Can't Sleep? Meditation as an Antidote for Insomnia

One of my students called me the other day from Paris asking me to please send a copy of my meditation CD to her as quickly as possible. She asked if I would send it overnight or whatever way was fastest to get it to her seven-year-old son. It was an emergency, she told me. They had forgotten it at home here in Los Angeles and her son just doesn't go to sleep without it.

I mailed it out, smiling to myself. What a great honor, I thought, that this little guy uses my meditation to fall asleep with. He is tapping into one of my primary intentions when I originally designed the compilation. I wanted the listener to feel calm and to know he was loved and safe. I know, from thirty years of teaching meditation, in ten of thousands of classes, that in order to meditate we need to get the body and mind calmed down so that we can move into deeper places in ourselves. I made the CD with this in mind. Quiet the mind and the rest will follow, including sleep.

I have a feeling many of my students use my meditation to fall asleep. We are all running around pretty ragged these days, managing families and work, and all the rest. Our minds become overtaxed and overwrought with anxieties over our children, our finances, etc. Many of us are living in such a state of nervous anxiety, sometimes even chronically, that when we finally lay down from a long day, we still can't let go of our mental restlessness. We end up staring up at the ceiling, hoping desperately to fall asleep. Even the worry that we can't fall asleep just creates another anxiety, and the whole cycle of consternation is reignited again with yet another worry.

Studies out of Harvard Medical School led by Herbert Benson, MD's team who wrote "The Relaxation Response" show that relaxation techniques like deep breathing and meditation help to relieve the effects of chronic sleep-onset insomnia. We can take advantage of this in our lives right now by practicing deep breathing and by creating an inner stillness that is conducive to sleep.

Ironically, as life moves faster and faster there is a higher likelihood of insomnia. You'd think because we are doing more we'd be more tired at the end of the day. But it's not physical labor we are mostly engaged in as perhaps our forefathers were. We're not farming and working with our bodies as much as we are sitting in front of computers or in traffic. Life has become more a mental exertion than a physical one, so that means we need new tools to deal with this agitated and amplified mental whirling. We can find ourselves wondering after staring at a computer screen all day, how do we turn it off?

If we are worn out in the day from not sleeping at night we are going to find ourselves feeling weak and not our best selves out in the world. A kind of sleep-deprivation mode sets in. This can weaken our immune systems making us more susceptible to colds and the like. In this state our minds are not as focused or alert for the things we need to be "up" for. We can find ourselves constantly trying to keep up, catch up, and move up the rungs of a ladder that seem to climb upward to infinity.

The whole trick is to sloooow down. Somehow, someway, right in the middle of everything, take a deep breath. This will give you much-needed perspective. It will open your heart again and reconnect you with what is truly meaningful to you. And my little meditation can become like a lullaby reminding you that everything is okay right now and you can relax.

By meditating you can learn to go into deeper states of relaxation and even inspiration. You can create a state of relaxation that will help your body heal, or simply fall asleep. However you use meditation, it is a simple, drug-free and inexpensive alternative to insomnia.