Deep Rest Yoga Nidra
Teacher Training
Within us all lies a profound calm that connects us to life itself
and to an unshakeable peace. Find it – and share it – through Yoga Nidra.
Join James Reeves to dive deeply into the heart of Yoga Nidra for yourself, and learn how to facilitate this beautiful, transformative practice skilfully for others.
What is
Yoga Nidra?
Yoga nidra is a powerful guided meditative practice which explores the conscious, hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep, permitting deep relaxation and transformative access to the multiple strata – conscious and subconscious – of our being.
Deep Rest in-person 4-day Yoga Nidra
Teacher Training with pre- and post-programme online learning and support
Hosted at YogaMoves, Utrecht, Netherlands.
This is our signature Deep Rest Yoga Nidra Teacher Training. It is a comprehensive 50-hour course for anyone who wishes to access deeper rest and relaxation, through a nuanced understanding of the human experience based on both yoga philosophy and modern neuroscience. The Training is equally popular amongst Yoga Nidra practitioners seeking to go deeper into the practice for themselves, and those who are inspired to teach Yoga Nidra to others.
How can Yoga Nidra help me?
Or help me to help others?
Practised skilfully, yoga nidra gives us powerful tools to gain a deeper, and often therapeutic understanding of ourselves as complex, multi-dimensional beings. Yoga Nidra can help us regulate emotion, soothe the nervous system, process and integrate difficult experiences. It can help us peacefully deconstruct negative psychological, physiological and psychosomatic schemas, and can help us foster and strengthen consciously chosen beliefs and intentions.
You do not have to be ‘a yogi’, or to have years of asana-practice under your belt in order to benefit from, or become an articulate facilitator of, Yoga Nidra. Whilst profoundly somatic in its inquiries, Yoga Nidra is a physically still meditation practice. This training is suitable for anyone who wishes to understand themselves more deeply, and from that new perspective to facilitate others in the same journey. Out of the deepened self-understanding Yoga Nidra offers, we can discover profound resilience, wellbeing and the capacity for mature, enduring equanimity in the face of life’s challenges.
Yoga Nidra can change lives.
Uniting the ancient yogic principle of the Koshas* with modern psychology, neuroscience and psychotherapeutic perspectives, the Deep Rest Yoga Nidra training will take you through a mind-body-integrative exploration of each of the ‘layers’ of our experience.
Moving from the somatic and tangible terrain of the physical body, through the realms of the breath and subtle energetic body, through the emotions and the cognitive, conditioned mind, including belief structures, self-concept and identity, into a deep, familiar and discerning inner wisdom, the training ultimately reveals and teaches you how to facilitate an embodied spiritual connection that at once integrates and transcends all the other layers. This is deep, powerful work, and often enables life-changing integrative breakthroughs.
*originating in the Taittiriya Upanishad, a 6th Century Vedic text.
Drawing on over twenty years’ experience, James will walk you – experientially – through the philosophy, psychology and neuroscience that underpin this fascinating, valuable practice. You will come away with unique tools and techniques designed for your own personal explorations, and for you to share with groups and individuals as a facilitator yourself.
This training is for you if:
You want to create well-thought-through and deeply restful experiences for others – you want to learn the theory and also finesse voice, presentation skills, pace, the creation of ambience, and use of audio recording – because you know the how is as important as the what
You’d like to gain confidence while feeling well-resourced as you embark on teaching Yoga Nidra
You’d like scripts, self-study videos, recordings, and self-inquiry practices to help you create your very own scripts and teaching resources
You’d like to develop a more nurturing relationship with yourself and go on your own journey with Yoga Nidra
You want to build or deepen an easeful, restorative regular meditation practice for yourself, and/or teach Yoga Nidra to others so that they may do the same
You want to explore the human experience more deeply, learning more about the inter-relationship between mind and body, emotion, cognition and identity
You’d like a fully integrative approach to Yoga Nidra bringing together ancient philosophy, meditative tradition, modern neuroscience and grounded spirituality
You are interested in the subconscious and learning how to welcome diverse experiences of imagery, sensation, memory, cognition and perception as they arise
You want to create a welcoming and best-practice environment within which to hold people safely and compassionately
Join James for the next in-person Deep Rest Yoga Nidra Teacher Training – 2-5 May 2026
at YogaMoves, Utrecht, NL
Complete with step-by-step guides, scripts and recordings, this comprehensive Yoga Nidra Teacher Training will give you the practical confidence to start sharing this wonderful practice with others, and potentially to transform some of your own personal challenges along the way.
