78. Yoga Nidra, the Koshas, and You

I was teaching my regular Monday night balance class when I realized something: the centering I've been guiding for years—body, breath, mind, intention—is a walkthrough of the koshas. I just never called it that.

In this episode, I break down the five koshas (body, breath, brain, belly, bliss—the five B's) and show you how this ancient model from the Taittiriya Upanishad is already woven into every class you teach. From your opening centering to your final savasana, you've been guiding students through these layers all along.

I also walk through how the koshas come alive in yoga nidra, why understanding them gives you a teaching tool no app or NSDR clip can replicate, and how to use the "specific to general" dial to guide deeper relaxation. Plus, the one thing you absolutely cannot do: force your students to relax.

Whether you teach vinyasa, restorative, or anything in between, this episode will change the way you think about centering, savasana, and everything that happens between them. I share a personal practice example, a practical challenge you can try this week, and resources for going deeper—including my forthcoming book Yoga Off the Mat and my 20-CEU course Teaching Yoga Nidra at Comfort Zone Yoga.

Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Get in the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you—let's chat there!

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Transcript

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Can I tell you something? One day I was teaching my regular Monday night balance class, and I caught myself doing something I have done literally over a thousand times. I settled everyone in. I asked them to notice their bodies on the mat. Then I invited them to turn their attention to their breath. Then I asked them to let go of whatever they walked in with the to-do list, the traffic, the conversation, still playing on a loop in their head. And then I asked them to set an intention, body, breath, mind, intention, and I realized, oh, I am walking them through the koshas. I have been walking them through the Koshas for years. I just didn't use that term for what I was already intuitively doing. That's what we're talking about today, the Koshas five layers of your being that yoga philosophy has been describing for thousands of years, and how understanding them doesn't just make you a better teacher of Yoga nidra, which we will also discuss, but it will make you a better teacher period in any class, in any format, and it gives you a pretty remarkable tool for self-knowledge along the way. I'm Sage Rountree, and this is Yoga Teacher Confidential. So let's start with what the koshas actually are, because I think a lot of yoga teachers heard the word once in teacher training, nodded politely and moved on. No judgment. I probably did the same thing. The Koshas are a model from the Taittiriya Upanishad, one of the oldest yoga texts we have. The word kosha means sheath. Think of a series of nested layers. Like a sword would go in a sheath, or like those Russian nesting dolls. Maka dolls. Each one more subtle than the last. There are five Koss, and they describe the layers of your being from the outside in. I like to picture them as lampshades around a light bulb. The light at the center is your truest self, pure awareness, bliss. The lampshades filter that light when they're all in alignment. You shine when one is crooked or cracked, the light gets dimmed or distorted. Yoga nidra, and really yoga in general is a journey through these lampshades. Here are the five Koss, and I'm going to give you both the Sanskrit and a shorthand that might be easier to hold onto. First, AYA Kosha. The physical body, Ana means food stuff. This is the densest most obvious layer. Your bones, your muscles, your skin. The U that you can see in the mirror. We can call this the body layer. Second is Aya Kosha. The breath body. Prana means breath and life force. This one is less tangible, but just as real. Take a full breath right now. You feel it in your chest? Yes, but something else shifts too. Something energetic. That's prana Maya, kosha. This is the breath layer. Third monoa kosha, the thinking and feeling body. This is the layer that talks the loudest. Your thoughts, your moods, your reactions, your to-do list at

