Teach Yoga Nidra
Learn to teach Yoga Nidra
A uniquely comparative, creative and investigative training course
This offers a unique approach to the exploration and understanding of how to practice and teach the most powerfully transformative yoga technique: Yoga Nidra.
At Sitaram Yoga Studio, Stroud Yoga Centre
This is a six day course, spread over six months to facilitate home practice and assignments. It is limited to 16 participants.
There are two intensive, retreat-style residential weekends in Stroud, running 11.30 Friday until 1530 Sunday afternoon:
Friday – Sunday, February 17th – 19th;
Friday – Sunday, May 11th- 13th.
The course is an elective module of the Yogacampus Yoga Therapy Diploma, and all bookings are handled by the very lovely people in the Yogacampus office
Cost: £695
About the course
We designed this course because we believe Yoga Nidra to be the most powerful of all yoga techniques and we wanted to share its benefits widely. There are quite a number of different approaches to the techniques, and we felt it was about time that yoga teachers could engage in a yoga nidra training that gave them an opportunity to explore all aspects of approaches to yoga nidra.
There is a wealth of excellent work encompassed by the name yoga nidra, and whilst we both fully honour the crucial innovations set out by Swami Satyananda, we feel it is important to offer a sustained examination of the other approaches which have developed over the past forty years. Swami Satyananda’s greatest (of many) contributions to the practice of yoga was to set out a clear and effective system for using yoga nidra, which has become, like a fountainhead, a source of inspiration and refreshment to many different practitioners and teachers of yoga throughout the world. This course explores all these approaches, and examines their relative therapeutic benefits, providing course participants with a broad understanding of yoga nidras, and developing each teacher’s own creative capacity to respond to the needs of their students, themselves and their clients with sensitivity and awareness.
The course has two compulsory set texts, the first is Swami Satyananda’s Yoga Nidra, and the second is Richard Miller’s Yoga Nidra, the meditative heart of yoga. Course participants are required to have read both these books before the course begins. The course rests equally upon these two texts, and upon the new and comprehensive manual which we have prepared especially for the course and which contains abundant diverse resources including articles and research material from a variety of other sources too. The course is non-denominational in terms of yoga schools, seeking to offer the best that all forms of yoga have to offer: this is a hallmark of Yogacampus trainings, which is why we enjoy to offer this course within the Yogacampus framework.
The course demands great commitment and regular practice from students, and includes high levels of exploratory, comparative and investigative work in yoga nidra and its effects. The hypnotic aspects of yoga nidra are well understood by Nirlipta from his perspective as a clinical hypnotherapist and yoga teacher, so he is well placed to guide student explorations of this dimension of the practice. In addition to Uma’s doctoral level skills in communications, and her experience as an author of four books, which enables her to offer very detailed technical guidance on the best use of language for effective yoga nidra, including topics such as grammar, metaphor, imagery and syntax, the course also includes contributions from Lucy Clarke, a yoga therapist whose doctorate is in Clinical Psychology. The understandings about yoga nidra which come through study of these adjunct healing disciplines of hypnotherapy and psychology provide very valuable perspectives for gaining a profound understanding of what yoga nidra can be and how it works.
If you have an interest in the course outline, please download it as a pdf: Yoganidracourseoutlineforweb
The nature of the course experience: a mini retreat in a rural yoga studio and a monastery
We believe that it is best to be in a peaceful and nurturing environment to go deeply in the study and experience of yoga nidra. This is why we have chosen to offer this course at our new home studio here in Stroud, in the Cotswolds. We begin on Saturday at 0900 and then the course unfolds in a retreat style, which extends the practice and study time into the evening on Saturday and begins early on Sunday morning. The retreat style approach really faciltates the deep engagement with this profound practice in a way that we do not feel would be possible in an urban location with 9-5 course hours.
We can go deep here in yoga nidra because we are away from the big city, out in nature. Our studio is at the end of a lane, sheltered by yew trees, and offering views across the valley to the National Trust Commons at Rodborough and Minchinhampton.
