You can think of yoga nidra as a way to reset your nervous system: shutting the whole thing down and rebooting. This meditation introduces the 6 week series I’ll be working on that will explore the 5 koshas, or layers of self, in yogic philosophy. The emphasis in this video is on the settling in phases of yoga nidra: the importance of intuiting your body’s needs to maximize comfort before the meditation begins, entering into the observer consciousness to create space between the experience you’re having and your reaction towards it, and the conscious ability to switch from the left brain, analytical thinking mind into the right brain, perceiving, sensing, and feeling state. The meditation includes a dip into annamaya kosha (the physical body), monomaya kosha (the layer of self that perceives duality and emotion) and vijnanamaya kosha (the layer of self that imagines). The following 5 weeks will be a deep dive into exploring each of these five layers in detail, one at a time.