Yoga Nidra: An interview with Cheryl Fenner Brown

Cheryl Fenner Brown is an Integrative Yoga Therapist and teacher living in Durham, North Carolina. We met when she was living in the San Francisco Bay Area. We talked about the classes she teaches, and more specifically about Yoga nidra, the practice of yogic sleep.

where are you currently teaching?

I teach for a continuing care retirement community called the Forest at Duke. The residents are professors and physicians from Duke. I teach them both chair and mat yoga as well as a quarterly Yoga nidra series, which is really nice.

Besides seeing private clients at my home studio and in a couple other places, my public classes are a little bit all over the place – I have fallen out of love with teaching in traditional yoga studios. During the summer I was teaching at a goat farm on a beautiful pavilion that they use for farm to table dinners. It is a really early morning class, twice a week in a rural area where there are no studios. We got to watch 75 goats and a donkey while we practiced which was really sweet.

Now that the weather is colder, we moved the class to the Bahama Ruritan Club building. I also teach two Yoga for People Managing Cancer classes in Durham, NC that are sponsored by the non-profit You Call This Yoga. And I round out my schedule with an Adaptive Yoga class for people over 50 and both active and restorative Aerial Yoga classes and workshops – which I love!

Oh cool!

I also offer a Healing Yoga for Cancer Survivorship teacher training. I was just back in California to do the first weekend of that training in Walnut Creek. And then two weekends ago I offered a whole weekend on the Subtle Practices - which included the Yoga nidra training – in Raleigh, NC for Blue Lotus Yoga Community’s 300-hr program. Really where I want to spend more time is teaching teachers and working with private clients.

Moving to North Carolina really helped to differentiate me from my teachers (who all still teach in the Bay Area). I'm one of the few people that do Yoga nidra and Mudra and the different subtle practices. It's all Vinyasa all day long out here. So it's nice to have that differentiation.

Yoga nidra is very different from Vinyasa. (I don't know very much about Vinyasa.) I once went to a hot yoga class with my brother in New York and at the end of the class, he asked me, “How was that for you?” I said, “Well, that was like espresso, and I'm used to chamomile tea.”

Hot yoga, I just feel for me, it would be very dangerous. And I'd probably die right there on the floor in a puddle of sweat.

You're a yoga therapist and teacher, right?

I call myself an Integrative Yoga Therapist because the school that I went to has integrative in the title - Integrative Yoga Therapy. So I'm an Integrative Yoga Therapist and teacher. This is my 15th year teaching. I graduated from the program at Piedmont in 2005. I graduated and we had a 725-hour program, which is unusual as a first taste of teacher training. Usually people do now two hundred hours. And this was just in the beginning, the first five years of the whole existence of Yoga Alliance who accredits the schools. It was a big deal that this was accredited by Yoga Alliance. It really wasn't for teaching; it was mainly for people to just do their home practice and learn about yoga - a lot of anatomy, pranayama because of Richard Rosen's influence in the Bay Area; philosophy and then the practice. But no, Yoga nidra was never mentioned. There was a little bit of vipassana meditation.

And then in 2007, even though I had such a huge training, I thought “I want to know why yoga makes you feel a certain way. Why does forward folding make you feel calm and why does backbending make you feel happy and awake?” I wanted there to be this sort of energetic, emotional understanding, not just an anatomic understanding.

Got it.

I started looking into a yoga therapy training and they were relatively new back then, there were just a couple. I started at Mount Madonna. It was just a short drive. Back then the people who run that program were Joseph and Lilian Le Page. And they retired and live in Brazil and didn't want to go to California anymore because it's a really long trip for them. They did this training at Kripalu, which is in Massachusetts, and I mean, it's as pretty much as far away as California as you can get and still be in the States. There was a five-week residential training and I split it up into three parts. I started in 2007 and did this specialization course And first time I had it was called the Multi-Dimensional Aspect of Asana. It was chanting and mudra and breathing and Yoga nidra and how that related to the postures.

And the first time I did Yoga nidra - they didn't really tell us what it was. They said “We're going to lay down and do a guided meditation.” Great. So we laid down and I'm listening very intently to everything the person is saying. And I didn't fall asleep the first time. And at the end I sat up and thought; “What just happened?” I felt totally different. I felt like all of my crud that I'm carrying around in my head and in my heart, it's almost like I could see it like a suitcase sitting to the side. And I looked at and thought “That's interesting. I don't think I want to pick that up again.”

