Stories For Sleep With David | Episode 27

Welcome to the Grounded Sleep Podcast! You don't have to do anything except get into bed, close your eyes, and allow David to guide you into a deep, peaceful rest. Enjoy letting go of the day, quieting all the mental noise, and going back to that primordial place of stillness that is calling you back.

Transcript

Are you ready to get some rest?

Good evening and welcome to the grounded sleep podcast.

I'm David and I'll be your guide tonight.

And before we get rolling,

Before we get relaxing,

Before we get asleep,

And I just wanted to invite you to go to davidgandleman.

Com,

My website.

And there's a picture of my face on my website.

And if you're having any issues with anxiety and you're wanting to learn some meditation tools to release anxiety,

I have a free releasing anxiety series.

Or if you're having some relationship issues,

I have a free healing from heartbreak series because I do.

I've been through it.

I get a thousand million questions about it and I felt like there was a gap there and people wanted some meditation tools for it.

So there's that series as well.

And probably some other cool free fun stuff on there by now.

I've been adding stuff to it regularly.

Davidgandleman.

Com check it out if you want to.

If you don't want to,

Fine,

Whatever.

My mom goes on there every day.

We have plenty of visits.

All right,

Let's get rolling.

Get nice and comfortable.

Get into bed.

Make the room dark.

Let the rest of the world go.

You can loosen up any tense muscles in your body.

And if you kind of scan your body up and down,

You'll notice you have more in a tensed up muscles than you think you do.

Like for example,

How's your jaw right now?

How about behind your ears?

Your shoulder blades?

Back of your knees?

The bottom of your feet?

So just start to really relax yourself.

You have no more responsibilities tonight.

Just lay back and listen to me yap away.

Tonight's story night.

Story time.

Gather around the fire.

And you may have heard me talk a bit about this before,

But I used to live up in the Himalayas for a while and I really enjoyed it,

Lived in an ashram with my head shaved and meditated a lot.

But of course,

And I practiced all of these different meditation techniques and studied with all of these different gurus.

But before all of that happened,

Kind of in my beginning Himalayan journey,

I went up to this town.

I can't remember how many hours on a bus it took.

So such a long windy ride up the Himalayas.

And I got to this little town and I almost don't want to share the name because I don't want too many people to go there.

But it's pretty popular already as it is.

It's called Vashisht.

And it's got these ancient hot springs built into a temple in the Himalayas.

And they separate them by male and female.

And you go into this temple and you walk into this hot spring.

It's just these stone walls with no roof or ceiling.

It's just open to the mountains,

To the largest mountain range in the world.

And you could just like feel this spiritual energy as you get in the water.

That water comes down from the mountains and it's so hot.

And you can smell the sulfur.

It's just so,

So freaking cool.

And I spent a good month in this town,

Just every morning with many of the locals just going into the hot springs and just absorbing this incredible mountain energy.

And while I was up there,

I met this really cool French guy and his name was Matias.

He's going to be like,

Why are you sharing my name in your podcast?

Actually,

He's French.

He'll be like,

David,

Why would you share my name in the podcast?

And one day he was like,

Hey,

Do you want to go hike,

Like really go hike the Himalayas?

And I was like,

Yeah,

For sure.

I mean,

I could sit in this hot tub,

Outdoor hot tub,

Ancient hot tub all day long,

But why not?

Let's go for it.

So we took a trek.

We found some trail,

Some other French nationals told him about,

And we were so ill prepared.

Most of the other trekkers had a porter with them to carry their stuff or,

You know,

Mules,

Horses,

Whatever it was,

Like real gear.

It was just me and him just started at a random spot on the trail with no timeline,

With no communication with the outside world.

There was no cell phone or anything.

And I was literally wearing Crocs.

And our first few days we get out there and it's going okay until we in the late afternoon reach this river and it's cold,

Ice cold Himalayan glacier water.

And it's the afternoon,

So it's been melting and it's not very easy to cross and the water is cold.

And he makes it across barely.

And then I go and because I was wearing Crocs,

They started like taking on water and pulling me down.

And just like 10 feet away,

There was a huge drop off.

And I knew if I let the water pull me down,

That was the end.

And so I all of a sudden couldn't feel my feet.

The water was so cold.

It was so cold.

And I had to just pull,

I had to put my hands in the water,

Pull the Crocs off and my French friend pulled me out to the other side.

And that was the beginning of a one month hike through the Himalayas.

Really wild start.

We walked through rain,

We walked through mud,

We walked around beautiful glaciers and lakes,

Incredible valleys,

Places that my eyes could barely take in the beauty of.

It was just hard to believe.

And we came across these amazing Buddhist villages in this region of the Himalayas called Zanskar.

And these people are very similar in culture to the Tibetans.

They lived in these regions before.

There were nation states and lines drawn the way there are now.

