MATRI ARK eco-yoga community - A Full-Length Yoga Nidra Script

There is a particular silence that falls about four minutes into a yoga nidra, and every teacher who has led one knows it. The shuffling stops. Somebody’s breath changes audibly. The room, which was eight separate people arranging bolsters, becomes one thing that is listening.

What you say into that silence matters, and most of us learned to say it by holding somebody else’s words on a phone screen in the dark, scrolling with one thumb and losing our place.

So here is a whole script, written out, with the pauses marked and the stages named. It runs about forty minutes. Read it as it stands, or take it apart and keep what works in your mouth.

— Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Yoga Nidra

For absolute relaxation you must remain aware. This is yoga nidra, the state of dynamic sleep.

What this is, and who it is for

This is the daily practice from a module on the mind called The Garden of the Mind, written for people learning to teach. It is a full-length, traditional practice: settling, the resolve, the rotation of consciousness, breath, opposites, and then one still image held long enough to work — a garden at dusk, the gate, the gardener, two birds, a fruit that lets go of its own accord.

It assumes you have led a relaxation before. It does not assume you have led this. Everything a listener needs is said inside the script itself, so you are never explaining and reading at the same time.

What the person lying down needs: a floor, something under their head, something over them, and no expectation of doing it well. What you need: the script, a slow mouth, and the willingness to stop talking for ten seconds at a time.

Before you read it aloud

The resolve is theirs, not yours. In stage two the listener chooses a short sentence of their own and repeats it three times. Four rules, and they matter: the same wording every time, in the present tense, about themselves and never about anybody else, and phrased for what they want rather than against what they do not. My strength is building, not I will be strong one day — the deep mind does not hear one day. They keep one sentence until it comes true. Do not supply it for them; the examples in the script are examples.

The rotation begins at the right thumb. That is not arbitrary and it is not negotiable if you want the practice to do what it does. The order runs through the hand and the face before it reaches the trunk, and anyone who has seen a map of how much of the brain’s surface is given to the thumb and the lips will recognise why. Name the parts steadily, without emphasis, and do not let your voice rise at the end of the list.

Never skip the opposites. Stage five raises heaviness, then lightness; coolness, then warmth. Both poles are woken by the mind alone, with no movement, felt fully, and then let go into balance. It is the stage teachers drop when they are running late, and it is the one that makes the rest hold.

The image must stay still. A garden at dusk is a static picture, deliberately — it looks alive, dimensional, almost breathing, and it does not move. Moving images take awareness much deeper and are a later instrument, for a group whose container is already strong. A first-time room gets the still garden.

And choose images with care. Never a child, never a mother holding a child, nothing sharp, nothing that chases or encloses. You cannot know what the people on the floor are carrying. When in doubt, go warm, still and ordinary — and the occasional gently absurd image is not a lapse of seriousness but one of the better tools there is for disarming a guarded nervous system.

How the script is laid out

Every line is its own line for a reason. Read one line, then let a breath go by before the next. The line breaks are the short pauses, and they are the difference between a practice and a recitation.

A marked pause is one you hold. Where you see [ pause · 10 seconds ], stop speaking and count it out. It will feel far too long in your mouth and it is not too long in theirs. There are seventy-three of them.

The pace is slower than you think. This script runs at about sixty-six words a minute, counted across the whole practice including the silences — less than half of ordinary reading speed. If you finish early, you read it too fast.

Do not cut it to fit a clock. If you have less time, read fewer stages rather than hurrying the ones you read. Haste is the only way to spoil this.

The script

The script · read aloud

The Garden at Dusk, to Read Aloud

forty minutes · 2,582 spoken words · seven stages

Settling, and the commitment to stillness

Please, lie down on your back.

And prepare to practise yoga nidra —

the sleep of the yogi —

for approximately the next half hour. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Make yourself comfortable.

Feet a little apart, falling open.

Hands beside the body, palms facing up.

Head and spine in one line.

Cover yourself if you may grow cool.

