Sleeping well is probably the only most significant thing we will do for our health. Sleep meditation will provide help to go to sleep sooner and improve the standard of your sleep.
Sleep is required for our health and well being. If we’re not getting enough sleep, neither the healthiest food regimen, one of the best exercise routine, nor 100 cups of coffee could make up for the issues brought on by sleepiness. If you happen to’re fighting insomnia, meditation may also help. Studies show meditation advantages a very good night’s sleep even greater than sleep hygiene interventions which encourage darkening the room, avoiding technology before bed, or eliminating caffeine after noon.
Sleep meditation goes far beyond counting sheep. The quiet moments before you drift off to dreamland offer a priceless opportunity to enhance your mindfulness while improving your rest. We explore eight ways to more mindfully drift off to sleep.
How you can Do Sleep Meditation:
Environment
When meditating to go to sleep, arrange your environment to encourage restfulness. Practice in a quiet and darkened room, a cushty bed, and switch off your devices to free yourself from distractions.
Posture
Sleep meditations are best practiced lying down. Select a cushty position, but be mindful of maintaining a naturally aligned spine. If you happen to’re lying in your side, support your head and neck with pillows to maintain your spine neutral.
Attention
In sleep meditation, we’re at risk of distraction just as we’re in another meditation. Be mindful of the difference between allowing yourself to grow to be sleepy, and allowing yourself to grow to be distracted.
Letting Go
The goal of sleep meditation is to drift off to sleep. Find balance between staying focused and letting go. Allowing your body and mind to slide right into a restful state.
– His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama –
We’ve all heard of counting sheep to assist us drift off to sleep. Counting breath is analogous, but keeps us connected to our bodies by placing our attention on a process that’s familiar and well-known.
The simplicity of breath awareness allows the mind to calm down. The give attention to the physical strategy of respiration keeps us present and holds distractions at bay. The convenience and repetition of counting to 10 lulls us right into a softening that’s experienced by each body and mind.
How you can do The Counting Breaths Sleep Meditation
Meditation helps us go to sleep by teaching us to let go of the thoughts that keep us awake. Without mindfulness, we regularly discover with our thoughts. We grow to be attached to our thoughts and it’s difficult to not chase them. If our thoughts are negative, we grow to be increasingly self-critical, believing our thoughts are a sign of failure or lack of self control. The more we fight against our thoughts, the stronger they grow to be.
Mindfulness teaches us to acknowledge our thoughts as merely energy. This energy arises and dissipates, just like clouds within the sky. We aren’t our thoughts, we’re the sky itself, the idea of awareness from which thoughts arise. By identifying because the sky, we give our thoughts space to drift on by.
How you can Do The Thought Cloud Sleep Meditation
Body scan meditations are excellent for sleep because they’re grounding and deeply relaxing. As awareness shifts from the crown of your head toward your toes, consciousness drops too, inducing sleep.
Using body awareness as an anchor for the mind also keeps the mind present. Tasking the mind with observing the physical form keeps it from ruminating or worrying. Every time you notice you’ve run off with a thought or emotion, ground your awareness and hold it present by returning to the body itself.
How you can Do A Body Scan for Sleep:
Visualizations help us go to sleep by carrying us to a spot during which we feel spacious and comfy. Nature is one such place. Since the mind takes the form of that which is in front of it, open skies, expansive landscapes, and the infinite horizon of the ocean each remind us that we too are spacious and infinite.
The ocean can also be a spot we associate with vacation, enjoyment and getting away. By recreating the main points of such an environment in our mind, we recreate the feel-good feelings related to being in a natural place. Awareness of this connection helps us return to our natural state, one in all peace, calm and contentment.
How you can Do an Ocean Visualization Meditation for Sleep:
Once we’re recent to mindfulness we practice meditation by working with an anchor to which we tether the wandering mind. Once we notice the mind has wandered, we return to our anchor. With the practice of spacious awareness, even distractions themselves can grow to be the thing of meditation. We notice all the pieces that arises in our awareness with an open curiosity.
This difficult practice asks us to note and permit all the pieces, without attaching or chasing. As a part of the strategy of falling asleep, spacious awareness may also help us work with thoughts, sounds or sensations that could be keeping us awake by asking us to not push them away, but to witness our relationship and response to them.
How you can Do A Spacious Awareness Sleep Meditation:
Once we’re lying in bed and trying to go to sleep, reviewing the day or looking forward to tomorrow can keep us awake, especially if we let our thoughts about what happened or what might occur pull us off center. Equanimity is the flexibility to stay balanced, regardless of great success or failure, stress or joy, or another opposites which may pull us toward attachment or aversion. The standard of equanimity brings inner balance and inner peace.
Equanimity shouldn’t be a state of dullness, but fairly one in all loving acceptance. We apply the identical open curiosity, and even gratitude, to every of the day’s events. By remaining stable in this fashion, we give ourselves the gift of calm, making it far easier to go to sleep.
How you can Meditate on Equanimity for Sleep:
Lying in bed with thoughts of self-criticism, worry or doubt can keep us up at night. A compassion practice helps us let go of those negative feelings by opening our hearts and guiding us to a spot of peace and ease. Once we recognize that our pain and suffering is human and we’re not the one ones who feel the way in which we do, we’re higher able to offer ourselves grace.
While self-compassion is a meaningful practice, sending compassion to others not only offers the identical heart-opening advantages, but eases our give attention to self. All of our problems stem from worrying about ourselves an excessive amount of, while all our joy comes from fascinated by others. An everyday compassion practice puts our troubles in perspective and makes it easier to sleep.
How you can Sleep Higher by Sending Compassion to a Friend:
Tonglen, or taking and sending, is a Tibetan Buddhist compassion practice that mixes a visualization with breath awareness. This soothing meditation teaches us to acknowledge our role in relieving the pain and suffering of others, and the facility we now have to energetically help all beings with the limitless source of affection and kindness that lives inside our hearts.
Tonglen meditation is an excellent approach to drift off to sleep since it combines awareness of the rhythm of breath with a peaceful and loving frame of mind.
How you can Do Tonglen Meditation for Sleep:
While sleep meditation is right for calming the body and mind and inducing sleep, even the meditations you do while awake will improve your sleep. Once we meditate day by day, we increase melatonin production and strengthen the areas of the brain which are answerable for regulating sleep and our circadian rhythm. A healthy and pleased mind is a mind that’s pleased to rest!