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00 AM This is the brain layer. Fourth, AYA Kosha, the wisdom body. Beneath the noise of the thinking mind is a quieter voice. Your intuition, your gut, knowing the clarity that sometimes rushes in when you finally get still enough to hear it. This is the belly layer, your gut wisdom. Fifth, Ananda Maya Kosha, the bliss body, the innermost lampshade, or the light itself. Ananda means bliss. And here's the important thing, you don't have to create bliss, make it happen, or even earn it. It's already there. This is the deepest, the bliss layer, body, breath, brain, belly, bliss, five Bs. Once you have that shorthand, the whole model fits in one hand. Now, here's why this matters to you as a yoga teacher, even if you never plan to teach a formal yoga nidra session, or describe the Koss to your students in your life. Think about any centering you've ever taught at the beginning of a class. What did you do? You probably said something like, find a comfortable position. Feel the ground beneath you. That's the body layer. Then deepen your breath. Notice the inhale and the exhale. That's the breath layer. Then maybe let go of whatever happened before you got here, set aside the rest of your day. That's the brain layer. You're asking your students to quiet the mental chatter and then set an intention for your practice that's reaching toward Aya Kosha, the wisdom body. You're inviting students to connect with something deeper than their thoughts. You have been guiding people through the Koshas. Every time you teach, you just might not have used this map. The koshas are the map, and it works the same way at the end of class. When you bring students into their final resting pose, you are repeating the journey, helping them settle back through these layers. The body gets heavy, the brain softens the thoughts, quiet down. And if you've done your job well and the students are willing, there's a moment of stillness underneath all of it. That's the bliss body. That's Ananda Maya Kosha. Your students have been touching it this whole time in final relaxation. They just might not have had a name for it, and maybe neither did you. Here's what I want you to sit with. Once you see this map of the koshas, you can't unsee it, and that changes everything, not just for your teaching, but for your own experience as a practitioner. I'll give you a personal example. I've been doing the sat crea in the mornings. It's a Kundalini yoga crea. This version involves chanting satnam for seven minutes, and I have noticed that the chanting moves me through the body layer and the breath layer almost. Automatically. Then I sit for meditation. I listen to a gong bath, and that clears my thinking mind. It's like it sweeps the brain layer clean with the vaguely ominous vibrations of a very large gong. And then I drop into that quieter place, that gut knowing Aya Kosha. And from there I invite access to the bliss within the truth that I am satnam. Once I could name those layers, my whole morning practice became more intentional, not more complicated, but more, more clear. That's the gift of the koshas. They don't add anything to what you're already doing. They just give you the language and the architecture to understand it. And this is where it gets really useful for your teaching because when you understand the Koshas as a framework, you start to see that guiding relaxation isn't just about telling people to relax. It's about systematically meeting them where they are at the surface in their physical body and walking them inward through increasingly subtle territory. You're moving from the specific and concrete toward the general and open-ended. I like to think of it as a dial at the beginning of a relaxation or a centering or yoga nidra, or any moment when you're guiding someone inward. The dial is turned all the way too specific. You are naming body parts, you're giving clear concrete instructions, and as you move through the layers, you gradually turn that dial toward general. By the time you reach the deeper ous, you're offering images, open-ended invitations, a whole lot of space, and your students' experience becomes entirely their own. That dial specific to general is one of the most useful teaching concepts I know, and it comes directly from understanding the koshas now you might have heard of something called NSDR, non sleep Deep Rest. It's a term coined by the neuroscientist and podcast host Andrew Huberman, and it's essentially yoga nidra, repackaged without the Sanskrit, and whatever you think of that rebranding. Here's what's interesting. Millions of people now know that guided deep rest is real and science backed because a scientist they trust said so. What they don't know yet is that this practice is richer and deeper than a 10 minute YouTube NSDR clip. They don't know that a trained yoga teacher, someone who understands the koshas, who can guide people through these layers with skill and intention offers something no app or podcast ever will. That is an opportunity for you, and it starts with understanding the map. So let's talk about yoga nidra specifically because this is where the Koshas really come alive as a teaching tool. Yoga nidra is the fullest most deliberate expression of this journey through the Koshas. In a centering, you might touch three or four layers in 90 seconds, maybe in five minutes. In yoga nidra, you spend the entire practice moving through all five slowly, systematically with intention. You start at the body layer with the rotation of consciousness, naming body parts, walking awareness through the physical form. Then you move to the breath layer. That could be counting breaths or just noticing the rhythm of inhale and exhale. Next, you work with the brain layer through the practice of opposites. Maybe you invite students to imagine heavy and light, hot and cold, rough and smooth This is an invitation for them to notice their mental and emotional landscape without getting stuck in it. Next, you move into the wisdom layer through visualization. This might include images like dawn and dusk, beach and Mountain, engaging a quieter, more symbolic mode of awareness, engaging the wisdom body. And finally, you arrive at the bliss body where you create space for your students to access something that was there all. Along. That's the journey of yoga nidra, body to bliss, specific to general outer to inner. And the koshas are the map that tells you exactly where you are at every point along the way. Here's what I really want you to hear, because this is the important part. Once you know how to guide that full journey, once you've learned to take someone from body all the way through to bliss with confidence and intention, you will never guide a Shavasana the same way again. You just won't because you'll understand what's possible. That final resting pose, you