And they were some of the most peaceful,

Beautiful people I have ever come across in my life.

They would just bring us into their homes,

Feed us,

Give us a place to sleep and just wanted nothing from us.

And some of their descendants have lived in those mountains for thousands of years.

And eventually we,

One day we were hiking and realized that we were out of food and it was getting dark and we hadn't really seen too many people.

Usually on an average day we'd see maybe like five or six people crossing our path.

And Matias told me this amazing story about how he used to live in Africa and he became friends with the king of this tribe.

And this tribe,

The king of this tribe said to Matias,

I will send my shaman to you,

To your house,

To work with you and to heal you.

And this shaman came to his house and he did some healing work with him,

Long story short.

And he said,

I give you,

I give you two angels and you can call on these angels whenever you need and they'll come to your aid.

And so we were,

We were hiking and it was getting dark.

We had no idea where to camp.

We didn't have very good gear and he tells me this whole story and then he says,

I will send my angels forward.

He sends his angels forward and there was something in me that just felt like,

Yeah,

Oh yeah,

They're going to help us.

I don't know what that means or how or if that's real,

But yeah,

I feel it.

And so not long after that,

Maybe an hour or two after that,

We reached a village.

We didn't know there was going to be one,

But we reached one and we could kind of like hike up the hill to the village or down the hill towards the river and there was a campsite.

And we both agreed we would hike down to the campsite.

So we got down there,

We're tired,

It's getting dark,

We're out of food,

Totally ill prepared for anything.

I've lost my Crocs.

Now I'm in the regular pair of shoes that I had with me.

And luckily there was like this group down there.

We had barely seen anybody,

But there was this group of like wealthy Germans and they had porters and beautiful tents set up.

And one of their Indian guides asked us if we were hungry and we were so hungry.

And he said,

Oh,

We'll make you something.

And while we were waiting,

All of a sudden from behind us,

We hear Matyas.

And Matyas who I was with,

He turned around and I forget his friend's name,

But let's just pretend it was like Jean-Michel.

He's like Jean-Michel.

And they hug it out.

And you have to remember we're in the middle of the Himalayas,

Like not on the most popular trail by any means.

And his old friend from France happened to be hiking the other direction through the Himalayas and stopped at the same campsite as us.

And they hug it out and it turned out his friend had just hiked a glacier,

Had a brush with death.

He was with a friend or two and here they were.

And they had lots of provisions and food and we set up camp and everyone's all excited.

And then all of a sudden the German group and their Indian guide come with literally gold plated.

These like gold plates of food just stacked with the most amazing food.

We'd been living on protein bars,

Just like this incredible cooked food on these gold platters.

They weren't plates,

They were gold platters.

And our eyes got so big.

And I looked at him.

Here we are with this amazing food running into his old friend in the middle of the Himalayas.

And I was like,

Matias,

Man,

Those are some kick ass angels.

We're hiking through the Himalayas and happened to find food and friends all in one night.

After that we reached a village where there was an NGO that happened to be building a school and we decided to stay for a few weeks and help build the school.

It was like a,

Not a solar powered school,

But like they were like solar windows.

And so we spent some time helping build this school.

I taught some kind of yoga movement classes to the kindergartener,

First graders.

We had such a great time.

And we lived very humbly sleeping on the floor and eating what seemed to be just paste of some kind every day.

And then when we felt like our time was up there,

We continued on our hike,

Stopping at monasteries that were like literally hanging off the edges of these cliffs where the monks would sit in age order from a five year old monk to literally a 90 year old monk.

And they would chant like this deep,

Deep just,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh.

I'm not doing it justice,

But it was so beautiful.

And they,

They took me and him into this back room and we,

We all sat in a circle and I pulled out some dried mango and I passed it around and I was kind of intimidated by these,

These,

You know,

Deep experienced monks.

Some of them,

Their faces were so,

Like leather from living in the Himalayas with the wind and the rough weather.

They look like,

Some of them look like dinosaurs,

Like just like old,

Wise,

Earthy,

Earthy monks.

And I thought they were going to be really serious,

But they took the mangoes and started hitting each other and like rolling on the floor and giggling.

And I realized,

Wow,

They,

They actually have a good sense of humor and know how to have fun.

And eventually our trip came to an end as we hiked out of the Himalayas to this kind of bigger town.

And then we took a long bus ride past some of the tallest peaks in the world.

And one of those bus rides just blew me away.

There were literally like 22 plus thousand foot peaks outside the bus window.

We're in the middle of the Himalayas,

Just absolutely breathtaking.

And everyone on the bus closed the window shades so they could watch a bad Balinese movie on the TV.

And the reason was,

Was because they lived there and they were used to the mountains,

But they wanted the TV.

And that just,

Wow,

Gave me some perspective.

All I wanted was the mountains and they wanted the TV.

You can go to sleep with that thought.

Like what?