[Laughs]

I just I broke from it for a brief period. It's because in Yoga nidra there's the hypnagogic state and hypnagogic means not awake and not asleep. It's that in-between twilight place. You are able to access your witness consciousness. The witness consciousness is not the everyday judgmental voice in your head that doesn't stop talking all day long. It's the part of your consciousness that's sitting back and observing everything. It's observing how you react, observing how you talk to yourself; your likes and dislikes and your judgments and memories and all of that.

And when you touch that witness consciousness, that's what allows you to look at your own stuff and have a different perspective about it. I thought “I'm hooked!” At the next training, I wrote a script and read it to people. We were at Kripalu and we did Yoga nidra and then everybody went and bought cookies at the snack bar. And they asked me, “Did you mention cookies?” I said “I didn't mention cookies, I don't know what you mean. There's no cookies in it.”

That's hilarious.

I really enjoyed writing the script. It's very creative. And then I started to offer it live in my classes. I would do it once a month, usually at the last class of the month. I started offering at the Cancer Support Community in Walnut Creek where I was working and teaching. We actually did a weekly class of Yoga nidra that was always well-attended on a Friday afternoon. It's still going on. One of my assistants is still teaching.

I'm not a good meditator. I have trouble sitting and being in silence. First of all, it's the consistency of it. You really do need to do it every day for it to be effective. And I've done it in the past but something usually happens, my schedule changes or I'm not sleeping well. I'd feel like I'm just going to stay in bed and I'm not going to get up.

But Yoga nidra - you can do it before bed. I can do it as soon as I wake up if I didn't sleep. I can actually do it in the afternoon. After lunch is probably my favorite time. 3 o'clock is when I like to do it. It's great if you're sick. A 30-minute Yoga nidra is worth about two hours of sleeping. If someone is sleep deprived they can actually get caught up, even if you don't fall asleep at all.

That's one of the amazing things about it. I was feeling sleepy at work yesterday and after I was done seeing patients, I thought “Let me do Yoga nidra.” I was totally fine for the rest of the night.

It's an amazing ability. It's almost like you rebooted yourself, like you reboot your computer. And even if it's a ten minute body scan (one of the CDs I have has a ten-minute body scan). You can do the body scan and you still feel better because you're quieting the mind to listen to the instructions. 

You're going in and you're allowing yourself to be with yourself. And we don't do that often enough. Usually when it's a quiet moment, you try to fill it with something, fill it with your phone, or you fill up with the conversation or TV or a book or whatever. But this is set aside time for you to be quiet with yourself. And it doesn't matter what happens - if you fall asleep, it's still effective.

There's a really wonderful woman in England named Uma Dinsmore-Tuli who sings the Yoga nidra script and it's a fabulous free resource. It's called the Yoga Nidra Network . There are people all over the world. And you can listen to a Yoga nidra in a language that you don't understand and still get the benefit.

It isn't the systematization of it that's that is the key. It's the ability for you to be in alpha brain function. And it's the voice that you're listening to, the person speaking. Even if you don't know what they're saying and you're trying to stay awake just enough to hear it. And that's what is the magic part of Yoga nidra is being in that alpha hypnagogic brain function.

It's really fascinating. I didn't know that. When people ask me what Yoga nidra is, I tell them it's ‘yoga napping’.

Yes. I always joke and say, this is our ‘adult-supervised nap time’.

Technically, what does it mean?

‘Nidra’ is ‘sleep’. So some people translate it to ‘divine sleep’ or just ‘yogic sleep’. There are other phrases that people have come up with but it really is the yoga of sleep.

There are some interesting articles about the history of Yoga nidra and when it became a systematized thing. It uses some practices that actually come from Western psychological relaxation practices. There's the setting of an intention which comes from this thing called Pratipaksha bhavana which is this ability for you to negate your own negative thought pattern. You create that positively stated statement. So you're putting that different frame around whatever is creating stress. 

