Insomnia

Do you ever lie awake at night, unable to get back to sleep, ideas rushing through your mind, worries and concerns chasing themselves around your tired troubled unquiet mind? Don’t we all know what that feels like sometimes? Can meditation help?

There are a couple of very simple, profound, powerful practices that you might try. I have field tested them for this purpose, and they work for me……so perhaps they will for you.

But before you try to get back to sleep, it’s always good to ask what your wakefulness has to teach you. Are you upset and unresolved about something? Are you the prey of anxieties that you could turn to your advantage, by asking them what they need from you so that they go away? What do they need, so that they don’t appear tomorrow night? When we address the causes of our sleeplessness, we sometimes get answers that are helpful pointers to action.

Whether or not answers come, there are powerful practices to let you enter the healing realms of sleep. Think of these practices as spells, for they have the quality of spells. We use practices to shift our consciousness. Spells for the mind, better than magic. The easiest spell to cross over and enter the realm of sleep is this one: lie there in the dark with your eyes closed, and say inwardly to yourself over and over, "God, God, God…" Say it over and over like a mantra. You will find yourself trusting sleep, and then being embraced by it.

If you’re not comfortable using the word "God," use another name of power and goodness. Invoke the being into which you wish to dissolve your consciousness. When you do this enough, your awareness does dissolve. Isn’t it nice to think of it dissolving into a being of infinite power and goodness?

A subtle variation of the practice is to follow the breath. To follow the breath into sleep, lie still, eyes closed, and focus your full awareness, all the power of your mind, on the feeling of your breath, entering, residing in, and leaving your body. The simplest but in many ways the most profound practice. A practice of total trust in what is. A spell to quiet the most anxious mind, like magic.

Both of these practices also help prepare us for death. When we enter the realm of sleep every night, letting our consciousness dissolve willingly, we are learning to trust, day by day, the absolute rightness of things. This is the bridge that we need to cross over, whether every day, or at the end of this life. And it is a bridge we can build with either of these two spells.