Yoga Nidra for Women’s Health: Restoring Balance, Easing Cramps, and Reconnecting with Your Cycle
What is Yoga Nidra and How Does it Work?
Yoga Nidra is a guided practice that leads you into the space between waking and sleeping. You lie down, get comfortable, and are led through a body scan, visualisations, and gentle awareness techniques. It may feel simple, but what’s happening beneath the surface is powerful. As your mind follows the guidance, your brain shifts out of busy, fast-moving beta waves and drops into alpha, theta, and even delta brainwaves, the very same states your brain enters in deep sleep. Except here, you remain aware. That’s why it’s often called ‘conscious sleep’.
This is where your body begins to restore itself. Stress hormones lower. The parasympathetic nervous system switches on. Digestion, hormonal regulation, tissue repair, everything gets a chance to catch up. What makes Yoga Nidra especially useful is that it stills the mind, often more easily than seated meditation. The practice gives the thinking brain something to follow. It feels like you’re doing something, but in reality, there’s nothing you need to do. Just lie down and be guided.
The Story of Nidra: The Goddess of Sacred Rest
In Indian mythology, Nidra Devi is the goddess of sleep, rest, and stillness. She is not a passive figure, she is powerful. In one story, when the gods needed help to defeat a demon that no one could touch, it was Nidra who entered the battlefield, not with force, but with rest. She put the demon into a deep sleep, disarming him not through violence, but through stillness. She reminds us that rest is not lazy or indulgent, it is potent. It restores clarity, balance, and strength. In this way, Nidra offers you a mirror: our power doesn’t always come from pushing. Sometimes it comes from softening.
Yoga Nidra draws directly from this lineage, from the understanding that rest, conscious sleep is a form of healing and a path to liberation. When you can access that place just before sleep consciously, you can open many doors into the subconscious mind.
Why Women Need Deep Rest
We live in a culture that prizes output, movement, and constant doing. For women, this can feel like swimming against our own biology, especially when we’re in the second half of our cycle, postpartum, peri-menopausal, or simply exhausted. Deep rest is not a luxury. It’s medicine. When we enter the slower brainwave states that Yoga Nidra provides, the body can shift into repair mode. That’s when hormonal balance becomes possible. That’s when menstrual pain starts to ease. That’s when the emotional highs and lows begin to soften.
Yoni Nidra and the Female Body
Yoni Nidra is a style of Yoga Nidra created with the female body in mind. This practice brings awareness gently through the entire womb space, pelvic bowl, yoni, heart and breasts, to listen, to acknowledge. Bringing your attention to these areas isn’t about fixing symptoms, it’s about cultivating a quiet, kind awareness, one that often leads to less pain, more softness, and a feeling of being safe and at home in your body. This style of practice supports menstrual health, fertility, emotional wellbeing, and hormonal balance.
Yoga Nidra for Cycle Health and Hormonal Imbalance
Many common imbalances, PMS, painful periods, irregular cycles, anxiety, insomnia, fertility challenges, have roots in nervous system dysregulation. If we are constantly living in fight-or-flight, our hormonal system can’t regulate properly. Yoga Nidra helps us exit that stress state. Over time, it becomes easier to access calm. The body remembers how to rest, and in that rest, it heals. The ripple effect touches every system of the body. And because Yoga Nidra helps bring your cycle into balance without needing to do more, it’s particularly powerful for women who already feel stretched.
A Practice for Each Phase of Your Cycle
To support you in aligning rest with your natural hormonal rhythms, I created the Cyclical Yoga Nidra Bundle, five unique practices designed to match the different phases of your menstrual cycle, guided by the wisdom of the Five Element Theory in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Each phase of your cycle mirrors an element; Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water and each Nidra in this bundle supports you to drop into the energetics of that season. Even if your cycle feels irregular or unclear, resting with the intention of each phase helps bring more balance over time.
You’ll receive:
Inner Spring – for the follicular phase
Inner Early Summer – for ovulation
Inner Late Summer – for the early luteal phase
Inner Autumn – for the premenstrual time
Inner Winter – for menstruation
These practices are downloadable, and yours to keep. Each one is designed to bring softness and presence to where you are to support you in coming into right relationship with your own rhythm.
You can explore the full bundle here → Cyclical Yoga Nidra Bundle