Course Material Overview
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Module 1: Introduction – Historical Context, Philosophical Background, Definitions, and Setting Intentions
- Gain an understanding of how Yoga Nidra has been born out of centuries of yogic traditions
- Harness the power of this uniquely situated practice, understanding how it brings together ancient contemplative traditions and modern psychology
- Deepen your understanding of the hypnagogic state as a bridge between our conscious and unconscious processes
- Discover how a 2,000 + year old map of the human condition relates to modern neuroscientific discoveries
- Grasp the most effective structure for intention making, learn how to make intentions stick by understanding how we relate to and ‘seed’ intentions in the subconscious mind.
- Make this practice simple, accessible and empowering for yourself and those you teach through learning how to centre subjective experience. Learn to facilitate skilful self-inquiries for yourself and others to ensure your yoga nidra is non-prescriptive, trauma-sensitive and as accessible as possible
- Explore deep questions that will support you to uncover your deepest wishes for this lifetime and affirm them to yourself, leading to feeling deeply at peace, congruent, and self-informed.
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Module 2: The Koshas – a Five-Layer Map of Being
- Understand the ancient Koshic model of the human experience and how Yoga Nidra harnesses this model to facilitate deep, multidimensional rest for people.
- Learn to see through the lenses of the Kosha model’s five distinct layers of subjective experience: Annamaya Kosha (the body), Pranamaya Kosha (the subtle energetic body), Manomaya Kosha (the mind and emotions), Vijnanamaya Kosha (the intellect and discerning wisdom), and Anandamaya Kosha (bliss, peace and joy).
- Learn how to facilitate and experience profound insights within each Kosha, through self-inquiry and intelligent yoga nidra practice structure.
- Learn how these layers are distinct yet simultaneously integrated, and come away equipped to weave an integrated approach to koshic inquiry into your practice and teaching.
- For example, learn how to explore and facilitate experiencing the body as sensation in order to build sensitivity to subtle energetics and breath, feelings and emotions; develop an embodied expression of the wise witness perspective by learning the non-dual philosophical position of ‘welcoming’, an approach which can reveal and provide insight into patterns of feeling, thinking, behaviour and conditioned beliefs; access states of un-caused joy through the cultivation of awareness of each Kosha independently and integratively.
- Learn how to work with commonly presenting challenges – pain, tension, stress, trauma, restlessness, resistance.
- Explore the physiology of breath and its relation to the energy body, and how to use breath practices within yoga nidra to aid rest, relaxation and down-regulation of the nervous system
- Learn 8 specific breathing techniques as both individual and blended approaches to working with deep mindfulness and focused attention. Explore profound insight into the relationship between breath and awareness and how ancient tantric philosophy points toward deep and lasting stillness through breath inquiry.
- Discover tools that will enable you, and those you teach, to befriend, regulate and integrate emotion, feeling and associated thought-patterns and beliefs through a psycho-somatic inquiry process.
- Gain insight into the deeper aspects of the mind through learning to work with shadow, resistance and repression. Come away with tools to regulate strong emotion through working with opposites, habituation and systematic desensitisation, and a range of interventions to help stabilise emotional regulation – both within a guided Yoga Nidra practice, and in everyday life, moment by moment.
- Discover and learn to facilitate a process of self-enquiry that can transform your relationship to the ‘inner critic’. Find self-compassion, inner knowing, and a reprieve from the brain’s negativity bias.
- Explore the structure of self, where yogic concepts of self meet the Western notion of ‘ego’ and how deconstructing it can lead us to the heart of meditative practice.
- Experience for yourself how beneath narratives of separation, there is a readily accessible underlying peace, stillness and equanimity – learn how to facilitate the discovery of an inherent joy, lightness and deep wellspring of wellbeing therein. Discover how to orient people and guide them towards the subtle lightness of being, and state of profoundly deep rest that can unfold through the systematic integration of the five Koshas.