Usually, people keep their sankalpa, which is the intention or the resolve, for a long time. I've had three in the past 15 years. Good ones that kind of get into core beliefs - something about yourself that really isn't true. Something that got installed maybe when you were a kid. You can really be specific, but then you also have another temporary sankalpa - say something else is happening like you're sick or whatever a crisis is happening. It could be dealing with that short term crisis and then go back to the other one. And so I've done that a lot, too.

There's a meditation with three mudras that help you create your sankalpa. It's free to listen to and there's a picture of the three mudras. It actually uses a meditation technique from Eckhart Tolle where you think about your stressor and then you think about what's the perfect outcome from this negative situation you are experiencing. And then you create the statement to get you to that outcome or to help you take a step toward the outcome. The sankalpa isn't something that you're asking the world to change for you; you're actually asking yourself to change your perspective on whatever it is that is making you feel the stressor.

So when you set the sankalpa and then you meet the witness consciousness, that's when it's able to sink in?

Yeah, it's a good question. In the beginning of the yoga nidra, you are asked to state your sankalpa and you are usually pretty awake in that moment. Then you state it again at the end of the yoga nidra and you are much deeper into your subconscious mind at that time. I like to think about like a bell curve and above the line is awake and below the line is asleep. And usually, you're kind of awake and then you kind of dip down and then you might be awake and then you dip down again. Then at the end, after the guided journey (if there is a guided journey) or the list of objects that are named, you say it again.

And usually you're deeper in that you're still hearing it, but you're not as awake as you were. That's where you're implanting it. Think of it like planting a seed and you are continuing to water and fertilize the seed. It actually just shifts everything; it shifts how you think about your stressors; it can shift how you relate to yourself, how you speak about them, how you behave, and they are very powerful. It's almost like you have to be careful what you wish for because you're asking yourself to change something and it's really a very deep thing. I've had people come back to me and say; “I wanted to work with fear and boy, did all the stuff that I was afraid of come at me!” When you're trying to change a bad habit, you have the urge to do that thing a lot more strongly. It's just how our how our psyche works.

You mentioned the list of objects during the meditation. Are there different parts of the Yoga nidra meditation? It seems like there is. What's the pattern of it?

Most traditional Yoga nidra meditations come from a little blue book from the Bihar school called Yoga Nidra. They systematized it. In the beginning of each script, there's a paragraph about we are doing Yoga nidra and assuming that the person is going to be listening to this at home, you tell them to lay down, get comfortable. Then you do some sort of awareness or relaxation exercise. That might be breathing. That might be listening. I often use listening because we're often not in quiet environments when we're trying to do this.

Then you create your sankalpa. Then you go into the body scan and that's where you're placing your awareness into each part of your body. You have a lot of nerve endings in your fingers and in your mouth. Sometimes the body scan is more specific in those places because you can differentiate different parts of your mouth and different fingers. You're connecting the nerves through both the motor cortex and the sensory cortex and actually relaxing your body and relaxing your brain at the same time. And that's usually when people start to fall asleep because they just get quiet and you start feeling the body parts.

Then you go into experience of duality. And oftentimes they are physical duality is like hot and cold, heavy and light. But it could also be emotional dualities like anxious/calm. And the idea here is what we think about can create sensation, physical sensation, and we can create memory, we can create emotion. We can change pretty much anything by just thinking about it. If we have a really good habit of creating anxiety for ourselves by how we think, if we can create anxiety, why can't we also create calm?

Yes.

It's getting you to try to remember. Remember a time when you were anxious. Now, remember a time when you were calm. Do you feel it in the body in a certain place?

Some traditions actually then say, “Can you think of both of them at the same time?” And you realize that, kind of neither one of them exists if they're blended together; it's just neutral.

Then it's the rapid image visualization. And this is usually just a list of objects, physical objects. And it also can be other things that are familiar. It's stuff from nature. It can be archetypes. It can be religious iconography, because the intention is for it to be ever so slightly evocative and provocative. For example, if it says Jesus on a cross and that's going to bring up a whole lot of stuff for most people. You're not going to dive into all of what that means for you. You're like a little dragonfly. You're going to touch this one and then you go to the next one and then you go to the next one.

There is a use for this privately to work with trauma. Now, I'm not a therapist. There actually is another form of Yoga nidra called iRest by Richard Miller and he does work with that. He does have that training.

