Sleep Better Using Meditation & Awareness

This is a carpenter's son's version of how to overcome a sleep disorder. I hit the issue right on the head and arm you with the right framework to help you overcome your sleep disorder. Having a listen to this audio track might help you overcome life's darkness and fears.

Transcript

Hello to all you beautiful people out there.

This is a continuation of last week's talk.

It's always a continuation of last week's talk because I can never really put into 15,

20 minutes.

So it's worked for me so far and I think it helps a lot of people that I keep it short and simple.

I try to,

Like I said,

Keep it down to about 15 minutes,

20 minutes,

Maybe 25 minutes at the most because I feel like I'm going to lose you after that.

It's hard enough to center yourself and pay enough attention to the message that's being transpired and the message I'm trying to share with everybody.

My father was a carpenter and from a very young age we were out learning how to hammer nails at the age of four.

We were on construction sites most of our childhood life.

My dad was working and supervising a job and babysitting us at the same time.

So as a carpenter's son you basically learn something about the psychology of life and that is that you as a carpenter's son you nail a nail with as few hits as you can take to push the nail all the way through and into the wood.

So if you learn to do it right you can hit a nail three or four times and it will drive all the way into the wood.

Then either aware of the fact or not but you go through life learning how to be direct and come right to the point and put that nail in that wood as fast as you can and with as little effort as you can because then you can move on to other projects and other things and focus on the next thing in life.

So what I'm getting at is that in a way I try to send my message across with as few words as possible to try to hit the nail right on the head and help you guys to overcome things like sleep disorders or addictions or bad habits in life.

There seems to be one common denominator to people with sleep disorders or addictions and other things and that common denominator basically is the fear of death and that hits the nail right on the head.

The fear of death is the root cause of all your major sleep disorders.

Maybe 90% of sleep disorders is basically the fear of death and I know what it's like.

Even as a spiritual person who's meditated for many,

Many years I used to have major sleep disorders or sleepless nights.

It got really bad at the worst point of my sleepless nights.

I would spend two or three days without sleep and one day without sleep is pretty rough but two days is even rougher but I've heard of people who have had like six to eight days or more of not sleeping.

Many people,

Some people have gone a year or two without sleeping and I can't even comprehend that.

I mean two or three days is pretty rough for me.

I asked what was causing my sleep problems until I started meditating and when I started meditating I brought awareness into my life and everything that I was doing in my life.

It seems like when I started meditating I realized that there were patterns.

Certain days I could fall right asleep and with no problem I mean I would just crash out in the middle of the day and fall asleep and sleep for an hour or two.

No problem.

I have no problems falling asleep but that was like in the daytime so I thought there was maybe a correlation with darkness and light.

Time to find out there is a correlation with sleep problems and darkness.

Some people who are afraid of death are also afraid of darkness.

Darkness and death kind of coincide with one another and when we fall asleep at night it's a sort of let go.

You are diving into the abyss of darkness or the abyss of emptiness and that can be scary and overwhelming for many people.

If this lingering fear of death is in the background causing you to lie there and not be able to settle down and trust existence.

That is one of the things about life is that existence has you cradled.

If you practice awareness and apply this awareness to your life that is like bringing light in.

That is the only way to dispel darkness.

You can't fight darkness.

You can't win a fight in this battle.

What needs to happen is you have to bring light in.

Bringing light in is basically the same thing as practicing awareness and self remembering.

Self remembering is one of the most important things in life.

Self remembering dispels darkness.

It dispels fear.

When you are practicing awareness and when you are centered and aware,

Even if you can be aware for a few moments,

It's really harder than you think it is to do.

To be consistently aware all the time.

That is really difficult.

Most people can't even manage a minute or two.

Some people can't even manage to be aware more than five seconds.

If you stare at your watch and it has a second hand on it,

It's an older watch of course,

But if it has a second hand on it,

Try to watch it for more than five seconds and just be aware,

Watching and staying in the present moment without thinking and just watching the second hand move.

And you'll come to find it.

