This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The term yoga nidra is older than the practice most students today learn under that name. In earlier tantric and yogic literature it names a state of conscious, deeply restful awareness, and in some devotional literature it describes a form of cosmic sleep attributed to a deity, a state of rest that is not unconsciousness. What did not exist before the twentieth century was a fixed, teachable sequence bearing the name as a specific method.
That method is the work of one teacher. Swami Satyananda Saraswati, a disciple of Swami Sivananda Saraswati who founded his own institution, the Bihar School of Yoga, in Munger in 1963, drew on his tantric training and his own practice to assemble a structured sequence, rotation of awareness through the body, breath awareness, guided visualization, and published it as a systematized teaching in 1976. He presented it explicitly as a synthesis rather than as an unbroken ancient transmission, built from older sources but organized into the repeatable form that let it be taught consistently to students who had never studied tantra directly. Nearly every version of yoga nidra taught today, including those from later teachers who have published their own variations, describes itself against Satyananda's 1976 synthesis as the reference point, whatever else it changes.