I have worked privately with students. I had a woman who was in the end of life, she had had cancer. And she wanted to work on her relationship with her family because they didn't agree with what was going on with her. She forewent treatment and they didn't agree with that. She wanted to use the Yoga nidra time to help her deal with those emotions. We checked in with each other and I showed her the script and I asked “Is this safe for me to say?” because there has to be a lot of trust between the practitioner and the student. She said yes and we just used that Yoga nidra for months.

Those images can pretty much be anything. Then if time permits, there is a guided journey. This is where you're gonna get the deepest into your subconscious state, and it's usually a physical journey. You're going to imagine yourself, for example, walking in the woods and you see a cave and then you sit down and then you look in a box and there's something in the box.

There's a lot of seeking in these journeys. What you're doing is, it's a metaphor for you looking in. If you can touch that witness consciousness. There are five levels of us and Yoga nidra actually takes you through all five of those levels. Your physical body is the first one, your energy body, which is your breathing and your nervous system. Then you have your mind and emotions, which is your everyday mind, then your wisdom mind, which is the witness consciousness and then the soul which is said to be bliss.

You're trying to get to the soul and say, “Oh! At my heart, when I'm not feeling stress, there's bliss there.” We carry that around with us all the time, which is pretty amazing. All the practices that we do, including Yoga nidra, are sweeping away all of the other crud, the stresses in the other layers so that you can see that bliss.

There's the journey and you state the sankalpa again. Then you're going to slowly start to bring people back into their body. There's often some sort of breathing exercise or a listening exercise or something that brings them back into the moment. Remind them that they're on the floor, remind them they're doing it Yoga nidra. And then you slowly bring them back up and out of it. So it's a gentle sort of the bell curve. They're gently going deeper and then you gently bring them back up.

Often I'll fall asleep during the body scan and then I'll wake up to the end of the physical journey and I wonder “Where am I?”

Oh, this is what I do. Technically, you're supposed to stay awake, but I don't really know anybody that isn't sleep deprived. I think that as long as you give yourself the time to do it, I think it's still extremely beneficial even if you don't remember anything that happened.

I listened to this one Yoga nidra on Insight Timer and during the imagery part, the person mentioned a corpse and I freaked out.

Yeah, that's traditional.

Why is that?

Savasana at the end of the yoga practice translates to “corpse pose”. One of the Kleshas, which are these things that prevent progress on the spiritual path, is the aversion to death. The original yogis used to actually go and lay in the cemetery in savasana and try not to be afraid of dying. I think it’s a throwback from that. Sometimes I'll say skeleton and to someone like us (meaning health care practitioners), that brings to mind anatomy, not dead bodies, right? I took it out because people asked “Why are you talking about a skeleton? Because my scripts are publicly available, I don't tend to provoke that. But it is traditional to talk about graveyards, corpses.

Also, the delivery is different. This is funny: Some of my stuff is on Insight Timer as well. The comments that people make range from “Oh my God, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.” And then someone else said “She sounds like a robot”. It just depends on what you're used to. It's different when I do it live than when I'm reading it, because it's more of a conversational style of delivery. 

The way I was taught is that you have to be slow because you have to give people time to do the things you telling them to do. You have to have spaciousness in the delivery, but also you shouldn't have this huge inflection of your voice because it's gonna be distracting to people. You really are trying to get them just almost asleep. If you're talking like this [She changes tone and inflection of her voice] they're not going to be able to relax. It's little bit monotone, a little bit robotic. 

There are different styles. There are so many different ones out there. Insight Timer is a good resource. Look up the yoga nidra in other languages. That's actually really cool.

I'm going to definitely try that in a language I don't speak. I'm used to doing this only one-on-one while listening to a recording. But you also do this for classes for several people. What is it like doing it? What's that experience like?

For years and years, I wrote the scripts. I've got probably 20 scripts that I've written on Phases of the Moon, different emotional processing, and there's some on different doshas (Ayurvedic constitutions); there was one for cancer. There's one for each chakra that I wrote with a dear friend from California named Sharon Olson. I've got so many and I would kind of just go through those.

And then last year, I had a student who I didn't know. She was the only person that came to the class. She didn't me information and I just sat there and I didn't have my scripts with me and I thought “I'm just gonna wing it.” I just sat and I felt like I started to channel ideas. And I took her through this guided meditation with a river. And then she sat up and she said: “How did you know?” She told me “I'm always working with water imagery.” I don't know, I just open myself up to guides. I'm a Reiki practitioner so I definitely believe in spirit guides. I channelled that, right?