Let the body be completely supported by the floor. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Yoga nidra is a state of deep rest with awareness kept awake —

as deep as the deepest sleep,

and yet a thread of you stays aware throughout.

You cannot do it wrong.

All you have to do is lie still, and listen. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Eyes gently closed.

Adjust the body one final time,

and then commit to stillness.

From now, if you can, the body does not move.

If you truly must move, move slowly, with full awareness.

But better to say to the mind: I will move after the practice. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Two things to remember.

One — no physical movement.

Still as a stone in the ground.

Two — try not to sleep.

Stay with my voice,

at the border of sleep but not across it.

And if the mind wanders off, that is alright too —

but aim, gently, to stay aware. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Begin to listen to the sounds around you.

The far sounds first.

Then the nearer ones.

And then the sound of my voice —

let it be the thread you follow through the whole practice. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Take three slow, deep breaths.

Breathing in fully — belly, then chest.

And breathing out, long and slow,

letting the body sink a little deeper into the floor. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Again — in.

And out, releasing the day. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

And once more — a full breath in.

And a long, complete breath out.

Now let the breath return to its own natural rhythm. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

The resolve

Now comes the resolve.

A short, positive sentence, in the present tense,

planted deep in the receptive soil of yoga nidra. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

I am the gardener, not the garden.

I am my own friend.

I am safe, and I am steady.

Choose one that is true for you,

and keep the same one, day after day. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Make it short, positive, and in the present tense.

Not I will be strong one day — but my strength is building.

The deep mind, like deep soil, does not hear “one day.”

It hears only now.

So speak to it as though the thing is already true —

because, in this depth, it is.

If you do not yet have a resolve, simply rest,

and let one come to you over the coming days. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Anything in life can fail you.

But not the resolve.

Whatever you plant here, in this state,

takes root and comes to pass. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Repeat your resolve now, silently, three times.

With feeling.

With conviction. [ pause · 20 seconds ]

Good.

Let it go now, deep into the ground.

It will return at the end. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

The rotation of consciousness

Now the practice moves through the parts of the body —

the rotation of consciousness.

As I name each part, take your awareness there,

feel it, and let it soften.

Do not move.

Only move the mind,

lightly and quickly, from part to part.

This gentle sweep settles the nervous system and draws the senses inward —

the natural gathering-in that happens each night as sleep comes,

done now on purpose, and awake. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Begin at the right hand.

The right thumb. Second finger. Third finger. Fourth finger. Little finger. The palm. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The back of the hand. The wrist. The forearm. The elbow. The upper arm. The shoulder. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The armpit. The right side of the chest. The waist. The hip. The right thigh. The knee. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The calf. The ankle. The heel. The sole of the right foot. The big toe. Second toe. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

Third toe. Fourth toe. Little toe. [ pause · 7 seconds ]

Now the left hand.

The left thumb. Second finger. Third finger. Fourth finger. Little finger. The palm. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The back of the hand. The wrist. The forearm. The elbow. The upper arm. The shoulder. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The armpit. The left side of the chest. The waist. The hip. The left thigh. The knee. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The calf. The ankle. The heel. The sole of the left foot. The big toe. Second toe. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

Third toe. Fourth toe. Little toe. [ pause · 7 seconds ]

Now the back of the body.

The right heel. The left heel. The buttocks. The lower back. The middle back. The upper back. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The right shoulder blade. The left shoulder blade. The whole spine, from base to neck. The back of the neck. The back of the head. [ pause · 9 seconds ]

Now the front of the body.

The top of the head. The forehead — let it be smooth. The right eyebrow. The left eyebrow. The space between the eyebrows. The right eye. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The left eye. The right ear. The left ear. The right cheek. The left cheek. The nose. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The upper lip. The lower lip. The chin. The jaw — let it be loose. The throat. The right chest. [ pause · 6 seconds ]

The left chest. The whole chest together. The navel. The abdomen. [ pause · 4 seconds ]

The whole front of the body. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Now the whole body together.

The whole body, lying still and heavy on the floor.

