How Meditation Can Help You Sleep
Are you one of those people who "can't meditate"?
I used to be.
You see, I was under the impression that meditation meant sitting on a cushion, in pure awareness and perfect bliss.
Indeed, exemplary lifelong yogic practitioners are reputed to achieve this state. Saying that's what meditation is, though, is like saying that painting involves being a natural Van Gogh, or playing music requires you to be like Mozart.
In fact, meditation is a simple practice available to any of us.
Like anything you try, when you first get started, it can be difficult.
This is what it's like:
Breathe in, breathe out. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Breathe in, breathe out. Thinking, thinking, thinking.
Meditation consists of focusing on something (like the breath) and maintaining your awareness there. When you realize you have lost your focus, you come back to the breath.
The idea is to observe the mind rather than be lost in the mind.
Much of the time, frankly, especially when getting started with meditation, you are lost in the mind.
Every once in a while you become aware that the mind has taken over. Then you focus back on the breath. And repeat.
Those glimpses of awareness are significant.
When the mental chatter of the mind predominates, it weaves its stories and obsessions through endless loops.
Through these compulsive thoughts, we filter our perception of reality.
Often we are quite unaware of this, as the mental chatter keeps us in a constant trance.
Meditation gives us room for respite.
With some practice and a bit of discipline, the mind can be trained.
It becomes less scattered and repetitive and slows down a bit, leaving gaps in the barrage of thoughts. Glimpses of something else beyond the immediate preoccupations of the “monkey mind” are possible.
So, what has this got to do with helping you sleep?
One of the things that can interfere with sleep are the preoccupations of the mind.
Your mental state is either too racy or too fixated on particular thoughts to allow you to relax and wind down.
This is the occasion when meditation is a wonderful sleep aid.
Once you have the basics of how to meditate, you can easily practice it to calm down the mind.
A great meditation teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, described this beautifully with the analogy of a bull in a field.
The bull is your mind racing around, snorting and angry, tossing this way and that.
Mediation is like a vast field, so vast that the bull just tires itself out racing this way and that and finally comes to a standstill.
When the mind has run out of obsessive energy, it peters out.
Finally, sleep can take over.