will know that Shavasana isn't just lie down and be quiet for three minutes. It's an invitation into the deepest layers of your students' experience. And even if you only have five minutes at the end of a flow yoga class, you will know how to make those five minutes land. The yoga teachers I know who offer the most delicious Shavasana, the ones where students don't want to get up, where the whole room goes somewhere together. Those teachers understand this journey. They might not all call it the kosher, but they know how to move people from the surface inward, slowly, layer by layer with the right words at the right pace, and that skill can come from understanding yoga nidra. So even if you're thinking, I don't teach yoga nidra classes, that's fine. You don't have to. I think you should as Yoga nidra is a fantastic workshop or series topic, but learning how to guide yoga nidra will make every single relaxation you offer richer, more intentional and more effective. It's like learning to cook a five course meal. You might not wind up serving all five courses every night, but knowing how each course works makes you a better cook even when you're just making a simple dinner. Now, here's the catch, and it is a big one. You cannot force people to relax. You just can't. As the bumper sticker says, never in the history of calming down has telling someone to calm down ever worked. You can guide people toward relaxation. You can create the conditions, you can walk them through the koshas with beautiful language and perfect pacing, but at a certain point, you have to let go. You have to trust the process and not be too attached to the outcome, and this is one of the deepest lessons yoga has to offer. It applies to your teaching just as much as it applies to your own practice. You do the work and then you release your grip on the result. The Bhagavad Gita says it. Patanjali says it. And if you've ever tried to will yourself into relaxation, you know it in your bones. The harder you try, the further away it gets. You know that scene in Seinfeld where George's father starts screaming, serenity Now, serenity. Now it's funny because it doesn't really work that way. You cannot yell your way to Serenity, and you can't force your students into bliss. What you can do is guide them layer by layer. Kosher by kosher toward the conditions where relaxation becomes possible, and then you step back, you get quiet, you hold the space, and you let them arrive on their own. That's the art of it. That's what separates a good relaxation from a truly transformative one. Not more words, not more effort, but the wisdom to know when to guide and when to get out of the way. So here's what I want you to try this week. It is simple, deceptively simple. The next time you teach a class, pay attention to your centering. Notice whether you're naturally moving through the koshas, body, breath, brain. Are you touching each layer? And if you usually stop there, try going one layer deeper. After you've asked students to quiet the mind, invite them to connect with something underneath the chatter and intention, a felt sense, their own wisdom. You don't need to call it culpa. You don't need to call it ion Maya Kosha. You don't need any Sanskrit at all. But see what happens when you guide your students one layer further in. Then at the end of class, notice the journey again. As they settle into rest, are you giving them enough space to move through those layers, or are you rushing from the brain layers straight to and slowly begin to wiggle your fingers and toes? Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is nothing. Give them 30 more seconds. Let the deeper layers do their work. And beyond your teaching. Try this in your own practice, in your own meditation, in your own morning ritual. See if you can feel the transitions between layers. The moment when your body settles, the moment when your breath takes over, the moment, when your thoughts quiet down, and the moment if your patient, when something underneath all of that starts to hum, starts to shine. That's self-knowledge. That's the koshas doing what they've been doing for thousands of years. In my forthcoming book, yoga Off the Mat, which I wrote with my co-author, Alexander Dodo, we explore the Koshas in depth as a chapter unto themselves. We look at them not just as a yoga philosophy concept, but as a genuinely useful tool for understanding your own experience in daily life. The you that can't find the right outfit on a Monday morning, that's your Anaya Kosha. The you that steps outside and breathes in deeply on a bright morning prana, Maya kosha, the you that chatters away about something meaningless. Manaya Kosha the you that knows what you really want, Nanaya, kosha, and the you that laughs easily, that snuggles with your child or your pet, or a good book. That's Ananda Maya Kosha. When you start seeing these layers in yourself, you get less attached to any single one, and that awareness is the whole point. Yoga Off the mat is available for Pre-Order now wherever books is sold. And also at the link in the show notes it publishes in July, 2026. I think you will love it. And if this episode has you curious about teaching Yoga Nidra specifically if you want to learn how to guide people through all five Kos. In a really structured and confident and purposeful way. I have a 20 CEU course called Teaching Yoga Nidra at Comfort Zone Yoga. It's part of my 300 hour yoga teacher training, but it's also available as a standalone offering. It is live right now. You could start today and listen to all the lectures as a private podcast. Or you can watch the videos or you can read the transcripts. We go deep into the koshas into what I call the master recipe for yoga nidra into how to write your own scripts and into how to teach yoga nidra with the same confidence you bring to any other class you teach. If you're interested in the koshas, if you want to go deeper into yoga philosophy, if you want another tool for serving your students, well, this course is for you. Visit comfort zone yoga.com/nidra to learn more. And if you want to keep the conversation going, join us in the Zone at Comfort Zone Yoga. It's my free community for yoga teachers. There are over 2000 wonderful people there. There are some of the most thoughtful, generous, dedicated folks I know. Visit Comfort zone yoga.com to join. Here's what I want you to take away from today. The koshas aren't some abstract philosophical concept that lives in a dusty text. They are a map, a map of your being, a map for your teaching, and a map for guiding people from the surface of their experience all the way into the light at the center. You've been using this map every time you teach, and now you know what to call it. Thank you so much for joining me. This is Yoga Teacher Confidential. I'm Sage Rountree, and I'll see you next time..