Hey friend,
Welcome back to the Grounded Sleep Podcast.
I'm David and I'm going to be your guide tonight and hopefully get you to sleep quickly and easily.
And I want you to know I'm flanked by two other guides tonight.
One of them,
Her name is Mookie and she's a little doggy.
And the other is my cat and her name is Imagine.
I call her Emmy and she's here every night with me.
So you're in good company.
And if you're not already there,
Get into bed.
Make sure you brush your teeth,
You've got your PJs on,
The lights are off,
And you've put away all your distractions.
And tonight's episode is called Going Home in Sleep.
And when I say home,
I don't just mean the place you live,
But a deeper home.
We could call it a spiritual home.
Maybe where we all come from.
We can call it the beyond.
Perhaps it's beyond even being named.
And I want to share a few stories that will kind of help lead us there.
Because when something is beyond,
It can't really be explained directly.
It can only really be explained by analogy,
Through myth,
Through story,
And as best we can through experience.
And I want to start by explaining it with a poem that I believe that I read in the first episode of this podcast and that I promised to read in the last episode.
But don't worry,
This is not the last episode.
And this poem is by T.
S.
Eliot.
And it goes like this.
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
I just love that poem,
That part of that poem in particular.
And so I want to start with a story from India in the 1800s.
And before I do,
Just make sure your body's really comfortable.
Drop your shoulders.
Breathe into your belly.
And relax the palms of your hands.
And so in the late 1800s,
There was this master named Ramakrishna.
And he was known to be kind of crazy,
Or seemingly crazy to people.
And he would sit and pray to the Hindu gods and goddesses,
Particularly to one goddess named Kali.
And this is obviously the very brief version.
But a more scholarly gentleman came along named Vivekananda,
Who at first thought Ramakrishna was crazy.
But at the same time,
He was intrigued.
And Ramakrishna would say everything is God.
And Vivekananda didn't quite believe him.
And of course,
As the story goes,
Ramakrishna touched him on the third eye.
And for a number of days,
I believe it was three days,
Vivekananda fell into a deep state of what in Sanskrit they might call Samadhi,
A form of enlightenment,
An experience of enlightenment.
And after those days,
He came out of it.
And he was like,
Wow,
Okay,
This guy's got something going on.
And he became a disciple of Ramakrishna.
And one day Ramakrishna told Vivekananda to go to America and start teaching.
And he did.
In the late 1800s,
He came to,
I believe,
The Chicago World Fair.
And he spoke about Hinduism and Eastern philosophy.
And that was really the first time that Eastern traditions were brought to the West in that way.
And then others came after him like Yogananda.
But really all of the meditation and Eastern stuff came to the West first through Vivekananda by way of Ramakrishna.
And if you go to India now,
There's many temples for Ramakrishna all over,
And they're really beautiful.
Anyway,
I tell this story because when I was living in India,
I had a guru I would go see at a Hindu temple,
An ashram,
Actually,
Let's call it.
And at this ashram,
There was another buried master named Shivananda,
Who was a famous Indian master in the Himalayas in a place called Rishikesh.
Hopefully one day I'll guide a retreat back there.
I would love to take a group to Rishikesh.
And anyway,
I had this guru,
This master I would go see.
And one day I asked him,
Hey,
Can you touch me on the third eye and give me some kind of spiritual awakening the way Ramakrishna gave Vivekananda.
And my teacher at the time said,
It takes a Vivekananda to be touched in that way,
In his deep voice.
And what he was saying to me was Vivekananda was ready for that.
And I wasn't ready.
And he was right.
But a few weeks later,
I was sleeping on an Indian train.
And at that time in my early 20s,
I would travel in second class,
No air conditioning.
It was one of the cheapest tickets,
And I was sleeping on kind of a hard surface.
And it was early in the morning.
It was an overnight train.
And I had this incredibly vivid dream.
It was almost beyond a dream,
Where my teacher at the time came to me and touched me on the third eye.
And all I could really say to describe it was I just felt so at home.
There was this deep,
Deep bliss.
It was so beyond,
It was so intense,
It was so beautiful and powerful that I woke up.
It just knocked me out of sleep,
And I sat up and gasped.
And I was like,
Wow,
That,
Whatever that was,
Felt like home.
It's a place I've been before.
It's a place I'm going again.
And it was just so sweet.
And I share that story with you because my sense is we all come from a place like that.
I can't describe it to you in the sense that it's another dimension or heaven.
I really don't know and don't have words for it,
But I have a deep sense and intuition that that's where we come from.
And it feels really good,
And it's beyond feeling really good,
But it does have a sense of bliss to it.
So just make sure as I'm sharing these stories that you're relaxed and maybe kind of allow yourself to melt into your bed.
Let your breathing slow down a bit with the intention that as you go to sleep,
You're going to let yourself go home because we can touch this place anytime.
We just have to let ourselves go.
So let me just add one more piece to this story.
There was a meditation I was doing one day when I was living in Hawaii,
And I had this very intense experience of almost like a near-death experience,
Even though physically nothing was happening.
And I found myself in a tunnel going towards a white light,
And I was flanked by two beings.
And they weren't Mookie and Imagine,
Maybe they were,
But the beings,
They were just made of light.
They were just two points of light.
And at the end of that tunnel was a white light,
Like many people describe.
And it was the same kind of feeling as when I was on the train,
Just a sense of going home.
And the paradox of this is it seems like it's a place,
It seems like somewhere we're going,
And at the same time it's always here,
Within us.
And as T.
S.
Eliot says,
We shall not cease from all our exploration,
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
And my sense is when we're in really deep sleep,
We go there every night.
We go there and we recharge our souls so we can come back.
So perhaps if you want to visit that place tonight,
Which maybe you will no matter what,
But if you want to have a memory of it or an experience of it and bring it back,
Maybe you just set that intention.
Just set the intention with your mind and your heart that you're going to touch that really deep place inside yourself and go home.
And this is a place beyond words,
Beyond thought,
Beyond matter.
And the way to enter that place is through deep silence and deep stillness.
That's how we enter.
So let yourself surrender to that stillness.
Every time you find a part of your body that's tense,
That doesn't want to surrender,
Just breathe into it and let it surrender.
Let it surrender to this moment.
Every time there's a part of your mind that doesn't want to surrender,
Again,
Just let it surrender to this moment.
Hallelujah.
Make sure you're breathing.
Just let yourself go home.
Relax.
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