Wow.

One of my good friends out in the Bay area started the Yoga for Hope event that happens in Union Square through the non-profit City of Hope. That was probably 250 people outside and I wrote a script specifically for that class about the threads that connect us all and staying hopeful – you can download that one from the Yoga Nidra for Emotions set. That was probably the largest group I have taught it to. Then in North Carolina, there's a yoga festival that happens to benefit You Call This Yoga which is the non-profit that sponsors the cancer classes I teach here. I have taught Yoga nidra at their festival for the past four years.

Last year, they asked me to teach it for closing ceremonies and it was probably a hundred people. I decided to do it live, I just walked around with the mike and I had an idea of the imagery I wanted to use, but I really enjoyed the live delivery and got a lot of positive feedback. Now I prefer to do them that way instead of trying to read it because it's a different feeling if someone is speaking versus reading. You can tell even if it's I'm reading words I've already written. I feel like I don't need to have the script anymore. I have the scripts and they're available for teachers to purchase. That's probably the thing that gets purchased the most out of my store is the scripts.

When you teach people how to do Yoga nidra, are you mostly teaching yoga teachers? Or can anybody learn to do this?

Anybody can learn to do it, but it's mostly yoga teachers that will have heard of it. My intention is to create an online training. That would actually take you through the history, all of the background on each section and then give you exercises on how you write one yourself. For yoga teachers, it would be continuing education. It amazes me that it isn't more popular. I think it is becoming more popular now, even here. I see it on schedules and I think “Yay for Yoga nidra!” It's wild to me that people I never met came to that very first yoga festival that I taught in 2015 will come up to me and say “You taught me Yoga nidra.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, you remember it?” What that tells me is that it makes a huge impact on people.

The reason why I wanted to interview you, Cheryl, is because it is one of those things that was life-changing for me. And I thank you for that. In 2015, I was doing a year of daily yoga. I got sick and I thought “How do I do yoga if I can't get out of bed?” You told me about Yoga nidra and then I listened to your recordings. Now I'm interested in learning how to do this, to guide people through it too.

It could be complementary with what you do. I think it could be complementary with Reiki, massage, or with any one-on-one type session. It kind of amazes me that more therapists don't get trained in the technique because I think for people that are dealing with a lot of negative self-talk, it can be a really great way to start to break that cycle, even if it just gives them a break for a little while. 

Yes.

The other question that I get from my students a lot is, if I have a recording, can I listen to the same recording or do I have to actually listen to different ones all the time? My teachers had a cassette tape and they listened to the cassette tape until they broke it. So, yes, you can definitely listen to the same recording. 

My favorite one is Soraya Saraswati. She's Australian and I love listening to her voice. There are three on her CD and sometimes I listen to all three of them. If I have an hour, I’ll just lay here and let it keep playing.

I have a Yoga nidra playlist just so I can play Yoga nidra meditations and then avoid random loud music after. I have it on my phone just so it’s all Yoga nidra all the time.

I have a playlist that's like that for music if I need music in a class and then I have a Yoga nidra playlist that's just Yoga nidra.

You touched on a little bit about the different meditations you have. I know you have Yoga nidra for healing and for insomnia. Then there are the long and short forms. What are the other meditations?

On the website, one of the main headers is for Yoga nidra. The ones for the chakras I wrote with Sharon Olson, who is also another yoga teacher out in California. And we're not selling the scripts for that

You mentioned the moon ones. Do you have those recorded?

They're not recorded. I do want to record the ones that I haven't recorded yet. The first one is called Yoga Nidra and it has a 10 minute Body Scan meditation by itself, a 20 minute Short Yoga Nidra and a 30 minute Long Yoga Nidra track. The Short Yoga Nidra is a basic meditation - you can actually download it for free by joining my mailing list. The Long Yoga Nidra takes you through the koshas I mentioned before, which are the different levels of our being. So you are guided to experience the koshas in different ways throughout the script. 

