Finding yourself settled,
Making any last final movements underneath your covers.
You might wiggle your shoulders,
Your hips,
Maybe you splay out a little bit wider,
Or maybe right now it feels better to curl your knees into your chest,
Creating a little cocoon with your body and slowly letting everything that has already happened and everything that is to happen,
Letting that all drift off into the background.
Sometimes it's not so easy,
So to help yourself,
Turning your attention to your breath.
You might feel the rise and fall of your chest,
Maybe you feel your belly stretch wide on your inhale and deflate on your exhale.
And in this noticing of your breath,
You might also feel the beating of your heart in your chest.
You might even feel the pulse of your heartbeat in your fingers,
Maybe your toes.
Noticing your entire body and then taking a collective inhale,
Fill up your lungs,
Fill up your belly as if you could reach the breath down into your toes.
Pause at that peak and then softly sigh out your mouth.
I'm doing that again and maybe this time you clench your fingers and clench your toes,
You might even scrunch up your face,
Clench your jaw,
And then let it go and ease all of your muscles.
And we'll do that one more time,
Big inhale,
Using some effort here to again find your muscular system to clench your thighs,
Your calves.
Yeah,
Give it a squeeze and then when you're ready,
Let it all go.
Seeing if you can sink your body down into the mattress,
Down into your bed,
Increasing the surface area of your skin along the support by one or two percent.
And then seeing if you can get softer still.
Maybe there are places in your body where you often hold tension,
Unconsciously or subconsciously.
For me,
It's my jaw.
For you,
It might be your forehead,
Your shoulders,
Your palms or your fingers.
Maybe it's your hips.
Wherever you feel some tension,
Directing your breath into these spaces like your breath could massage out any tension,
Any stickiness.
On the exhale,
Giving yourself permission to find more ease.
Sometimes it feels like we carry the weight of the world on our shoulders,
Encumbered by all of these titles,
All of these responsibilities.
And it can get really heavy.
This heaviness can weigh on us in our thoughts,
In our feelings,
And in our physical body.
This culmination or cumulative stress builds up in our cells,
Burrows away in our tendons and our joints,
Deep into our muscles.
In these quieter times right before sleep,
Sometimes it's really hard to wash away all of this tension.
Giving yourself some time here.
Starting to breathe in and out.
Maybe creating a metronome-like quality with your breath.
Breathing in for a count of three or four,
And then breathing out for the same length of time.
Creating this soothing metronome-like quality with the breath to anchor yourself into your deeper knowing.
The deeper wisdom that exists at all times,
But sometimes gets buried by everything else we pay attention to.
Laying down all of your worries,
Your concerns,
Your thoughts.
First and foremost,
All the stories that you tell yourself.
Letting those drift off.
Sometimes I find it useful to imagine a sky above me.
My true nature,
Who I truly am,
Is the blueness of the sky forever there.
And these clouds that enter into our vision as we gaze up at the sky become our thoughts.
But as we blink,
As we close our eyes and then open them again,
These thoughts shift and change.
They're not ever quite the same.
They come and they go and sometimes they hold more weight and we attend to them a little bit longer,
But they often dissipate.
But the one thing that stays the same is our true selves.
Even if they're clouded over for a long period of time,
Become dark and thick,
These clouds always eventually pass.
And it is in your breath,
In this anchoring down,
That we remain more steady.
That we see the clouds as just clouds.
We can see our thoughts as just thoughts,
Creating weather and environments that will always change.
Continuing to be in awe and trusting of the impermanence of it all.
And once we start to see these clouds,
These thoughts as always changing,
Always evolving,
We can start to see them as separate,
No longer in control.
I wonder if you are able to find the silence underneath the thoughts.
What lies beneath?
Scanning the body for points of tension that might have already started to build up in the body as you lie here.
Knowing that the urge to return to your thoughts is human.
And that the practice of returning to the breath is a challenging one to take on.
Resting in the knowing that you don't need to do anything at all but lie here.
This is exactly enough.
You exactly as you are,
Are enough.
Keep breathing.
Keep letting go.
Keep seeing past the clouds to see what's really there.
Sleep well,
Dear one.
