedroom window.

I returned to the ashram every week after his funeral to finish my 2nd yr of study. Deep in grief and affected by trauma, I experienced a brutal bout of insomnia that lasted 3 months. Yoga nidra was my secure space. It was the one way I could get rest. It was the one time I felt peaceful. It was the one thing that kept me sane, on condition that I used to be in such a state of severe sleep deprivation and emotional pain. It also helped me integrate the emotions and steadily release the sensation of responsibility I had been holding onto since his death.

I even have personally experienced each considered one of yoga nidra’s transformative advantages: relief of stress and anxiety. Restoring my sleep and rest. Emotional healing of trauma. Transformation. Letting go. Spiritual oneness. Yoga nidra has helped me make sense of life. In reality, it’s provided me with my life’s path.

The photo above was taken shortly after I received my spiritual name from Swami Satsangi Saraswati. Your spiritual name represents your potential, and serves as a mantra to remind you of your highest self every time it’s spoken.

It’s no coincidence that my spiritual name is Om. The mantra of yoga nidra. The symbol of Om 🕉  represents the 4 states of consciousness—waking, dreaming, sleeping and the fourth—pure awareness in deep sleep—the state of yoga nidra.

So, I’m going to attempt to live as much as my name. I’m going to maintain on keeping on, guiding folks into relationship with yoga nidra—the practice and the state—with the hope that it would transform their lives because it did mine.

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Hilary Jackendoff is a Yoga Nidra and meditation teacher, in addition to a Teacher Trainer and Human Design coach. In 2008, she began studying Tantric Yoga, then spent two years formally training while living at an ashram in Australia. In 2019, she discovered Human Design and has been creating containers and training offerings for de-conditioning, integrated with Yogic practices. Hilary’s work is devoted to sharing accessible tools and grounded spiritual teachings to encourage self-inquiry so you’ll be able to release stress and self-judgment and awaken self-love, inner ease, and joy.

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