The second CD I published is called Yoga Nidra for Healing which I created for cancer patients, or anybody that's going through a health crisis. The first track is a Setting Your Sankalpa meditation that I mentioned earlier – you can also get that on the website for free. Then there is Yoga Nidra for Healing track which guides you through a visualization to boost your life force and give gratitude to doctors and treatments – so it does not specifically mention cancer. The final track is Yoga Nidra for Insomnia that is unique. It is the last track. You could actually lay in bed at night, put it on, and it doesn't wake you up at the end. You go through all of you go through all those steps and you get down into the guided journey and then you basically get left asleep, hopefully at that point.

The third CD I published with Sharon is Yoga Nidra for Chakra Balance and contains 8 35-minute meditations. So there's one for each of the seven chakras and one that touches on all of them. Those are the only media that I have that are recorded. The other scripts that are coming.

The scripts that you can purchase include the scripts from the Yoga Nidra and the Yoga Nidra for Healing CDs as well as Yoga Nidra for the Yamas and Niyamas which are part of the eight limbs of yoga. Think of them like moral and ethical restraints that you hope to live by if you're a yoga practitioner. Yoga Nidra for the Doshas, which contains three scripts for Vata, Pitta and Kapha which are Ayurvedic constitutions. Then Yoga Nidra for the Emotions which contains four meditations on Joy, Gratitude, Compassion and Hope. Four other scripts in the Nature Yoga Nidra set which focus on guided journeys in the Garden, Ocean, Mountain and Forest. And finally, Yoga Nidra for Phases of the Moon that I wrote this year. There is one for a new moon, waxing, full, and waning. And those were fun to write.

I’m so excited for them!

I want to record them for myself and listen to them. The only weird thing about them is I fall asleep. At first, when I listened to my own, I would be editing but now it's like listening to myself think and I just pass out. I would like to record those because I think that people would really like to have them. And you can listen to one every week. 

Oh, that's so incredible. You've got so many resources.

I just want people to do it. I've only had a couple of people that I've taught that gave me negative feedback about how they related to it. So you do have to be a little bit careful. It's not recommended for people that are in a really high anxiety state because you are in the same place as hypnosis. If I'm offering it in a public setting, I have no idea what trauma or what anxiety or what triggers someone has installed in them from experience. I might say ‘red ball’ and someone might have this horrible red ball experience. My goal is always just to make sure that I'm constantly reminding them that they're safe, that they're doing Yoga nidra. They're not like reliving any kind of experience. The pacing of the language is such that you don't leave them in any place for very long, whether it's positive or negative, that you just keep on moving.

Cheryl Fenner Brown

Is there anything else that you'd like to add that I haven't asked you about?

You can read more about the history of Yoga Nidra article by Jason Birch. It’s a good one about the history of how it all came to be systematized. It brings together all these different practices kind of into one practice. It started back when that blue book was written in the 50s or 60s. It isn't this ancient practice, but there are pieces of it that are very old, like the body scan, it's a practice called Nyasa, where the yogis would sit and imagine like an old glowing ohm in every little part of their body. And they would have to keep track of all of it as a focus exercise. 

I just want to make it available to people. That's why I have all the information out there. A lot of people get the free one, which is great. Probably four or five people join every week and it’s probably because they get the free Yoga nidra.

I have all this content on the website and I was a website designer (still am) before I was a yoga teacher and I have been maintaining a blog for almost 10 years of what I taught every week. It's crazy how much content that I've accumulated on the site in the last 15 years. What I realized is that people aren't using it. I think it's overwhelming. They don't know what's there and they don't know how to find anything. 

My next offering is a 21 Days to Holiday Bliss self-care course that gives 5-15 minute practices every day that might be a pose, mudra, breathing practice, body scan, yoga nidra. Everyone has 15 minutes a day to do something to make themselves feel better, right? One option is to join the course and follow along with the email prompts or watch Facebook Live videos that I will record as we go along. Or if you feel like you need more guidance, I am offering three 30-minute private yoga therapy calls one at the beginning, middle and end so if there's something that you need - a different direction - I can make some other content available to you if it will enrich the practice.

In the coming year I also hope to get the Yoga Nidra training recorded as well as start thinking about creating a Mudra training and slowly get the Healing Yoga for Cancer Survivorship training online as well.

All right. And how can people find out about you? What's your website? 

It's yogacheryl.com.

Great. Thank you.

My pleasure.