The whole body.

The whole body. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Feel the whole body at once, in one glimpse —

from the top of the head to the tips of the toes.

The right side and the left side, together.

The front and the back, together.

One whole body, resting, complete. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

And as your awareness rests on the whole body,

feel a subtle warmth moving through it.

The more you are simply aware of the body,

the more it softens, and settles, and rejuvenates itself —

resting more deeply than ordinary sleep, and yet you, awake, and aware, and here. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Feel that this body is good ground.

It has carried this life through everything.

It has held the whole of it.

And now it rests, deeply,

like earth resting between seasons —

quiet, and fertile, and safe.

Let every cell let go.

Let the muscles melt into the floor.

Let the internal organs release their long day of holding.

The whole body, resting in good stillness,

tended by your simple awareness. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

No sleeping.

Stay with the voice.

If the mind has wandered, gently bring it back now. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Breath awareness — the count

Now become aware of the breath.

Do not change it.

Only watch it — the natural breath, flowing in and out. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Now count the breaths backwards,

from twenty-seven down to zero.

Breathing in, twenty-seven.

Breathing out, twenty-seven.

Breathing in, twenty-six.

Breathing out, twenty-six.

And so on, in silence, down toward zero. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

If the count is lost, or the mind wanders,

simply begin again from twenty-seven.

The aim is not to reach zero.

The aim is only to stay aware,

with each breath, one at a time.

Continue now, in silence. [ pause · 30 seconds ]

Keep going, gently, in silence.

Do not sleep.

Stay with each breath.

Each count is a small return of the mind to the breath —

like a gardener’s feet returning,

again and again, to the same well-loved path.

There is no wrong way.

Only the breath, and your awareness of it, one at a time. [ pause · 25 seconds ]

Let the counting go.

And notice — the breath has become slow, long, and quiet.

Let it breathe itself, and simply rest in its rhythm. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

Opposites

Now feel the pairs of opposites —

awaken each with the mind; do not move.

Feel the whole body become heavy.

Very heavy.

Sinking into the floor,

like a stone settling into good earth.

Heaviness.

Heaviness. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

And now the opposite.

Feel the whole body become light.

Weightless.

As if it could float, like a seed on the wind.

Lightness.

Lightness. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Now feel coolness.

A cool evening air across the skin,

the cool of a garden at dusk.

Coolness. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

And now warmth.

A gentle warmth, spreading from the centre of the chest —

the warmth of being safe, and held.

Warmth. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Now feel, for a moment, a subtle restlessness —

the way the mind can feel at the end of a hard day,

a faint stirring, a wanting-to-move.

Just notice it, lightly.

Do not chase it.

Restlessness. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

And now the opposite — deep peace.

A settled, spreading calm, like still water at dusk.

The peace that is always underneath,

when the surface quietens.

Let it fill the whole body.

Peace. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Feel how you can witness both —

the restlessness, and the peace — and be neither.

You are the one who watches them come and go.

They are weather crossing the garden.

You are the sky. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Now let heaviness and lightness, cool and warm,

restlessness and peace, all dissolve.

The body perfectly balanced.

The mind perfectly even.

Perfectly still.

Perfectly at ease. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

The images — the garden at dusk

Now shift your awareness to the dark space behind the closed eyes.

And as I name each image, let it appear there, gently.

Do not strain.

If no image comes clearly, rest in the feeling of it.

And if only stillness comes — witness the stillness.

That is perfect too. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

A garden, at dusk.

This garden — the garden of the mind.

The evening light soft and golden and low.

The air cool and still.

Roses in one bed; worn paths; a wilder corner further off.

All of it, held in the kind evening light. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

And a gate.

You are standing at the gate of the garden.

And you are the gardener.

Not the garden —

the one who stands at its gate and sees it whole,

and is not tangled in any of it. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

The gardener at the gate.

Feel how safe it is here.

You do not have to enter, or fix, or weed anything.

You only stand, and look,

over the whole garden, with kind and steady eyes. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

Let the gaze rest, a moment, on the whole garden at once.