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Module 3: Neuroscience and Sleep, Research, How and Why Yoga Nidra Works
- Explore how modern neuroscience relates to and supports the practice of Yoga Nidra.
- Understand how different neural networks engage or down-regulate, depending on our focus within Yoga Nidra and what happens neurologically when we slip into varying states of relaxation and meditation.
- Review current and emerging research that supports the practice of rest, and advocates structured rest practices such as Yoga Nidra, over unstructured rest breaks. Apply this research and scientific understanding to professional teaching environments and feel equipped with a language to explain the benefits of Yoga Nidra from an empirical, scientific perspective.
- Learn about sleep cycles and how they relate to Yoga Nidra.
- Discover how yoga nidra can enhance sleep…. and how sleep can enhance Yoga Nidra!
- Discover how to avoid sleeping in practice and what happens if we do fall asleep during the practice.
- Learn how to stabilise the liminal state of being ‘between’ sleep and waking.
- Understand sleep phenomena such as physical jerks and spasms and why they happen.
- Learn how to tailor a yoga nidra practice to benefit sleep, and how to support people who have insomnia.
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Module 4: Teaching Yoga Nidra
- The course is structured in such a way as facilitates experiential learning within each module, but we also give significant focus to the specifics of delivering skilful, professional and high quality Yoga Nidra experiences.
- Be guided and supported in learning how to use your physical voice well while leading Yoga Nidra. Receive guidance and feedback on tone, volume, pace, dynamics and presence as you facilitate.
- Feel fully supported by scripts, audios and ‘made for you’ resources you can directly deliver from, yet be encouraged to step into your fuller power and magic as a facilitator as you uncover your own unique expressive voice in terms of style, language and presence.
- Receive practical guidance around how to set up Yoga Nidra classes, courses and workshops, both online and in person.
- Get clarity on pricing and marketing your classes, as well as how you wish to deliver Yoga Nidra – as a one-to-one experience, for groups, as drop-in classes, courses, workshops or retreats, or for a particular focus group audience.
- Understand the Ethics of teaching Yoga Nidra, and in the light of which, consider how you present your offering and whether you wish to use waivers, consent forms and formal agreements with your clients. Receive pro-forma examples of these.
- How to seek support as a Yoga Nidra teacher.
“I have come away from this training deeply resourced and with a grounded sense of knowledge and confidence of how to share this transformative practice with others.”
— Jahna Clark, Yoga Teacher & Somatics Exercise Coach
www.sensingwithin.com
Course Structure and What’s Included
The course is delivered over the course of 4 in-person days, during which you will be given:
7 scripts for you to use, practise with, take forward to your own classes, or amend to suit your own turn of phrase and choice of vocabulary
3-month access to Find Your Calm, James’s Membership-only digital library of over 100 Yoga Nidra recordings, talks and practice sessions
A digital pdf copy of a 76 page Teacher Training Manual
Audio recordings of the live training event
A step-by-step scriptwriting outline to help you get started with making your own scripts
Study circles and peer support and review
Online pre-recorded content to support your learning, both pre and post-course dates
Further Reading List for advanced learning
Self-practice journal with insights into each kosha and 3 different inquiries to support your own understanding of the practice of Yoga Nidra
Total time investment:
31 Contact hours (24 in-person, 7 online)
Pre-course reading, self-practice journal reflections and self-inquiries - 5 hours
Post-course self-practice journal entries, script writing and sharing 19 hours
Total 50 hours
About James Reeves
James Reeves is a rest expert, Yoga and Yoga Nidra teacher with a passion for helping people uncover and come home to a deep sense of stillness, spaciousness and peace within. James is internationally known for his warmth, presence and down-to-earth enthusiasm for embracing humanness within rest practices, and for facilitating deep, meaningful emotional and relational transformation for people. Author of ‘The Book of Rest’, James’s teaching draws on non-dual meditation and a background in Kashmir Shaivism, and he is also influenced by integrative psychotherapeutic approaches to the psyche such as Internal Family Systems and Somatic Parts Work.
More about James