The studio itself, which doubles as our yoga library, is a womb-like haven of golden yellow walls, and gorgeous Devi yantras. It is well equipped with cosy blankets, bolsters, beanbags, blocks, belts, comfortable mats, eye pillows and everything you might possibly need to enter into deep states of healing and restorative yoga nidra. There is no need to bring anything, other than yourself. Our home studio comfortably accommodates 16 for study and practice, and this group size is ideal for allowing everyone time to practice and develop and deliver their own yoga ndra script and to get feedback from the course tutors. Because the studio is only ever used for yoga, meditation, healing therapies, devotional song, prayer and ceremony, there is a palpable energy of quiet and peace that is most conducive to study, sharing and deep experiential learning.
This makes it the ideal location for a teach yoga nidra course. If you would like to come on a visit we’d be happy to welcome you, perhaps to one of our regular weekly yoga classes or kirtan sessions before the course begins? You can read more about what is on offer outside of the Yoga Nidra course on the Stroud Yoga Centre page.
Accommodation during the course weekends is provided by the Sisters at the nearby Cistercian Monastery of Our Lady and St Bernard in Brownshill. This is about two miles from the Yoga Studio. The Monastery is a deeply peaceful and nourishing place, with its own beautiful gardens and chapel, and we are very fortunate to have a warm welcome there from the nuns for the yoga teachers enrolled on this course. There are single and twin rooms, simple and comfortable. The course timetable includes time for the beautiful (hilly!) country walks through the woodlands and fields between the Yoga Studio and Toadsmoor Valley,where the monastery is situated. Students can choose to walk or to be driven over and back to the monastery at the start and end of the days. There is also the option to arrive Friday night and stay at the monastery overnight before the course starts, or to take an additional evening stay at the end of the course weekends if desired. Advance notice and an additional fee of £20 per night is needed to arrange this option.
More about the venue
Stroud is a small rural town at the heart of five beautiful valleys. It’s about 130 miles west of London on the M4, or an hour and 40 minutes from Paddington station. The studio is one mile from Stroud railway station, and we can pick you up if you let us know what trains you are arriving on. Stroud is very easily accessible from Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham, Gloucester and Cirencester.
The history of the course’s development
For the past twelve years Uma has been contributing to the training of yoga therapists and yoga teachers, firstly through the Yoga Biomedical trust course, and latterly for the past eight years through my own courses offered through the British Wheel of Yoga and Yogacampus. She has not only devised her own courses to provide specialist further trainings in yoga therapy for women’s health (Womb Yoga) but has also provided modules and workshops on the use of yoga nidra for yoga therapy. These short yoga nidra components were very well received and effective parts of the Yoga Biomedical Trust’s diploma in yoga therapy, and latterly were also part of the Yogacampus Yoga Therapy Foundation Course, where they often provided yoga teachers with their first sustained encounter with the power of yoga nidra.
This new course is in many ways an outgrowth of these modules, expanded, developed and improved to provide more practical training as an elective module within the new Yogacampus Yoga Therapy Diploma. Equally, the new course manual grows out of the writing and recordings which Uma has made of yoga nidra in her previous three books, all of which have contained explorations of this most powerful practice. The course manual brings together a very wide range of different commentaries and approaches to yoga nidra, together with practical exercise and assignments all intended to help students to gain a deep and practical understanding of the practice.
Tutors
Uma Dinsmore-Tuli has been teaching yoga for seventeen years, and Nirlipta Tuli (now retired) has been teaching for twenty years. We designed the course together.
Yoga Nidra has been a part of our daily practice for the past fifteen years. We have experienced of a number of different approaches to the practice, and have also had the blessing to be able to teach the practice to a great variety of different people in many different environments, ranging from schools in the London Borough of Lambeth, to Women’s Refuges, hospitals, newspaper offices, and the idyllic settings of the glorious Santosa yoga camps where yoga nidra has been a daily part of the programme for the past five years. To read more about our background and experience with yoga nidra, please read the biogs here.