The roses, and the worn paths, and the wild corner,

all together, in the soft golden dusk.

All of it grew for reasons.

None of it is an enemy.

And none of it is you.

You are the one who holds the whole — the gardener,

who can see it all in a single kind gaze,

and is not tangled in any of it.

Rest here, as that one, in the last warm light of the day. [ pause · 20 seconds ]

Look, too, at the wild corner,

from where you stand at the gate.

You do not walk to it.

You only see it, in the soft light, and offer it, silently,

a gardener’s understanding: *you grew to protect me.

You are not my enemy.

And you are not the whole of me.*

Then let it be, and stay at the gate. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

Now see, in a tree near the gate, two birds.

One eats the fruit of the tree,

and is moved by every taste —

lifted, then crushed, then lifted again.

The other sits close beside it,

and simply watches, serene, unmoved.

Two birds.

And you are the one who watches.

The still bird.

The witness. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

Rest as that still bird a while.

Whatever the first bird tastes — sweet or bitter —

the second bird is unmoved, and at peace.

That peace is the deepest nature here,

beneath all the tasting and the weather.

Simply rest as the one who watches,

close and kind, and never swept. [ pause · 20 seconds ]

Now see a single fruit on the vine, fully ripe.

And as you watch, it releases — gently, of its own accord,

in its own good time — and falls softly to the earth.

Not torn.

Not forced.

Simply ripe, and free.

So too,

whatever binds can one day release like this: gently,

when the time is ripe, when the ground is safe.

You do not have to tear anything loose.

Ripeness frees itself. [ pause · 20 seconds ]

And now, over the whole garden,

let a soft golden light gather.

The last warm light of dusk,

touching the roses and the paths and even the wild corner,

gently, kindly, holding all of it.

Let that light be a warmth in the centre of the chest —

the warmth of being safe, and whole,

with nothing required at all. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

And now see a small seed in the open hand.

A seed of something kind and true —

a new way of being, ready to grow.

Perhaps the seed of the resolve itself.

Kneel, in the soft earth of the garden, and plant it.

And water it.

You do not have to see it grow now.

You have only to plant it, and tend it —

and by the patient law of all growing things,

it will rise, in its season. [ pause · 15 seconds ]

Rest a moment beside the planted seed,

in the golden light, as the gardener.

Nothing more to do.

The fruit released of its own ripeness.

The seed planted and watered.

The whole garden held in the last kind light of the day.

And you, at peace in the middle of it,

its friend and its keeper. [ pause · 20 seconds ]

Now let all the images dissolve — the seed,

the fruit, the birds, the gate, the garden.

And rest as the one who saw them all.

The gardener.

The witness.

The still awareness in which the whole garden,

and all its dusk, appears.

The small, tired, defended self —

let it dissolve, for these few moments,

like salt in water, into this vast and peaceful awareness.

Nothing is lost.

You go nowhere.

You only rest, as what you have always been.

This is the deepest rest there is. [ pause · 30 seconds ]

The resolve, three times — and the slow return

Now, gently, prepare to return.

Let the garden and its dusk dissolve completely,

but let their peace remain within. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Return once more to the resolve.

The seed planted at the beginning,

now watered by this deep stillness.

Repeat it silently, three times, with feeling —

knowing that what is resolved in yoga nidra comes to pass. [ pause · 20 seconds ]

Now bring your awareness back to your body.

Feel your whole body lying on the floor.

The weight of it.

The points where it touches the ground.

The clothes on your skin, the covering over you,

the temperature of the air. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Feel yourself here — a person, resting,

having just given yourself the deepest rest there is.

Nothing was asked of you here.

Nothing was dug up, or forced, or fought.

You only rested, deeply,

as the gardener at the gate of your own kind garden. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Become aware of the room.

The space around you.

The walls.

The furniture.

The sounds near and far.

The time of day. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Begin to deepen the breath.

And begin to make small movements — the fingers, the toes.