Eventually we came to this town,

This city called Lei,

And it's one of the highest cities in the world based on altitude.

It's near the Chinese border and it's just full of oddly enough,

Like military bases,

Indian bases and Buddhist monks.

And it was just absolutely stunning.

And this trek that took a month through the Himalayas that ended in this town,

And there,

I mean,

A hundred more stories in here,

But this trek just opened my eyes to what I consider to be like the top of the world.

When you're in the Himalayas,

You feel like you're on top of the earth.

And there were moments where,

When we were on the bus,

We would climb up to the top of the bus and literally hold onto the sides while the bus was swerving through the Himalayas with thousand plus foot drops.

And I had never felt so alive and the people so kind.

And it left one of the most amazing lasting memories of my life.

And sometimes when I dream,

I like to go back there,

Back to those snow capped peaks of mountain consciousness.

And it's to me,

Not surprising that so much spirituality and meditation was born in the Himalayas because when you're up there,

When you're sitting in these mountains,

You cannot help but feel and know the true power and presence of life.

There's no noise,

Street noise.

There's no mental noise.

There's no distraction.

It's just immense,

Peaceful,

Serene beauty.

In the summertime,

Of course,

In the winter I'd get out of there.

Now we can't all be in or live in the Himalayas,

But we can embrace that sense of peacefulness that it has taught us.

And there are the thousands and thousands of monks that live in the Himalayas.

They devote their lives to meditating.

And in my opinion,

They raise the consciousness of the entire planet.

And the top of the highest mountain peaks in the world for me are a symbol of the place that we can aspire to reach our consciousness to.

And whether we're climbing those literal mountains or symbolic mountains in our lives,

There are these peaks that we're all going for.

And of course,

The closer we get to the top,

The steeper it can get,

The harder it can get,

But also the more peaceful.

And each part of the mountain teaches us a different lesson.

Maybe as you fall asleep tonight,

You take a journey and explore some of these maybe we'll call them astral mountains.

The mountains in our dream time.

You don't have to live in the Himalayas and you don't have to be a monk.

But you have that inside of you.

Doesn't matter if you're wearing red robes or a green t-shirt or purple pajamas.

Everyone has the potential to be their own awakened self.

And even as we go to sleep,

Even as we melt into our unconscious,

We can become awake in our sleep,

In our dream.

Meditate yourself to sleep.

Don't try to fall unconscious.

Try to be conscious as you go to sleep.

Be relaxed.

Enjoy letting go.

Melt into your bed.

And have a deep,

Deep sleep.

Good night.

Reviews

A godsend, so appreciated, such a sweet offering. Authenticity extraordinaire! www.grateful.org, www.compassioncourse.org, ahimsa

You are quite the adventure! I’m glad your feet are OK. ;-)

Thanks for taking us on a virtual hike through the magical himalayas...

Amazing and positive story. U made me happy. Thanks!

Nice 🤗 I loved the story, your voice + laugh...and your kindness🙏 very soothing 🏞️💖🙏

nice but for more details I have to stay awake

Thank you, David. That was fascinating and heart-warming and it's good to hear more about what you do. I'm probably older than your Mum and I feel the love and warmth between you. It’s beautiful. I already go to your sleep meditation regularly and now
I’ll definitely be looking for more of your ‘work’. Showers of blessings and a big hug. Suze (“sooz”)

Thanks David, a great story.

I love this story so much.🙏🌟 Thanks for sharing. ❤️

Did the trick at 3 a.m. The story still bounces playfully in my heart. What an experience.

I’m not sure when croc’s are EVER appropriate…… always the enjoyable storyteller David. Thank you 😊

Loved listening to this.. such beautiful images in my head of your adventure. Thank you 🙏

As a former mountain climber who used to dream of going to the Himalayas, this touched me very deeply and even brought a few tears. Thank you 💕💕

Awe… I finally made it to the end and felt I should go there, of course! I had a little envy going on. But as my dog never leaves my side it’s hardly likely. But who knows… it sounds so beautiful. Lucky you David. And Matthias too. I will have to go do some hill walking instead. And dream. 🙏🏼❤️

Great story!

David, thank you for your story. You made me smile and helped me calm my busy mind. What a Beautiful trip !

A really great story.
Thank you 🙏 for sharing your Himalayan journey. I enjoyed seeing it through your eyes. 💖💖💖💖💖

Oh this is priceless! 😀 Thank you David for such a fun and sweet story time. From your small laughs, to your mom visiting your website, to your crocs and of course the angels…this was just a precious story. I rested well during the telling of your tale and though I was not asleep yet by the end..I felt Lighter and Happy and ready to sleep. Which then I did…I think of mountains. 🏔⛰ 😊👍🏼🙏🏼💙💤 thank you David!!!

I have no idea if that was good or not because I fell asleep in 2 minutes

Wonderful. Fell asleep quickly