You'll have many thoughts break up your awareness and those thoughts are basically darkness encroaching on your light.

So darkness comes in many forms and many shapes and sizes,

But the way to dispel darkness is to bring in light.

Even if the darkness is very old,

You may have had a sleep disorder for many,

Many years.

If you bring in one new candle,

I know it's a brand new candle and it's this baby light,

It's brand new,

It can dispel all that darkness.

In fact,

Everything you've done in your life that was done unconsciously or in darkness can all be dispelled.

Even if you,

I would say,

Robbed a bank or did something horrible in your life or did something horrible to other people,

If you brought light into your life,

If you brought awareness into your life,

It would dispel all that darkness instantly.

So all the karma that goes along in life and goes along with darkness can be dispelled by bringing in light,

By bringing in awareness and bringing in consciousness.

It worked for me because I went from not sleeping two or three nights in a row and not understanding why I couldn't sleep.

I was like,

I'm so tired,

I feel so tired,

But I can't,

I lie down and I just can't sleep.

Awareness made me realize that it was things that I was doing in my life,

Things that I was eating.

Some of these things that I was eating and believe it or not,

Even little things like drinking water or something or taking a bath,

It seemed to create sleeplessness in me.

I would try to go to bed at night and I couldn't sleep and I'd lie there for an hour or two,

Then I'd get up and take a bath,

And then I'd be wired,

I'd be completely wired.

I'm like,

How the hell is taking a bath making me wired?

I should be more relaxed,

I should be,

You know,

That should settle me down more.

But it was just the opposite.

So what I found out was my body became sensitive.

It became sensitive to certain chemicals and it became sensitive to basically tap water.

I know that sounds crazy,

But I became so sensitive to tap water,

It would send my body into a shock.

And what I found was that if I took a bath or something or a shower,

Then after eight hours my body would recover from that initial shock.

And then I would fall right asleep after those eight hours.

And a lot of times when you go to bed at night,

After eight hours,

It's time to wake up.

So that's why I wasn't sleeping so much,

It's because my body became sensitive to things.

And it was the awareness that meditation brought in and practicing awareness in my daily life,

Bringing it into the little things and doing things at work,

You know,

Just little things,

And then eventually bigger and bigger things until it encompasses your whole life.

And now I have absolutely no sleeping problems.

In fact,

I sleep too much now.

I know I'm getting older,

That's for sure,

But now I sleep maybe seven,

Eight hours a night at least,

Sometimes even more because I go to bed early and I try to sleep in.

But you say,

I just,

When my body says I'm rested,

Then I get up.

So I listen to my body.

You have to be true to yourself.

And if you meditate and you meditate quite often,

You'll find that you'll need less and less sleep.

So it's just what happens in meditation is amplified to what happens at night.

And there's no fear of death when you're centered on yourself.

When I forget myself,

That's when the issues come in.

Like I'll take a nap and I'll feel guilty.

What am I doing sleeping here?

I'm spending all this time sleeping,

But my body's asking for it.

And I listen to my body and I'm true to my body.

And when I can nap,

I nap.

And then there are other times when we're out surfing or skydiving or doing crazy things that I love to do.

After a good day of skydiving or surfing,

Then you sleep really well at night.

But it's all about overcoming fears.

The fear of death,

The fear of darkness,

Or living in darkness.

And if you have this self-remembering,

If you remember yourself,

Then going to sleep basically is like having a light on where it dispels the darkness.

It dispels fear.

It dispels all the negative things.

And it helps if you practice meditation at least once,

Maybe twice a day.

Sometimes it only takes like 10 to 15 minutes of meditation.

And what happens in those 10 to 15 minutes is that you calm your mind,

You become centered.

And what happens in sleep is that you have to go through different levels of sleep where you're like half conscious,

Half awake.

And that's our dreaming state.

And you have to go through some of that dreaming state to get to a period or just sometimes there's a very short period at night,

Five,

Six minutes,

Where you're in a deep sleep and you stop dreaming.

And then you come out of that deep sleep and then you go back into dreaming again.

