And children not only educational Yoga nidra helps to sharpen a child's psychic abilities. So a child is already naturally inclined to have psychic abilities to see things hear things and be in tune with another realm, if you will, that they just come into this claim being aware of the realm of mystical, the mystical, fairies other beings, speaking with people who past being tapped in and empathetic to others thoughts, telepathy and those sorts of things. What happens in our body see, our pineal gland is very much responsible for this talent and ability. And in a child the pineal gland is active it is working properly producing certain hormones and by age eight that glands starts to calcify starts to shrink, because it's not continued to be used and it's not being taken care of. It's not there's no practices that are being enacted to support the continued use of this gland.

And so especially as one goes toward puberty and adolescence that gland basically shrivels up shrinks pituitary gland takes over and you know, like, the remnants of the pineal gland in adults. I mean, you can see the reports of autopsies. Most elderly people's pineal gland is nothing but a very small, hard pebble like a stone in the middle of their brain. Or when you're young, you know, it's a large, vibrant, watery gland. It has rods and cones just like the eye. It's what they call the third eye the inner vision.

So Yoga nidra helps to keep the pineal gland work. properly. And as a child starts to take in information from what we call the adult world, you know our reality and intelligence and logical reasoning mind, Neal gland and the practice of yoga nidra helps them balance these two worlds, which is really maintaining the balance of the two hemispheres of the brain, the right and the left hemisphere, the creative and the logical mind. So it's something we all ought to be aspiring to balance as well. That's what the yoga practices in general that are spreading across the world are helping, but Yoga nidra specifically also helps to develop this easy movement between worlds that children are able to easily pick up on. So it basically keeps their natural view abilities, their creative abilities alive in an effortless way.

I'm going into the back of the book page 186 counteracting stress. A survey by the Australian federal health department in 1980 revealed that stress is the aspect of modern life that concerns most people. So this section is talking about how we're basically just as stressed out people saying, the pressures of life of surviving of paying our bills, and the lack of relaxing sort of practices and spiritually tuning uplifting, and you know, creative sort of activities, the lack of those and the buildup of stress has created basically a situation where so many people are getting diseased and ill, and their bodies are breaking down because of the hormones that we're producing from stress. So the body is built to deal with stress in this fight or flight sort of thing. The amygdala produces these different hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol and all these things, but when we're not Really fearing for our lives, you know, physically maybe we feel like we are we worrying maybe the the wolf set the door knocking for the bills, but what's happening is our bodies are breaking down, decay and death is coming quicker diseases coming quicker and how can we counteract these things.

One of the most important thing that studies showing about yoga nidra as Yoga nidra is lowering the stress in the body, increasing the body's innate healing and rejuvenating capacities. It's allowing us to go into a worthless state and throwing off the stresses so that we're able to actually not even just do well with stresses and not be affected by them, but actually use the stress as a catapult to a higher awareness into a more productive lifestyle. So it's actually that the stress gets turned around and it becomes to our benefit. So the relax response. It benefits the hypothalamus. It helps the all the glands in the body and helps our ability to visualize and imagine situations ahead of time preparing ourselves for them.

And the list goes on and on, on the benefits of stress. You're going to you're on stress and tension in the body. I'm going to quickly run through some of the therapeutic applications. You can look at these in the book I really encourage if you don't have the book to pick up the yoga nidra book that's listed in the course. If you go back to page 195 good therapeutic applications are basically helping people, especially geriatrics. I'm going to start there and kind of come backwards with the children.

So let's go to the elderly, especially people who are dealing with the reality of their aging and you know impending leaving this plane. There can be a lot of depression, psychological depression, there can be Loss of motivation. You know, a lot of accumulated tensions and yoga nidra has been found to really benefit these people help reduce the depression, help them become more motivated, more relaxed in their lifestyle and even enjoy this time of their lives. So you're gonna need us also helped with conventional medicine for anything from coronary heart disease, to cancer, to arthritis, to asthma, to ulcers, and if you are in early stages of illness, then it can help to turn those things around. And if you're in later stages that can help you psychologically they found to deal with the reality of things that are happening in a much better way and reduce the need for pain medications and other drugs and just keep one's attitude up.

Basically, studies have also shown that Yoga nidra helps insomnia and this seems like a real no brainer. But it definitely does. I have personal experience with people who've dealt with extreme insomnia can help them get off of their barbiturate medications and basically get into a deep sleep to rejuvenate and regenerate their bodies. The last thing I'm going to touch on here in this lecture is pain relief. You can go in the book and find a whole lot more information and I highly recommend you do but pain relief is a huge concern of people all across the world. And our body You know, it produces certain hormones certain chemicals in the body to help us deal with pain.

Yoga nidra is one of those practices that helps the body naturally produced that with which it would do to deal with extreme pain and lower the required amount of pain medication up to 81% effective pain reliever in the studies that are in the book study from Presbyterian University College in Pittsburgh, USA, yoga teacher was used to control pain from things like gastrointestinal pain, slip dick disc, no shoulder and neck pain. Just regular intermittent pain. And after about six weeks of use, pain was reported only 81% left. And I've also experienced this with pain as well. So you're gonna need it is an incredible practice to help with those things. You know, and that's what I'm going to really touch on right now with the studies with the body in mind, but I want to go back and re emphasize something that was in the promo video and that is that yoga mudra was not devised by the Yogi's and sages as a means for dealing with this mundane life of our pains and aches and depression and so forth.

It was designed as a practice of self realization and self realization, some people think is just this blissful state where you kind of buzz out and leave the world and the cares of the world, but it's not. It's a conscious space, of presence, interacting with the world from a place where you almost can see things in a slow motion way, and be able to choose what the best thing to say the best action to take because you are attuned with what's happening in the world. You're tuned with your own creative abilities and you're conscious on all levels of your mind. There's nothing hidden from you anymore. You've taken the masks of this reality off and you've allowed yourself to settle into The knowingness of who you really are. Yoga nidra helps us to navigate into the realm that previously we were asleep to literally asleep to in our dreams and our unconscious.

But a self realized person, a liberated person is one who has no more hidden spaces, no more on resolved emotions intentions, all those emotions, intentions and memories and patterns and, and behaviors and things that are not harmonious in the body have been thrown up. Yoga nidra literally translated as sleep after all the cares and worries have been thrown off and sleep meaning relaxation, yogic sleep yoga, yoga is union or a union with a whole self. So being able to just be a The leaf dream that we're all in a way to make it a happy and blissful dream. And in the end, not really sleep at all, it's what we would refer to as sleep but it's conscious. And that's why this is the conscious practice. So for more information on the scientific studies, there's loads and loads and loads in the back of this book, including great pictures on the eg is showing the different brain patterns when someone is engaging in yoga nidra and how the brain just really becomes more active during the process of yoga nidra so I will post some of these pictures.

This is a I just want to quickly show you I know this is kind of a funny image, but this is a resting mind. So normal sleep. And this is a yoga nidra brain here. So the difference is showing the visual center the back of the head, and at the top of the head active here at the bottom, and at the top, the rest picture is closest to normal, waking state, kind of a stressed out brain. But anyway, you can get into the book to find out why that is interesting. And maybe talk a little bit more in some of that future lectures.

But basically I just wanted to get down to some of the really great information available with the scientific research and just spark your interest in going deeper into this practice how it can help you in your life right now.