Gently move the hands and feet.

Move the head slowly from side to side. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

Take a deep breath,

and have a gentle stretch, if it feels good.

Feel yourself returning, as if waking from the deepest,

kindest sleep — refreshed, and calm, and whole. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

And when you are ready — in your own time —

roll gently onto your right side, and rest a moment.

Then slowly, using your hands, come up to sitting.

Let the eyes open only when you are ready. [ pause · 5 seconds ]

Come all the way back now — bright, clear, and refreshed.

Wide awake, and well rested, and present.

One with all your senses,

ready to rise, and go on with your day. [ pause · 10 seconds ]

The practice of yoga nidra is now complete.

Carry the garden’s dusk within you —

its calm, its kindness, its patient light —

into your day, or into the sleep that,

more and more, will come to you as a friend.

You have a garden within you now,

and a gate, and a gardener who is you.

You can return, any time, for as long as you live.

End of script

The turn

A gardener does not grow anything. That is the whole of it. She clears, she waters, she waits, she keeps the worst of the weather off — and the growing is done by something she did not supply and cannot hurry. The oldest mistake in gardening is the belief that effort is the active ingredient, and the second oldest is pulling a thing up to see whether the roots have taken.

This is exactly what a person does to their own mind, and exactly what we have done to every catchment and grassland we tried to improve. The work in both cases turns out to be mostly restraint: find out what the system does when it is left alone and supported, and then do that. Yoga is the ecology of one person. Ecology is the yoga of everything else. The discipline is identical, and it is almost entirely a discipline of not interfering.

Where the rest of this goes

You already have what this page promised. The script above is complete, it is free, and nothing below is needed in order to use it.

First, and free — a Free Reader account. A name and an email address, no payment, and it opens the reading. Create one here. It stays free, with no strings. If you only ever do one thing on this site, do this one.

Then, if you want the rest — membership, at three Australian dollars a week. That opens the eMag in full, the whole online library, the Institute classrooms and the weekly live sessions, and it makes you eligible to enrol in the Institute’s other courses. What membership opens.

And for teachers — The Patanjali Fellowship. The order matters here, and the portal enforces it: you become a Member first, and only a Member can request the Fellowship — a Free Reader cannot ask at all. Fellows are one of two things: volunteers who help organise, moderate or write, or those who run the live sessions. It is where teachers organise with each other and with me, and it is the side of the door the full script library and the teacher-training resources sit on. If that is you, request it from the membership page and the request is considered promptly.

From the Practice — read it to yourself first

Before you take this into a room, lie down and read it aloud to the ceiling, at the pace the pauses demand, the whole way through. You will find three or four places where your own mouth stumbles, and those are the lines to change into your own words. You will also find out what forty minutes of your own voice at this speed actually feels like, which is the thing no amount of reading about it will tell you. Record that read-through on your phone and listen back once. Most teachers discover they are going roughly twice as fast as they believe they are.

References

Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Yoga Nidra. Yoga Publications Trust, Munger (ISBN 8185787123). The manual that defined and codified the stages of the practice. The rotation of consciousness in this script follows its sequence, beginning at the right thumb, and its pairing of heaviness with lightness and cool with warmth.
Swami Satyananda Saraswati, satsang at Sivanandashram, Munger, 16 October 1982, published in Yoga (Bihar School of Yoga). The account of the older tantric practice of placing the mind on the parts of the body, from which the rotation of consciousness is drawn.
Wilder Penfield and Theodore Rasmussen, The Cerebral Cortex of Man. Macmillan, New York, 1950. The cortical map of the body, against which a reader can compare the traditional order of the rotation — hand and face first, trunk last — and see why it runs as it does.

Forty minutes, and nothing in it asks anybody to try. That is the part that takes teachers the longest to trust: that you are not going to make the relaxation happen, that your voice is a thread and not an instruction, and that the deepest thing in the room will arrive while you are saying something quite plain about a gate at dusk. Read it slowly enough and you will feel the moment it stops being your practice and becomes theirs.