So you're then half conscious,

Half awake.

You're maybe fulfilling desires or things in your life that are keeping you from being centered,

Keeping you from being aware all the time.

So some things go on in life and then they have to be fulfilled at night.

That's not all that dreams are made of.

Dreams are very mystical things.

But in meditation,

What happens is that it's amplified.

The amount of time that your mind is still is way,

Way more than when you're sleeping at night.

And at night you're all focused and into dreams and dreaming and the mind is not completely still.

But we need dreams.

And they've done studies where they prohibited people every time they started to dream to stop them from,

They would wake them up and stop them from dreaming.

And people would go mad,

People would go crazy if they weren't allowed to dream.

So dreams are a necessary part of our existence.

And they can be very beautiful things.

And when you meditate a lot,

Then you get into this whole lucid dreaming thing where basically you're aware,

You're awake in the dream and you know you're dreaming,

But you just let the dream continue on.

And you enjoy the dream.

In another dimension or whatever you want to call it,

Your body is asleep somewhere and it's resting and it needs that sleep.

So like I said,

Meditators are allowed to,

They easily step in and out of lucid dreaming.

And in lucid dreaming,

You can have all kinds of fun things going on.

You can meet people,

You can fly in the sky without any help.

You can land a skydive without a parachute.

In fact,

I used to have these dreams when I started getting into skydiving of all these people that were landing without parachutes in front of me.

And it made me wonder,

What was that all about?

And then another skydiver friend of mine said he had the same dreams.

And maybe it's just this overcoming of fear.

There's a certain amount of fear that coexists with skydiving.

And overcoming those fears helps you to grow as a human being.

Because you know there's a light on the other side of fear.

When you center yourself,

When you become self-aware again,

And you remember yourself,

Then the light shines.

As long as the light's shining,

Then you can even fall asleep with the light shining.

It's self-remembering.

And as you drift off,

You slowly,

Slowly let go.

And that let go is the hardest thing for some people with sleep disorders.

Because once you get into it,

Then you'll soon realize that,

Yeah,

That's 90% of sleep disorder problems in the whole world is people that are afraid of that let go,

Afraid of death,

Afraid of darkness.

But darkness and sleep go hand in hand.

You'll find out in life that I've met people who work the night shifts.

And usually those people have like bags under their eyes.

And they look horrible.

It's like,

Oh God,

You need some sleep.

So yeah,

Darkness and sleep coincide with one another.

It's easier to sleep in darkness.

But if you can just remember and have that self-remembering that you're centered and you're aware,

And that existence has you,

Existence has you cradled.

And as long as you're practicing awareness,

You'll always be cradled by existence.

That is,

To be,

In a sense,

A loving and aware person,

Then with that center,

You're always going to be OK.

You won't fear the darkness.

You won't fear death anymore.

You can face these things.

But you have to bring light in.

And light has to be present.

And we dispel darkness with that.

Even just a little light can dispel all the darkness.

So whether it's addictions or sleep problems or drunkenness,

Whatever you've done in the darkness can all be dispelled by a little bit of light.

And the light comes in.

This inner light shines when you practice awareness and when you meditate and live in an aware life.

So I hope this helped you guys and girls.

I know sleep disorders are horrible things,

And it's a hard thing to deal with,

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

There is hope and a way out of all this anxiety and all this stress that comes along with a sleep disorder or an addiction or something.

So like I said,

I appreciate your time for listening to me these few moments and these few minutes.

I don't know how to squeeze in,

Because next week I'll think of something else to add to this recording.

I wish I could think of everything I need to say and condense it more into a 15-minute talk without forgetting anything,

Leaving out the major points.

But I think we hit the nail on the head this time.

And I want to thank you for joining me,

And I appreciate your time.

Aloha and namaste to all my friends and family and blue skies to all my skydiving friends.

So y'all take care of yourselves,

And I hope you have plenty of sleep full nights full of rest and wake ready to face anything that comes at you.

All right,

Guys and girls,

Take care of yourselves.

Bye bye.